Rangga Prakoso – The Attorney General's Office says it will work with the national rights commission to direct the latter's constant attempts to get prosecutors to open an inquest into past rights abuses by the state.
Basrief Arief, the attorney general, said on Friday that the coordination was needed given that the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) kept repeatedly submitting its report about the abuses to the AGO without the necessary supporting documentation.
"We don't want to keep giving them directions and have them keep arguing with us without any effort to follow our directions," he said. He added he did not know how soon his office could meet with Komnas HAM officials to discuss the matter.
In a landmark report issued last July following a four-year investigation, Komnas HAM concluded that there was evidence of serious human rights violations and crimes against humanity during the state's anti-communist purge of 1965-66 and in a spate of extra-judicial killings of suspected criminals from 1982 to 1985.
The purge of members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and their families and suspected sympathizers left an estimated 1.5 million people dead.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono initially welcomed the release of the report and ordered the AGO to follow up with a legal probe into the findings.
However, Basrief said in November that his office could not proceed based on the dossier submitted by Komnas HAM, saying that the evidence gathered by the rights body was "insufficient to justify an official legal investigation."
The rights commission resubmitted the dossier to the AGO in December, but was again turned down. The AGO said it had once again "failed to fulfill our criteria and requirements."
Early this month, however, the AGO said it would look into the possibility of opening an inquest into the cases, but stressed that the handling of gross human rights violations cases had to be conducted based on a specific legal method.
Komnas HAM and independent rights activists have accused the AGO of dragging its feet on opening an inquest.
Nurkholis, a Komnas HAM commissioner, said last month that the AGO was purposefully slowing the investigation when it returned the documents to the rights commission on the grounds that they did not specify the guilty parties behind the violations.
He said the documents clearly pointed to Suharto's security forces as the main suspect in both the anti-communist purge and the extra-judicial killings, adding it would "be easy" for the AGO to investigate the allegations.