Government challenged in preparing centers for juvenile offenders

The 2012 Juvenile Justice System Law is slated go into effect in July of next year if all implementing regulations are stipulated on-time. Then, rulings for juvenile offenders as “children of the state”, which are children who are placed in child detention centers under the State’s care until they turn 18, will no longer exist.

Juvenile offenders, who carried out a crime with a penalty of less than seven years, will instead be returned to their families, assigned to community service or placed in social welfare centers under the Social Affairs Ministry or regional social agencies.

While social workers embrace the restorative justice approach for juvenile delinquents, there is a sense of apprehension on how best to accommodate juvenile offenders in rehabilitation centers. “There is a quite heavy risk for us,” said Syaiman, head of the Taruna Jaya Youth Education Center in Tebet, South Jakarta.

Syaiman was sitting in his office at the Taruna Jaya Youth Center. The center is located in a greenery-filled area of Tebet, secluded with its own road entrance from Jl. Tebet Barat Raya. At the moment, the center that provides vocational skills for young school drop-outs supports 70 children from poor families in Jakarta. The screeching sound of welding from one of the vocational classes lightly floats in the air.

“We’ve been informed by the Social Affairs Ministry about the new policy,” he said. “But, we need time to prepare all the necessary arrangements,” he added.

“It would be impossible to immediately transfer children from detention centers to be placed here. We have to prepare the infrastructure and there are different treatments for neglected children and children of the state. That’s not to say that we’re moving the detention center here, but we need to take precautions so that [children] don’t escape,” he said.

Syaiman added that if a child escapes, he would be legally responsible.

The change in the juvenile justice system in Indonesia is bringing new development in dealing with juvenile delinquency. The 2012 law on juvenile justice system replaces the 1997 juvenile court system deemed unaccommodating to children’s rights. The new law increased the age of children who could be processed through the judiciary system for criminal offense from 8 to 12-years-old. Furthermore, only children over the age of 14 are allowed to be taken into custody. Imprisonment is the last resort according to the law on juvenile justice system, and diversion or an out of court settlement is highly advised.

Another change is the elimination of the status child of the state, a form of rehabilitative punishment for juvenile offenders who could not be returned to the community for reasons such as not having any relatives and other reasons under judge’s discretion. A child of the state is under the care of the state in the juvenile detention center until he reaches the young adult age of 18. Currently, there are 115 such “childs of the state” in Indonesia.

The Social Affairs Ministry subdivision head in charge of children facing the law, Puti Hairida, said that a year after the juvenile justice system in Indonesia has been in effect, children of the state should no longer be in prisons. The restorative justice approach to juvenile delinquency means that the Social Affairs Ministry has a bigger task with the rehabilitation of juvenile offenders than the Law and Human Rights Ministry. Puti is candid in saying that the mandate given to her ministry is a tough one.

“Within five years, we have to set up social welfare centers for children in each province in Indonesia,” she said. Currently, the ministry only has four centers — in Jakarta, East Nusa Tenggara, South Sulawesi and Central Java — for rehabilitation of juveniles. Each region has its own social affairs agency.

However, presently, the regional social welfare centers are entirely for neglected children from marginalized communities, such as orphans, street children, children of poor families who have dropped out of school and children dealt with psychotropic drugs.

Puti said that the government would utilize existing social welfare centers in regions and religious institutions to accept child offenders who have been referred to social welfare centers. She did not specify the budget needed to set up the social welfare centers and the human resources needed for preparing the child-centered juvenile rehabilitation process. But, Ucu Rahayu, head of Jakarta Social Agency’s children rehabilitation, said that operational costs for one social welfare center in her region was Rp 2 billion (US$208,486).

Like Syaiman, Ucu said that they needed to think about how to ensure that the children would stay in the centers. “Our centers are very open, they can carry out their activities outside the center and interact with the community,” she said. “The centers do not have tall gates, while these children [child offenders] do need some kind of tight surveillance,” she added.

Syaiman said that sometimes, the children at Taruna Jaya would ask permission to go outside of the center’s compound to buy snacks. “But, sometimes they just say that to trick us and they just don’t return,” he said.

“For children who believe that they are not guilty of their crime, they would not want to stay in a place against their will,” he said.

Puti said that there would be challenges in transferring the children from a detention cell to an open social center. “Creating a comfortable atmosphere would not be easy. There will be children who would rebel, especially, a lot of them think that they have done nothing wrong,” she said.

But, Puti said that one thing for adults to keep in mind is: “It’s not their fault that they are in this position. They are victims too … It’s our fault as adults,” she said.

