The Jakarta Globe, Sep 22, 2014
Jakarta. Four soldiers were shot and wounded in an altercation with police officers during a raid on a fuel storage facility in the Riau Islands over the weekend, in the latest flare-up of violence between the military and police over lucrative protection rackets.
Both the Indonesian Military (TNI) and the National Police are investigating the incident, but details about the violent clash are still unclear.
TNI spokesman Maj. Gen. Fuad Basya said in Jakarta on Monday that two soldiers were injured when police tried to forcibly detain them near the scene of the raid.
“The police were raiding a storage suspected to be hoarding fuel in Batu Aji, Batam, when two soldiers who had just finished their night duty stopped to watch the commotion. They were caught, beaten and shot in the leg,” Fuad said.
Two other soldiers were similarly shot and injured when they stormed into the nearby police station in retaliation at the earlier incident, Fuad said.
The spokesman, however, refused to call it a “clash” between the soldiers and members of the police’s Mobile Brigade (Brimob).
“It was not a clash. The information I received said the police forcibly detained the soldiers,” he said.
A source within Batam Police, speaking in condition of anonymity, told the Jakarta Globe that the soldiers were shot after a raid on an illegal storage facility holding diesel, which was located about 500 meters from the local TNI base.
Police found the facility and detained two people who claimed to be passing by during the raid, the source said.
“When the police were checking out the evidence and questioning the witnesses some men with crew cuts gathered in front of the storage facility,” the source said.
More men, whom the source claimed were soldiers, arrived and allegedly shouted, “Let’s go to war.”
The police decided to wrap up the raid and leave the location, but the men allegedly tried to stop the police officers from leaving and assaulted one who was riding a motorcycle.
The source told the Globe that following the incident several soldiers turned up at the police station and began shouting insults.
Brimob members, who had just finished their night briefing, saw the incident and one officer fired two warning shots into the air while others chased the soldiers to a nearby bridge, the source said.
More soldiers then showed up at the police station and torched a motorcycle and a canteen owned by a Brimob member, the source said.
“Then gunfire broke out, causing four TNI members to get shot. So it’s not true that this shooting happened for no reason,” the police source said.
Police deny the soldiers were shot intentionally.
Fuad said the TNI was still collecting evidence and information from victims and witnesses and the soldiers were recovering in hospital.
National Police Chief Gen. Sutarman said police would form a joint task force with the TNI to investigate the incident.
Organized and systematic
The incident is the latest in a long list of clashes between personnel from the TNI and the police force, which until 2000 was a branch of the military.
The devolution of power away from the military to civilian rule following the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998 gave the police a more prominent role in security operations, thus cutting out the military from lucrative money-making schemes and protection rackets.
Observers say that this, combined with the growing discrepancy between the salaries for police personnel and for soldiers, has fueled the animosity between the two security services.
One of the most serious recent clashes between the police and the military occurred in March 2013 when some 70 soldiers converged on a police station in Ogan Komering Ulu district in South Sumatra to demand that police investigate the fatal shooting of a soldier by a police officer.
The two sides reportedly disagreed on how to handle the case and a brawl broke out.
By the end of the riot, the station was ablaze, four people were injured and one was seriously wounded. Two other police posts were attacked during the incident.
Part of the hostility is fueled by competition for access to many lucrative avenues for corruption and extortion.
Hoarding and selling fuel, particularly subsidized fuel, is a common practice among members of both security services, highlighted in recent years by cases involving trillions of rupiah in the black market trade.
The practice is “organized, systematic and continuous,” says Sofyano Zakaria, the director of the Center of Public Interest Studies, or Puskepi, a think tank.
“It’s time for the government to fight the mafia in the subsidized fuel [distribution] process, who continue to enjoy extraordinary profits, much more so than from corruption,” he said recently.
Sofyano said that given the wide disparity between the prices of subsidized and non-subsidized fuels, it was no surprise that criminal enterprises — and officials with a criminal bent — saw an opportunity to make huge profits.
Tama Satrya Langkun, a researcher with Indonesia Corruption Watch, agreed that the theft of subsidized fuel should be treated more seriously by law enforcement agencies.
Tama said the crime should be categorized as an extraordinary crime because it infringed on the interests of the general public.
Tama was speaking in response to a case where a lowly bureaucrat in Batam has been linked to a total of Rp 1.3 trillion ($110 million) in financial transactions between 2008 and 2013, allegedly from selling stolen fuel.
The suspect allegedly had help from two military officers to keep the business afloat.
Last year, Papua-based police officer Adj. First Insp. Labora Sitorus was arrested in Jakarta after 400,000 liters of subsidized fuel was seized from a tanker boat registered in his name. In total around a million liters of fuel inked to the officer was confiscated.
Labora, who was found guilty of money laundering in May this year, had his sentenced increased last week following two appeals by prosecutors concerned about earlier, more lenient, sentences handed down by lower courts.
The disgraced officer was also found to be involved in illegal logging. A total of 115 containers, which stored 2,264 cubic meters of rare tropical hardwood merbau, were found at Surabaya’s Tanjung Perak Port — bound for export, illegally, to China — and were also traced back to the officer.
None of Labora’s superiors has been investigated by the police for allowing him to run his illegal business so blatantly for years.
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di 23 sep 2014 - 3:02