Bill Guerin, Jakarta – A post-mortem examination in the Netherlands has left Indonesian police with a classic whodunit mystery and human-rights advocates in Jakarta fearing for their lives. Like any of British mystery writer Agatha Christie's famous novels, this mystery has a body, evidence of poisoning, and motives galore. The setting, however, is hardly the English countryside.
A post-mortem by the Netherlands Forensic Institute on diminutive 38-year-old Munir Said Thalib, a prominent and outspoken human-rights campaigner who died on a flight to Amsterdam two months ago, revealed last week that his body contained high levels of the poison arsenic. Why it took two months for the autopsy results to be released to authorities in Jakarta is just one of the mysteries surrounding Munir's death, which many are now calling a murder.
Arsenic has been used for criminal purposes throughout history more than any other poison and was thought to have claimed the lives of many, including Britannicus, Pope Pius III, Pope Clemente XIV, and Napoleon Bonaparte. The presence of a lethal dose of arsenic in the body seems to suggest foul play, a judgment the UK-based Indonesia Human Rights Campaign (Tapol) believes is the case.
In a press release issued on Thursday, the day the news was first made public, Tapol said the findings of the autopsy confirm "the fears of many of his [Munir's] colleagues that he was assassinated".
That possibility is worrisome to many, including Jakarta's most famous human-rights advocate, Todung Mulya Lubis. "If it is a political assassination, it could happen to any one of us," Lubis said. "It is very dangerous for Indonesian society because it means people cannot be critics."
A murder mystery
Initial reports suggested that Munir had succumbed to a heart attack – he had been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and had suffered bouts of hepatitis C in the months prior to his trip – yet the head of the Jakarta-based human-rights group Imparsial, Rachmand Nashidik, said the group had long suspected something unusual about Munir's death.
"Before going to Holland he was in good health and had a medical checkup. Moreover, we met with the doctor with him on the Garuda flight, who said that while he had diarrhea, he was surprised he had died," Nashidik said.
After the autopsy results were released last Thursday, Dutch prosecutors said they did not have the jurisdiction to launch a criminal investigation, as the death took place on board a Garuda Indonesia aircraft. The Dutch government then handed a copy of the report on Munir's death to the Indonesian Foreign Ministry.
National Police criminal investigation chief General Suyitno Landung said an investigative team had already been dispatched to The Hague to spearhead an inquiry into the activist's death to determine whether he was murdered. A diplomatic delegation will also be sent to act as an "intermediary" between the Netherlands Forensic Institute and the police team, Foreign Affairs Minister Hassan Wirajuda said on Saturday.
"Certainly we have suspicions and must follow up the autopsy report with an investigation to determine when, where and by whom [Munir] was poisoned, if there was indeed such a criminal act," Wirajuda was quoted as saying.
Death on board GA 974
Munir boarded Garuda Flight GA 974 at Jakarta's international airport on September 7. The plane stopped over at Singapore's Changi Airport before continuing to Amsterdam.
Three hours out of Singapore, the cabin crew supervisor informed the pilot, Captain Pantun Matondang, that Munir had fallen ill and was vomiting violently.
According to a Garuda statement, Matondang ordered the supervisor, Najib, to seek help from a doctor traveling on the plane. Munir was moved next to the doctor but was reportedly in agony during his final moments. Munir died when the aircraft was about two hours away from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport.
His widow, Suciwati, said she was informed of the autopsy results on Thursday night by Coordinating Minister for Security Widodo Sucipto, who told her he had phoned at the request of the president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Shortly after his death, Suciwati said she would be prepared to have her husband's body exhumed if it would help solve the mystery about how he died and urged the Indonesian authorities to provide her with the results. "I want this to be resolved thoroughly," she said.
Dedicated and fearless, Munir was described by former president Megawati Sukarnoputri as a relentless fighter for democracy who never stopped fighting for what he believed.
Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group said he was everything a human-rights activist should be: principled, tough, smart, funny and fearless. "He stood up to people in power, he made them angry, he got threat after threat after threat, and he never gave up," Jones said.
In 1998 he was awarded the prestigious Yap Thiam Hien human-rights prize and named Man of the Year by the leading Indonesian Muslim periodical UMMAT. Asia Week named him one of "20 young Asian leaders for the new millennium" in 2000, the year when he was one of four recipients of the Alternative Nobel Prize, the Right Livelihood Award, at a ceremony in the Swedish parliament.
Founder of the award Jakob von Uexkull said at the ceremony: "During the decades of authoritarian rule, we were told by Suharto's Western friends that different rules, rights and values applied in Indonesia. Add this to the rise of fundamentalism, the search for scapegoats, the unwillingness of the military to step back and accept the primacy of democracy – and you have an idea of the challenges facing Munir," von Uexkull said.
In the final months of Suharto's reign, Munir, who was staunchly critical of the Indonesian military (TNI), took up the cause of dozens of activists who had disappeared in suspicious circumstances. He co-founded Kontras, the Commission for the Disappeared and the Victims of Violence, and later became a director of the human-rights group Imparsial.
