Human rights, antigraft drive first priority: Watchdogs
Human rights, antigraft drive first priority: Watchdogs
M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Non-governmental organizations demanded on Thursday that the new
government make corruption eradication and human rights promotion
its priorities.
Rights watchdog the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims
of Violence (Kontras) and corruption watchdog the Indonesian
Corruption Watch (ICW) said in a joint statement that as Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono had accepted the mandate of the people, the new
President should not shy away from punishing the human rights
abusers of previous regimes and scores of corruptors who were
vindicated by the previous government.
"Human rights abuse and corruption are intertwined and their
perpetrators are often from the same groups. We suspect that some
of these groups are now rallying behind Susilo and contributed to
his rise to power. We urge the Susilo administration not to bend
under their pressure and uphold justice," the statement said.
Kontras, in its report, recorded numerous cases of human
rights abuses: The military's purge in the wake of an aborted
coup blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) --which
allegedly killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the latter
half of the 1960s -- a series of mysterious shootings in the
early 1980s, the Semanggi incident, in which scores of students
were killed in 1998, and the abduction and murder of labor
activist Marsinah.
Press reports suggested that elements in the military had a
hand in all of the aforementioned cases.
The ICW said that Megawati's administration had failed to
prosecute businesspeople who swindled state money, which was
injected to bail them out of the financial crisis at the height
of the late 1990s economic crisis.
"Instead, the administration issued release-and-discharge
orders for fraudulent businessmen, which absolved them of any
wrongdoing," Luky Djani of the ICW said.
Fellow activist Usman Hamid of Kontras said that the first
step the Susilo administration should take was to rid the
Attorney General's Office of corruption.
"We are glad that Susilo appointed Abdul Rahman Saleh as
Attorney General. However, the appointment alone is not enough,
there has to be thorough reform in the Attorney General's Office,
which has been corrupt to the core," Usmand said.
He urged the new attorney general to replace scores of
attorneys and prosecutors whose litigation in numerous cases of
corruption and rights abuses had stalled.
Usman said that the new Attorney General's Office could
include ad hoc prosecutors, consisting of non-officials and local
prosecutors.
Aside from reforming the AGO, the NGOs demanded that the
Susilo administration unveil the blueprint for its national
anticorruption program.
The NGOs called for the swift reopening of cases that concern
the public at large.
"The responsibility of resolving cases of graft and rights
abuses does not go away with the changing of administrations,"
they said.