No freedom of speech in Indonesia

Robertus Robet is an Indonesian human rights activist. On wednesday he was arrested and faces two years in prison for "hate speech" for singing a protest song:

Robet was arrested in relation to a song delivered at an event called Kamisan, a weekly human rights demonstration held in front of the state palace in Jakarta every Thursday.

The national police spokesman Dedi Prasetyo said on Thursday that Robet is being investigated for hate speech and faces up to two years in prison if convicted.

At the event on 28 February, Robet sang a song that was popular among student protestors in 1998, when massive demonstrations led to the fall of authoritarian dictator Suharto, who ruled Indonesia for more than three decades.

Robet’s song was meant as a criticism of the government’s recent plan to move unemployed military generals into civil institutions to address an institutional surplus.

His prosecution proves his point: that Indonesia is returning to an authoritarian state where people are not free to say what they think or criticise the government. And if that happens, countries like New Zealand should be reconsidering our diplomatic relations. We should not be friends with a dictatorship.

New Fisk

Why is Indonesia not in the Saudi-led Sunni coalition against terror?

One country at a time

Indonesia has announced a moratorium on executions:

Indonesian presidential chief of staff Luhut Panjaitan made the announcement, saying the country needs to focus on fixing its economy.

The decision comes seven months after the execution of convicted Australian drug traffickers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.

"We haven't thought about executing a death penalty with the economic conditions like this," coordinating security minister Luhut Pandjaitan told reporters. He didn't elaborate.

Possibly that's a sign that the Australian boycott of Indonesia over their executions is working.

A moratorium is not repeal, and Indonesia has had moratoriums before them resumed executions. Still, anything that stops them killing people is a Good Thing - and hopefully, this time, it will become permanent.

The death penalty and legal cooperation

Indonesia murdered eight convicted drug smugglers this morning, including Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. It was a barbarous act, a symptom of a legal system focused on sadism rather than justice. It shows that Indonesia is not the sort of country we should call a friend, or encourage New Zealanders to visit. But it also raises serious questions about the degree of cooperation on law enforcement matters we can have with them.

We already have limits. New Zealand law allows the government to refuse extradition in death penalty cases. While that seems weak, the subsequent affirmation of the right not to be deprived of life by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act - a right to which there can be no "justified limitation" - strengthens it significantly, effectively turning the "amy" into a "must" (though it would still be good to have that set in statute, just to remove any wiggle-room for the government). But extradition isn't the only form of legal cooperation. In 2011 the NZ Police signed an "Arrangement on Cooperation in Preventing and Combating Transnational Crimes" with Indonesia. While the text isn't publicly available, it likely includes information sharing on crimes such as international drug smuggling. NZ Customs likely have similar arrangements. The problem is that given Indonesia's demonstrated use of the death penalty, sharing information with them on death penalty offences or people accused of such crimes is almost certainly illegal.

Why? Because the BORA applies to all actions "by the legislative, executive, or judicial branches of the Government of New Zealand", regardless of where they take place. And the right to life isn't restricted to New Zealanders, but applies to all persons. The net result: providing information or assistance to overseas agencies which would reasonably result in them being arrested, convicted, and executed violates their right to life and therefore violates New Zealand law. In Indonesia's case, that means that we simply cannot talk to them about drug smuggling, or any other crime for which they have the death penalty, anymore.

Australia's corruption cover-up

Wikileaks strikes again:

A sweeping gagging order issued in Australia to block reporting of any bribery allegations involving several international political leaders in the region has been exposed by WikiLeaks.

The prohibition emerged from a criminal case in the Australian courts and applies throughout the country. It was issued by the criminal division of the supreme court of Victoria in Melbourne "to prevent damage to Australia's international relations that may be caused by the publication of material that may damage the reputations of specified individuals who are not the subject of charges in these proceedings".

The Australia-wide gagging order is a superinjunction, which means it also contains a clause insisting that the terms of the order itself should remain secret. It was issued on 19 June and states: "Subject to further order, there be no disclosure, by publication or otherwise, of any information (whether in electronic or paper form) derived from or prepared for the purposes of these proceedings including the terms of these orders."

