Louise Williams, Jakarta – Lawyers for Ms Megawati Sukarnoputri have challenged the Supreme Court to show that its judges were not ordered by the Soeharto Government to rule against the Indonesian democracy leader.
Police lines ringed the Supreme Court yesterday as Ms Megawati's lawyers and scores of her supporters took the petition to the court's chairman. A lawyer, Mr R.O. Tambunan, said he was seeking to ask the chairman whether a senior official of the Soeharto Government had talked with Supreme Court judges and instructed them to prevent Ms Megawati's cases succeeding. Ms Megawati launched numerous legal cases following her removal as chairman of the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) at a government-backed rebel PDI conference last year and an attack by security forces on her headquarters which provoked two days of rioting in Jakarta. Mr Tambunan said Ms Megawati and her supporters had received information about two meetings, the first with Supreme Court judges and a later meeting in Yogyakarta, central Java, where provincial judges were given the same instructions.
"We just want to know whether this is true," he said. "Where is justice if you cannot go to the courts?"
Mr Tambunan said a representative of the Supreme Court had agreed to meet him "in the near future" but had made no reply to the challenge.
Ms Megawati has been banned from contesting general elections in May following her ousting from the PDI leadership. But this latest challenge indicates that her followers are unlikely to allow the poll to proceed uninterrupted.
The Soeharto Government has banned all mass rallies in the lead-up to the elections and on Monday staged a demonstration of combat readiness by part of a special military force of 10,000 soldiers to be deployed for the election period. Troops slid down ropes from helicopters into the city's banking district and commanders of the exercise claimed the special anti-riot squad had been deployed from its base to the city centre within five minutes.
The Government has been eager to show that security forces are in control after a series of religious and ethnic riots. President Soeharto this week warned foreign journalists that negative reports could provoke further violence.
"Continuing to blow up the issues of poverty and income gaps without offering a realistic concept for solving them may provoke the sensitivity of our diverse community," he told Newsweek magazine.
"Sometimes such sensitivity leads to riots and destruction of property, even of our social foundations."