Acts of violence against journalists in Indonesia will continue to increase in line with political tensions ahead of next year's legislative and presidential elections, activists warn.
Eko Maryadi, the chairman of the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), said at a discussion at the US Embassy in Jakarta on Wednesday that there had been a spike of cases of violence against journalists in the first five months of this year and that the trend was expected to go up as 2014 approached.
He said that the AJI had recorded at least 56 cases of violence against media workers in 2012, including by local legislators, police and military personnel, and that so far this year there had already been 14 such cases.
According to Eko, very few of those cases had been addressed formally with justice delivered. "You can count on one hand the number of cases that have been investigated or legally resolved," he said as quoted by Antaranews.com.
Eko warned that the threat of election-related violence would be a serious step back for Indonesia's increasingly open climate of press freedom, noting that the country currently enjoyed one of the most free press environments in the Southeast Asian region.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists says that 10 journalists have been killed in Indonesia since 1992, six of them with impunity.
The most recent confirmed killing of a journalist was in April 2012, when unknown gunmen open fired on a small plane as it came in to land at an airport in Mulia, Papua. Local reporter Leiron Kogoya was killed on board the plane, while four other people were injured. Police have still not been able to capture or identify the gunmen.
Hubert Gijzen, the director of the Jakarta office of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, said separately that the problem of violence against journalists was a serious one around the world, with some 600 reporters killed in the past 10 years.
Speaking at the Asia Media Summit in Manado, North Sulawesi, on Thursday, Gijzen said that 121 journalists had been killed in 2012, making that year a particularly deadly one for the press.
He added that of the 121 deaths reported to Unesco, only in nine cases were the perpetrators arrested, tried and convicted.