Vaudine England, Jakarta – A military tribunal yesterday charged nine police officers with the 1998 murder of anti-government student protesters, an event which triggered widespread riots that contributed to the fall of former president Suharto.
But students and human rights activists believe the tribunal, which opened yesterday and charged the nine junior officers with opening fire without orders, is unlikely to stop a cover-up.
The tribunal comes after a parliamentary committee conducted hearings into the killings. It heard a series of senior military and police officers give standard denials of any wrongdoing.
The four students who died on May 12, 1998 – Elang Mulia Lesmana, Heri Hertanto, Hendriawan Sie and Hafidin Royan – were from Jakarta's Trisakti University and were hailed as martyrs by the reform movement that ousted Suharto.
Most reformists and commentators say the four were killed by plain-clothes snipers from the military's special forces, in a deliberate provocation intended to create chaos in the struggle for power surrounding Suharto's fall.
Suharto's son-in-law, then Lieutenant-General Prabowo Subianto, who was competing for influence with then armed forces chief General Wiranto, was blamed for instigating the riots, which included anti-Chinese violence. Mr Prabowo denies any hand in the killings.
Student groups have regularly denounced both the parliamentary committee investigating the incident and military efforts to ignore accusations of dirty tricks.
Their claim that the armed forces was using Parliament's investigation to absolve themselves was supported by a former MP. "Members of Parliament only attend such committee hearings if they are paid and you can be sure the military is spending a lot on this committee in particular," he said.
Instead of a handful of junior policemen being tried by a military body, the senior officers who allegedly ordered the extra-judicial killings should be tried by ad hoc judges in a civilian court, rights leaders say.
The Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras) said a military tribunal could not be expected to be objective. It also fears a similar whitewash in another student killing, known as the Semanggi case, in which five people died after security officers opened fire on a demonstration.
"We suspect that there must be a conspiracy between the House of Representatives and the TNI [Indonesian military] not to try the Trisakti and Semanggi cases through an ad hoc trial because the House will need the TNI's support for its proposal for a special session of the People's Consultative Assembly to impeach [President Abdurrahman] Wahid," Kontras secretary Usman Hamid said.