— JP/Prodita Sabarini

The Jakarta Post | Reportage | Mon, December 03 2012, 9:55

After bombs, Bali youth drives creative industry

Energetic: Bali’s Navicula band performs at a charity concert for the orangutan in Medan, North Sumatra, in July. The musicians are among many livening up the island’s creative industries. (Antara/Irsan Mulyadi)

In conjunction with today’s commemoration of a decade since the blasts of 2002, The Jakarta Post’s Prodita Sabarini and Agnes Winarti look at developments in Bali, particularly among the younger generation, and among survivors of the terrorist acts.

Days after the bombing in Bali 10 years ago, the vocalist of rock band Navicula, Gde Robi Supriyanto, was busy. Like many Balinese youngsters, he was part of the island’s tourism industry, working in a tour and travel agency, while playing music on the side.

After terrorists bombed Paddy’s Pub and the Sari nightclub in Kuta, tourists fled in the hundreds. The whole week after the bombing, Robi, 33, frantically worked to cancel visitors’ bookings. His boss had to hire more staff simply to cancel clients existing itineraries as they headed for home.

Some of his colleagues were laid off, while his working hours were reduced from six days a week to just three. The bombing and the turn of events later inspired a change in the path of his life. With more free time on his hands, he turned from his day job to focus on his music and social activism.

Indeed, the aftermath of the bombing became a turning point, a moment that the youth of Bali took and shaped into a life driven more by creativity rather than tourism. A decade after the first Bali bombing in Kuta and seven years from the second bombing, tourism has fully recovered and is growing rapidly. However, driven by the island’s young and interconnected with the indie movement in other Indonesian cities and abroad, another sector has sprung up: the creative industry.

The typical career or business path most Balinese youth embark upon begins with an entry into the tourist industry. With a thriving industry, the young can always make money, Robi said.

Like Robi, Navicula’s guitar player and founder of blues band Dialog Dini Hari, Dadang Pranoto, 33, went to tourism school after graduating from high school. “People can get a job in tourism while they’re still in college or … they can be a tour guide for two or three days,” Robi said.

But the bombings changed that. For one thing, the indie music scene in post-Bali bombing became livelier than ever. Bars that had once catered to tourists started to seek out a younger local crowd. “And if they wanted people from Denpasar to come, they had to bring in local Balinese bands,” Robi said. Local indie bands, such as Navicula and punk band Superman is Dead, started to get record deals with major labels.

Local punk aficionado Rudolf Dethu, 43, then the manager of Superman is Dead, later opened his clothing shop Suicide Glam as a meeting point for the indie community.

Young people started to meet up and exchange ideas. The music community worked together with the art community and people from design, clothing, filmmaking and other creative industries, including urban farming.

Small independent businesses started establishing themselves in the island and by 2008, the Bali Creative Community was founded.

Rudolf, one of the founders of the community, said that the emergence of Bali’s creative industry was nearly simultaneous with similar developments in Bandung, West Java’s capital, whose youth have developed their own music, clothing and design industries.

“The idea is to branch out from tourism so we’re not dependent on it and Bali would not be heavily affected by force majeurs,” Rudolf, who now resides in Sydney, said during a Skype interview. Apart from terrorist attacks, an outbreak of bird flu could also send tourists packing, he added.

Nina Hadinata, the 28-year-old founder of clothing label This is a Love Song, acknowledged tourism’s contribution to the island’s economy, but she added that she was sometimes saddened by current developments that “change the simplicity of the island we used to know”.

Nina believes that Bali’s youth are shaping the island with innovation and creativity. “Now more than ever, there is a force of young people striving to think outside the box, creating ideas that we have never seen before here on the island,” she wrote in an email.

The size of Bali’s creative industry has yet to be measured. Rudolf said the community is a fluid organization that was different from a business association. The leading industry in Bali is still tourism, contributing 30 percent of total regional revenue. The second-largest sector is agriculture, a fall-back in Bali if disruptions destabilize the tourism sector, according to the head of the Central Statistics Agency (BPS)’s Bali office, Gede Suarsa.

The tourist industry is undoubtedly growing strong, but those reaping the largest benefits come from mostly outside of Bali. Suarsa estimated that 75 percent of players in the tourism industry are from other parts of Indonesia or from foreign countries. This lopsided ownership poses risks of capital flight if tourism in Bali faces a time of crisis.

Some local entrepreneurs are concerned they will be marginalized by outside interests who do not share the same cultural traditions and responsibilities.

