It wasn’t that long ago that Prabowo
Subianto was one of Indonesia’s most reviled men. The son-in-law of
former Indonesian president General Suharto, Prabowo has been accused of
kidnapping, human rights abuses, and an attempted coup.
Today the retired army general is
the leading presidential candidate in Indonesia’s 2014 elections.
In May of 1988 General Suharto was
thrown out of office following a period of rioting and economic upheaval.
Prabowo was accused of instigating the violence. Soon after being dismissed
from the army and shunned by the Jakarta elite, he began living in self-exile
in Jordan.
In just over a decade, Prabowo
has transformed from one of the most despised men in Indonesia to one of
the most celebrated. Prabowo is the leader of the Great Indonesian Movement Party (Gerindra), a
political group with an estimated 15 million members. However, Prabowo still
needs the support of the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI-P) or another
major party in order to become a coalition’s presidential nominee .
Human rights activists say Prabowo
isn’t fit to head the country because of his alleged involvement in the violent
crackdowns on democracy protestors during the Suharto era.
“I think to have Prabowo as the next Indonesian President would have
tremendously negative implications for resolving human rights cases,” said
Haris Azhar, Executive Director of Indonesian human rights NGO KontraS.
“How do we expect a policy of human rights accountability from a person
responsible for atrocities?”
When Suharto’s 32-year reign came to
an end in a frenzy of national protest and riots in 1998, members of the
Indonesian Special Forces unit that Prabowo commanded were accused by activists
of kidnapping democracy advocates, among other crimes. When Suharto stepped
down, the military forced out General Prabowo. “[I]n the 1990s, [Prabowo] was
instrumental in forcefully defending the Suharto regime from perceived threats,
and he was therefore diametrically opposed to the reformist elements that gave
rise to Indonesia’s democratization,” said Kevin O’Rourke, the Jakarta-based
author of “Reformasi,”
a book on Indonesia’s transition to a democracy in the late 1990s. “His high
ranking in recent presidential preference polls reflects disenchantment with
other aspiring nominees.”
Prabowo was never charged with any
wrongdoing. He claims that he wasn’t involved with any human
rights abuses and that political rivals have spread rumors about him. “This is
the risk of being a military leader. When you serve a government and serve your
country, then when politics change, we have to face the risk of allegations,”
he said.
Prabowo says his party has a
relatively clean record on corruption, long considered a serious problem in
Indonesia. Another pillar of Mr. Prabowo’s platform is that he is solidly
secular, and his party plans to protect the rights of minority religious groups
in the Muslim-majority country.
Australia and the United States have made
it clear in the past that they would deny Prabowo a visa because of his
human rights record, but now face the possibility that they will have to accept
what one diplomat calls “new political realities.”
Indonesia is the world’s largest
Islamic Democracy and a strategic ally for the US in Southeast Asia. If Prabowo
becomes Indonesia’s next President, the US will need to seriously revise its
relations with the former general. The relationship could pose further problems
with the release of a report by the Indonesian Human Rights Commission,
Komnas HAM,
about the Suharto-era Communist purge, which could implicate Prabowo.
By Diana Sayed Human Rights Defender Program
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