Activist par excellence
Munir's life and career exemplify that of a man who answers his calling to the end. The diminutive rights activist championed a great cause during an extremely difficult period in Indonesian history.
The 39-year-old confided recently to a friend that he was "exhausted" with the endless demands on his energy that came with endless rights violations. He was looking forward to "a rest" in the Netherlands, where he had been offered a scholarship to continue his studies on human rights.
But Munir died aboard the aircraft on Tuesday, just hours before it landed at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport.
Munir rose to national and international prominence at the end of the 1990s, when many activists went missing. "Thanks to his efforts, not only did most of those activists survive, but Munir turned disappearances into an issue that helped push the New Order into history," Sidney Jones, Southeast Asia Project Director of the International Crisis Group and one of his many friends, wrote in a personal email.
The work of Munir meant breaking through a somewhat twisted perception of violence and their victims here.
Amid student shootings, riots, a war against separatists and orgies of violence in places like Maluku, there was a sense that victims were divided into those who were said to have "deserved it" and those who didn't; there were "real" martyrs of reformasi and merely unfortunate bystanders.
Those who "deserved" to be dead or missing included ungrateful citizens siding with separatists. A perception also existed that one human rights case was more important than another: Thus the May 1998 riots, for one, remains unresolved.
Munir tried to put the picture in focus, and said that such selective sympathy was because "all Indonesians feel they have been victims" at one time or another in their turbulent history.
This may not have been a satisfactory answer, but the feeling that some get what they deserve or some cases should be left untouched reflects a more serious problem -- one more serious than dealing with the dark forces that inevitably cropped up in Munir's investigations of rights violations.
Yet Munir simply went digging up facts -- to show that a crime is a crime and someone should be held accountable for it.
He made many a respectable person "red to the ears", as former chief security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono put it. But even Susilo was forced to acknowledge that it was people like Munir we needed when we strayed from the ideals that we preached.
His passing leaves a huge vacuum in a nation that needs a thousand Munirs to address its appalling human rights record.
Perhaps the only consolation is the hope that the young people with whom he worked will now strive even harder to keep alive -- and realize -- Munir's wish to live among a people who enjoyed the right to be free from fear.