Suparta Karang is the owner of Mimpi bungalows and a native of Kuta. After the 2002 bombings, he initiated the Kuta Carnival Festival to attract tourists. He said people from outside of Bali had an advantage over locals, who are obliged to be involved in the planning and organizing of the numerous religious rituals, and less time to run their businesses than other investors.

Bali Tourism Board director Ngurah Wijaya said the unique Balinese culture is what makes the island such a special destination. So, the government should prevent Balinese business owners from being marginalized through proper management of the tourist industry. “You can’t blame the businesspeople … but the government should make sure that the development that’s underway matches with what Balinese need, and not with what national [business players] need”.

Ngurah wonders whether Bali actually needs as many tourists and as many hotels as it has today. The island welcomed more than 2.8 million last year, an increase from around 2.5 million visitors in 2010. Badung regency, home to Kuta, Nusa Dua and Jimbaran, has seen a surge in hotel rooms, from around 37,000 in 2001 to 78,000 this year.

At a press briefing on Wednesday, Bali Governor Made Mangku Pastika acknowledged the problem of mass tourism in Bali.

“So many people come to earn their livings here, to get wealthy and to suck money from Bali,” he said.

While Bali was becoming more prosperous, he said, it was becoming overwhelmed with urban issues of traffic jams, garbage, water problems, accommodations, pollution and social disparities. Pastika attempted to call for a moratorium on hotel development in Badung, Gianyar and Denpasar, to shift development to the island’s less popular northern areas. However, the call was not compulsory and the southern areas were less willing to cooperate. Badung regent AA Gede Agung said he still welcomed hotel investment projects.

While creative Bali youth expand their horizons to other areas, local leaders remain fixated on tourism. All around them, other creative people are producing innovative products, such as Nina with her clothing label, and other youth engaged in film and design. It seems as though the regional leaders of Bali stand to learn a thing or two from the island’s youth.

The Jakarta Post | Reportage | Fri, October 12 2012

Sampang revisited – where’s compassion?

Nearly seven months ago, I went to Sampang, a small town in Madura Island off the northeastern tip of Java. Around 200 Shiites were taking refuge in a indoor tennis court. Their houses razed to the ground by an angry Sunni mob. I went there and talked to the people: the stories can be read here, here and here.

I’ve worked on different stories since and however disheartening what happened in Sampang, it slowly slipped my mind. Until a few days ago, I thought of them, and wondered about how they were doing. When I was there, the Sampang regent was adamant that he would not let them return to their houses, even though they were forcibly displaced by religious vigilantes. Has he changed his mind?

Apparently not. Andy Irfan, from East Java Commision of Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras) said they were still in the same tennis indoor court.

Worse still as their fate is in limbo, the court ruled the only person the police arrested over the attack as not guilty. No one from the thousand of people who burned down people’s houses is held accountable.

Madura is famous for the many Islamic boarding schools in the island. They call it the land of ulemas. But, why is there no compassion and justice in that island?

*Human Rights Watch released last month a report on religious intolerance and violence. See HRW’s report here and the government’s response here.

Kuta: From a hippy gem to an overcrowded tourist strip

Rebound: Tourists pass Jl. Legian on the Kuta tourist strip, which reeled after 202 people died in the bombings in 2002. The isle’s second terror attack, in 005, further devastated the island’s tourism-dependent economy. Today, Bali’s young people are now turning to creative industries to make their ivelihoods. (JP/Agung Parameswara)

At the turn of the 1960s–‘70s, 17-year-old I Made Wendra would see American hippies camping on Kuta’s white sandy beaches.

At the time there were no hotels in Kuta, apart from the big government-owned Grand Inna hotel, according to Wendra.

The hotel was only accessible to those who had the money to afford to stay there, so the rest (and the more adventurous traveler) had to be content with tents.

However, there was one facility the campers lacked, which was a bathroom, and they did not want to defecate on the beach.

“They had to go to the villagers’ houses, so that’s how we first began contact with tourists,” Wendra said. “But we didn’t have toilets either! The visitors told us that we should make toilets and that we should rent out places for them and that was the start of it,” Wendra said. His family would rent out their house to tourists and Wendra experienced nights sleeping on the kitchen floor.

While it was nature’s call that made tourists connect with the villagers, the flocking of tourists to Kuta, which transformed the area into a bustling tourist enclave by 1990s, was mostly down to word of mouth, he said.

Wendra witnessed Kuta’s transformation from a sleepy village into the mass tourist center that it is today. When terrorists hit Bali on Oct. 12, 2002 with the bombing at the Sari club on Jl. Legian, he was the customary village leader in Kuta.

