Still seeking justice in Indonesia

Whether the threats come by anonymous letter, curt phone call or text message, the point for Suciwati Munir is always the same: Stop blaming Indonesia’s military for your husband’s killing or you may be next.

The faceless bullies step up the intimidation before the widow makes one of her frequent trips abroad to ask foreign governments to back her effort to win justice for Munir Said Thalib, a leading human rights activist who was poisoned in September 2004.

“They have called me a traitor to this country and a destroyer to the united state of the Republic of Indonesia,” she said in a recent interview. “The language they used is very militaristic. But I don’t pay any attention to them. And I think if I tell people about the terror I’ve received, it’s the same as if I’m spreading the terror itself.”

Munir, 38, died of arsenic poisoning during a flight to Amsterdam aboard state-run Garuda Indonesia Airlines. The father of two was executive director of Imparsial, a rights group he co-founded.

He received numerous death threats while criticizing Indonesia’s military for rights abuses in conflict zones such as Aceh, Papua and the former Indonesian province of East Timor, now an independent country. He also worked to expose widespread corruption among military officers, including illegal logging that is decimating the country’s forests.

“People see Munir as extremely anti-military even though that’s not the case,” his widow said. “Munir was a person who was always critical about the military so that they would be professional soldiers.”

In 2005, an Indonesian court convicted Pollycarpus Budihari Priyanto of conspiracy to commit murder in the Munir case. Pollycarpus, then a Garuda pilot, was a passenger on the flight Munir took from Jakarta to Singapore en route to the Netherlands. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison, but the Supreme Court acquitted him last year, citing a lack of evidence.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a former army general, ordered police, prosecutors and intelligence officers to renew the effort to find out who killed Munir.

Last month, police arrested Garuda’s former president and a secretary to the chief pilot. But they didn’t go after the chief suspects in the State Intelligence Agency, also known by the Bahasa Indonesia acronym BIN, which a fact-finding team implicated in the killing.

Adnan Wirawan, a leading defense attorney who won Pollycarpus’ acquittal, said that if the conspiracy was hatched at BIN, the secret would die there.

“Here is our theory: If BIN is responsible, its client has to be the government. They cannot just say, out of the blue, ‘I don’t like this guy and I want to kill him,’ ” the lawyer said. “If that is the case, no one is ever going to catch the murderer, because it’s all going to be buried there.”

Charmain Mohamed, a Human Rights Watch researcher specializing in Indonesia, said the arrests of the Garuda officials were “clearly a good sign,” but she said the police couldn’t be taken seriously unless they followed leads pointing to the involvement of Indonesian intelligence.

A crucial challenge

The Munir investigation is a crucial test of the president’s power and authority, Mohamed said from London.

“If he cannot ensure a transparent and credible process for this, the most high-profile case in the country today, then who is really running the country?” she said. “There remains an enormous gap between Indonesia’s public commitments to human rights and the reality on the ground, where human rights defenders can be murdered and the perpetrators can simply get away with it.”

Evidence linking Pollycarpus to Indonesia’s spy service includes numerous phone calls at the time of the poisoning between him and Muchdi Purwopranjono, then the deputy director at BIN, Suciwati Munir said.

The FBI, which assisted in the investigation, uncovered 41 calls between Pollycarpus and Muchdi over a month, she said.

“When Muchdi was asked why there were some records of contacts between him and Pollycarpus, he said that his cellphone could be used by anybody,” she said. “That is ridiculous. Even my cellphone cannot be used by just anybody, and I’m only a civilian.”

Though Pollycarpus’ lawyer acknowledged the evidence that the former Garuda pilot had links to the BIN, Wirawan suggested that his client might have been set up as a fall guy.

“Even if he was an intelligence agent, does that mean he killed Munir?” the attorney asked. “There’s no crime in him being an informant for the BIN. If anything, it’s a noble thing.”

A list of the calls between Pollycarpus and Muchdi was introduced as evidence on a plain sheet of paper that did not identify the source, which the court was told was confidential, the attorney added.

