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Tanjung Priok acquittals a Travesty of Justice

14 July 2005

The decision taken last week by an appeals court in Jakarta to acquit twelve soldiers who had been sentenced for their role in the killing of scores of Muslims at a mosque in Tanjung Priok in September 1984 is a travesty justice. It perpetuates the principle of impunity which was the hallmark of the thirty-two years of Suharto rule, and represents a bleak comment on the state of the rule of law in post-Suharto Indonesia.

The twelve men who have now been acquitted were in any case serving sentences which were far too lenient, bearing in mind the scale of the massacre that occurred in Tanjung Priok. One of the men is serving a three-year sentence while the others received sentences of two years. Nor were the true masterminds of the crime, General Benny Murdani and President Suharto, ever called to account for their role in the killings.

The Tanjung Priok Massacre was undoubtedly the worst mass killing to occur in Indonesia, apart from the killings in East Timor and and in West Papua during the Suharto era.

The massacre occurred in the wake of a series of provocations by members of the Indonesian army in and around a mosque in Tanjung Priok, the dockland district of Jakarta, a heavily populated region on the outskirts of the Indonesian capital. At the time, the Muslim community in Indonesia was deeply exercised by the Suharto government's decision to impose a Soceties' Law which required all organisations to adopt the sole ideology of the State, the Pancasila.

Preachers in Tanjung Priok had been voicing their discontent with this decision during the early days of September. On 7 September 1984, soldiers entered a local prayer-house in Tanjung Priok and ordered the removal of posters from the walls, followed by a subsequent visit to make sure the posters had not been returned to the walls. Tempers flared among congregants while local mosque officials attempted to calm things down.

On 12 September, several preachers spoke at an open air prayer meeting, following which a large crowd of about one thousand five hundred people marched to the local police headquarters to lodge a protest. They found themselves hemmed in on all sides as they approached their destination and gunfire was heard coming from all directions. Within minutes, there were scores of dead bodies while the less seriously injured fled the scene.

According to local witnesses, at around midnight, an hour after the killings had begun, General Benny Murdani, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, came to inspect the scene. According to several sources, he had been in the vicinity throughout the massacre, directing the operation.

On the following morning, General Murdani, together with Major-General Tri Sutrisno who was then military commander of Jakarta, visited the area, and proclaimed that nine people had died and fifty-three had been injured, and even alleged that local people had been armed with crowbars and chopping knives when they approached the police headquarters.

In a comment published shortly thereafter based on information from lawyers who later defended a number of persons charged for their role in the Tanjung Priok unrest, TAPOL stated:

'The impact of the incident on Tanjung Priok was shattering. Virtually every family in the neighbourhood had lost relatives in the massacre. Estimates that hundreds had been killed soon gained currency and were mentioned in several reports ( for example, Far Eastern Economic Review, 22 November 1984). Some of those who survived have since put the number of dead at around six hundred but the official cover up made it impossible to investigate the magnitude of the slaughter or check claims about secret mass graves where victims were buried without the knowledge of their families.' (TAPOL Publication: Indonesia: Muslims on Trial, April 1987)

The true instigator of this massacre was none other than Suharto himself, yet in May this year, the Indonesian government pronounced Suharto to be free of any problem and should be allowed to spend the rest of his life without charge.

The acquittals of soldiers involved in the massacre is a further sign that New Order elements and the New Order mentality still hold sway in Indonesia, regardless of the democratic election of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as the country's president.

ENDS

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