A low-ranking officer with the Papua Police who was found to have suspicious transactions totaling Rp 1.5 trillion ($132 million) in his bank records will not be arraigned for corruption and instead face money laundering charges, Attorney General Basrief Arief said on Friday.
Adj. First Insp. Labora Sitorus, an officer with the Sorong district police in West Papua, was arrested in Jakarta in May and named a suspect in a fuel smuggling case, following the seizure of 400,000 kiloliters from a boat registered in his name. Around a million liters of fuel linked to the suspect have been confiscated.
Labora was allegedly also involved in illegal logging, and police at Surabaya’s Tanjung Perak Port seized in May 115 containers storing 2,264 cubic meters of illicit merbau lumber allegedly belonging to the officer. The wood came from Sorong, a district in West Papua.
Basrief said that prosecutors will charge Labora with money laundering, illegal logging and fuel hoarding. Labora will not be charged with corruption.
“The dossier we received was like that,” Basrief said in reference to the report used as a base for prosecutors to prepare the indictment.
He did not elaborate on what was contained in the dossier, but said that since it was completed, the case would be soon passed over to the court for trial.
“I think that within two weeks the case will be handed over to the judicial court,” Basrief said.
Neta S. Pane, the chief of police watchdog Indonesia Police Watch, said that the dossiers filed with the prosecutors demonstrate that the police were unscrupulous in their handling of a case involving a fellow officer with a fat bank account.
“It just shows that the [police] are not acting professionally in this case… the worry is that the panel of judges will acquit Labora Sitorus,” Neta said.
He said that Labora should also be charged with corruption and speculated that the charge was most likely omitted since his dossier lists 33 police officers who allegedly received money from Labora.
IPW, Neta said, is suspecting that the charge was dropped in order to close the investigations on the 33 police officers.
A police dossier that was not done comprehensively will make it difficult for prosecutors to prove their accusation in court, he added.
“The prosecutors’ office will have to work hard to complete Labora’s dossier themselves by tracing back the flow of money to the 33 police officers. If not, then the prosecutors will be in a difficult position because of the police’s unprofessionalism,” Neta said.
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Archipelago | Fri, September 20 2013, 7:42 PM
The house of Maybrat Regent Bernard Sagrim in West Papua was set ablaze on Thursday by an angry mob following a decision to move the regency’s capital from Kmurkek to Aymaru.
Bernard is the regent for 2011-2016.
“Rage erupted after a clash broke out on Thursday between Bernard’s supporters who are Aymaru tribesmen and supporters of Agus, who competed against Bernard in the election and is from the Ayfat tribe,” National Police spokesperson Sr. Comr. Hilman Thayib said on Friday as quoted by tempo.co.
Hilman added that the angry residents, who opposed moving the capital, also blocked the street to Maybrat.
The Constitutional Court approved on Thursday Bernard’s appeal to move the regency’s capital. (hrl)
3) Freeport Indonesia Union Says Pay Talks Stall, TimeframeExtended Thursday 19 September 2013 8:36pm WIB (JoyoNews1) Reuters Jakarta - Pay talks at Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc s Indonesian unit have stalled but a deadline for an end to negotiations has been extended, a union official said on Thursday, easing the threat of any disruption. Pay negotiations between workers and management at Freeport s remote Grasberg mine in Papua, the world s second-biggest copper mine, resumed in late June after being suspended in May when a tunnel collapse killed 28 people. "Freeport only offered us a quarter of the pay rise that we are demanding," union spokesman Juli Parorrongan told Reuters in a text after talks this week involving Freeport Indonesia CEO Rozik Soetjipto and Freeport CEO Richard Adkerson. "Workers cannot accept the offer because it is considered too low," said Parorrongan, adding that the union was pushing for a 40 percent pay increase over two years or two annual 20 percent rises. Relations between Freeport and the union have been strained in recent years following a three-month strike in late 2011, May s deadly accident and a series of minor spats. The Freeport union agreed a deal for a 37 percent pay rise over two years in late 2011, after initially pushing for a pay rise to as much as $200 an hour compared with a pay rate at the time of $2-$3 an hour. Under the current wage agreement, which is due to end on Sept. 30, the majority of workers are paid 4.6 million rupiah to 7.7 million rupiah ($400-$670) a month, said Parorrongan on Thursday. Freeport Indonesia employs about 24,000 workers, including contractors and staff. About three-quarters are union members. Talks on a new pay deal had been expected to last up to 60 days, and Parorrongan said a new deadline of Oct. 4 had been set for talks to conclude. Freeport unions had yet to decide what action to take if no agreement was reached by the new deadline, Parorrongan said. Freeport Indonesia could not be reached for immediate comment on Thursday.
TEMPO.CO, Yogyakarta - Defense Minister Purnomo Yusgiantoro, informed that Indonesia has recently received six Sukhoi SU-27 SKM and SU-30 MK2 fighter jets from Russia. The addditional jets have completed Indonesia's Sukhoi squadron with a total of 16 fighter jets.
