Elections body receives beefs about candidates

Elections body receives beefs about candidates

JAKARTA (JP): The General Elections Institute has received a
number of complaints about candidates of the three political
groupings contesting the May general election.

Coordinating Minister for Political Affairs and Security
Soesilo Soedarman said after a meeting of ministers under his
coordination here yesterday the institute had received three
complaints about candidates of the Moslem-based United
Development Party (PPP), 18 about candidates of the ruling
Golkar, and five objections to nationalist-Christian alliance
Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) candidates.

According to Soesilo, the complaints ranged from doubts about
candidates' "morality" and "commitment to state ideology," to
reports about alleged criminal activity. He refused to disclose
the kind of crimes said to have been committed by the prospective
peoples representatives.

"Have pity on them," he said.

The General Elections Institute announced 2,303 names on the
provisional list of House of Representatives candidates. The PPP
has 730 nominees, Golkar has 829, and PDI has 744.

The public are allowed to scrutinize and raise objections to
the candidates. The time allocated for this purpose is between
Jan 21 and Feb. 18. Afterward, the institute will announce the
final list of candidates.

After the meeting yesterday, Soesilo also spoke about the
planned establishment of Alert Command Centers across the
country. He said they were not new institutions but "meant to
sharpen and increase the function of the already existing
district military commands".

He said the centers would be useful as an early warning system
to detect possible unrest and prevent it.

Cheating

Separately, in Probolinggo, East Java, chairman of the regency
chapter of PPP said yesterday around 1,400 young party cadres
from 325 villages and five sub-districts would be trained to
detect and handle unfair practices during the general election.

Musyafa said his party would deploy the trained cadres to all
voting booths in the regency.

"We will also prepare two more trained cadres in each village
as a backup in case the first cadres can not serve at the
booths," he was quoted by Antara as saying.

He said the training would be conducted in the hope that the
general election would be held in accordance with the principle
of Luber (Indonesian acronym for a direct, public, free, and
confidential election).

In yet another development, the state-owned telecommunication
company PT. Telkom Indonesia announced Wednesday they had
installed a telecommunication system for use by government
agencies responsible of organizing and supervising the May 29
general election.

Among the facilities making up the system is a "Telkomnet"
which will be on-line around-the-clock to convey quickly and
accurately preliminary results of ballot-counting from provincial
committees to the national committee, Antara reported.

PT. Telkom had also provided telephone and facsimile lines to
connect district and provincial committees and even special lines
to link sub-districts to districts as long as the districts
possessed an automatic telephone center.

Telecommunications services and facilities would be available
across the country, particularly at the National Elections
Committee headquarters in Cilangkap, the command post on Jl. Imam
Bonjol in Central Jakarta, the Ministry of Home Affairs, the
provincial and district-level committees, regional and resort
military commands, regional and resort police commands.

Special telephone lines were also being made available to
high-ranking state officials, Antara reported. (imn/08/swe)