Febriamy Hutapea

With several minsters and other senior officials once again declining to attend a House hearing concerning military abductions of students in the late 1990s, lawmakers on Thursday roundly criticized the government for failing to take serious steps to resolve the issue.

Lawmakers said they would send a letter to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to urge him to take action over the absence of cabinet ministers who were summoned by the House of Representatives, causing yet another delay in proceedings that have already been suspended for more than 10 years.

The committee deputy chairman, Darmayanto, said that if the officials skipped the next hearing as well, the House would go ahead without their input in determining whether the abductions constituted a gross human rights violation and thus merited an ad hoc human rights court.

“Don’t blame us if we go ahead and make a decision on our own,” said Darmayanto, of the National Mandate Party, or PAN.

Politicians and even some activists had earlier questioned the timing of efforts to reinvigorate the House special committee’s proceedings ahead of this year’s elections, in which multiple former military members are running as candidates — some of whom, like presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto, are implicated in the abductions.

Poengki Indarti of the NGO human rights watchdog Imparsial said the families of the missing did not want the case to be politicized or used to blast rival parties in the elections.

“We just need them to take real action to finish the case and find the 13 people who have been abducted,” she said.

During former President Suharto’s rule, 22 pro-democracy activists disappeared from 1997 to 1998. Nine of them resurfaced with accounts of torture at the hands of the military, but 13 remain missing.

The special committee hearing was supposed to be attended by the National Police chief, Bambang Hendarso Danuri; the State Intelligence Agency head, Syamsir Siregar; the military chief of staff, Djoko Sutanto; the coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, Widodo A.S.; Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono; and Attorney General Hendarman Supandji. Only Agus Brotosusilo, an adviser for the Defense Ministry, came to the hearing. Lawmakers said that Agus was sent to the House merely as a “victim” and that he was not in a position to speak for the government on the case.

Legislator Soeripto from the Prosperous Justice Party, or PKS, and Andreas Pareira from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-P, said the absence of the government insulted the House and showed that officials underestimated the case.

“They have not put serious emphasis on this case,” he said. “We should serve them a
warning.”

The fact-finding team of the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence, or Kontras, has presented its conclusion to the House and Attorney General’s Office that the abduction of student activists was a gross human rights violation.

The House committee was formed following the fall of Suharto in 1998 amid widespread civil unrest.

The committee adjourned in 2007 and resumed again last year.