The attack was only a short walk away from his lodgings at the Aquarius Hotel, and so he was among the first who helped victims of the attack.

The attack in 2002 and again in 2005 wrecked Bali’s heavily tourism-dependent economy. “Kuta experienced the biggest hit,” Wendra said.

After each bombing, it took around one year to recover. Ten years after the first attack, Kuta is the bustling area it was before and more. But there is the feeling of a good thing gone sour.

Traffic jams frequent the narrow Legian road up to the wee morning hours. In what was once a place famous for its small budget hotels, huge high rise developments have joined the crowd.

Former Kuta head district I Gusti Adnya Subrata who was in office during the Bali bombing tragedy said that Kuta developed “too soon” and the government attempted to manage it “too late”.

“Kuta’s growth was unplanned. It grew by itself and the local government was too late in setting up infrastructure,” Subrata said. Unlike the resort area developed by the government — Nusa Dua, in the most sourthern part of Bali, which is equipped with large roads and adequate pedestrian paths — Kuta developed organically.

Families of locals such as Wendra, Subrata and Supatra Karang (owner of Mimpi bungalows and initiator of Kuta Carnival) started to build accommodation between Kuta’s narrow roads. This also attracted investors from outside Bali who followed the wave of Kuta’s increasing popularity and opened hotels, bars and restaurants to get a slice of the tourism pie. Subrata said despite its chaos, people were drawn to Kuta because they could interact with the local Balinese. “Which is different to Nusa Dua,” he said.

Kuta’s regency, Badung, has the highest increase of hotel rooms in the whole island. Badung, which consists of Kuta, Seminyak, Canggu, Nusa and Jimbaran, had more than 78,000 rooms in June 2012. Over a decade ago the area only had less than half of that number with nearly 37,000 rooms in 2001, according to the Association of Indonesian Hotels and Restaurants (PHRI).

Karang, who initiated the annual Kuta Carnival to revive tourism in the area, said that there is now an urgent environmental problem to tackle in Kuta aside from the traffic jams.

Groundwater exploitation due to mass tourism will lead Kuta to a water crisis, he said. This had been predicted nearly two decades before in 1997 by the Environment Ministry. The ministry predicted that the island would experience a water deficit of up to 27 billion liters by next year.

Bali Governor Made Mangku Pastika last year initiated a moratorium for hotel development in the southern part of Bali — Badung, Denpasar and Gianyar — but regional leaders have refused to commit to it. Badung Regent AA Gede Agung said that his regency still welcomed hotel investment projects.

The only place that is off-limits to hotel investment projects is the area where Sari club once stood. Across from the bomb memorial on Jl. Legian, the plot of land is an abandoned vacant lot. Pastika and the Australian government want to develop the place into a memorial park for the bomb victims. Plans for this are stifled because the owner, who lives in Jakarta, is asking for a “crazy” price, Pastika said. For now, this plot of land at least is free from new development.

— JP/Prodita Sabarini

The Jakarta Post | Reportage | Fri, October 12 2012

A decade after the bombs, Bali remains vigilant

A decade after the 2002 bombing, Bali continues to be vigilant of terrorist threats as more tourists and migrants flock to the island of gods.

Bali governor Made Mangku Pastika on Wednesday told a reporter that despite Bali’s full economic and security recovery in the decade since the first bombing in 2002 and seven years since the second bombing in 2005, security, intelligence and the local community are continually on alert for possible terrorist threats.

“We have to be very, very cautious, all the time,” he said. Pastika said that the people of Bali realize that terrorists are “living around us” and that the Balinese have accepted this as something that the community has to deal with as part of their lives. The security [officers] and the people must carry out preventative and pre-emptive measures “to clean our society,”

“That’s the only thing we can do, you know? Bali is a destination for everybody. We cannot check everybody who wants to come to Bali. There are a lot of entry points into Bali. They can come and go anytime – this is the tourist area. That is the biggest problem,” Pastika said.

Bali tourism has continued to grow in the last years. More than 2.8 million visitors came to Bali last year an increase from around 2.5 million visitors in 2010. Economic development on the island has also attracted people outside Bali to live and work in the island. According to the 2010 census out every 1,000 people living in Bali, 28 of them are migrants.

“So I always say, ‘yes, now we are safe’ but I don’t know about tomorrow. Nobody can guarantee that, even the best security officers in the world,” he said.

