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Impunity in Indonesia: ‘Long COVID’, or endemic?
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, victims of human rights abuses in Indonesia have indeed been experiencing their own version of “long COVID”.
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Time flies: Family members of 1998 May riot victims attend the 21st commemoration of the tragedy in Klender Mall in East Jakarta on May 13, 2019. The event was held to raise people’s awareness of unresolved past human rights abuses. (Antara/Aprilio Akbar)
L
ife is unpredictable, right? And this is certainly no less so in Indonesia. But there are some things in this country that are very predictable, which does not mean we should be thankful for them.
One of them is the tendency for high-ranking government officials to fail to show up at the last minute even after they have confirmed their attendance. This is an Indonesian cultural thing anyway, but it is even more the case with government top dogs.
This is what happened on June 2 at a webinar titled “Opportunities for Eliminating Impunity in Indonesia“. It was the last in a series of five webinars on “Understanding and Unraveling Impunity in Indonesia” conducted over a period of five months since January.
In the introductory blurb of the webinar series, the organizers wrote that “human rights violations are generally left unchecked and the state and its legal institutions are not trying to fix it. In Indonesia, this situation has existed for decades, with disastrous consequences for the rule of law and society at large”.
The series was organized by the Jentera Indonesian Law School, Amnesty International Indonesia, the Indonesian-Dutch Working Group on Justice and Development and the Van Vollenhoven Institute of Leiden Law School. The topics of the first four were: “Understanding impunity in Indonesia: An Introduction” on Jan. 27, “Impunity in the Legal System in Indonesia” on Feb. 24, “Non-judicial Aspects of Impunity” on March 31 and “Strategies to Fight Impunity” on April 21.
Pretty comprehensive right? If you followed seriously all five webinars, you could easily become an expert on impunity in Indonesia. Hey, maybe our government officials should take it!
The lineup of speakers for all the webinars was impressive, including the concluding one: Mahfud MD, coordinating political, legal and security affairs minister, Marzuki Darusman, former attorney general (1999-2001), Galuh Wandita, director of Asia Justice and Rights (AJAR) and Usman Hamid, executive director of Amnesty International Indonesia and lecturer at Jentera. The last three speakers are well-known figures who have a long-standing commitment and experience in the field of human rights.
