Govt to stand by result of party screening

Moch. N. Kurniawan and Muninggar Sri Saraswati, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The government will not accede to requests from parties that did not qualify as political groupings to reverse the screening results, an official said Sunday.

Zulkarnaen Yusuf, the director general of legal administration at the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, said that most, if not all, of the 34 parties that did not pass the third and last screening did not have required number of branch offices in provinces and regencies.

In some cases, parties had no offices, while verification officials from the ministry also discovered several cases of double leadership, he said.

"We will show the 34 parties that they failed to meet the requirements as political parties," Zulkarnaen told The Jakarta Post on Sunday.

The Justice and Human Rights Ministry announced on Saturday that only 32 out of 66 parties screened in the third and last phase met the requirements for registration as political parties.

Under the prevailing law, a party has to have branch offices in 50 percent of provinces, 50 percent of the regencies/municipalities in those provinces, and 25 percent of the total subdistricts in those regencies.

Indonesia has 32 provinces and 416 regencies/municipalities.

With the last 32 parties passing the ministry's screening, a total of 50 parties are entitled to register with the National Elections Commission (KPU) to be screened as contestants for the 2004 elections. Nine of them have already registered with the KPU.

At least three of the 34 parties that failed the screening are to hand over the necessary evidence to the ministry to prove that they should qualify.

"We are going to hear the ministry's explanation on Monday as to why we failed to pass the screening. We will provide the ministry with proof that we should have passed the screening," said Bambang Sulistomo, chairman of the Indonesian Nationalist Alliance Party.

According to Bambang, his party would still demand that the government revise the outcome of the screening if his party could prove that the ministry had made mistakes in the screening process.

He said his party had branch offices in 21 provinces, thus passing the requirement set by the law.

Bambang said he was not going to sue the ministry as this would take too long whereas a party had to register with the KPU on Oct. 9 at the latest to be included in the verification process as a contestant in the 2004 election.

The Reform Mandate Party and the United People's Opposition Party (POPOR) also claimed they should have passed the verification stage as they had fulfilled all the requirements for recognition as a political party.

M. Dulwatin, the president of the Reform Mandate Party, said his party should have qualified as it had branch offices in 24 provinces.

Unfortunately, the ministry had not yet checked all the provinces, according to Dulwatin.

Dulwatin also questioned Yusril's advice to disappointed parties to challenge his ministry's decision in court.

"We are not afraid, but we might run out of time as court proceedings can take years," he said.

POPOR secretary-general Yusuf Lakaseng said his party would meet with ministry officials on Monday to question them about the ministry's decision that his party had failed the screening.

He argued that his party, which had 18 branch offices, should have qualified, saying that the ministry had undertaken unfair practices in verifying his party.

For example, he said, hoodlums in Banten had intimidated his party officials in the new province not to reveal themselves as POPOR officials. Thus, the ministry officials had not been able to properly verify his party there.

In other areas, the ministry's officials came earlier than they had promised, so that not all of his party officials had met with the verification officials.

"So there have been systematic attempts to stop our party from contesting the 2004 elections. We will not beg the ministry to allow us to compete in next year's election," he said.