In March, Indonesia’s anti-terrorist squad Detachment 88 received a tip off that a terrorist group planning to carry out a suicide mission had arrived in Bali. Police killed five suspected terrorist linked to Jamaah Ansharut Tauhid (JAT), founded by radical cleric Abu Bakar Baasyir, who were believed to be planning to launch an attack in Bali and other areas in the country. The suicide bomb groom reportedly escaped.

Indonesia’s top tourist destination is gearing up for the 10th commemoration of the first Bali bombing. On Oct. 12, 2002, terrorist attacked Sari Club in Jalan Legian, Kuta killing 202 people, 88 of them Australian. Terrorist launched a second attack three years after in Jimbaran and Kuta, which killed 20 people.

This year’s commemorations will be the biggest of all of the ceremonies staged in the last 10 years. The Bali administration also said that this would be the last. “It’s not easy to forget a tragedy so big, but I think we have to forgive and with this forgiving spirit we hold this commemoration,” Pastika, who led the investigation of the first Bali bombing, said.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and former Prime Minister John Howard is expected to attend the ceremony on Friday at Garuda Wisnu Kencana Cultural Park in Jimbaran. Around 4,000 people are expected to attend, including around 800 Australians who are families of the victims of the bombing.

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | National | Wed, October 10 2012

Life, interrupted: When children face the law

Recent brawls among high school students left two dead in separate incidents in the city, leading to an outcry on how the chronic problem might be overcome.The Jakarta Post‘s Prodita Sabarini filed the following reports.

In a movie plot, a murder suspect on the run being caught would be the climax of a police chase scene. But rarely is it the end of the story.

Fitra Rahmadani, 19, who police suspect to be the culprit in the death of Alawy Yusianto Putra, 15, a first-year student caught up in the decades-old warring tradition between two elite South Jakarta state schools, SMA 70 and SMA 6, last month, was arrested last Thursday.

Police found him in a rented room in Sleman, Yogyakarta. Detectives allege that Fitra stabbed Alawy with a sickle during a brawl between students of the two high schools
on Sept. 24.

Two days after Alawy’s death, another teenager, Deni Yanuar lost his life in a brawl in Manggarai, Jakarta, between SMK Yayasan Karya 66 and SMK Kartika Zeni vocational school students. Police have also arrested suspects in Deni’s murder.

Alawy’s killing has become the country’s highest profile criminal case involving students. It has brought the old issue of violent high school rivalry to the fore once again.

But the deaths of Alawy and Deni and Fitra’s arrest not only raise the issue of unchecked school rivalries. The police investigations, which include minors being named as witnesses and subject to police interrogation, also raise the issue of the rights of children facing the law.

Juvenile delinquency in Indonesia has continued to rise each year. The government Commission on Child Protection (KPAI) has reported that each year around 7,000 children come before the law and that 80 percent end up convicted and sentenced to prison.

The National Commission on Child Protection (Komnas PA), a non-governmental organization focusing on child’s rights reported that in the first quarter of this year there were 2,008 cases of juvenile crimes. Komnas PA said that they found 2,508 cases last year, higher than the 2,413 cases in 2010.

The House of Representatives this year passed a law on juvenile justice, which aims to protect children’s rights during the criminal investigation process. The new law replaces the old 1997 Law on juvenile courts and promotes restorative justice for children facing the law. The new law also rules that only children above the age of 12 can be criminally processed; but only those 14 and over can be detained. Implementing regulations for the new law, however, have yet to be issued. Nevertheless, Indonesian children are protected by the 2002 Law on child protection. Indonesia has also ratified the International Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Being 19, Fitra would not be eligible for the protections entailed in the child protection law.

Jakarta Police spokesperson Sr. Comr. Rikwanto said that anyone questioned by them had provided their own defense counsel, in line with the law that minors be accompanied by legal representatives when dealing with the authorities. The South Jakarta Police have so far questioned all of the 15 students of SMA 70 allegedly involved in the brawl.

In the absence of defense counsel during the legal processes any charges made against minors should be annulled, Komnas PA chairman Arist Merdeka Sirait said.

The high profile character of the SMA 70 — SMA 6 student brawl case will almost certainly ensure public scrutiny of the police investigation process. For instance, the Jakarta Working Group on Child Protection Seto Mulyadi reportedly plans to visit Fitra.

High-profile cases where the child has access to legal representation, such as the case of A, 14, who was charged with partaking in the murder of a father and son in Bojong Gede, Bogor, could see the possibility of the child actually undertaking restorative justice. Komnas PA provided legal assistance to A during his legal process. Arist said that in the end A was sent to a rehabilitation center for seven years.