Purnomo said that the the Sukhoi squadron will help to safeguard Indonesia's air space. The bulky fighter jets are equipped with jumbo fuel tank, enabling them to cover the whole Indonesian region.
The Minister added that the Indonesia Air Force will also receive nine units of CN295 transport airplane produced by state-owned airplane manufacturer Dirgantara Indonesia. to replace the current F-27 airplanes.
Furthermore, the Defense Ministry also provided four units of Grob G-120 TP training plane. The plane's manufacturer Grob Aircraft is set to send a total of 16 training planes, which will be delivered in several phases until 2014.
5) Beef, boats and elections: what’s in store for the Australia-Indonesia relationship
Somehow, the debate on Indonesia-Australia relations has got stuck on Bali, beef and boats.
While there is no point pretending that either beef or boats are about to disappear as issues any time soon, we need to broaden the discussion both to understand what is at stake in the obvious differences between the two nations and to move towards the possibility of resolving them.
On the positive side the current Indonesian Cabinet is highly educated and very familiar with Australia: six of the 24 Cabinet ministers have PhDs as does Vice President Boediono.
The Vice President studied at three Australian universities, UWA, Monash and ANU. Foreign minister Marty Natalegawaand Tourism minister Mari Pangestu both have ANU PhDs. Other ministers in Cabinet have spent long formative periods in USA and Europe. This is a highly educated, internationalised, Australia-literate Cabinet.
By contrast, there is no one in the Abbott Cabinet who can claim substantial knowledge of or experience in any part of Asia, let alone Indonesia. Not only is the Cabinet shamefully devoid of women, it is notably unrepresentative of Asian Australians.
Indonesia too is about to enter a presidential campaign period. Many observers have suggested that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, in the last year of his second and final term of office is already a lame duck. The shape of Indonesia’s next government is hard to predict.
But as Australia saw in its own recent election campaign good sense often disappears quickly. In the Indonesian campaign, too, one should anticipate that nationalist fervour will rise – it is never far from the surface of Indonesian politics anyway.
Three Presidential candidates, most discussed in the Indonesian national media are: Abu Rizal Bakrie (super rich and mired in New Order and post New Order controversies),Prabowo (Suharto’s son-in-law, who is banned from entering the US because of accusations of human rights violations), and Jokowi (Joko Widodo, the immensely popular governor of Jakarta).
Jokowi is a self-made millionaire who started as a small businessman in the furniture industry. As Mayor of Solo (2005–2012), Jokowi revitalised local businesses and the arts community. As Jakarta governor he has begun the work of fixing up the city’s decrepit transport system. Though less discussed, in both cities Jokowi has also worked to support and regulate the small traders. In Solo, he ran heavily on a brand of local cultural identity. How any of this will translate into his presidential campaign is hard to predict.
Bakrie, everyone suspects, will do more or less what suits his own business and political interests, and it would be easy for him to play the economic nationalist card from time to time. No-one expects him to have a consistent hand on the economic till.
Prabowo’s appeal is a lot like that of Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra. He has a huge rural popularity but no support amongst the educated elites. Notably, Prabowo’s hero is Kemal Ataturk of Turkey. We would expect him to jump on the nationalist bandwagon whenever it suits him – and it is quite likely to suit him a lot of the time.
In this context, Australia’s new agriculture minister Barnaby Joyce and his brand of economic nationalism is a perfect foil. One can see escalating nationalism in economic debate on both sides to the detriment of the kind of integration needed for long-term prosperity and stability in the region.
Prabowo is worth looking at a little more closely. He is the son of one of Indonesia’s leading intellectuals and connected both through his own family and that of his wife (Siti Hariyadi, Suharto’s daughter) to a massively influential business and political network. Prabowo is named after an uncle who was a hero of the anti-Dutch nationalist revolution.
Prabowo’s grandfather and father hold a legendary status in Indonesia’s intellectual history and the latter served in senior economic portfolios under Suharto. Despite his impeccable economic and political pedigree, there is enough credible evidence of human rights violations against Prabowo both in Timor and on anti-Suharto activists in Jakarta on the eve of regime change that he is banned from entering the US.
Since being discharged from the army under a cloud, Prabowo has worked closely with his brother Hashim in a variety of businesses. Hashim is a highly successful businessman with links into the US political and business community. Hashim has recently made substantial donations to Republican thinktanks (the best known is the Sumitro Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, named after their father), which could in part see some whitewash of Prabowo’s image in the US. There is little doubt that if he were to be elected, the travel ban to the US would be immediately lifted.
In considering Indonesia-Australia relations, we need to take into account the likely election of one of these three men and how the Coalition policy of turning back or buying back asylum seeker boats might provide a fertile ground for an ultra-nationalist discourse in an election campaign in Indonesia.
Pitted against the Indonesian need to provide food for its burgeoning population, the whipping up of a mass protest by Australian Cabinet minister Barnaby Joyce to protect Australian agricultural land provides fertile ground for nationalist electioneering in Indonesia.
