Serious action warranted

The fatal shooting on Thursday morning of Justice M. Syafiuddin Kartasasmita, a junior judge for general crimes at the Supreme Court, has spread ripples of terror and alarm throughout the community. Obviously designed to intimidate law enforcing officers into practicing greater leniency in passing out justice, Thursday's assassination was an incident that the authorities are advised to take most seriously, in order to prevent a serious setback to our current reform efforts.

Thursday's assassination of Justice Syafiuddin was a high- profile incident of the first order for a number of reasons. He was the judge who, in September last year, sentenced former president Soeharto's youngest son, Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra to 18 months in jail and fined him Rp 30.7 billion (US$3 million) on charges of corruption during the course of Soeharto's 32-year dictatorial rule over the New Order regime. Tommy has since escaped justice and remains a fugitive despite a police manhunt that has lasted many months. It was also Justice Syafiuddin who sentenced Soeharto's golfing buddy Mohamad "Bob" Hasan to six years in jail earlier this year for corruption committed during the same period.

The murder itself was done with all the trappings of the New York mafia. Eyewitnesses said they saw four men on two motorcycles forcing the Honda CVR, which Syafiuddin was driving, to stop on Jl. Serdang, Kemayoran, in Central Jakarta. The time was about 8:30 a.m. One of the men stepped down from his motorcycle and calmly approached the judge's car from the right and shot his victim twice in the head through the closed window. Another man fired at his chest from the left side of the car. The shooting also took another victim as the justice's car careened and hit a cigarette stall and a roadside barber, seriously injuring the cigarette vendor. The four assailants immediately fled the scene of the crime, leaving the eyewitnesses little time to take a closer look at them.

So far, no progress has been reported in the police investigation of the crime, although Senior Comr. Adang Rochyana, the chief of detectives at Jakarta Police Headquarters, said police were investigating whether the shooting had anything to do with Tommy Soeharto's case. To his colleagues, Syafiuddin was known as a man of integrity, committed to eradicating corruption, known to be rampant in Indonesia's legal institutions, going as high as the Supreme Court itself.

Syafiuddin is reported to have complained to his colleagues that he was often approached by people with offers of bribes, the last time being on Tuesday, when Syafiuddin told one of his colleagues there were people offering him Rp 20 billion in exchange for letting Bob Hasan win his appeal. Another offer had come from people reportedly linked to Pande Lubis, who was suspect in the Bank Bali corruption case.

While there are still many judges with integrity left in this country's legal profession, these judges consider threats to their lives an inescapable risk of their profession. Clearly, effective measures must be taken against such intimidation without delay to protect judges and other professionals working for the cause of justice.

The effective upholding of the law and justice is one of the major pillars on which any society rests. To treat such Mafia- style attacks against our law enforcers as commonplace incidents is to turn all our efforts to build a civil society based on the rule of the law into a joke. Serious action must be taken, without delay.