“He did not end up in prison, he can still go to school,” he said. A’s school was also outside the rehabilitation center, so he was not confined to a cell, Arist said.

But in smaller and less publicized cases, children are at risk of being abused and even tortured during investigations. They also face the risk of being denied their rights to a legal defense and to a fair trial.

A damning report by the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH Jakarta) on violations of children’s rights when facing the law showed that most juvenile offenders in Greater Jakarta experienced torture by the police. LBH Jakarta carried out a survey between January 2011 to 2012 on 100 children detained at the Tangerang correctional facility for male and female juvenile offenders as well as the Pondok Bambu prison in East Jakarta.

From the findings of the survey, the LBH concluded that “torture was institutionalized”, which meant that intentional acts of physical and psychological harm were carried out by state officials or under the orders of state officials, with the purpose of discrimination or extracting information or confessions.

Nearly all respondents said they experienced torture during arrest and police interrogations and more than 70 percent during incarceration.

Apart from being yelled at and being lied to, they had their hair pulled, had guns pointed at them, were burnt by cigarettes and stripped naked. One respondent said has was shot at, and six said they were electrocuted. Respondents also reported rape and other forms of sexual abuse.

“Our finding shows that the main perpetrators [of torture] are the police. The intensity of forms of torture are no different form those experienced by adults,” Restaria Hutabarat, LBH Jakarta’s head of research division said. LBH Jakarta has also released a report on police brutality. According to LBH data, the number of wrongful arrests and officers allegedly torturing people during questioning increased to 75 percent in 2011 from 66.7 percent in 2010.

Many of the juvenile offenders sentenced to prison come from low-income families whose parents work in the informal sector. The findings also shatter the myth that most juvenile crime is carried out by street children; Restaria said more than 90 percent of juvenile offenders were living with their parents and were still in school.

Syahri “Koko” Ramadhan, 19, was one such victim of police brutality. In 2009, when he was still 15, his neighborhood leader reported him to the police for allegedly stealing his laptop and handphone. Police arrested him and to make him confess, Koko said police beat him up. Koko only lasted three days of such interrogation. “I thought to myself, how can I make them stop? So, I made up a story and pretended that I stole the stuff,” he said. Syahri was released without charge as the real perpetrator was caught and confessed that he was the thief.

Syahri’s uncle Hermiansyah said that police told Koko’s mother that she should provide money if she wanted her son to be released. Koko is now suing the police for torture and wrongful arrest.

Rikwanto said the police followed the laws on child protection and on juvenile courts when dealing with juvenile offenders. Commenting on the LBH’s finding on police torture, he said that interrogations were standard procedures that the police carried out. He said that people might perceive the interrogation methods as harsh. “But police officers have a duty to produce dossiers,” he said.

Commenting on restorative justive, where children are placed under Social Affairs Ministry monitoring or returned to their parents, Rikwanto said that it all depended on the type of crime. “If the children commit a serious crime, then they have to be prosecuted,” he said.

Apong Herlina, deputy head of KPAI, however said that sending children to prison was not the answer to juvenile delinquency. She said that children’s prisons should be abolished altogether and that regional administrations should be responsible for the rehabilitation of juvenile offenders. “A lot of prisons in Indonesia are not child friendly. They are overcrowded, the children mix with adults, there’s not much rehabilitation,” said Apong, the former head of LBH Jakarta.

Arist also said imprisoning children should be the last resort. “Prisons are like a school for criminals, they learn more about crime and risk coming out of prison being proud of their status as ex-convicts”.

The Jakarta Post | Reportage | Fri, October 05 2012

Children risk unfair trial, torture

A 15-year-old boy returned home on the night of March 14 this year to find all the lights in his house in Depok, turned off. He had spent the day fishing with his friends and found the darkness of his house rather peculiar. He pushed open the creaking door and saw his mother with tears streaming down her cheek.

“Mother, what’s wrong?”

His mother’s reply was incomprehensible: “People looking for you,” “giving drugs to a girl”, “taking off with her”.

“What drugs? What are you talking about? I’ve been fishing all day”. His friends backed up his story.

Adi (not his real name) decided to go to the neighborhood leader’s house. They were expecting him and the father of a girl he was acquainted with was also waiting for him there.

In the two weeks preceding that night, a girl from a neighboring area had been hanging out with Adi
and his friends. As they were all mostly school dropouts the girl used to skip classes and spend time with them.

