Clarification required

Clarification required

From the photo-journalistic point of view, the picture that
appeared in a number of Jakarta's newspapers yesterday could
perhaps be considered rather nice. After all, it is not every day
that we are treated to the spectacle of the Menteng sector police
chief, Maj. Anis, and the chairman of the Indonesian Legal Aid
Foundation (YLBHI), Adnan Buyung Nasution, working side-by-side
in an apparent spirit of camaraderie on a common project.

What makes the whole affair much less palatable is the nature
of the job on which the two were working: the cleansing of the
walls of the foundation's building at Jl. Diponegoro 74 in
Central Jakarta's elite Menteng residential neighborhood. The two
men were eradicating the obscene graffiti scrawled there by
unidentified vandals during the night earlier this week.

Foundation officials have said they believe the unknown
perpetrators came to the building between midnight and 3 a.m.,
which are the hours when the security guards make their regular
rounds.

The dirty words and symbols were spray painted and, according
to foundation director Luhut Pangaribuan, were not likely to have
been put there simply for kicks by juveniles in a random act of
petty vandalism. Rather, he said, it was a deliberate and clearly
planned act and thus, by inference, done with a certain purpose
in mind. "Whoever they are, they must be people with sick minds,"
he told reporters.

The defacing of the foundation's building on Jl. Diponegoro
was the latest incident in a series of mysterious threats to
legal aid workers and damage done to their property in Jakarta,
Palembang and Bandung within the span of the past fortnight or
so.

In the first incident, which occurred in Palembang, South
Sumatra, on Jan. 25, the tire bolts on a car belonging to one of
the foundation's lawyers were loosened while the vehicle was
parked outside the local foundation's offices. Five days later,
on Jan. 30, acid was poured over the hood of a car which was
being used by the foundation's lawyers. All the car's tires were
slashed. Then, on Feb. 5, unidentified people smashed the window
of a car owned by a lawyer of the Nusantara Legal Aid
Organization in Bandung.

So far it seems that all those acts of vandalism have in no
way affected the morale of our legal aid workers in these three
cities. The only thing which the perpetrators of those crude and
utterly vulgar acts seem to have achieved at this stage is to
illustrate the depths to which the art of expressing views has
sunk in some circles of our society.

In the meantime, the one obvious question which all this
raises is: Who could be the perpetrators of such contemptible and
cowardly acts? To find the most likely answer to this question,
the natural thing to do is obviously to try to identify the party
or parties whose interests are the most jeopardized by the
activities of those legal aid foundations and who have the means
to conduct such acts of terrorism.

Perhaps a number of possible guilty parties could be
identified. But whoever they might be, it is in the interest of
all of us, the authorities in particular, to put a stop to the
vandalism and to clear up the mystery as promptly as is possible.
Not only are such acts a disgrace, in the minds of the majority
of us rests the assumption: Who could these guilty parties
possibly be but people with money and power -- those whom the
legal aid lawyers are constantly battling?