Rights activists ask govt to free political prisoners
Rights activists ask govt to free political prisoners
JAKARTA (JP): Human rights campaigners called on the government on Saturday to release political detainees and prisoners and to discontinue the practice of political detention, because Indonesia means to be a democratic country which highly respects humanity.
During a one-day seminar held by the Indonesian Society for Humanity, it was agreed that citizens should not be detained or imprisoned because of their political beliefs. Rather, participants argued, people should be allowed freedom of expression.
"The 1945 Constitution protects every citizen from detention or imprisonment on the basis of their political beliefs. People may be detained only if they express their ideas with physical violence," said Marzuki Darusman, a member of the National Commission on Human Rights.
Marzuki was insistent that the state ideology Pancasila does not permit Indonesians to be held as prisoners of conscience. The five tenets of Pancasila are belief in one God, national unity, consensus through deliberation, humanism and social justice.
Marzuki was one of the speakers at the seminar, which was entitled "Fifty years of Indonesia's independence and the problem of political detainees and political prisoners in Indonesia" held at the headquarters of the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation on Saturday.
Participants included government critics such as former Jakarta Governor Ali Sadikin, human rights activists H.J. Princen, Adnan Buyung Nasution, Mulyana W. Kusumah and the prominent mystic Permadi. Ex-political detainee H.M. Sanusi was also present.
Held under the watchful eyes of some 20 police officers, who constantly moved in and out of the building, the participants held a lively discussion, making many critical comments about the observance of human rights in Indonesia.
The gathering would have been dispersed by the police if Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation activist Hendardi had not succeeded in convincing the police officers present that they lacked the legal grounds to move in.
Marzuki said that in 1994 the number of political prisoners in Indonesia reached 195. However, other participants put the number at 246. In the 1970s, not long after the tragic Sept. 30, 1965 coup attempt by the Indonesian Communist Party, the figure was as high as 1.43 million, Marzuki said.
Many people who were involved in, or known to have links with, the communist party have remained in detention until the present time.
However, even being released does not mean full freedom: the ID cards of such people are marked with the initials "E.T." (ex- tapol, or "ex-political detainee") and their children and immediate relatives -- "cursed" as being ideologically "unclean" -- cannot hold positions in government.
Harkristuti Harkrisnowo, a professor at the University of Indonesia's School of Law, brought up the basic question of what exactly a "political crime" is and who has the right to judge whether or not a person could be punished because of a "political crime".
"How do you actually define a political crime?" she asked.
A study she had conducted showed, she said, that even the courts and the jails did not agree on the proper use of the term, resulting in different statistics under the term "political detainees".
Inhumane
Franz Magnis-Suseno, a professor from the Driyarkara School of Philosophy, and Aswab Mahasin, a religious scholar and a teacher at the Institute for Research, Education, Economic and Social Information, both considered the continued punishment of ex- political criminals to be "inhumane."
Magnis-Suseno viewed the "guilt and shame" inherited by descendants of ex-political criminals as a punishment which is given simply as a means of revenge, while Aswab described this as an "inherited sin".
"No matter how guilty a person was, is it humane to make him continue paying for his crime after these 30 years -- and for the rest of his life?" Magnis-Suseno asked.
The Sep. 30, 1965 abortive coup has been brought up again and again "for the sake of political opportunists", he said.
Aswab said that the institution of inherited sins was against the basic notion of "a just and civilized humanity" contained in Pancasila.
"We have to see a person as a human being, as a subject with rights and responsibilities... Justice and harmony can only be achieved by guaranteeing a balance of all forces, not by eliminating an opposing force or by establishing uniformity. True democracy does not recognize such a thing as a political detainee," he said.(pwn)