On March 14, Adi called her to ask if she would like to go fishing, she refused and stayed with a friend instead. When her father came looking for her, the girl told her father that Adi had given her drugs and had sexually assaulted her.

Adi did not know that when he went to face the accusations, it would be the last time he would see his home.

The house of the neighborhood leader was packed with neighbors, as well as the police. Adi came and introduced himself to the crowd and to the father of his friend.

He was met with a kick from the man and the police took him away for questioning.

The rest of the story brought Adi to where he is now. Adi is currently serving two years at Salemba prison in the children’s facility. His head is shaved extremely short and his eyes often glance straight ahead when recounting his experience, as if seeing the events unfold before his eyes.

According to Adi’s lawyers, from the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH Jakarta), Adi has been a victim of an unfair trial. Under the 1997 Law on juvenile courts and 2002 Law on child protection, children’s trials should be closed to the public. Yet during Adi’s trial, the father of the girl, who works as a debt collector, brought dozens of thugs to the trial. According to Arif Maulana, Adi’s lawyer, the judge allowed the men to intimidate Adi and did not prevent the thugs from interrupting Adi’s lawyers during the cross examination of witnesses from the attorney’s side.

Further, Arif said, tests showed there to be no trace of drugs in the girl and the victim report did not provide any proof of the alleged assault.

Arif said the most disturbing part of the trial was that the judges rejected the request for witnesses to be called to support Adi’s innocence. Arif said they had witnesses who could testify that Adi was fishing at the time of the alleged assault and that the girl was not with him but was with another witness.

Arif said that Adi’s case was not only unfair but in addition, did not consider Adi’s young age. The judge has been reported to the Judicial Commission and Adi is now waiting for his appeal process to begin.

Children facing the law are vulnerable in terms of their legal rights and according to LBH Jakarta, violations occur across the whole process; arrest, interrogation, detainment and trial.

Syahri Ramadhan, 19, also endures the trauma of having to relive his own harrowing experience of being assaulted by the police as a 15-year-old boy. He is suing the police for false arrest and torture.

In 2009, he was accused of stealing his neighbor’s cellular phone and a laptop. While being questioned by the police, he said that the detectives used force to make him confess to the crime. On the first day, police officers told him “just confess that you’re the perpetrator.” “There is no use in you denying it, I’ll put you in prison,” Syahri cited the officers.

“[They] started beating me the next day. Perhaps they lost their patience,” Syahri said.

Syahri explains the abuse he suffered at the hands of the police, who beat him so much that the interrogation room was covered in his blood and hair. Police put a sandal inside his mouth when he cried, burnt his skin with cigarettes and pointed a gun at his stomach. Syahri lasted three days until he finally agreed to a confession. “You know, I was a kid. For a child, being beaten by his father is scary enough to make him run away, more over by [police] officers,” he said.

At his trial he withdrew his confession, saying that he was under duress. The judge released him from all charges as another suspect was caught who confessed to the crime and said that Syahri had nothing to do with it.

Syahri never continued onto junior high school. He said he was embarrassed and rather than dealing with the stigma of having once been accused as a thief, he’d rather just go straight to work.

He is now working as a mechanic.

Jakarta Police spokesman Sr. Comr. Rikwanto said, commenting on police brutality against minors, the police follow both the child protection law and law on juvenile courts.

Maruli Rajagukguk, Syahri’s lawyer, said Syahri’s case was the first where the police were sued for brutality against a minor. “This could be a good precedent to show that the police can be held accountable. It will encourage police to carry out reform,” he said.

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post | Reportage | Fri, October 05 2012

Youth stuck in violent cycle

Following the brawls that led to the deaths of two students last month, there is a sense that the jailing of juvenile delinquents and police brutality when dealing with minors facing the law is creating a cycle of violence.

Most of the children imprisoned in Greater Jakarta were tortured by the police during their arrest or interrogations, according to a study conducted by the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH Jakarta) that covered the 12-month period prior to January 2012.

Noted child advocate Arist Merdeka Sirait said that incarcerating youth offenders would not solve the problem of juvenile crime, as the nation’s prison system was an infamous “school” for criminals.

In the first case of its kind, the Cibinong District Court in Bogor, West Java, on Thursday heard testimony in the civil case filed against the police by Syahri Ramadhan, 19.

“The police should not get away with beating kids,” Syahri told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday at the garage in Tebet, South Jakarta, where he works as a mechanic.

Syahri, who alleged that he was tortured by officers who questioned him when he was a minor, has been challenging the “brown line” of the National Police. He has filed suit, claiming that he was falsely arrested by officers assigned to the Bojong Gede police precinct in Bogor.

