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?