The suppressed order is here. Wikileaks' commentary is here. Basically, the government has ordered the cover-up of their biggest corruption case - one apparently involving the bribery of leading figures in Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia - as a matter of "national security". Because that's what that phrase means now: the global elite covering up for each other's crimes.

Superinjunctions are an affront to open justice. They're used by the privileged to stop us peasants from sniggering at them and by governments to cover up their crimes. Fortunately, the internet gives us a free market in legal jurisdiction, making such instruments worthless. And we should use it to publish every such self-suppressing injunction until judges get the message and stop issuing them.

Spying on lawyers

The latest NSALeak: The US got its toadies the Australian Defence Signals Directorate to spy on American lawyers representing Indonesia in trade talks:

A top-secret document, obtained by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, shows that an American law firm was monitored while representing a foreign government in trade disputes with the United States. The disclosure offers a rare glimpse of a specific instance in which Americans were ensnared by the eavesdroppers, and is of particular interest because lawyers in the United States with clients overseas have expressed growing concern that their confidential communications could be compromised by such surveillance.

The government of Indonesia had retained the law firm for help in trade talks, according to the February 2013 document. It reports that the N.S.A.’s Australian counterpart, the Australian Signals Directorate, notified the agency that it was conducting surveillance of the talks, including communications between Indonesian officials and the American law firm, and offered to share the information.

The Australians told officials at an N.S.A. liaison office in Canberra, Australia, that “information covered by attorney-client privilege may be included” in the intelligence gathering, according to the document, a monthly bulletin from the Canberra office. The law firm was not identified, but Mayer Brown, a Chicago-based firm with a global practice, was then advising the Indonesian government on trade issues.

On behalf of the Australians, the liaison officials asked the N.S.A. general counsel’s office for guidance about the spying. The bulletin notes only that the counsel’s office “provided clear guidance” and that the Australian agency “has been able to continue to cover the talks, providing highly useful intelligence for interested US customers.”

So we now have clear evidence that our spy agencies use each other to circumvent bans on spying on their own citizens, and that they do not care about basic norms such as attorney-client privilege when doing so. This is utter contempt for the law. And note that its not being done in the name of "national security", but of commercial interests and petty trade disputes.

Again: the only way to end these abuses is to vote out the spies. Defund them, disband them, and destroy their equipment. Nothing else will do.

More blowback

Last week we learned that Australia had been spying on Indonesia. The Indonesians are naturally furious, and have already ended co-operation over people-smuggling. Now they've gone one further and stopped co-operating on terrorism and crime as well:

National police chief Sutarman told the Indonesian parliament’s Commission I on foreign affairs that there was now no cooperation between his forces and Australia on counter-terrorism, information sharing and international crime.

Defence minister Purnomo Yusgiantoro told parliament that three joint exercises with Australian troops had been cancelled — one involving the elite Kopassus special forces troops, one in Darwin and another — a navy counter-terrorism exercise in Manado, North Sulawesi — later this month. He denied there would be any disadvantage for Indonesia over these suspensions.

“Joint exercises are important, coordinating patrols is important, but how can we do it if there is lack of trust among the crews or among the soldiers?” Mr Purnomo said.

Spies justify their powers and budgets with the claim that they keep their citizens safe. Instead, the excesses of Australia's spies are now actively endangering Australians. Time to shut them down.

Spying on Indonesia

Today's NSALeak: Australia spied on the President of Indonesia:

Australia's spy agencies have attempted to listen in on the personal phone calls of the Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, and have targeted the mobile phones of his wife, senior ministers and confidants, a top secret document from whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

The document, dated November 2009, names the president and nine of his inner circle as targets of the surveillance, including the vice-president, Boediono, who last week visited Australia. Other named targets include ministers from the time who are now possible candidates in next year's Indonesian presidential election, and the first lady, Kristiani Herawati, better known as Ani Yudhoyono.

[...]

A slide entitled Indonesian President Voice Intercept (August ‘09), shows a call from an unknown number in Thailand to Yudhoyono. But the call did not last long enough for the DSD to fulfil its aims. “Nil further info at this time (didn’t make the dev threshold - only a sub-1minute call),” a note at the bottom says.