His work covered the full spectrum of human-rights concerns in Indonesia, from abuses by the military and police, to attacks on labor activists, impunity for human-rights crimes in Aceh, East Timor and Papua (Irian Jaya) to the rights of the Chinese ethnic minority.
East Timor probes
On September 21, 1999, shortly after the East Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence, Dutch journalist Sander Thoenes, who had just turned 31, was brutally murdered. His throat was slashed, one of his ears was cut off, the skin on his face was peeled away and a gaping hole was dug in his left breast. Battalion 745 of the TNI, which included many troops of East Timorese origin, was the prime suspect for the murder.
The case sparked widespread international criticism of Indonesia. To avoid an international trial, the Commission for Investigating Human Rights Abuses in East Timor was formed. Munir was appointed a member of the commission, which later led to an investigation into the conduct of six senior army officers, including the former commander-in-chief, General Wiranto.
A year later the names of 19 suspects were announced by the head of the investigating team, M A Rachman, who was – incidentally – later to become Megawati's attorney general. Thoenes' murder was one of the five cases presented to the Attorney General's Office (AGO), together with an attack upon a Dili diocese, and attacks on the house of Manuel Carrascalao, a church in Liquica and the Ave Maria Church in Suai.
Months later the Thoenes case was officially closed by the AGO, on the grounds of insufficient evidence and a lack of witnesses available to take the case any further. At the time Munir said there appeared to be a plan on behalf of the AGO to freeze the East Timor case and to release, one by one, the generals listed for trial. That is exactly what happened.
Progress under Wahid
Things seemed to change for the better under president Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid, who on Friday urged police to "seriously hunt down the syndicate or group that poisoned Munir". During his period in power, 1999-2001, Wahid pushed ahead with special tribunals to prosecute human-rights abuse in East Timor, forced General Wiranto from his job as military commander, and engaged separatist forces in Aceh and Papua in dialogue.
Wahid appointed Baharuddin Lopa to replace Marzuki Darusman as attorney general. The corruption charges against former president Suharto were to be Lopa's test case. "I only need two of the documents that the attorney general has and I would be able to drag Suharto into court," he told Asia Week in 1999.
Lopa had built a reputation as a serious, crusading and incorruptible lawyer when he served as secretary general of the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM). Unfortunately he died of heart failure in Riyadh's al-Hamadi hospital while on a visit to Saudi Arabia. According to the then-minister of defense, Mahfud M D, Lopa and his predecessor realized that their positions were vulnerable to possible poisoning or black-magic practices.
An editorial in a mainstream daily in Jakarta even hinted at black magic in its obituary on Lopa. This was a reference to Indonesians' belief in the mystical powers, for good or evil, possessed by dukun (witch doctors).
Just two weeks before his death Lopa told a hearing with the House of Representatives that he would pursue several major cases concerning human-rights abuses in East Timor and several banking-corruption cases.
Attack after attack
Munir regularly spoke out for justice in the face of intimidation. His work made him many enemies in powerful places and he said he had "lost count" of the number of death threats he had received from anonymous telephone callers.
His activities provoked the fury of thugs said to be acting on behalf of the military and often became the target of brutal physical attack. The headquarters of Kontras in Jakarta was often a target of gangs bent on intimidating its activists. They made no secret of the fact that they were looking for Munir, and the office was several times subjected to abuse and the threat of destruction.
On March 13, 2002, a 300-strong mob smashed all of the windows and many of the desks of the office and all but one of their computer terminals. They also raided food supplies meant for flood victims and stole vital documents related to human-rights abuses around Indonesia – in particular those related to the killing of Theys Eluay, a Papuan independence leader, and the engineering of the communal violence in Maluku and Central Sulawesi. Members of the mob criticized Kontras for attempting to have Wiranto prosecuted for massacres of pro-democracy activists.
On May 27, 2003, thugs struck again, accusing Munir of being unpatriotic because of his criticism of the military's offensive in Aceh, and demanding that Kontras investigate the deaths of several Muslims killed at the same time as several students were killed by the military during the Trisakti and Semanggi incidents in 1998 and 1999.
But Munir knew what the real agenda was: "When they were attacking me, I told them that if they felt there was a case of discrimination or human-rights violation that they should give me the information and I will take this case up as well. But they said, 'No, we just want you to stop investigating the student deaths.'"
There has been no explanation from The Hague or from Jakarta as to why it took two months for the post-mortem results to be released to authorities in Jakarta. Foreign Affairs Minister Wirajuda said after the death that Indonesian officials had not been allowed to see Munir's corpse, which was kept under close guard by the Schiphol Airport authorities while awaiting the work of the pathologist.
Munir died on the day the House of Representatives approved the setting up of a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation body to investigate killings and abductions during the Suharto regime.
[Bill Guerin, a weekly Jakarta correspondent for Asia Times Online since 2000, has worked in Indonesia for 19 years in journalism and editorial positions. He has been published by the BBC on East Timor and specializes in business/economic and political analysis in Indonesia.]