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Widow to attend opening of Munir bicycle lane in The Hague
The city administration of The Hague, the Netherlands, will officially name one of its city streets âMunirpadâ (Munir Path), after murdered Indonesian human rights activist Munir Said Thalib, in an event attended by Munirâs widow
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he city administration of The Hague, the Netherlands, will officially name one of its city streets 'Munirpad' (Munir Path), after murdered Indonesian human rights activist Munir Said Thalib, in an event attended by Munir's widow.
Den Haag Mayor Jozias van Aartsen will hold the event on Tuesday, in a complex with streets, paths and lanes named after other human right activists such as Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela, Salvador Allende and Mother Theresa.
'It's an extraordinary thing to me. Munir's name is acknowledged by a country known as the center of international human rights justice,' Munir's widow, Suciwati, was quoted by kompas.com as saying at a press conference on Saturday.
She will depart for the Netherlands on Saturday night to attend the event. Amnesty International in the Netherlands and human rights activists from both Indonesia and the Netherlands are also slated to attend the event.
She claimed that the idea had been talked about since 2011 when she came to the Netherlands to attend film screenings on human rights. The mayor of Den Haag promised her that a street would be named after Munir in four to five years.
Munir was poisoned with arsenic on board a Garuda Indonesia plane flying him from Jakarta to Amsterdam on Sept. 7, 2004. A former Garuda pilot, Pollycarpus Budihari Prijanto, was sentenced to 20 years in jail for this case, then granted remissions to 14 years, but released on parole in November 2014 after only serving six years in prison.
Imparsial, a human rights organization, recently filed a petition to challenge the parole and had its first hearing on March 25.
'It's ironic, that another country could give such an acknowledgement while our own country just lets Munir's murderer run free,' Suciwati said as quoted by Antara news agency. (fsu)(+++)
