Tiarma Siboro, Jakarta – Two years after an official report on the May 1998 riots was submitted to the Attorney General's Office implicating top members of the security forces in wrongdoing, no one has been prosecuted by the state. Meanwhile, the AGO and the body that investigated the riots continue to blame each other for the halt to the investigations.
Attorney General's Office spokesman Wayan Pasek Swarta claimed prosecutors could not investigate the riots because the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) "has failed to provide additional data in their report." "As soon as we received the report two years ago, we told Komnas HAM's investigators to provide more data in relation to the riots. As of today, the investigators have failed to do so," Pasek Swarta told The Jakarta Post over the weekend.
About 1,000 people are believed to have died in the riots from May 13-15, according to a joint fact-finding team set up by the government and the national rights body, which first investigated the incident in 1999. Many of those who died in the chaos were trapped in buildings, which were set on fire by unknown perpetrators, the team said.
The riots, which preceded former president Soeharto's resignation, were sparked after four university students were shot dead during protests against the New Order regime on May 12. Only lower-ranking police officers were convicted for the shootings, while no one has been arrested and prosecuted for inciting the riots. The initial team's report also said 52 women, mostly Chinese Indonesians, were gang raped or sexually assaulted in the riots.
However, it was not until the 2003 that the group's preliminary report on the riots was submitted to Komnas HAM, which then took over the investigations. After making revisions, another team set up to reinvestigate the riots, submitted its report to the AGO in 2004.
A former member of the first fact-finding team, Asmara Nababan, said the AGO "has refused to follow up (both) the reports, claiming that Komnas HAM members had not taken the necessary oaths, entitling them to conduct an investigation." Asmara said the AGO was conveniently ignoring the law setting up the national rights body, which gave Komnas HAM members the authority to investigate all human rights cases.
Asmara said the absence of progress in the case showed the government and lawmakers lacked the political will to proceed. "I can't blame the AGO because it is part of the executive, and what it does is certainly based on the orders of the top authority in the executive," Asmara said, referring to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
The official report on the riots names several top-ranking officers, who it said should be held accountable for maintaining security at the time of the violence, including former military chief Gen. (ret) Wiranto.
"As Wiranto outranked Susilo when they were both active military officers, I am pessimistic that the current administration will be willing to deal with the May riots," Asmara said. "But I do not think that we should stop filing appeals to the government to prosecute the alleged orchestrators of the riots," Asmara told the Post.
Aqil Mochtar, the deputy chairman of the House of Representatives Commission III on legal and human rights affairs, said lawmakers would have the chance to ask Attorney General Abdul Rahman Saleh about the May riots in a scheduled hearing later this month.
Aqil said lawmakers could also question Abdul Rahman about other outstanding human rights issues. "The Constitution grants us the right to supervise the executive, and we will execute these rights during the planned hearing," he said.