“Someone cannot send you to prison confidentially,” Wirawan said. “If you want to keep something confidential, you should not bring that into court.”

As police expanded their investigation in April, Muchdi said he was ready to be questioned again, contending that he had nothing to do with the death.

“The investigation is over and the killing should no longer be connected to me,” he said.

After getting little help from police in the nearly three years since her husband’s death, Suciwati Munir is careful not to get her hopes too high that the culprits will be caught.

“Sometimes when I deal with the police, I feel like I’m looking at the darkness,” she said. “It looks like they aren’t doing anything. It makes me sad and angry.”

Ill-fated journey

When her husband boarded the flight to Singapore on Sept. 6, 2004, Indonesian politics were heating up. Yudhoyono, a former security minister, was in a runoff for the presidency against incumbent Megawati Sukarnoputri. Two weeks after Munir’s slaying, the former general won the race.

Munir was on his way to take up a one-year scholarship to study international humanitarian law at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He was poisoned with almost 500 milligrams of arsenic, more than four times the lethal amount.

On the first leg of the flight, from Jakarta to Singapore, he was supposed to sit in economy class seat 40G.

Munir entered by the business class door, where he encountered Pollycarpus. The off-duty pilot had a letter from the airline’s chief executive permitting him to take the flight as a security officer on a “special assignment.” His lawyer said it was unheard of for a pilot to work under the direct supervision of the airline’s CEO.

Pollycarpus gave up his business class seat to Munir and moved to first class. A witness told investigators he saw the off-duty pilot in the galley with flight attendants as they prepared to distribute orange juice to passengers on the short flight.

Prosecutors first alleged that that was when Pollycarpus spiked Munir’s drink with arsenic.

But witnesses testified that Munir picked his drink at random from a tray of several glasses, and an expert defense witness said the type of arsenic that killed him would have turned the orange juice green. The trial judge suggested that Munir’s meal of sauteed noodles must have killed him, but prosecutors provided no evidence to suggest that his food was poisoned, Wirawan said.

Both men got off the plane at Singapore’s Changi Airport. Munir joined the other passengers in the waiting area before reboarding the 747 about 1 a.m. to continue the journey to Amsterdam. Pollycarpus caught the first flight back to Jakarta the next morning.

The investigation is focusing on Singapore’s airport as the crime scene. Witnesses say Munir appeared fine before reboarding to take his assigned seat in economy. But three hours into the second leg of his journey, a flight attendant awoke a doctor to ask his help because Munir had made several trips to the toilet to vomit.

If the intelligence service orchestrated the conspiracy, Pollycarpus would have been assigned specific tasks that didn’t necessarily include murder, his lawyer said.

“How it operates anywhere in this world is on a ‘need to know’ basis,” Wirawan said. “Pollycarpus was told specifically to get on board, and that’s what he did. Then he could have been told to change seats with Munir, and that’s exactly what he did. And that was it. He doesn’t know anything else.”

When the Supreme Court acquitted Pollycarpus on the murder charge, it upheld his conviction for using a fake permission letter authorizing him to be a passenger on the flight.

Airline found negligent

This month, a civil court found Garuda negligent because the pilot flying the plane failed to make an emergency landing as Munir’s condition worsened. He died about two hours before the flight landed in Amsterdam. The court ordered the airline to pay about $73,000 in damages to his widow, who had sued for $1.4 million and a public apology.

For now, she must settle for anonymous death threats, which started coming soon after her husband’s death. In November 2004, Munir found a cardboard box on her doorstep containing a chicken’s head, legs and intestines. There also was a typed warning: “Do not connect the [military] to Munir’s death if you do not want to end up like him!”

The threats haven’t sapped her determination to end Indonesia’s long history of human rights abuses.

“For me, there is no democracy in Indonesia yet,” she said. “We can call Indonesia democratic when the people who have violated human rights are brought to justice.”

paul.watson@latimes.com