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Kidnapped activist slams Kopassus trial

Source
Agence France Presse - April 20, 1999

Hong Kong – The trial of 11 members of Indonesia's elite special force found guilty of kidnapping pro-democracy activists was a farce designed to protect high-ranking soldiers, one of the nine who was captured and tortured said here Tuesday.

"The trial was not fair ... only those of lower ranks were blamed," said Raharja Waluya Jati, who was held by Kopassus troops for six weeks last year.

"It ignored the matter of motive and the involvement of Prabowo," he said, referring to then Lieutenant General Prabowo Subianto, a son-in-law of former strongman Suharto, who was head of Kopassus when the abduction took place. It was Prabowo himself who was behind the kidnapping," he told reporters.

A military council found Prabowo had been involved in the abduction and torture of activists, but he was given an honourable discharge from the army and escaped further punishment.

In a verdict handed down earlier this month, a military court sentenced 11 Kopassus members to sentences of between a year and 22 months in prison, although six of them were allowed to remain in the army.

The court martial was derided by human rights activists as a "face-saving exercise" by the military and they pointed out that the highest-ranking soldier charged was only a major.

Jati, in the territory as part of an eight-nation speaking tour organised by the Asian Human Rights Commission, said the outcome of the trial conflicted with the details of the kidnappings which indicated they were part of a larger design.

"The person behind it must have been more than a major because the kidnappings happened over a wide area and over a long period of time, which in the military means it had to be organised at a high level," he said.

Jati was beaten, strangled, burned with cigarettes and tortured with electric shocks by masked interrogators after being abducted in March last year.

Only nine of the 23 activists kidnapped in the last months of the Suharto regime have resurfaced. One was later found dead and 13 others are still missing.

None of the 11 Kopassus men were charged with torture despite detailed accounts of such treatment from most of the nine victims who survived, nor were they questioned over the kidnappings of the other activists.

Jati, a member of the People's Democratic Party which was banned in the Suharto era and relaunched two weeks ago, was pessimistic about the general election planned for June.

He said it would be held under political laws that were not democratic and in an environment where the armed forces had free rein to interfere. The spectre of money politics was also likely to place a role, he added. "I an see a lot of things to indicate it will not be a free and fair election," he said.

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