Activist par excellence

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.