Actress Nikita Mirzani may find herself in the middle of a cyber crime investigation after she was accused of defaming Indonesian military (TNI) Commander General Gatot Nurmantyo in a Tweet.
Yesterday, a group of lawyers called the Alliance of Al Islam NKRI Advocates reported the actress to the South Sumatra Police for a tweet on her official account, dated September 30, in which she allegedly wrote that the 1980s propaganda film G30S PKI is not thrilling (that part’s legal), and that it would be more interesting if General Gatot were to be assassinated in the film (that part’s not).
Today, Nikita denied having ever posted the tweet, saying she knows the person responsible for it.
“I know the person who did it. It first appeared through his Facebook account, owned by a man, and I have his identity,” Nikita said, as quoted by Kompas.
Nikita added that she’s willing to be questioned by the police to prove her innocence.
“I’ll just prove it. I am fully aware that I never posted it. It never even came to my mind to insult the general, I respect Indonesia’s generals,” she said.
While she did not give any explanation as to how someone could have posted the tweet on her account, Nikita said she hadn’t even tweeted for a long time and most of her tweets these days are mirrors of her Instagram posts. She also claims she hasn’t even watched G30S PKI.
The tweet appears to be deleted from Nikita’s Twitter account.
Gatot has not given any statements regarding the matter.
G30S PKI is a controversial propaganda film released in 1984 and sponsored by the New Order government. It offers what historians believe to be a highly inaccurate version of the events leading up the assassination of six military generals as part of a coup plot by the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) in 1965. It was shown annually on Indonesian television until Suharto’s downfall in 1998.
Despite happening more than 50 years ago, the mass killings that took place in Indonesia from 1965-1966, which are estimated to have claimed the lives of 500,000 to 1 million communists and their sympathizers, remains a highly taboo topic in Indonesia.
Activists and survivors who want to discuss the truth behind the genocide are often accused of communism themselves, as happened last month when police shut down a private historical seminar held by the Jakarta Legal Aid Foundation (LBH Jakarta) and then again by angry mobs at a pro-democracy event.
Following those events, General Gatot controversially ordered that the film be screened for all members of the military, saying that it was important for the younger generation to know the nation’s history.
Reader Interactions