Ary Hermawan, Jakarta – The failure to unravel the 2004 murder of human rights activist Munir highlights the need for speedy reform of the intelligence services, defense analysts said Thursday.
"The Munir case should be linked to the agenda of security reform," said defense analyst Edy Prihartono of the National Alliance for Intelligence Democratization (Sandi).
The alliance brings together 10 civil society organizations, including the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), Imparsial, the Institute for the Free Flow of Information (ISAI) and defense watchdog ProPatria.
Edy, an analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said the reforms were aimed at assuring citizens that what happened to Munir would not recur in the future.
"We demand the security apparatus be reformed so as to be controlled and accountable," he said. "If they are not reformed, we can't tell them from criminals." ProPatria executive director T. Hari Prihartono said efforts to reform the security sector should now be focused on the state intelligence service.
Intelligence reform is "crucial", he told The Jakarta Post, saying intelligence was the "heart" of the nation's security sector. He said over the last seven years the military and police had improved and shown openness to change, but this was not the case with the intelligence service.
"We have never had a law on intelligence, after more than 60 years of independence," he said. The intelligence units are currently regulated by presidential decrees and government regulations. "Because intelligence is regulated by decrees lower than law, it has always become an instrument of power. For decades, intelligence has been a tool of power," Hari said.
The government submitted a bill on the intelligence service to the House of Representatives last month for deliberation. Civil organizations have been urged to get involved in the debate.
"We all bear the moral and political responsibility of watching over the deliberation," Edy said, adding that the Munir case was linked with the performance of the intelligence service.
Munir died from arsenic poisoning while traveling from Jakarta to Amsterdam on Garuda airline in 2004.
Courts found that off-duty Garuda pilot Pollycarpus, the sole suspect in the Munir case before he was exonerated by the Supreme Court, had frequent telephone contacts with agents from the State Intelligence Agency (BIN). BIN denied any involvement, but suspicion is rife that its members helped plot the killing.
A military analyst from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, Ikrar Nusa Bhakti, urged the government to declassify state secrets related to cases of human rights violations.
He also urged the government to separate intelligence agents and the agencies they were worked for. "The acts made of National Intelligence Agency (BIN) agents cannot be categorized as the official acts of the agency," he said. He therefore urged the government to disclose details of the phone calls between Pollycarpus and former top BIN official Muchdi PR to shed light on the alleged conspiracy behind Munir's killing.
Military analyst Andi Wijayanto said the Munir case showed that the state could stifle human rights cases on behalf of state secrecy. "The government-sanctioned fact finding team has pointed to sources of information that could disclose the Munir case but they are blocked from acquiring the information by the government," he said.