Bintang complains of obstruction
Bintang complains of obstruction
JAKARTA (JP): Politician Sri Bintang Pamungkas says the government is making a feeble attempt to bring in two key witnesses expected to testify on his behalf.
In a press statement made available to The Jakarta Post yesterday, Bintang said the government might instead be devising ways to prevent Sri Basuki and Soenarto from entering Indonesia. The two, currently living as stateless residents in Germany, said that as of yesterday they had not received a summons to testify from the prosecutors.
Bintang has been accused by government prosecutors of calling Indonesia's first president Sukarno and his successor Soeharto dictators during a seminar held last April in Berlin. He has also allegedly accused them of deviating from the 1945 Constitution.
Presiding Judge Syoffinan Sumantri has twice ordered the prosecutors to present the two, both of whom attended the seminar in which Bintang allegedly made the remarks.
Chief Prosecutor P. Sitinjak claims that he has sent letters through the Indonesian Consulate General in Bonn, Germany, requesting that the two testify in the trial.
According to Bintang, the staff at the consulate general claim to know nothing about the letters.
"The government should be ashamed," stated Bintang, who was dismissed from the Moslem-based United Development Party for his outspokenness last year.
He charged that the government might devise ways to actually prevent Sri Basuki and Soenarto from testifying for him. "Their testimony would certainly benefit me," he said.
Soenarto, who found out about the summons from the Jakarta Legal Aid Foundation (LBH), has said in a letter that he could not afford the risk of entering Indonesia in his stateless condition.
He and Sri Basuki were former students during Sukarno's era in the 1960s who had been sent to then communist East Germany to study. "I'm an asylum seeker," Soenarto has written.
Yesterday, however, Sri Bintang declared that Soenarto was actually making preparations to fly to Indonesia.
Soenarto has reportedly contacted the consulate general inquiring about the requirements he must meet in order to testify, and written Sitinjak asking for a guarantee that he could return to Germany afterward.
However, said Bintang, "if the two witnesses have to sacrifice their freedom and safety in order to appear in court, then I'd rather not have they come."
The next session is March 6.
Soenarto and Sri Basuki were the most active participants at the Technische Universitaet seminar in Berlin on Apr. 5, 1995, which featured as speakers Sri Bintang Pamungkas and Yeni Rosa Damayanti, a student activist.
Both Soenarti and Sri Basuki raised questions which contained the terms "dictator", "Indonesian Communist Party (PKI)" and "violations against the 1945 Constitution".
Bintang said he used the same words to paraphrase the questions before answering them. Those remarks, however used, have been called slanderous by prosecutors. (swe)