Margot Cohen with John McBeth, Jakarta – The offer was on the table: silence or death. A petrified Pius Lustrilanang did not hesitate. He promised to keep his mouth shut about his two months in captivity in a detention centre outside Jakarta, and his kidnappers rewarded him with a plane ticket home to south Sumatra.
But three weeks later, on April 27, the 30-year-old political activist was back at an airport – this time, clutching a ticket to Amsterdam and a visa arranged by the Dutch embassy. Refuge abroad seemed imperative for Pius after his harrowing testimony earlier that day in Jakarta before Indonesia's National Commission on Human Rights.
As the television cameras rolled, Pius had grimly intoned a tale of electric shocks, sleep deprivation and water torture, and of fellow prisoners languishing in six windowless cells. In offering him freedom, Pius's masked persecutors had allegedly told him they would track him down if he ever broke his silence, whether it took two days or two decades. "We are patient people," they said.
Riveting though it was, Pius's unprecedented public testimony failed to clear the mystery surrounding his disappearance: Who abducted him, as well as 11 other activists gone missing between February and March? Where was the detention centre so close to Jakarta that Pius spoke about? Was the military involved? Was his kidnapping new evidence of splits in the armed forces? And, perhaps most importantly, how could the government prevent further disappearances?
The hunt for answers has heightened as other missing activists resurface and recount stories of abduction at gunpoint. Even though the culprits remain unidentified, Pius's ordeal – and his testimony – will likely breathe more fire into the increasingly vigorous anti-government student protests countrywide.
Underneath the clamour, however, is growing appreciation for human-rights advocacy. In recent weeks, diplomats and visiting foreign officials quietly raised the issue of the vanishing activists with Indonesia's armed-forces commander, Gen. Wiranto, and a range of cabinet ministers. Local and foreign media kept up a constant drumbeat. Worried relatives flocked to the human-rights commission.
Then, in early April, not long before a United Nations hearing in Geneva on human rights in Indonesia, some of the missing activists began to resurface. "The pressure from outside was strong enough to force the re-emergence of these people," concludes Ifdal Kasim, an activist.
Four people still remain unaccounted for, however. Two are student leaders who vanished recently from Jakarta and Sragen in Central Java, and two are loyalists of opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri. Family members of the Megawati loyalists – missing since May 1997 – have fresh hope that both are alive. In his testimony, Pius said the two had been detained in adjacent cells. There is no such relief for the relatives of more than a dozen others still missing since the violent assault on Megawati's party headquarters in central Jakarta in July 1996.
Attention is now focused on the military's alleged role in the abductions – and the possible complicity of the police. In one case, police officials remained silent about who had delivered a missing activist into their custody. Two days before Pius's hearing, Lt.-Gen. Bambang Yudhoyono, armed-forces chief of political and social affairs, reiterated that Wiranto had given no orders to arrest or detain activists.
Most independent observers are prepared to give Wiranto and the reform-minded Bambang the benefit of the doubt. So is the human-rights commission. "I am confident that this is not a policy coming from above," says commissioner Samsudin, a retired major-general who sat on the panel hearing Pius's disturbing saga.
Even so, that's unlikely to convince many people about Jakarta's harder line on political dissent. "It doesn't matter what they say, no one is going to believe that this isn't an organized operation," says one Western military observer. "The feeling is going to be that if the leadership didn't know, then they should have known."
Analysts say the abductions might have been the work of either rogue elements within the military or an extremist group that enjoys its support. Hariadi Darmawan, a retired brigadier-general who has joined forces with the swelling student movement, says the tactics are reminiscent of the covert intelligence operations of years past, and blames them on an "over-eagerness" to suppress dissent. "In every armed forces, there are always psychopaths," he says. "The higher officials usually don't know."
Pius told the human-rights commission that his interrogators wanted to learn more about the activities of Megawati, as well as the outlawed People's Democratic Party, accused of masterminding a recent bomb blast. They also wanted to know about Pius's initiatives as secretary-general of Siaga, a non-governmental organization formed to gather support for Megawati and Islamic leader Amien Rais. A "wrong" answer brought electric jolts to his hands and feet. At one session, interrogators repeatedly forced his head and shoulders under water. Pius's widely publicized testimony brought no immediate reaction from the military's top brass. But Wiranto might eventually feel a formal investigation of the recent abductions is necessary – if only to reinforce that under his leadership such practices are a thing of the past.