Ismira Lutfia – The Ministry of Defense said on Wednesday that a controversial draft bill on national security was not an attempt to return to the country's repressive past.
"The bill only outlines the potential threats we might face and how we deal with them," the minister, Purnomo Yusgiantoro, said at a meeting with the editors-in-chief of the country's major media outlets.
Purnomo said the bill would be designed to cope with the "paradigm shift" in national security, where threats had moved beyond the conventional ones. He said the contemporary threats to national security were mostly non-military and the draft bill, if passed into law, would define what constituted a threat, as well as outline the appropriate response measures.
"So we know exactly what our position is [against the threats]," Purnomo said. He added that in the case of an emergency, the national security bill would dictate which government body would assume the main responsibility, the scope of its authority and the duration of the emergency situation.
The role of intelligence agents, one of the contentious issues in the bill, was also discussed, with Purnomo describing them as "the eyes and ears that provide valuable input to the National Security Council [DKN]."
Sjafrie Sjamsuddin, the deputy defense minister, said that unlike in the past, intelligence agents were no longer given any real power. "They are not granted any authority, they are only state instruments to gather information that serves as inputs to draw conclusions," he said.
The State Intelligence Agency (BIN), Sjafrie said, had over the years undergone considerable reform, just like other national defense and security units.
The draft bill has faced stiff resistance from rights and pro-democracy groups who worry that the bill would see a return to the time when intelligence agents had the power to arrest and detain suspects.
"There have been reforms on the structure and attitude within the intelligence agency, they are not working for a [certain] power and they don't have any power," Sjafrie said.
Meanwhile, Defence Ministry official Pos M. Hutabarat, said there were no provisions in the bill that were open to interpretation or that could pose a threat to press freedom, as the Press Council argued last month.
In contrast to a number of his colleagues, Pos said the national security bill was not in fact designed to become an "umbrella bill" for a slew of laws and regulations on defense and security. The bill, he said, was an attempt to address the loopholes not covered by those laws.
Pos said matters of implementation and supervision were not covered in the bill, but rather were included in other security-related laws, including regulations on the National Police and others.