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Journalist Nairn challenges Prabowo to day in court
Jakarta Globe - June 26, 2014
Nairn called on Prabowo to say whether he wanted him arrested and that he would be glad for the opportunity to accuse Prabowo of crimes against humanity in a court of law.
"I am currently in Indonesia so if the TNI [Indonesian military] would like to capture me, they can," Nairn wrote on Thursday.
Nairn recently published a segment of his 2001 interview with Prabowo on his blog. The interview was conducted on an off-the-record basis, but Nairn has decided to break this bond 13 years later on public interest grounds.
"I think the harm of breaking my anonymity promise to the general is outweighed by what would be the greater harm of Indonesians going to the polls having been denied access to facts they might find pertinent," Nairn wrote.
Nairn cited a statement put out by Prabowo campaign spokesman Budi Purnomo on June 26.
"Allan Nairn is an American journalist who is known to not have a good relationship with the TNI," Budi said as quoted by Merdeka.com. "[The] TNI has even said that they are going to capture Allan if they learn he has returned to Indonesia."
Nairn was imprisoned repeatedly during the Suharto era for reporting on rights abuses by the security forces in what was then the Indonesian province of East Timor. He dismissed accusations that he was now working as a puppet of an anti-Prabowo United States.
"One of my main criticisms of the US for the past 40 years has been of their practice of exploiting and killing poor people around the world, including in Indonesia," Nairn wrote, adding that the TNI was "one of the many" US-backed forces utilized to kill civilians.
"In my view, the two most important facts about Prabowo are, first, that he killed civilians, and second, that he killed them while being sponsored by the United States," he wrote.
In 2012, Prabowo told Reuters that he was still being denied entry into the United States due to allegations that he had instigated riots in the aftermath of the May 1998 resignation of Suharto, who was Prabowo's father-in-law.
Prabowo's former commanding officer, Wiranto, told journalists last week that Prabowo had been thrown out of the military for exceeding his authority by ordering the kidnapping of pro-democracy activists.
"As to my writing about Prabowo, it is accurate," Nairn wrote. "If the general wants to deny this, I invite him to face me in the Indonesian courts by filing criminal libel charges against me."
Source: http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/journalist-nairn-challenges-prabowo-day-court/.
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