Ridwan Max Sijabat, Jakarta – The attempt of relatives of victims of the 1998 and 1999 Trisakti and Semanggi shooting incidents to have their cases tried at a special ad hoc rights court ended in disappointment Tuesday when the House of Representatives rejected plans to have the cases heard in a plenary session.
Speaker Agung Laksono, who presided over a meeting of the House's consultative committee, said the cases failed to win majority support, which was needed to put them on the main agenda of the upcoming plenary session. He said that only four factions had supported the plan, while the remaining six disagreed.
The four were the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, the National Awakening Party, the National Mandate Party and the Prosperous Peace Party, while the Golkar Party, the Democrat Party, the Prosperous Justice Party, the United Development Party, the Reformed Star Party and the joint pioneering democratic faction of minor parties rejected the move.
Agung said the House had found no gross human rights violations in the cases in its 2003 investigation. "The House therefore entrusts the Attorney General's Office to carry out an investigation into the incidents," he said.
An investigation into past gross human rights violation has been in limbo, with the House and the Attorney General's Office blaming each other for not taking the initiative to start the investigation.
Attorney General Abdul Rahman Saleh has repeatedly said that his office needed a recommendation from the House and the President declaring the past rights cases gross human rights violations before it could start the investigation, as regulated under the 2006 Human Rights Court Law. The House, however, has said the office did not need such a recommendation to start the investigation.
Law commission chairman Trimedya Pandjaitan expressed his disappointment with the consultative committee's decision not to have the cases heard before the plenary session.
"The reasons provided by the consultative committee were groundless because the law commission, which represents all House factions, had agreed to reopen the three cases upon the order of the House leadership through the consultative committee itself," Trimedya said.
He said the House's latest decision set a bad precedent for planned investigations into other human rights cases, including the abduction of 17 democracy activists from 1997 to 1998.
Relatives of those killed in the Trisakti and Semanggi shootings and a number of NGOs plan to launch a campaign against at least 14 political parties that they say have ignored efforts to settle human rights cases.
Coordinator of the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence Usman Hamid said the committee's decision was not surprising as both the government and the political parties lacked the political will to settle the cases.
He accused the political parties of "buying time" with the investigation, saying that many generals implicated in human rights abuses were "hiding behind them and the oligarchic element in the government".
He said the House's unwillingness to settle the past rights abuses would only make it more difficult to uphold civilian supremacy over the military.