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Police stop Prabowo Subianto supporters from storming Constitutional Court
Sydney Morning Herald - August 21, 2014
About 3000 supporters of Mr Prabowo had gathered during the day, chanting and singing in front of hundreds of riot police deployed to protect the court.
At about 2.35pm, local time, as chief justice Hamdan Zoelva began reading the verdict, the front line of protesters suddenly attacked the police, prompting them to release a hail of tear-gas and deploy water cannon. The protesters failed to break through the police line and, after a brief skirmish, retreated.
The Constitutional Court was expected to pronounce Mr Joko, the Jakarta Governor, as president after Mr Prabowo's huge legal team mounted a weak and unconvincing case.
They had appealed against the announcement on July 22 by the country's electoral commission that Mr Joko had clearly won with about 53 per cent of the vote.
Mr Prabowo's appeal against the electoral commission's ruling was widely considered thin and ill-prepared, failing to provide evidence, as required by Indonesian law, of "systematic, structured and massive" vote-shifting.
An analysis by academics Jim Della-Giacoma and Veri Junaidi said Mr Prabowo's case was "more like a political statement than a well-argued lawsuit".
Where voting patterns did seem suspicious, it was ambiguous who might have benefited and involved relatively small numbers of votes: nowhere near the 8.4 million vote margin in favour of Mr Joko.
The judges criticised Mr Prabowo's witnesses for failing to have firsthand knowledge of events. One was scolded because his evidence was that he had read it in a newspaper.
One example of alleged intimidation raised by Mr Prabowo in a personal statement to the court was emblematic of much of the case. He told the court of a case in the village of Banyuwangi, East Java, where "the house of our witness was burned down".
Online media portal Detik.com sent a journalist to check the claim but found that, firstly, it was not the witness' house that was attacked, it was the Prabowo-Hatta campaign office, and, secondly, that it was not set on fire but someone threw stones at it.
Police told the journalist that the office was not specifically targeted but some people had been throwing stones that day at a number of neighbouring houses. It had nothing to do with the election but was purely a criminal incident, the police said.
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