JAKARTA - A post-mortem examination in the
Netherlands has left Indonesian police with a classic
whodunit mystery and human-rights advocates in Jakarta
fearing for their lives. Like any of British mystery
writer Agatha Christie's famous novels, this mystery has
a body, evidence of poisoning, and motives galore. The
setting, however, is hardly the English countryside.
A post-mortem by the Netherlands Forensic
Institute on diminutive 38-year-old Munir Said Thalib, a
prominent and outspoken human-rights campaigner who died
on a flight to Amsterdam two months ago, revealed last
week that his body contained high levels of the poison
arsenic. Why it took two months for the autopsy results
to be released to authorities in Jakarta is just one of
the mysteries surrounding Munir's death, which many are
now calling a murder.
Arsenic has been used for criminal
purposes throughout history more than any other poison
and was thought to have claimed the lives of many,
including Britannicus, Pope Pius III, Pope Clemente
XIV, and Napoleon Bonaparte. The presence of a lethal
dose of arsenic in the body seems to suggest foul play,
a judgment the UK-based Indonesia Human Rights Campaign
(Tapol) believes is the case.
In a press
release issued on Thursday, the day the news was first
made public, Tapol said the findings of the autopsy
confirm "the fears of many of his [Munir's] colleagues
that he was assassinated".
That possibility is
worrisome to many, including Jakarta's most famous
human-rights advocate, Todung Mulya Lubis. "If it is a
political assassination, it could happen to any one of
us," Lubis said. "It is very dangerous for Indonesian
society because it means people cannot be critics."
A murder mystery Initial reports
suggested that Munir had succumbed to a heart attack -
he had been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and
had suffered bouts of hepatitis C in the months prior to
his trip - yet the head of the Jakarta-based
human-rights group Imparsial, Rachmand Nashidik, said
the group had long suspected something unusual about
Munir's death.
"Before going to Holland he was
in good health and had a medical checkup. Moreover, we
met with the doctor with him on the Garuda flight, who
said that while he had diarrhea, he was surprised he had
died," Nashidik said.
After the autopsy
results were released last Thursday, Dutch prosecutors said they
did not have the jurisdiction to launch a criminal
investigation, as the death took place on board a Garuda
Indonesia aircraft. The Dutch government then handed a
copy of the report on Munir's death to the Indonesian
Foreign Ministry.
National Police criminal
investigation chief General Suyitno Landung said an
investigative team had already been dispatched to The
Hague to spearhead an inquiry into the activist's death
to determine whether he was murdered. A diplomatic
delegation will also be sent to act as an "intermediary"
between the Netherlands Forensic Institute and the
police team, Foreign Affairs Minister Hassan Wirajuda
said on Saturday.
"Certainly we have suspicions
and must follow up the autopsy report with an
investigation to determine when, where and by whom
[Munir] was poisoned, if there was indeed such a
criminal act," Wirajuda was quoted as saying.
Death on board GA 974 Munir boarded
Garuda Flight GA 974 at Jakarta's international airport
on September 7. The plane stopped over at Singapore's
Changi Airport before continuing to Amsterdam.
Three hours out of Singapore, the cabin crew
supervisor informed the pilot, Captain Pantun Matondang,
that Munir had fallen ill and was vomiting violently.
According to a Garuda statement, Matondang
ordered the supervisor, Najib, to seek help from a
doctor traveling on the plane. Munir was moved next to
the doctor but was reportedly in agony during his final
moments. Munir died when the aircraft was about two
hours away from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport.
His widow, Suciwati, said she was informed of
the autopsy results on Thursday night by Coordinating
Minister for Security Widodo Sucipto, who told her he
had phoned at the request of the president, Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono. Shortly after his death, Suciwati
said she would be prepared to have her husband's body
exhumed if it would help solve the mystery about how he
died and urged the Indonesian authorities to provide her
with the results. "I want this to be resolved
thoroughly," she said.
Dedicated and fearless,
Munir was described by former president Megawati
Sukarnoputri as a relentless fighter for democracy who
never stopped fighting for what he believed.
Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group
said he was everything a human-rights activist should
be: principled, tough, smart, funny and fearless. "He
stood up to people in power, he made them angry, he got
threat after threat after threat, and he never gave up,"
Jones said.
In 1998 he was awarded the
prestigious Yap Thiam Hien human-rights prize and named
Man of the Year by the leading Indonesian Muslim
periodical UMMAT. Asia Week named him one of "20 young
Asian leaders for the new millennium" in 2000, the year
when he was one of four recipients of the Alternative
Nobel Prize, the Right Livelihood Award, at a ceremony
in the Swedish parliament.
Founder of the award
Jakob von Uexkull said at the ceremony: "During the
decades of authoritarian rule, we were told by Suharto's
Western friends that different rules, rights and values
applied in Indonesia. Add this to the rise of
fundamentalism, the search for scapegoats, the
unwillingness of the military to step back and accept
the primacy of democracy - and you have an idea of the
challenges facing Munir," von Uexkull said.
In
the final months of Suharto's reign, Munir, who was
staunchly critical of the Indonesian military (TNI),
took up the cause of dozens of activists who had
disappeared in suspicious circumstances. He co-founded
Kontras, the Commission for the Disappeared and the
Victims of Violence, and later became a director of the
human-rights group Imparsial.
