Democracy in peril

Democracy in peril

The raid by the police at an international conference in
Sawangan near Jakarta on Friday, and the arrest of 40 of the
participants, including 32 foreigners, was bizarre, if not
disturbing, to the conscience. You could be forgiven thinking
that news reports of this incident, which also appeared in this
paper on Sunday, were mistakenly taken from a leaf of the history
book of a recent bygone era, when undemocratic practices such as
dissolving a gathering were normal. Some of us would probably
have wished that Sawangan was not in Indonesia, but in a country
where people's democratic rights, including the right to freedom
of opinion and of assembly, are not respected.

Alas, there was no mistake. The story was real. The raid, and
the arrests, did take place at the weekend here in Indonesia and
not too far away from the capital. And the raid was conducted by
officers from our very own National Police.

What is worse was that hours after the police raid of the
Asia-Pacific Labor Solidarity Conference on Neoliberalism, a
group of thugs, using holy Islamic symbols, arrived and
physically attacked the remaining participants. These thugs did
not only seem to have the tacit approval of the police, but they
finished off the police's job in dissolving the gathering. Like
the raid itself, the use of thugs by the police and military to
do its dirty job was normal practice during the Soeharto era.

The Sawangan incident drew a disturbing picture of Indonesia
one year into the new millennium. Was it not three years ago that
this country renounced all forms of tyranny and repression? Was
it not in 1998 that many young Indonesians paid with their blood,
sweat and tears to put an end to the rule of one of the world's
longest-ruling tyrants? Since then, even as the country was
struggling out of the political and economic crises, the nation
was nevertheless fully resolved never to let itself return to
that dark era as far as democracy was concerned.

There seemed to be a strong commitment among the nation's new
leaders since then that the only way to ensure this country never
fell back under another tyrannical rule was to protect people's
basic democratic rights, which include their right to freedom of
expression, of speech, and of assembly. There was a national
consensus that the military and the police, both of which were
turned into Soeharto's personal tools of repression for over
three decades, would be reformed with the nation's new
commitments to building a democracy. And there was a consensus
that the rule of law must always prevail in this country.

The nation held a democratic general election and elected a
president in 1999, fully believing that the only way forward
towards long-lasting prosperity for all the people was first to
build the democratic foundations of the state.

All of these commitments now sound more like lip service after
Friday's police raid in Sawangan. The police and its thug friends
have made a complete mockery of every value and principle that
this nation has been struggling to establish in the last three
years, along with the sacrifices that have gone with this
struggle. With a single stroke, the raid in Sawangan has simply
turned back the clock on the nation.

The police's excuse, that the raid was part of its operation
to strengthen security ahead of the special session of the
People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), is simply unacceptable. The
MPR session, scheduled to start on Aug. 1, is a very important
constitutional process to determine the future of embattled
President Abdurrahman Wahid. The police's explanation sounded all
too familiar to those who lived through the Soeharto era. Then,
as now, security was always the overriding reason why basic
democratic rights could be waived, or repressed.

The police's claim that the participating foreigners were
violating their tourist visas by taking part in the conference,
is highly debatable. At any rate, the police must have had prior
knowledge of the conference, and the involvement of foreigners,
and it could have warned the organizers beforehand about the visa
regulations. But you do not bust a conference, an international
one at that, once it has started.

If the police and its thug friends are allowed to get away
with such unconstitutional acts unpunished, we can be sure that
this will not be the last of such incidents. The day the nation
turns a blind eye to its own law enforcement institutions
breaking the law and the constitution is the day this nation
kisses goodbye to democracy.