Remembering Munir

TEMPO Interactive, Friday, 07 September, 2012

Jakarta:Munir Said Thalib was 38 when he was poisoned with arsenic. He was a man who died a drawn out, painful death on a plane. This was eight years ago, today. Munir was a human rights activist who tirelessly worked for families who had been kidnapped or who had disappeared during the final years of former president Suharto’s ironclad rule. He was an optimist. Despite having faced verbal and physical intimidation, he fought on in the face of lies spread against him. He received numerous death threats, but still chose to stand for the families of unknown people in Indonesia who had been kidnapped. The intimidation he faced included a bomb being left outside his home. He was born in 1965, and hailed from the East Java town of Malang.

He was a man of a small demeanor, but with a firm voice, full of the conviction that what he was doing was right. He refused to accept that the disappearance and kidnappings of people were individual, ordinary acts of crime, and he therefore co-founded the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras) in 1998. Kontras provided legal aid for victims whose family members were either lost, tortured or kidnapped.

Munir set up humanitarian posts in Aceh and ensured that people were on the ground when chaos broke out in Maluku. Munir had at one time received the Yap Thiam Hien Human Rights Award and the Right Livelihood Award 2000. He suffered from health problems but continued working for human rights. Most notably, he was involved in investigations into violence in East Timor, which left over 180,000 people dead, and the 1984 killing of demonstrators in North Jakarta’s Tanjung Priok.

Nobody and nothing seemed able to stop him. He firmly believed he could change Indonesia for the good.

Unlike the unknown, ordinary victims legally represented by Munir, the man who stood trial for masterminding Munir’s death was neither unknown, nor ordinary. Muchdi Purwopranjono was deputy of the National Intelligence Agency (BIN). He was acquitted of killing Munir, after lead prosecutor Cirus Sinaga had failed to produce sufficient evidence to prove to the courts that Muchdi was behind Munir’s murder. Cirus is in jail now. In October last year, Cirus was sentenced to five years in prison for doctoring the indictment of graft convict Gayus. H. Tambunan in attempts to help him evade corruption charges.

London-based Amnesty International said on Thursday that resolving the murder of Munir would be a “test of our history,” as it called for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to remember his own statements in 2004. The rights organization demanded that Indonesia should make public a fact-finding report into the Munir murder which had been drafted out in 2005, to learn more and establish the truth behind the killing of Munir.