Indonesia Notebook: Activists are Disappearing

by Andreas Harsono

"I only want to know whether my son is still alive. If he is alive, where is he? If he is dead, I want to pray for his soul," said Fransisca Sri Haryatni Djamilus.

This frail widow traveled from Palembang, the provincial capital of southern Sumatra, to Jakarta, about a two-hour flight, after having waited a fruitless month for news on her missing son. But she never tired of asking, "Where is Pius Lustrilanang, my son?"

Lustrilanang is a 27-year-old activist who helped operates a loose coalition between opposition figure Megawati Sukarnoputri, the ousted chairperson of the Indonesian Democratic Party, and Muslim leader Amien Rais, who has openly challenged the rule of President Suharto.

His friends still saw Lustrilanang when visiting a Jakarta hospital on Feb. 4. "He just disappeared and vanished from this earth. His girlfriend does not know his whereabouts. His brother and mother also have never heard from him," said an activist friend.

"We hope that the government does not put him on the list of missing people. They must investigate this case," said Darusman, underlining his concern over increasing reports of missing human rights workers and student activists.

Darusman did not exaggerate. Fears are mounting in Indonesia nowadays over the fate of scores of activists who have been rudely taken into custody by plainclothes intelligence officers and others who have just mysteriously disappeared over the last two months.

Take, for instance, the case of student leader Andi Arief. A group of gun-toting men abruptly entered his brother's shop and adjoining house in Lampung, on the southern tip of Sumatra island, went to the second floor and forced him into a waiting van on March 28. After threatening his brother, they took Arief away into the darkness of the night.

It is widely known here that the baby-face Arief had been on a military wanted list since riots broke out in Jakarta in July 1996. The government blamed his network of radical students for masterminding the riots.

Surprisingly, the Lampung police denied any role in the kidnapping.

"If it had been the security police who caught Andi, there would have been co-ordination. But until now there have been no reports of where he is," said Lt. Col. Anto Sugiarto.

Indeed, the public here quickly related the kidnapping to either the police or military officialsm since arms ownership is highly restricted under the Indonesian law. Only law enforcement officers and licensed hunters can posses firearms. The hunters must keep their rifles in the offices of the police.

Other missing activists include lawyers Haryanto Taslam, a close aide to Megawati, and Desmond J. Mahendra, who worked with a legal aid organization. Several other lesser-known student leaders, who organized anti-Suharto rallies in Lampung and violently clashed with the police on March 19, have also mysteriously disappeared.

But many Indonesians believed that the police are really not involved in the kidnapping. They speculate that military intelligence officers have probably kidnapped the activists. That explanation ought to be expected; the intelligence officials have done a number of times in the past.

Two years ago, military intelligence officals raided a house in a Jakarta suburb where Arief's friends in the banned Indonesian People's Party were hiding. Later, the student activists said that all of them were taken to the military intelligence headquarters in the Kalibata area in southern Jakarta and interrogated for days before being handed over to the police.

Indonesia's rubber-stamp parliament re-elected Suharto in a carefully-orchestrated general session between March 1 and March 11. But a mounting economic crisis, mass unemployment and soaring prices have made students and workers angry and sent them to the street to protest his rule.

Military spokesman Brig. Gen. Wahab Mokodongan, however, denied charges that the armed forces are behind the disappearances, saying that it is unfair to always accuse the intelligence officers of the kidnapping and other violence of human rights. Mokodongan even stressed that it is not always the military that abuses human rights.

"We do make mistakes, but it does not necessarily mean that all mistakes should be directed to the military. Isn't it possible that all those allegations are made to slander the Indonesian military?" Mokodongan asked.

Despite these confusing remarks, when leaving the human rights office, Djamilus told journalists that her son's idealism in fighting for change in Indonesia is something he had probably inherited from her late husband, Professor Djamilus, who taught chemical engineering at the Sriwijaya University in Palembang.

She once asked her son to stop opposing the Suharto regime. "You are no match to the government," she said she once told her son. Lustrilanang, however, simply replied that it was impossible for him to retreat. "I beg you to accept this," she quoted her son as saying.

"From that time on, I could no longer stop him," the sobbing mother said. She could only pray for her son as he took the risky path of resistance. Now his mother, a devout Catholic, is still praying.