During the Australian election campaign, Indonesia’s Australia-literate Cabinet was able to distinguish between election rhetoric for domestic consumption and what the real policies of a new government might shape up to be.
But is it likely or even possible that the Abbott Cabinet will have similar depth of knowledge of Indonesia to navigate its way through the complexities of Indonesian domestic politics to distinguish between rhetoric and reality? It certainly does not have on its frontbench the kind of knowledge of Indonesia that the Indonesian government has of Australia.
However, it is to the great credit of the Abbott government that in broad terms it has recognised the deficit in Australia’s knowledge of and embedding in the Asia-Pacific region. ItsNew Colombo Plan aims to devise a long-term solution to this problem by supporting a generation of undergraduate students to experience Asia as a rite of passage.
But the immediate challenge of contradictions between the rhetoric of our recent election and the imminent Indonesian election campaign remains an impediment to improvement in the relationship in the short-term.
6) Jakarta relations beyond boats, says Tony Abbott
TONY Abbott has declared he does not want illegal boat arrivals to dominate the Australia-Indonesia relationship and is aiming for the controversy surrounding his policies to deter people-smuggling to be only a "passing irritant".
"Indonesia is a land of promise for us and we do not want the relationship to be defined by boats," the new Prime Minister told The Weekend Australian yesterday.
"This will hopefully be a passing irritant, not a long-term defining issue."
Preparing for his promised first overseas trip as Prime Minister to Jakarta at the end of next week, Mr Abbott played down the importance of the boats issue in the meeting with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. He also stressed the vital need for Australia to develop closer, more "intimate" ties with its nearest, largest neighbour.
Mr Abbott said he was ready to assist Indonesia with the issues that concerned it, including a broader agricultural relationship beyond just supplying live cattle and more two-way investment.
Advocating better, broader long-term ties with Jakarta, Mr Abbott said Australia should be heading in the direction of having a similar relationship with Indonesia as it has with New Zealand.
For months the Coalition's policy of using the Australian navy to turn people-smugglers' boats back into Indonesian waters has drawn criticism in Jakarta and in Australia, with Indonesian MPs complaining it would infringe national sovereignty. When he returned as prime minister in June, Kevin Rudd suggested Mr Abbott's policy could lead to "armed conflict" with Indonesia and Julia Gillard taunted the then opposition leader in parliament, saying he did not have the "guts" to raise the issue with Dr Yudhoyono at a meeting in Darwin.
Mr Abbott this week spoke by telephone with Dr Yudhoyono and organised a precedent-setting first trip to Jakarta on September 30 and October 1.
Mr Abbott hopes all future incoming prime ministers will follow his lead and make their first official overseas trip to Indonesia as part of a move to get "more Jakarta and less Geneva" into foreign policy.
Mr Abbott yesterday responded emphatically to criticism that Australia would infringe on Indonesia's sovereignty.
"We absolutely and fully respect Indonesia's sovereignty and wouldn't do anything to undermine it," he said.
"We want Indonesia's help and co-operation on this issue (illegal boat arrivals) and we are more than happy to be helpful and co-operative with Indonesia on the issues that are of concern to it."
Mr Abbott said boat arrivals "should never define our relationship and this trip is not all about boats". "Obviously it will be one element in the trip but, only one element and I want our relationship with Indonesia to be a stronger, deeper, broader relationship in the future than it has been the past. It's been a good relationship, mostly, but it's vital for our country that the relationship . . . be much more intimate in the years ahead than it has sometimes been in the past. It's probably not realistic to think of Australia having the same relationship as it has with New Zealand but that's the direction you would like it to move in."
Mr Abbott said Indonesia offered great opportunities for Australia. "We like to talk about how our coal and iron ore industries have benefited massively from the rise of China; I think Indonesia is now in a similar position economically to China in the early 80s and if we play our cards right this is a great opportunity for us," he said. "The Indonesians would like to have a more broadly based cattle trade and more broadly based agricultural exchange than simply them buying our live cattle. Whether that involves more Australian investment in Indonesia or more Indonesian investment in Australia or both, I am obviously very open to it."
Mr Abbott, who was in Bali on holiday with his family during the second Bali bombings, said millions of Australians had spent happy times in the holiday destination and so "there is no reason why there can't be a much closer personal relationship that those millions of Australians feel for Indonesia and Indonesians".
"If Indonesia continues to grow at the current rate its GDP per head within a couple of decades will be at least that of Malaysia, at the present time, and by that time Indonesia's total GDP will be three or four times ours," he said.
"Even though the average Indonesian is likely to be poorer than the average Australian for a very long time to come, the strength of Indonesia will be vast and we need to ensure we are their trusted partners."
Mr Abbott said the relationship was "in many respects our most important overall relationship".
Earlier this week, Mr Abbott tried to allay concerns raised by Indonesian MP Mahfud Siddiq that the Coalition's plan on illegal boats would contravene Jakarta's sovereignty.
Mr Mahfud, chairman of parliament's foreign affairs commission, said while Australia's handling of asylum boats in its waters was its legal prerogative, it had no authority to deal with them in international waters.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.