Old habits die hard
Old habits die hard
"The law, not the use of force should be your weapon," President Megawati Soekarnoputri told top brass and field officers of the National Police assembled at the Senayan east parking lot on Monday to celebrate the corps' 56th anniversary.
Aptly said, for a few hours after she spoke, police officers mobbed and beat up several of the hundreds of student demonstrators gathered at the House of Representatives' front gate to protest the House's failure to form a committee to look into the Rp 40 billion corruption scandal known as Buloggate II.
Dozens of students and four photo journalists present to cover the event were injured in the incident.
Just a few days earlier police in the East Java city of Sidoarjo beat up another photo journalist who was covering a labor strike at PT Maspion for the Jakarta-based newspaper Kompas. The officers were chasing striking workers after a clash and seized the photographer's identity card and camera. Police later replaced the damaged camera, but the film was lost, apparently ruined after officers removed it from the camera. This, though, is highly revealing because it shows why police tend to regard nonpartisan photo journalists as adversaries: They do not want their uncontrolled rage to be shown to the public. Like it or not, violence is still very much the preferred weapon of police officers in the field whenever the situation they are assigned to control threatens to get out of hand.
In the past year alone -- from May 3, 2001 to May 3, 2002 -- the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) recorded 58 cases of physical assault on reporters, including the assault by police personnel in Maluku on the SCTV television network reporter. Recent cases of physical violence toward journalists by police indicate that the police refuse to support press freedom in this era of reform, commented Adnan Pandupraja, who chairs the non- governmental organization Police Watch.
Adnan's view is shared by Fachry Ali, a socio-political observer associated with the National Institute of Sciences (LIPI). In Fachry's opinion, the police are still reluctant to support press freedom in the post-Soeharto era. The police still feel they are soldiers, rather than public security personnel whose duty it is to serve and protect members of the community, including journalists. This clear gap between promises of democratic reform and the naked reality, however, has considerably damaged the credibility of the National Police force.
A recent poll conducted by the newspaper Kompas in Jakarta, for example, showed that over the past few years the public's faith in the police has continued to drop each year. Where legal matters are concerned, 56.3 percent of the 815 respondents polled said they believed that involving police in such problems did not help to provide a solution, but instead tended to make matters worse. A similar survey of 905 people last year resulted in a figure of "only" 43 percent. Furthermore, 74.4 percent of respondents in the latest poll this year found it "incredibly annoying" to have to deal with the police -- again, up from last year's 60.3 percent.
No need to say, Indonesians have every reason to be alarmed at such a trend, since the only alternative one can think of -- which is for people to take the law into their own hands -- is even worse than having a poorly functioning police force. It must be said, however, that in the 18 months since the police have ceased to be a mere supporting branch of the military and become an independent security force under the direct jurisdiction of the President, the Indonesian public has seen little evidence of democratic reform in this very important sector.
In order to ensure that a solid sense of security prevails among the Indonesian public at large, the National Police would do well to heed the President's advice for each police officer to adopt a proper attitude and use the law as a weapon instead of resorting to the use of violence to resolve problems.