A Decade After Munir’s Assassination, Questions Still Linger

‘Test of Our History’: President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono promised to solve murder of prominent human rights activist, but its masterminds remain at large as his administration comes to an end

Jakarta Globe, Nivell Rayda & Raja Humuntar Panggabean, Sep 05, 2014

Munir Said Thalib, center, his wife Suciwati, left, and an unidentified staff member of the
Indonesian Human Rights Monitor (Imparsial), moments before the human rights defender
boarded a flight on Garuda Indonesia on Sept. 6, 2004. (Photo courtesy of Imparsial)

Jakarta. They were the last pictures of human rights defender Munir Said Thalib alive, taken late on Sept. 6, 2004, shortly before he took the Garuda Indonesia flight where he would draw his last breath.

The pictures showed Munir with his closest friends: his staff from the Indonesian Human Rights Monitor (Imparsial) and his wife Suciwati, sharing jokes and laughs over cups of coffee at a doughnut shop at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport.

He looked well. Healthy as could be. His short, curly hair was golden brown, like ripe corn kernels glinting from the camera’s flash.

In almost every shot, Munir is grinning from ear to ear, enthusiastic about his planned post-graduate studies in the Netherlands — a dream he’d had to postpone so many times before because he was too busy advocating for victims of violence, too anxious about leaving Indonesia, whose democracy was still in its infancy.

But that year he found very few reasons to put his dream on hold again. For the first time, Indonesia had held a free presidential election.

Munir was pleased with the fact that former military chief Wiranto, a candidate whom he saw as having the worst human rights record, failed to advance to the runoff vote. In a few weeks’ time, then-president Megawati Soekarnoputri would be going head to head against her former security minister, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Neither was an ideal candidate in Munir’s eyes, but at least they were committed not to let Indonesia fall back into military rule. The outcome of the election made him slightly less uneasy about leaving Indonesia.

It had also been years since Indonesia saw a major human rights violation, and he saw a growing number of people start to speak up about human rights. He was confident he could pass on his work to his peers and juniors.

Poengky Indarti, who eventually took over from Munir as Imparsial’s executive director, felt the urge to take lots of pictures of him before he left that day. She felt it would be years before she could see him again.

She also went against Munir’s wishes and asked an old research consultant friend named Sri Rukminingtyas, who had recently moved to Rotterdam, to pick him up at Amsterdam’s Schiphol International Airport.

“I don’t need anyone to pick me up,” Poengky, then Munir’s number three at Imparsial, recounts her old boss as saying. But Poengky insisted. “I’m not sure why. Maybe it was just my maternal instinct. I had been taking care of his scholarship applications and getting his visa. I guess I needed to be sure he would be taken care of when he got there.”

On Sept. 7, 2004, Munir died on board the plane as it flew over Budapest.

Sri remembered packing four tuna sandwiches that morning before she set out to pick up Munir. She thought that perhaps Munir might not have eaten on the plane, and getting breakfast at the airport would be too expensive.

She doesn’t remember now what happened to the sandwiches. All she could remember was an announcement blaring from the airport’s speakers mentioning the name “Munir.” She also remembered that shortly afterward she got a call from Poengky. Poengky told her that someone from Garuda had just called to say that Munir was dead.

Sri immediately went to the airport’s information office. A police officer confirmed that Munir had indeed died during the flight. “I lost control of myself and cried loudly. It was like being struck by lightning,” Sri says.

Her seemingly simple task of picking Munir up at the airport turned into a somber affair, but one that threw her into a crucial role in unraveling the true nature of his death.

Sri explained to the Dutch police that Munir was 39 and in good health. She explained that he was a very prominent human rights defender back in Indonesia and that the he had received multiple death threats. Based on Sri’s statements, the Dutch police ordered an autopsy done, and subsequently found a fatal dose of arsenic in Munir’s body.

“If Sri hadn’t been there, maybe his death would have been attributed to natural causes. His body would have been sent back to Indonesia without any investigation and we wouldn’t have known the truth,” Poengky says.

A man covers his face with an image of Munir Said Thalib. (JG Photo/Nivell Rayda)

Legacy of impunity

Sunday marks the 10-year anniversary of Munir’s death, a case that still holds many questions.

