M. Taufiqurrahman, Jakarta – Solving a murder case is rarely easy, especially when it allegedly involves one of the country's most powerful, yet secretive institutions: the National Intelligence Agency (BIN).
Regardless of BIN, it should not have been all that difficult for the government of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to find the mastermind of the murder of rights campaigner Munir Said Thalib. There was so much support, and also pressure from the international community as well as the local public, a public grown wary of past skeletons in the closet. Although the Munir case has not yet gained the stature of, say, the imprisonment of Myanmarese pro-democracy leader Aung San Su Kyi, it has nevertheless gained attention outside the country.
Western leaders have voiced concern over the slow pace of the investigation into Munir's death.
Departing for Amsterdam to pursue postgraduate studies, Munir was poisoned with arsenic on a Garuda flight in 2004.
European Commission chairman Manuel Baroso questioned Yudhoyono about Munir's murder while the two were attending an Asia-Europe meeting. A US Congress member was reported to have sent a letter to the Indonesian government to push for an accelerated investigation into the murder.
In early November, Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, wrote to Yudhoyono about the possibility of him being granted access to the investigation of Munir's death through technical assistance, such as DNA testing. After a meeting with Munir's widow, Suciwati, in mid-October, Alston said he would press Jakarta to step up the investigation.
Among her travels abroad to campaign for justice, Suciwati herself traveled to the US to drum up support from international human rights bodies and Congress.
At home, after months of feet-dragging, the House of Representatives in early December ordered the President to form a brand new investigative team. It argued that an investigation by the revived team would come up with little, judging from experience. The House also called on the government to seek international support in the investigation into Munir's death if necessary.
Yet the case remains unsolved. Worse, a severe blow was dealt by the Supreme Court when it quashed the murder conviction of Garuda Indonesia pilot Pollycarpus Budihari Priyanto, the sole suspect in the murder who was sentenced to 14 years in prison by the Central Jakarta District Court, one year earlier. With the ruling, no one or no single institution has been held accountable for Munir's death.
Yudhoyono himself has from the early stages of the investigation stated that he wanted the mastermind to be caught. But it seems that efforts to unravel the mystery have come up against a brick wall.
Even the replacement of the BIN chief, which analysts have said was motivated by Yudhoyono's efforts to speed up the investigation into the case, has produced little result.
It could have been bureaucratic inertia but some suggested the probe stalled because Yudhoyono would have to deal with some of his former seniors in the military.
Whatever the constraints, what is at stake is the President's human rights record, which he might want to watch out for ahead of the 2009 elections. The Munir case makes him an easy target for his rivals – the solving of the assassination was expected to be a landmark effort in ending the culture of impunity in the country.
With many human rights violations still in the dark, including those handled by Munir and his colleagues in the independent Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), many were hoping for clues to unsolved cases, once the death of the leading fighter against impunity himself was solved.
Parents are still waiting for answers on their children's disappearances and deaths; the wife of the missing poet Wiji Thukul, for one, has been trying to locate her husband's whereabouts since 1998; and survivors of violence, without any guarantee of protection, seal their lips.
All this and much more happened way before Yudhoyono was elected president in 2004. But because few have been brought to account for these rights violations, a larger stake than the incumbent's fate in 2009 is Indonesia's future of humanity, the core issue championed by Munir.