Derwin Pereira, Jakarta – Crime is shooting up and guns are the rage in Jakarta these days. Media reports here suggest that the increase is due to the increasing availability in Indonesia of firearms and other weapons for personal defence, such as tear-gas canisters.
The consequences of this have been "alarming", The Jakarta Post said in an editorial yesterday. The English-language daily said that, in recent weeks, at least four robberies had taken place on highways linking the capital to the West Java hinterlands.
Also, armed robberies took place on the streets of the capital almost daily. "Nowadays, motorists stopping at red lights and railroad crossings pray nothing bad will happen to them while they are waiting for the light to turn green or the train to pass," it said.
The newspaper revealed the existence of an illegal arms-trading ring involving a number of military personnel selling weapons and ammunition to rebels in the restive province of Aceh. It added that it was reasonable to assume that a similar illicit inflow of firearms was keeping troublemakers in riot-torn Maluku supplied as well.
These factors were raising violence and tension in a country trying to recover from the riots of May 1998. The Post noted: "The wide availability of weapons of all sorts, plus the increasing proclivity towards violence among certain segments of the community due to the increasing tensions and pressures of life in our big cities, is contributing to the sharp rise of armed crime."
Even politicians were being assaulted, it said. In what appeared to be a failed assassination attempt, two men attacked the chief of the Nation Awakening Party on Sunday. This prompted the police to propose that MPs be allowed to carry arms for self-defence – a move that generated strong criticism from politicians and human-rights activists.
On Monday, police chief, Lt-General Rusdihardjo, told a parliamentary hearing that legislators had only to apply to get a police permit to carry guns. But respected Islamic scholar Nurcholis Majid said that this would only lead to "a cowboy" culture, while one MP raised the possibility of legislators shooting each other.
Human-rights activist Abdul Hakim Garuda Nusantara said yesterday that the security of government officials and politicians was in the hands of the police and should stay that way. He warned that arming legislators "will only widen the risk of violence". Golkar party member Theo Sambuaga added: "What we are calling for is to step up security measures and not increase the number of firearms in circulation."
Other local media also took a swipe at any proposal that would allow civilians to carry guns in public. The Indonesian Observer wrote in a hard-hitting editorial: "In the United States, children often come into possession of firearms due to the negligence of their parents and we have seen how many of those children have caused unspeakable human tragedies because of the firearms they were able to acquire. "We must make sure that similar heart-breaking mishaps do not take place in this country."