Senior officer gets marching order over Al-Zaytun affair

Tiarma Siboro and Nana Rukmana, Jakarta/Indramayu

A middle-ranking military officer was discharged on Wednesday for involvement in the illegal mobilization of voters to the advantage of candidate Gen.(ret) Wiranto.

Lt. Col. E was said to have been involved in the deployment of 21 military vehicles carrying thousands of civilians to the Al-Zaytun Islamic boarding school in Indramayu regency, West Java on Monday.

The decision to discharge the officer was taken immediately after the West Java Election Supervisory Committee (Panwaslu) discovered an unusually high number of voters had come to cast their ballots on the school grounds -- almost 25,000 compared to 11,000 in the April legislative election.

It was not clear whether the local election committees had accepted additional voters or whether the voters had cast their votes more than once. Based on regulations each polling station can accommodate a maximum of 300 registered voters.

The Indonesian Military (TNI) headquarters also imposed administrative sanctions on 20 civil servants working at the headquarters for having used the vehicles for business purposes.

"TNI headquarters regrets the incident because it happened amid military efforts to remain neutral in the election. The use of the vehicles also violates military regulations," the TNI said in a statement on Wednesday.

"But what we regret most is that the vehicles were used to mobilize people to vote at Al-Zaytun, for a certain presidential candidate."

Gen. (ret) Wiranto and Solahuddin Wahid, the ticket from the Golkar Party, garnered a total of 24,794 votes in the polling stations located in Al-Zaytun.

According to the statement, a man named Emut Muhtar, called a civil servant named Isna and asked whether he could rent 21 vehicles to transport local residents to the Islamic school complex to participate in a prayer gathering.

Emut paid Rp 940,000 (US$94,949) for each bus and Isna, along with 20 other civil servants provided 21 buses that drove the passengers to the school on July 4.

The buses picked up passengers from three locations in South Jakarta and dropped them at Al-Zaytun. The drivers returned to the school complex late on July 5 to transport the passengers back to Jakarta.

"The TNI has deployed a team nationwide to monitor the neutrality of soldiers during the elections and to record any violations of the TNI chief's instruction," said the statement.

It referred to an earlier instruction issued by TNI Chief Gen. Endriartono Sutarto.

Meanwhile, 13 journalists complained to the police after being expelled by Al-Zaytun executive Abdul Halim.

"Al-Zaytun officials invited us to attend a press conference on the issue. They were initially polite, but inspected us one by one before we entered the complex. Then suddenly Abdul Halim asked us to leave without a valid reason," the journalists said in their report.