JAKARTA: Civil groups have denounced the acid attack against human rights defender Andrie Yunus as a cowardly act aimed at silencing government critics, saying they will not bow down to any intimidation threatening their work.
Andrie, who works at rights group the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras) as deputy coordinator, was attacked by two unidentified men on a motorbike with acid shortly before midnight on Thursday (March 12), when he was riding his motorcycle along Jl. Salemba I in Central Jakarta.
He sustained serious burns to his right eye, face, hands and chest.
“The intimidation faced by Andrie will never deter or stop Kontras’ work that was first built 28 years ago,” Kontras coordinator Dimas Bagus Arya said in a press briefing hours after the incident. “This brutal attack is a cowardly act against an activist, who is a civilian.”
The 27-year-old Andrie has been vocal in opposing increasing military involvement in civilian affairs in Indonesia and had just finished recording a podcast on the topic when he was attacked.
Amnesty International Indonesia executive director Usman Hamid cited numerous past cases in which Kontras was targeted, including the unresolved murder of its cofounder Munir Said Thalib, a vocal activist who died of arsenic poisoning in 2004, aboard a flight from Jakarta to Amsterdam.
“But don’t think that we’ll back down even an inch because of the attack [against Andrie]. It won’t deter us at all from fighting for justice,” said Usman, a former Kontras coordinator. “This cowardly act must not be dismissed as ordinary street crime.”
Planned attack?
Kontras said the acid attack violated several provisions on the protection of human rights defenders, including the 2015 National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) regulation, which outlines the procedural framework for protecting activists.
In a statement on Saturday, the Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (ICJR) described the attack as an attempt of “premeditated murder”, noting that the assailants had deliberately targeted Andrie’s face with acid, which could have fatally choked his respiratory system.
The watchdog said that those responsible for such an attempt could face a maximum imprisonment of 15 years under the new criminal code.
A similar acid attack occurred in 2017 against Novel Baswedan, then-investigator at Corruption Eradication Commission who believed the assault was related to his work in handling some high-profile graft cases at that time.
Three years later, two low-ranking police officers were found guilty of attacking him, though critics lamented that authorities did not dig deeper into the case given that both officers were unlikely to be acting alone.
The latest incident has reignited fears that the police would repeat the method, despite the public closely following the case through sleuthing open-source evidence on social media.
Coordinating Law, Human Rights, Immigration and Correctional Services Minister Yusril Ihza Mahendra said on Friday that the modus operandi of the assault indicated “organised planning”, urging the police to not limit their probe to the attackers on the scene but to also pursue criminal charges against the mastermind behind the crime.
National Police Chief Gen. Listyo Sigit Prabowo said on Sunday that President Prabowo Subianto had ordered him to investigate the case “thoroughly” and “transparently”, calling the incident a “serious concern for the President.”
Government Communications Office (GCO) head Angga Raka Prabowo previously stated that such an act of violence is intolerable and that the government hoped that “the legal process will run smoothly so that the perpetrators can be held accountable”.
But Prabowo himself has yet to personally comment on Andrie’s case. Thin-skinned In a cabinet meeting hours after the attack, Prabowo, without naming names, accused some observers of being “unpatriotic” and having ill intention in criticising his administration, marking his latest in a string of similar remarks slamming government critics.
"I think some observers simply don't want their own government to succeed due to various motivations. I’d say they are narrow-minded, not patriotic,” Prabowo said.
He pledged to discipline those critics, claiming to have been informed about who was funding them.
Usman called such a statement as a “serious threat” to critical voices coming from the general public, students or activists. He said that the current administration has increasingly mimicked the Suharto-era New Order regime for trying “to either silence or co-opt” government critics.
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said on X on Friday that he was deeply concerned by the acid attack and called for those responsible to be held accountable for the “cowardly act”.
Human rights defenders "must be protected in their vital work and able to raise without fear issues of public concern,” he said. - The Jakarta Post/ANN