Three people have been convicted of his death: Pollycarpus Budihari Priyanto, an off-duty Garuda pilot and suspected State Intelligence Agency (BIN) operative who spiked Munir’s drink with arsenic; and two accomplices who played minor roles in arranging for Pollycarpus to be on the same flight as Munir.

But those who masterminded the murder, giving Pollycarpus his orders, remain beyond the reach of the law. And activists blame this travesty on the reluctance shown by the administration of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who came into office the same year that Munir died, to bring those responsible to justice.

“At the beginning of his rule, SBY promised to resolve [Munir’s] case and even said that it would be ‘the test of our history,’ ” says Choirul Anam, the executive secretary of the Solidarity Action Committee for Munir (Kasum). “But now at the end of his administration the case is not fully resolved.”

After two months of intense pressure from human rights activists and international media, Yudhoyono formed an independent fact-finding team on Nov. 23, 2004, to monitor the police investigation into the case and conduct its own inquiry.

Witnesses on board the flight noted that Pollycarpus was seated next to Munir on the flight from Jakarta to Singapore, where it picked up more passengers. The passenger manifest indicated that Pollycarpus got off in Singapore and didn’t continue on to Amsterdam. But before he left Singapore’s Changi International Airport, he was seen offering Munir a cup of coffee, which was spiked with arsenic.

Munir’s health deteriorated from that point on, and he eventually died on board, hours before the plane landed in Amsterdam.

The fact-finding team also found that immediately prior to and after Munir’s death, Pollycarpus had communicated extensively with Muchdi Purwoprandjono, who at the time was a deputy chief of the BIN.

In their court testimonies, several intelligence officials also said that Pollycarpus often visited the BIN headquarters and met behind closed doors with Muchdi. In at least one of those meetings, Abdullah Mahmud Hendropriyono, the BIN chief at the time, was also present.

Pollycarpus is now serving a 14-year prison term after the Central Jakarta District Court, on Dec. 1, 2005, found him guilty of murdering Munir. The South Jakarta District Court, however, acquitted Muchdi of all charges on Dec. 31, 2008, despite the judges in Pollycarpus’s trial ruling that Pollycarpus had acted on Muchdi’s instructions.

Police never questioned Hendropriyono for his alleged involvement in Munir’s killing.

Kasum secretary Anam notes that during Yudhoyono’s two terms in office, Pollycarpus’ sentence went from 14 years to two years in 2006, to 20 years in 2008, and finally, last year, back to 14 years. Pollycarpus also enjoyed a number of sentence cuts, amounting to a total of 42 months during six years in prison.

Anam says recent developments in the case should give prosecutors enough evidence to launch a fresh investigation.

“This government has never been serious in punishing those responsible, let alone solving the mysteries surrounding his death,” he says. “Ever since Muchdi was acquitted, [prosecutors] have done nothing. Even after two changes of attorney general, they only made promises.”

Anam says Yudhoyono has left his successor, Joko Widodo, with the very important task of seeking justice for Munir. “They had all the evidence. All that it takes is courage,” he says.

Uli Parulian Sihombing, the executive director of the Indonesian Legal Resource Center, has called on Joko to bar those with questionable rights record from serving in his administration, following Joko’s appointment of Hendropriyono as an adviser to the team preparing the new government for office.

Munir’s widow, Suciwati, has also lambasted Hendropriyono’s appointment. “Human rights is not a political commodity. If [Joko] has promised [to resolve rights abuse cases], then he must fulfill it by forming a government that is free of human rights violators,” she says.

Human Rights Watch researcher Andreas Harsono says it is important that Joko appoint reform-minded people as his picks to head up law enforcement agencies, to ensure the resolution of Munir’s case as well as all past human rights abuse cases, in which Munir so passionately sought justice during his lifetime.

A fearless defender

Anam describes Munir as a courageous fighter, even during the Suharto era, when free speech was greatly curbed and those criticizing power ended up dead, missing, or in jail. “He was never afraid of pointing at people’s noses,” Anam says. “Even powerful generals.”

