‘Nothing has fundamentally changed!’ The majority of
Indonesian Human Rights organisations have given
their, and for good reason, for in the three months the
new government has now been in power, not one law
has been amended, whilst, according to observers, it
has not hesitated to govern by decree to manage the
bankruptcy of the country’s major companies. The
tools of repression used by the Suharto regime in its
32 years of government have not become a thing of
the past, the civil society refuses to acknowledge the
undeniable progress in terms
of fundamental
freedoms that has
been made over
the last three
months.
For example, the
only Bill which has
been submitted to
Parliament is a text
to limit the freedom
of expression even
more.
Even so, a number
of things have
changed in fact
since General
Mohammed
Suharto was forced
to resign on 21st
May 1998, in the
wake of heavy
student
demonstrations.
Countless political
prisoners have
been released,
journalists
undeniably have greater freedom in their scope of work now, even
though they sometimes still practise self-censure. The
Editor of Tempo, an independent paper which was
banned in 1994, has now been granted a licence to
publish again, without even lodging a claim. Prodemocracy
activists can now gather without fear of
police intervention and questioning of all the
participants, a situation which civil society still has
difficulties to come to terms with. But in view of the renewed violations of fundamental
liberties, this cautiousness is justified. On 30th
September, a journalist was called to the police station
for a ‘press offence’. Opponents of the regime claim
that they are being pursued by members of the
security services again and that there was intimidation
again. On 18th September, Ratna Sarumpaet, a
concerned activist and coordinator of the National
Dialogue for Democracy, was called ‘as a witness in a
criminal case of insulting the President [...] and
disruption of public order’. Already,
shortly after the fall
of Suharto, she had
been imprisoned for
more than two
months, which
earned her the title
of ‘the last political
prisoner of
Suharto’, or maybe
‘the first political
prisoner of Habibie’. The wind of freedom
does not seem to
have reached the
banks of Timor. The
demonstrations to
mark the visit of
Jamsheed Marker,
UN special envoy,
were followed by a
number of arrests
after his departure.
According to our
own reports, some
fifty people are still
in detention.
Families of
activists, and in this
case demonstrators, are hasselled, questioned and
sometimes threatened. All these are practices of
intimidation which have been widespread since the
invasion of the island of Indonesia. What is more,
while several Indonesian troops have been withdrawn,
new troops are silently being deployed in East Timor. A
typical attitude of ‘government of appearance’ of the
Habibie government?