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January 30, 2008 

A little more hope

"Who killed Cock Robin?/ I, said the sparrow / with my bow and arrow / I killed Cock Robin."

In the old English rhyme the response came instantly. In the case of the murder of renowned Indonesian human
rights activist Munir, facts about the bow and poisoned "arrow" have been much longer awaited.

But in the "good old days" of Soeharto, it would have been categorized a miracle in itself that the murder of
Sept. 6, 2004 made it to trial.

The investigation and trial in the Munir murder case proceeded inch by inch — until the Supreme Court reached
a new verdict on Friday.

We welcome the Court's decision to revisit its previous verdict and convict Garuda pilot Pollycarpus Budihari
Priyanto of the murder of Munir and sentence him to 20 years. Earlier the Court had acquitted Pollycarpus,
overturning a lower court verdict sentencing him to 14 years.

When Munir was found dead on board a flight from Jakarta to Amsterdam an autopsy revealed arsenic
poisoning.

This verdict gives us hope — here is one murder that won't remain forever mysterious, an addition to all the
other skeletons in this country's closet.

The court cited "new evidence" that Pollycarpus was "the main actor" in the crime — evidence that would have
surfaced in court much earlier if President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had announced the findings of a fact-
finding team that he himself commissioned in the case.

The question now is whether the case will continue to inch along toward closure, how far it will go, and how
long this may take.

Why on earth would a pilot want to kill an activist is the vexing issue. Moreover, to call Pollycarpus the
principal in the crime — the court called him the "main actor" — is to add one more to an ever-longer list of
insults to the public intelligence.

The former pilot's links to the National Intelligence Agency resurfaced in court like persistent footprints, despite
earlier denials by agency officials.

Whatever the shortcomings of the Supreme Court verdict, it opens the door to further pursuit of the mastermind
behind the murder. There should be an option for giving Pollycarpus a lighter sentence in exchange for
cooperation; for as the National Police have said, this is the only way to get the real answers.

The revelation of the agency's involvement led Munir's widow, Suciwati, to say that "everyone responsible must
be prosecuted, because everybody is equal under the law."

But the law, as we know it here, is often a mess, as reflected by the consecutive challenges to court verdicts in
the Munir case.
 http://indonesia.pelangi.org/blog/a-little-more-hope-117

Pollycarpus' legal team is challenging last Friday's verdict and where this will go is unclear. When is the last
word on justice the last word?

Further, law enforcers seem either unwilling or unable to effectively present evidence in court: the pilot had
already been linked to intelligence agency officials by mobile phone records uncovered by the fact-finding
team. This evidence was made public in lower court hearings. And yet only now has the court heard that the
pilot asked for assistance from an intelligence agent in drafting his request to be assigned on board the fatal
flight.

With Pollycarpus intending to appeal his conviction, nothing is certain yet. But if everything stops here, there
will be some truth in the statement of Pollycarpus and his wife, that he merely a scapegoat.

Innocent or not, the public remains distrustful of suggestions that the Sparrow who killed Cock Robin acted
alone.

The Jakarta Post

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