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)