Apriadi Gunawan, Medan, Karanganyar – Hundreds of participants in the public service exam in North Sumatra and Central Java staged protests Tuesday over the decision by regional administrations to annul the announcement declaring that they had passed the exam.
The applicants in Medan, North Sumatra, went to the local office of the Legal Aid Institute, while those in Karanganyar regency, Central Java, went to the office of Karanganyar Regent Rina Iriani to express their disappointment. Others in Surakarta went to the City Hall and a similar protest also took place in Temanggung.
Suhendri, one of Medan applicants whose name had been announced in the media before the annulment, said that he and his colleagues could not accept such treatment and pledged to seek legal settlement through the help of the legal aid institution.
"We will file a lawsuit against the North Sumatra provincial administration for the annulment of its announcement," Suhendri told The Jakarta Post.
Suhendri explained that in one newspaper he and four of his friends, namely Saripuddin, Mahani Manurung, Nurmila and Azmiar, were cited as having passed the exam as teachers of Islam.
In the next announcement, however, their names were replaced with five other applicants, namely Sulastri, Siti Aisyah, Jumiah, Nurleli and Widiyanti.
Suhendri questioned how this could happen. If the mixup was due to data copying, all the data should have been wrong, not only the five, he said.
Mangasing Mungkur, head of North Sumatra province's recruitment section, stressed that the mistake was caused by a technical problem. "This is a good lesson for us... we hope it will not happen again in the future," he said.
Meanwhile, 134 emotional applicants in Karanganyar were received in a cordial way by Regent Rina Iriani at her office, Antara reported.
In the revised announcement, up to 2,881 applicants who were mentioned in the first announcement were replaced by other applicants in the subsequent announcement. Out of 667 applicants declared cited as having passed the exam in Karanganyar, 134 were dropped.
The protesters asked the regent to take up the issue with the Central Java provincial administration and the central government.
In Surakarta, Deputy Surakarta Mayor FX Hadi Rudiatno disclosed Tuesday that the revision of the announcement by the Central Java province was made because data was falsified during registration.
Speaking to the protesters, Hadi said the falsification was uncovered during a meeting at the governor's office. A revision was the only viable action rather than annulling the results of hundreds of thousands of applicants throughout Central Java, he said. The number of applicants whose test results were annulled in Central Java reached 2,800, with applicants hailing from 35 regencies and mayoralties, he said as quoted by Antara.
Hadi has asked the provincial administration to accept all the annulled applicants for next year's public service exam. However, the applicants asserted that they should be accepted as civil servants immediately.