[Kabar-indonesia] NYT: Indonesians Protest Acquittal of Pilot in Rights Advocate’s Murder

[Joyo at aol.com]

The New York Times
Sunday, October 8, 2006

Indonesians Protest Acquittal of Pilot in Rights Advocate’s Murder 

By JANE PERLEZ

JAKARTA, Indonesia, Oct. 7 -- The acquittal of an Indonesian pilot convicted 
in 
the murder of one of the country’s most respected human rights advocates has 
unleashed a storm of protest from critics of President Susilo Bambang 
Yudhoyono and his government. 

The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that there was insufficient evidence to 
support a lower court’s verdict that the pilot, Pollycarpus Budihari Priyanto, 
had murdered Munir Said Thalib, a human rights lawyer who investigated abuses 
by the Indonesian military. 

Mr. Munir, 38, died from an arsenic overdose when he flew on the national 
airline, Garuda, from Jakarta to Amsterdam in September 2004. 

Mr. Pollycarpus, a pilot with Garuda, was a passenger in business class 
during the first leg of the flight, from Jakarta to Singapore, and had arranged an 
upgrade for Mr. Munir, so that they sat in the same cabin for 90 minutes. An 
autopsy found that Mr. Munir, who died when the plane was over Europe, had 
swallowed three times more arsenic than his body could tolerate. 

The criticisms of the government’s handling of the case were directed in an 
unusually personal way at President Yudhoyono, who has been mentioned among the 
news media here as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize because of his work 
promoting a peace accord between the Indonesian Army and separatists in Aceh 
Province. Mr. Yudhoyono, the first directly elected president of Indonesia 
since the fall of ex-President Suharto, a dictator, in 1998, took office two years 
ago. 

But in a scathing editorial entitled “Forget the Nobel, Remember Munir,” The 
Jakarta Post wrote Friday that there was still little political will to 
uphold human rights here. The paper said the acquittal followed a pattern that 
included the exoneration of all the senior Indonesian military officers accused of 
crimes against humanity in East Timor in 1999. 

“Our politicians posture and make the right noises in international forums, 
often to applause, while at home activists work tirelessly to campaign for 
these rights,” the paper said. “And sometimes they are murdered on the job.” 

Mr. Yudhoyono said the investigation of Mr. Munir’s death was “a test case 
for whether Indonesia has changed.” After the acquittal, the president’s 
spokesman said that Mr. Yudhoyono had ordered the police to strengthen their 
investigation. 

But Asmara Nababan, a member of a government-appointed fact-finding 
commission into the case, described the spokesman’s reaction as too little, too late. 

“It is only rhetoric, a kind of public relations,” Mr. Nababan said on 
Indonesian radio. 

The widow of Mr. Munir, Suciwati, who like many Indonesians uses only one 
name, said at a news conference on Friday that Mr. Yudhoyono’s spokesman had 
asked her “not to criticize the government too much.” 

Critics said little effort had been made to uncover what the lower court in 
its verdict had called a conspiracy to kill Mr. Munir. 

The fact-finding commission found that more than two dozen calls had been 
made from Mr. Pollycarpus’s cellphone before and after the death of Mr. Munir to 
the phone of Maj. Gen. Muchdi Purwoprajoyo, a deputy director of the State 
Intelligence Agency in 2004. 

Lt. Gen. Hendropriyono, the leader of the intelligence agency at the time of 
the murder, refused to answer a summons from the commission. Several prominent 
Indonesian lawyers have said they believe that Mr. Pollycarpus was used by 
the intelligence service to kill Mr. Munir, and that neither President Yudhoyono 
nor the police had the fortitude to stand up to the agency. 

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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