Yogie SM denies funding rival PDI leadership

Yogie SM denies funding rival PDI leadership

JAKARTA (JP): Minister of Home Affairs Moch. Yogie SM has denied giving money to the rival leadership of the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI).

Yogie told journalists at his office over the weekend that Yusuf Merukh, the leader of the PDI rival board, had told a lie when he said recently that he had received Rp 3 billion (US$1.48 million) from the authorities.

Yusuf was quoted as telling reporters on Thursday that his self-styled PDI leadership would hold a special congress in April which would be financed by the government.

"That is a lie," Yogie retorted on Saturday. "From whom in the government did they get those funds?" he asked, rhetorically, as quoted by Antara.

Yusuf was not available for comment.

Meanwhile a member of the PDI executive board has accused Yusuf of involvement in the 1965 communist coup attempt.

Suparlan said he would ask the military authorities to investigate.

"The PDI presently has enough witnesses to testify against Yusuf," Suparlan said at PDI headquarters. He was accompanied by the party's secretary general Alexander Iitaay.

Suparlan refused to name the witnesses but said that they knew very well Yusuf had been on the staff of minister of agrarian affairs Hermanses in president Sukarno's government.

According to Suparlan, Yusuf mysteriously disappeared after his minister was arrested in 1966 on charges of involvement in the abortive communist coup.

To show his sympathy to the communists Yusuf had also tried hard to foil students' anti-communist demonstrations in 1966, he said.

Suparlan added that Yusuf's plan to hold a special congress for his self-styled PDI was "a political joke that deserves no attention."

Screening

Meanwhile former Minister of Home Affairs Rudini has said that the idea of repeating military screening of political activists would not be difficult to implement because the government already had a system for it.

Speaking in Balikpapan over the weekend, Rudini asked "why so much fuss when the rule of the game is there?"

The suggestion was made by PDI chairwoman Megawati Sukarno- putri because, she said, so far only her party had been suspected of harboring communist elements while others have not.

She wanted the authorities to screen members of the government party, Golkar, as well.

According to Rudini, during the 1987 general election all political parties submitted the names of their candidates for military screening.

"The Armed Forces later scrutinized the lists and reported to the political party concerned where it suspected that certain activists should be investigated further for his or her alleged involvement in communist activities," he said.

Rudini said that in the present case people should not deduce from the involvement of one person in the communist coup attempt that their relatives were also involved.

Citing an example, he said that a person who was born in 1966 after his father's involvement in the 1965 coup attempt, is not automatically to be regarded as being involved in communist activities.

The criteria for assessing someone's or someone's relatives' involvement in leftist activities are different for the general public, on one hand, and candidates for Armed Forces membership, on the other, he said.

In the 1980s political entities were confused about the criteria and accused the authorities of abusing the right to screen their activists as a means of removing outspoken politicians from the list of election nominees, Rudini said. (tis)