His work covered
the full spectrum of human-rights concerns in Indonesia,
from abuses by the military and police, to attacks on
labor activists, impunity for human-rights crimes in
Aceh, East Timor and Papua (Irian Jaya) to the rights of
the Chinese ethnic minority.
East Timor
probes On September 21, 1999, shortly after the
East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence,
Dutch journalist Sander Thoenes, who had just turned 31,
was brutally murdered. His throat was slashed, one of
his ears was cut off, the skin on his face was peeled
away and a gaping hole was dug in his left breast.
Battalion 745 of the TNI, which included many troops of
East Timorese origin, was the prime suspect for the
murder.
The case sparked widespread
international criticism of Indonesia. To avoid an
international trial, the Commission for Investigating
Human Rights Abuses in East Timor was formed. Munir was
appointed a member of the commission, which later led to
an investigation into the conduct of six senior army
officers, including the former commander-in-chief,
General Wiranto.
A year later the names of 19
suspects were announced by the head of the investigating
team, M A Rachman, who was - incidentally - later to
become Megawati's attorney general. Thoenes' murder was
one of the five cases presented to the Attorney
General's Office (AGO), together with an attack upon a
Dili diocese, and attacks on the house of Manuel
Carrascalao, a church in Liquica and the Ave Maria
Church in Suai.
Months later the Thoenes case
was officially closed by the AGO, on the grounds of
insufficient evidence and a lack of witnesses available
to take the case any further. At the time Munir said
there appeared to be a plan on behalf of the AGO to
freeze the East Timor case and to release, one by one,
the generals listed for trial. That is exactly what
happened.
Progress under Wahid Things
seemed to change for the better under president
Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid, who on Friday urged police
to "seriously hunt down the syndicate or group that
poisoned Munir". During his period in power, 1999-2001,
Wahid pushed ahead with special tribunals to prosecute
human-rights abuse in East Timor, forced General Wiranto
from his job as military commander, and engaged
separatist forces in Aceh and Papua in dialogue.
Wahid appointed Baharuddin Lopa to replace
Marzuki Darusman as attorney general. The corruption
charges against former president Suharto were to be
Lopa's test case. "I only need two of the documents that
the attorney general has and I would be able to drag
Suharto into court," he told Asia Week in 1999.
Lopa had built a reputation as a serious,
crusading and incorruptible lawyer when he served as
secretary general of the National Commission on Human
Rights (Komnas HAM). Unfortunately he died of heart
failure in Riyadh's al-Hamadi hospital while on a visit
to Saudi Arabia. According to the then-minister of
defense, Mahfud M D, Lopa and his predecessor realized
that their positions were vulnerable to possible
poisoning or black-magic practices.
An editorial
in a mainstream daily in Jakarta even hinted at black
magic in its obituary on Lopa. This was a reference to
Indonesians' belief in the mystical powers, for good or
evil, possessed by dukun (witch doctors).
Just two weeks before his death Lopa told a
hearing with the House of Representatives that he would
pursue several major cases concerning human-rights
abuses in East Timor and several banking-corruption
cases.
Attack after attack Munir
regularly spoke out for justice in the face of
intimidation. His work made him many enemies in powerful
places and he said he had "lost count" of the number of
death threats he had received from anonymous telephone
callers.
His activities provoked the fury of
thugs said to be acting on behalf of the military and
often became the target of brutal physical attack. The
headquarters of Kontras in Jakarta was often a target of
gangs bent on intimidating its activists. They made no
secret of the fact that they were looking for Munir, and
the office was several times subjected to abuse and the
threat of destruction.
On March 13, 2002, a
300-strong mob smashed all of the windows and many of
the desks of the office and all but one of their
computer terminals. They also raided food supplies meant
for flood victims and stole vital documents related to
human-rights abuses around Indonesia - in particular
those related to the killing of Theys Eluay, a Papuan
independence leader, and the engineering of the communal
violence in Maluku and Central Sulawesi. Members of the
mob criticized Kontras for attempting to have Wiranto
prosecuted for massacres of pro-democracy activists.
On May 27, 2003, thugs struck again, accusing
Munir of being unpatriotic because of his criticism of
the military's offensive in Aceh, and demanding that
Kontras investigate the deaths of several Muslims killed
at the same time as several students were killed by the
military during the Trisakti and Semanggi incidents in
1998 and 1999.
But Munir knew what the real
agenda was: "When they were attacking me, I told them
that if they felt there was a case of discrimination or
human-rights violation that they should give me the
information and I will take this case up as well. But
they said, 'No, we just want you to stop investigating
the student deaths.'"
There has been no
explanation from The Hague or from Jakarta as to why it
took two months for the post-mortem results to be
released to authorities in Jakarta. Foreign Affairs
Minister Wirajuda said after the death that Indonesian
officials had not been allowed to see Munir's corpse,
which was kept under close guard by the Schiphol Airport
authorities while awaiting the work of the pathologist.
Munir died on the day the House of
Representatives approved the setting up of a South
African-style Truth and Reconciliation body to
investigate killings and abductions during the Suharto
regime.
Bill Guerin, a weekly Jakarta
correspondent for Asia Times Online since 2000, has
worked in Indonesia for 19 years in journalism and
editorial positions. He has been published by the BBC on
East Timor and specializes in business/economic and
political analysis in Indonesia.
(Copyright
2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
