Police break up art fair amid rights day
Police break up art fair amid rights day
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Police broke up a fine arts fair in Surakarta, Central Java, on
Friday, as students and activists staged protests around the
country to mark International Human Rights Day.
Attendees of the arts fair were forcibly dispersed by police
intelligence officers, who said they were preventing a possible
social disturbance.
The week-long event was opened earlier in the day at the
Soedjatmoko Gallery in Surakarta to commemorate the International
Human Rights Day, which fell on Dec. 10.
The organizing committee said the police action was triggered
by an installation titled Dead Body by artist Suryo.
Suryo presented 98 pictures of the hammer and sickle, arranged
as a colossal work covering the walls of an entire room. The
hammer and sickle is the symbol of the outlawed Indonesian
Communist Party (PKI).
Police confiscated the work in question.
Surakarta Police chief Adj. Sr. Comr. Lutfi Lubihanto
acknowledged there were no legal grounds to break up the event
and confiscate Suryo's work.
"We were acting on our intuition because it was feared the
artwork could incite social violence," he said.
However, Lutfi denied the action had anything to do with
anticommunist activists who put up banners denouncing the PKI
ahead of the recent presidential election.
He denied the police were violating freedom of expression,
saying if art had the potential to cause public unrest "we are
forced to take action to protect the artist".
Suryo said he was extremely disappointed by the actions of the
police.
He said he chose the pictures of hammers and sickles to
commemorate the gross human rights abuses that followed the
abortive coup blamed on the now-defunct PKI on Sept. 30, 1965.
"Such a work of arts should have been understood as a medium
for contemplation and reflection, so a similar human tragedy
would not occur. I am not in the position to support a certain
ideology," Suryo told The Jakarta Post.
Meanwhile, hundreds of students and activists protested in
Surabaya, East Java, to mark the international rights day,
demanding that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's government
resolve the outstanding human rights abuse cases in Indonesia.
Protesters said rights violations involving former dictator
Soeharto and the Indonesian Military had to be dealt with.
They also raised the case of prominent rights campaigner
Munir, who died recently after being poisoned.
Protesters also demanded affordable education for all, better
pay and protection for workers, land reform and more freedoms for
gays and lesbians.
Two similar protests took place separately in Yogyakarta, in
which hundreds of students urged the government to resolve the
death of Munir and rights abuses in Aceh and Papua.
The protesters demanded an immediate end to military
operations in Aceh, which have left hundreds of people dead,
mostly innocent civilians.
Dozens of students and activists also commemorated the human
rights day in Pekanbaru, Riau, raising several local cases,
including violence against civilians in a land dispute between
residents of Tambusai, Rokan Hulu, and PT Surya Damai.
In Bandung, the Bandung Legal Aid Institute (LBHB) said on
Friday it had recorded at least 141 cases of human rights abuses
in West Java between January and November, with only 10 percent
of these cases ending up in court.
LBHB director Wirawan said most of the cases were related to
land disputes and involved more than 60,000 people in the
province.
The Semarang Legal Aid Institute said it had recorded at least
150 rights cases in Central Java involving about 120,000 people.
In Semarang alone, there were at least 22 cases of industrial
pollution that had harmed fishermen and residents living along
rivers, institute director Asep Yunan Firdaus said.