Indonesian authorities cooperative: EU observer
JAKARTA (JP): With the country looking forward to what most people hope will be the most democratic elections ever, the Indonesian authorities have been cooperative with local and international observers in their efforts to ensure these hopes are realized, said a European Union (EU) official.
John Gwyn Morgan, executive coordinator of the EU Election Observation Unit, said on Thursday foreign observers had the freedom they needed to closely monitor all stages of this year's elections.
"I've not found anything except full cooperation from the Indonesian authorities, who have let our observers monitor the election stages anywhere," he told The Jakarta Post.
"We have an agreement with the government and the General Elections Commission (KPU), but our observers are granted freedom to go anywhere during the election campaign, to closely monitor the polling booths on the election day and to follow the counting of the votes as well as the transfer of the votes from villages to the district sections," he said.
He said the EU will deploy 130 observers to 14 provinces, including Jakarta. The EU will not send observers to monitor voting and ballot-counting in the troubled regions of Aceh, East Timor and Irian Jaya.
"We have been advised by the United Nations not to go to the troubled regions, especially East Timor."
"We have no other choices but to comply with the UN suggestion," he said.
However, Morgan insisted that the EU's absence would not mean it excluded those three regions from its monitoring program.
"We'll cooperate with other international observers and work closely with local Indonesian observers to fill in the gaps, especially in open centers and rural areas," he said.
Meanwhile, the official Elections Supervisory Committee on Thursday announced "indications" of alleged misuse of government funds and facilities, as well as bureaucrats' partiality, in the pre-election period. The committee urged Golkar Party and the People's Sovereignty Party (PDR), which have been targets of the accusations, to positively respond to the report and make itself accountable to the public.
"Those under public scrutiny should not see critical reports as slander," it said in a statement. "Terrorizing people who supply information on alleged breaches of election laws is against the commitment to creating a new political order."
Meanwhile coordinator of the University Network for Free Elections (Unfrel) Todung Mulya Lubis said Thursday that some 130,000 volunteers of the body might lose their voting rights as election committee officials did not know about a ruling allowing volunteers to cast their votes at any polling station.
"KPU has actually issued the ruling, but doubted that the polling committees at provincial and regional levels have copies of it at hand," he said.
In Mataram, West Nusa Tenggara, a private research team of the respected Jakarta-based LP3ES reported discrepancies between the number of voters at villages, subdistricts and districts and the figures at the provincial elections committee.
Suhardi Surjadi, the head of the team, said the subdistrict office of Monjok in Mataram town registered 9,570 voters, while there were only 9,556 voters from the subdistrict registered at the district office. (imn/edt/49)