Another slide, titled Indonesian President Voice Events, has a graphic of calls on Yudhoyono's Nokia handset over 15 days in August 2009. It plots CDRs – call data records – which record the numbers called and calling a phone, the duration of calls, and whether it was a voice call or SMS. The agency, in what is standard procedure for surveillance, appears to have expanded its operations to include the calls of those who had been in touch with the president. Another slide, entitled Way Forward, states an imperative: “Must have content.”

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot's response? It's not spying, but "research". Somehow, I think the Indonesians will see it rather differently, and Australian-Indonesian relations will suffer as a result.

Just another example of how spies are harmful to friendly relations and national interests.

Why are we training Indonesia's murderers?

Indonesia's Kopassus special forces have an extremely unpleasant reputation, being linked to torture, disappearances and murder in West Papua, in East Timor before independence, and in Indonesia itself. To pick one example, in 2010 a group of them filmed themselves torturing people in West Papua. And we're helping to train them:

Major Edwin Sumanta recently attended New Zealand's premier military educational institution, the Command and Staff College at Trentham, near Wellington.

Kopassus conducts special operations for the Indonesian government and has been widely accused by human rights groups of violating human rights in Papua and Aceh.

Radio New Zealand International was told by a Defence Force spokesperson that the involvement of Major Sumanta in the college's course is too sensitive for public comment.

Meaning "it might look bad", I guess. And so it should. Kopassus are murderers. And we shouldn't be helping them to become better at it, or to further oppress the people of West Papua. The only reason we should ever allow one of these murderous thugs into our country is to put them on trial for the crimes they have committed.

No freedom of religion in Indonesia

Alexander Aan is an Indonesian civil servant. In January, he created a page on Facebook on which he declared himself an atheist and said that he did not believe in angels, devils, heaven and hell or other myths. As a result, he was arrested for "blasphemy", and has just been sentenced to two and a half years imprisonment and a US$10,000 fine.

Freedom of religion? Freedom of speech? There's no such thing in theocratic Indonesia.

McCully ignores torture

Murray McCully is in Indonesia at the moment, talking trade (of course) and closer cooperation. Meanwhile, the Indonesian military are torturing people in West Papua [graphic video]. McCully's response? "I know nothing!"

As that Scoop story points out, this is almost certainly bullshit. That video has gone around the world. Its been in all the major media, and major governments and NGOs have commented on it. His office has been specifically informed about it. It beggars belief that MFAT would not have briefed him on it. Either they are grossly incompetent (which I find hard to believe), or the Minister was briefed and chose to remain silent in the face of clear evidence of torture. Which is it?

No tears for Suharto

So, Suharto is dead. As with other despots, I won't be shedding any tears for him. The man was a corrupt and brutal dictator, who looted his country to enrich himself and his cronies and kept his nation in fear for the 32 years of his rule. He was a mass-murderer, responsible for the deaths of over half a million communists and Indonesian Chinese in the bloody purges which followed his rise to power. And he ordered the invasion and occupation of Timor Leste - an occupation which the UN has said amounted to genocide. Sadly, he died before he could be held accountable for any of these crimes - but at least he won't be causing Indonesia any further problems.

Murdered

Brian Raymond Peters, in the company of fellow journalists Gary James Cunningham, Malcolm Harvie Rennie, Gregory John Shackleton and Anthony John Stewart, collectively known as “the Balibo Five”, died at Balibo in Timor- Leste on 16 October 1975 from wounds sustained when he was shot and/or stabbed deliberately, and not in the heat of battle, by members of the Indonesian Special Forces, including Christoforus da Silva and Captain Yunus Yosfiah on the orders of Captain Yosfiah, to prevent him from revealing that Indonesian Special Forces had participated in the attack on Balibo.

That's the finding of a coroner's report [DOC] into the deaths of the Balibao Five, just released this afternoon. In other words, it was murder, and a war crime. The question now is whether the Australian government will seek to extradite and prosecute those responsible, or whether they will continue their policy of looking the other way on Indonesian human rights abuses and extend it to abuses committed against their own citizens.

As the Indonesian Human Rights Committee point out, it's a question also faced by New Zealand, as one of those killed - Gary Cunningham - was a New Zealander. We have a case, we have a clear law (the Geneva Conventions Act 1958) under which the offence can be prosecuted, which provides for extraterritorial jurisdiction for such offences. The government should put its money where its mouth is on human rights, and use it.