Execution sought for ecstasy dealers

Yogita Tahilramani, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

With more and more people here producing and trafficking psychotropic drugs, including ecstasy, the courts should begin handing down the death penalty to punish these crimes, police and observers said.

Despite a law on psychotropic drugs that allows for capital punishment for members of organized crime syndicates dealing in the drugs, the courts have yet to sentence an ecstasy producer or trafficker to death.

"If Indonesia is serious about getting tough on the production and trafficking of ecstasy and shabu-shabu (crystal methamphetamine), then the death penalty should be adopted. Even a 15-year jail term is not enough for such criminals," noted lawyer Trimedya Panjaitan said.

"Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Japan sentence drug traffickers and dealers to death, but drug dealers in Indonesia get out of jail within months."

Criminologist Mulyana W. Kusumah said it was a shame that ecstasy producers received such light sentences.

Law No. 5/1997 on psychotropic drugs says that anyone found guilty of producing and distributing psychotropic drugs as a member of an organized crime syndicate can be given a maximum sentence of a death, life imprisonment or a 20-year jail term and Rp 750 million in fines, depending on which article of the law they are charged under.

Some police officers, state prosecutors and judges, however, seem satisfied with slapping defendants in cases involving psychotropic substances with much lighter charges. Many observers suspect the reason for this is that financial agreements are reached between defendants and those meant to prosecuting them.

Ang Kiem Soei, alias Tommy Wijaya, the alleged owner of two of the country's largest ecstasy-producing factories who was arrested last week, was a fugitive after being sentenced in absentia to three years and 24 days in prison in 1998.

"He was on the wanted list for so long ... we searched for him everywhere, and actually all this time he was in Tangerang, setting up ecstasy factories and running them," the chief of the National Narcotics Agency, Comr. Gen. Nurfaizi, who was in charge of the operation that led to the arrest of Ang Kiem, told the Post on Thursday.

"Three years and 24 days is not enough for a producer and trafficker like him. The death penalty better suits him. He has even confessed to selling some 150,000 pills in Malaysia."

Though Nurfaizi insisted that Ang Kiem had confessed to making about Rp 9 billion each month from the sale of millions of ecstasy pills produced in his factories in Cipondoh, Tangerang, police sources said that figure was known to have reached between Rp 15 billion and Rp 20 billion a month.

Nurfaizi declined to comment on rumors that officers from the National Police, the Jakarta Police and the Tangerang Police had known that Ang Kiem was in Tangerang since 1999, and that they themselves could have been on Ang Kiem's payroll, receiving billions of rupiah each month from the sale of millions of ecstasy pills produced in his factories.