Antigraft drive first priority: Watchdogs
M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Non-governmental organizations demanded on Thursday that the new government make corruption eradication and human rights promotion its priorities.
Rights watchdog the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras) and corruption watchdog the Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW) said in a joint statement that as Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had accepted the mandate of the people, the new President should not shy away from punishing the human rights abusers of previous regimes and scores of corruptors who were vindicated by the previous government.
"Human rights abuse and corruption are intertwined and their perpetrators are often from the same groups. We suspect that some of these groups are now rallying behind Susilo and contributed to his rise to power. We urge the Susilo administration not to bend under their pressure and uphold justice," the statement said.
Kontras, in its report, recorded numerous cases of human rights abuses: The military's purge in the wake of an aborted coup blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) --which allegedly killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the latter half of the 1960s -- a series of mysterious shootings in the early 1980s, the Semanggi incident, in which scores of students were killed in 1998, and the abduction and murder of labor activist Marsinah.
Press reports suggested that elements in the military had a hand in all of the aforementioned cases.
The ICW said that Megawati's administration had failed to prosecute businesspeople who swindled state money, which was injected to bail them out of the financial crisis at the height of the late 1990s economic crisis.
"Instead, the administration issued release-and-discharge orders for fraudulent businessmen, which absolved them of any wrongdoing," Luky Djani of the ICW said.
Fellow activist Usman Hamid of Kontras said that the first step the Susilo administration should take was to rid the Attorney General's Office of corruption.
"We are glad that Susilo appointed Abdul Rahman Saleh as Attorney General. However, the appointment alone is not enough, there has to be thorough reform in the Attorney General's Office, which has been corrupt to the core," Usmand said.
He urged the new attorney general to replace scores of attorneys and prosecutors whose litigation in numerous cases of corruption and rights abuses had stalled.
Usman said that the new Attorney General's Office could include ad hoc prosecutors, consisting of non-officials and local prosecutors.
Aside from reforming the AGO, the NGOs demanded that the Susilo administration unveil the blueprint for its national anticorruption program.
The NGOs called for the swift reopening of cases that concern the public at large.
"The responsibility of resolving cases of graft and rights abuses does not go away with the changing of administrations," they said.