Election institute faces lawsuit over dropped candidates

JAKARTA (JP): The United Development Party (PPP) is planning to sue the General Election Institute for rejecting its legislature candidates "without clear grounds".

Secretary-General Tosari Wijaya said Tuesday that because of suspicion of foul play, the party executives were currently gathering information on how the institute screened its candidates.

"We'll file a lawsuit against the General Election Institute once we have strong evidence of 'violations of procedures'," Tosari said. He did not elaborate why the party executives became suspicious.

Last Friday, during a General Election Institute meeting, the National Screening Committee's chairman, Sutoyo N.K., announced the committee had rejected 130 candidates from PPP, 21 candidates from Golkar and 106 candidates from the Indonesian Democratic Party. The number approved for the provisional list of legislature candidates was 2,293.

Each political group submitted a maximum of 850 candidates for next year's election. The figure is twice the number of House of Representatives seats up for grabs; the remaining 75 House seats are reserved for the Armed Forces, whose members do not vote.

Sutoyo cited the nominees' failure to meet the deadline for various administrative matters as grounds for rejection, and that the public could file their objections against listed candidates with the institute.

Sutoyo did not mention whether there were candidates who failed the screening procedures, which were to weed out those candidates with past communist links.

Tosari, however, blasted the institute for what he said was "groundless rejection" of the party's candidates. He pointed out that out of the 130 rejected nominees, 55 did not receive no- communists-links statements from Bakorstanas, the internal security agency involved in the screening.

"The screening committee did not give us clear explanation as to why our 55 candidates did not get the statements," he said.

Tosari said he suspected that three of the candidates were rejected because they were civil servants. Members of the Corps of Civil Servants are tacitly expected to be loyal to the dominant Golkar group.

The three were Fauzi A.R. Fachruddin, a doctor at Yogyakarta General Hospital; Toha Abdurrahman, a lecturer from Sunan Kalijaga State Institute of Islamic Studies; and Jalaludin.

"We need as many selected candidates as possible to be our vote-getters during the election campaign," he said.

According to the time table established by the General Election Committee, the election campaigning will start April 29 through May 23, 1997. A cooling-off period of seven days follows before polling day, which is set for May 29, 1997. (imn)