Among those he named as human rights abusers was Hendropriyono. The latter, at the time an Army colonel, led a bloody military crackdown on civilian protesters in Talangsari, Lampung, in 1989 that led to 45 people being killed and 88 others missing. The military also burned the protesters’ village to the ground.

Munir’s criticism of Hendropriyono intensified when the retired general joined Megawati’s campaign. Aside from highlighting his past cases, Munir also raised concerns that he might abuse his authorities as the BIN chief for the campaign’s benefit. Munir even lodged a lawsuit with the State Administrative Court demanding Hendropriyono’s removal from his BIN post.

“But does that have a direct correlation with Munir’s death? We don’t know yet. What we know is that [Hendropriyono] is not the only human rights violator with a military background who had a grudge against Munir,” Anam says, adding that Munir’s many enemies could have conspired to have the rights defender killed.

Then there’s Prabowo Subianto, a close friend of Muchdi’s and the losing candidate in this year’s presidential election. Munir repeatedly accused Prabowo, who was then chief of the Army’s Special Forces unit Kopassus, of kidnapping pro-democracy activists toward the end of Suharto’s 32-year rule.

Several of those activists remain missing to this day.

Munir’s constant pressure to have Prabowo tried forced the government to form a fact-finding team and the military to set up an ethics tribunal, which eventually led to Prabowo’s dismissal from the Army.

Prabowo has repeatedly denied responsibility for the abductions, saying he was simply carrying out orders from his superiors and that all the kidnapped activists were released after being interrogated.

“He would have got onto the first flight back to Indonesia,” Poengky says when asked what she thinks Munir would do if he were alive to see Prabowo running for president.

An activist lays out 10, to commemorate the death of Munir Said Thalib,
who died on Sept. 7, 2004. (JG Photo/Nivell Rayda)

Inspiring generations

Munir’s killers might have been trying to send a message by having the prominent activist killed in an elaborate assassination plot on board an international flight.

“If this can happen to Munir then imagine what could happen to lesser-known activists in remote areas like Papua or Aceh, so far away from the media spotlight,” Poengky says.

But Munir’s death only emboldened the next generation of activists to continue his struggle, advocating for the victims of human rights abuses.

Novia Seni Astriani is 25 and for three years she has been advocating for Munir’s killers to face trial, as a member of Kasum’s campaign and networking division.

“While in college, like so many of my peers, we learned that what we were taught as kids were lies. We never knew that our history was so tainted by so many human rights violations. We were never taught about Munir’s assassination,” says Astri, as she is better known.

“In college I got to know Munir. I got to know the cases he was fighting for … his thinking. And I was saddened. How could anyone murder someone like Munir? How could his case remained unsolved to this day? I felt I needed to do something.”

On Thursday, Astri organized Kamisan, a weekly rally in front of the State Palace in Central Jakarta to demand the resolution of past human rights abuses. This week’s Kamisan is dedicated to Munir with some protesters wearing a mask bearing the likeness of the slain activist.

After some 20 minutes of silent protest, Astri grabbed a microphone and began talking to the crowd to fire them up.

“Let’s all gather around facing the so-called ‘palace of the people.’ For 10 years Munir’s case has been in limbo. For 10 years the person at that palace has done so little,” Astri tells some 40 protesters.

Aside from a handful of ageing victims of human rights abuses and violence, most of the rally’s participants are youths, not much older than herself.

Munir has also inspired many to follow in his footsteps of advocating for victims of injustice.

“Munir as a human rights defender has given us a legacy that is simple yet very profound in its meaning,” says 23-year-old Ichsan, who works for the Jakarta Legal Aid Foundation (LBH).

“In his time, he wasn’t afraid to reveal injustice. All youths should learn from his courage.”

Veronica Koman, 26, another LBH Jakarta lawyer, says she always bows whenever she goes to her office, which proudly displays Munir’s pictures.

“Much of Munir’s legacy inspires me. Munir … has become a symbol of human rights in Indonesia,” she says.

Those behind the assassination might have succeeded in killing Munir, but in doing so, they unwittingly created a martyr, an inspiration and a legend.

Further Coverage

Editorial: Munir and the Fight for Human Rights

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Remembering Munir — Human Rights Defender, Brother, Husband, Father and Friend

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