In a potentially explosive post on his blog, award-winning US journalist Allan Nairn says General A.M. Hendropriyono, a powerful figure in the Indonesian military and a key advisor to President Jokowi, admitted to having “command responsibility” in the assassination of the Munir Said Thalib, one of Indonesia’s leading human rights activists.
Nairn claims Hendropriyono revealed his involvement in the assassination and much more during two interviews at the general’s mansion in Jakarta earlier this month.
Nairn was mostly recently in the Indonesian news during the presidential elections, when he controversially used his blog to reveal the contents of an off-the-record interview he had done with Prabowo Subianto, the losing presidential candidate and former commander of the TNI’s Kopassus. Nairn said he was willing to violate journalistic ethics to prevent Prabowo, whom he considers extremely dangerous, from winning the election.
Unlike the Prabowo interview, Nairn’s talk with Hendropriyono was on-the-record. Nairn said the general might have, “perhaps inadvertently, ended up submitting himself to close questioning.”
As Nairn writes on his blog, “By the time it was over [Hendropriyono] had abandoned some of his and TNI’s longest standing defenses, and had agreed to stand trial for three major atrocities: the Munir murder, the 1999 terror campaign that devastated occupied East Timor, and the 1989 Talangsari massacre that earned him the nickname ‘the Butcher of Lampung.’”
Munir, who was considered to be Indonesia’s leading anti-corruption and human rights activist, was assassinated with poison during a flight from Jakarta to Amsterdam in 2004. Pollycarpus Priyanto, a former Garuda Airlines pilot, was charged and sentenced to 20-years for carrying out the assassination, but the person or organization that gave him his orders was never brought to line.
Until now, potentially.
Although his generic Blogger.com site doesn’t scream professional, Allan Nairn is a well-respected journalist. He has reported on Indonesia extensively. In 1991, he witnessed the massacre committed by Indonesian troops in Dili, East Timor, getting injured in the process. For his reporting, he won the the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award, the George Polk Award and the James Aronson Award.
If Hendropriyono doesn’t take back everything he said in this interview, and Nairn is able to back it up, then the potential fallout of the revelations contained with could have a serious impact on Jokowi’s administration, as Hendropriyono has served as one of his key advisors on his transition team (a move that caused many to question his commitment to human rights). The interview also implicates Wiranto, an ex-general who chairs the Hanura political party and has been a strong supporter of Jokowi, with involvement in many of the crimes Hendropriyono discusses.
We’ll either be hearing a whole lot more about this in the next couple of days, or it will fall off the radar like it never happened. In the meantime you can read the first part of the interview, as well as learn how Nairn was able to score the interview, by following the link to his blog below.
Related
How to sound smart when talking about Jokowi’s new cabinet: a pros and cons list
Jokowi’s Backpedal on Investigating Past Human Rights Abuses is Causing Many to Doubt That He’s Truly the People’s Champion