Police detained Syahri in connection with a robbery when he was 15; during interrogations, investigators allegedly tortured him to make him confess, Syahri said.

Syahri was found innocent by the Cibinong District Court, but not before he spent two months in jail. He later dropped out of junior high school out of a sense of shame, Syahri said.

Syahri’s attorney, Maruli Rajagukguk from the LBH Jakarta, said that suing the police for false arrest or torture would challenge people’s complacency about the brutal and illegal treatment of minors at the hands of law enforcement officers.

Maruli said that the police needed to be “held accountable” to deter similar bad behavior from their peers.

Separately, police have made little progress in their investigation of the killing of SMA 6 high school student Alawy Yusianto Putra on Sept. 24.

Jakarta Police spokesman Sr. Comr. Rikwanto said on Thursday that detectives had finished questioning witnesses. The only suspect named in the homicide investigation remains SMA 70 student FR.

Rikwanto said that detectives had concluded that the students from both schools had asked nearby street vendors to store their machetes and other weapons used in the brawl.

Two days after Alawy’s death, Deni Yanuar, a first-year student in Manggarai, was killed in another high school brawl.

Three students of SMK Kartika Zeni vocational high school were arrested following his death.

The National Commission on Child Protection (Komnas PA), an NGO focusing on children’s rights, reported that in the first quarter of this year there were 2,008 cases of juvenile crimes.

The House of Representatives this year passed a law on juvenile justice, which aims to protect children’s rights during the criminal investigation process. The new law also rules that only children above the age of 12 can be criminally processed; and only those 14 and over can be detained.

Implementing regulations for the new law, however, have yet to be issued. Nevertheless, children are protected by the 2002 Law on Child Protection. Indonesia has also ratified the International Convention on the Rights of the Child. (aml)

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Headlines | Fri, October 05 2012

Property owners turn to Internet to advertise

Amin Cheng owned an apartment. He was looking for a tenant and needed to advertise. Putting a classified in a daily newspaper would mean paying an ad every day until he found the right person. So he set up his own advertising space on the Internet.

This was five years ago. Now, his apartment in Hamptons Park in South Jakarta has a long-term leaseholder who pays yearly rental fees. On top of that his website sewa-apartemen.net was now relatively popular with 300 new ads per month, he said. In the meantime, he has created three new websites for advertising boardinghouses and apartments.

The development of apartment complexes and boardinghouses in Jakarta has opened a new web-based business opportunity, websites for real-estate advertising. Typing search-terms such as “kost” on web search-engines like Google or Yahoo! will direct one to sites such as infokost.net or kosjakarta.com. “Rent apartment Jakarta” will give you apartmentsjakarta.com and sewa-apartemen.net among others.

Other real-estate websites are rumah.com, rumah123.com, Jakarta-apartment.net.

Amin is an IT programmer who has invested his money in property. At his home in Bintaro, South Jakarta, he said that more people were looking for cheap ways to advertise their properties. “If you put an ad in a daily newspaper, the information gets lost when the day is over and you have to place another ad. While on the Internet, it will stay there for a while,” he said.

Amin said that people could place an ad on his website for between Rp 50,000 (US$5.22) and Rp 80,000 for three months.

Two years after he created sewa-apartemen.net, he started kosjakarta.com. “A competitor, infokost.net, started to mess around with my market and also opened their site for advertisements for apartments, so I’ve tried to get their clients as well,” he said with a laugh.

Ads for boardinghouses were fewer compared to apartments, he said. He gets 50 ads per month for kosjakarta.com. One reason is that one boardinghouse can contain dozens of rooms, so it only needs one ad to get the attention of potential tenants. Meanwhile, apartments are more individual. He also said that kos owners could still place a sign in front of their boardinghouse, while apartment owners really needed to reach out to people.

The current trend for middle-range apartments is short-term leases on a per-day basis, instead of long term. “Owners really need to lease their apartments because even if there are no occupants, they still need to pay maintenance fees per square-meter,” he said.

Amin also speculated that kos owners were relatively older than apartment owners and thus less tech savvy.

“A lot of kos owners are old people. Some are not used to technology. They would have to ask their nephews to place an ad on the net,” he said.

— Prodita Sabarini

The Jakarta Post | Reportage | Wed, September 26 2012

For ‘kos’-owners: no pain no gain

With the high demand for inner-city housing from office workers, owning and running a kos (boardinghouse) might seem like a lucrative business.

But owning a kos is nothing like the traditional landowner who sits idly and has the rent money pour into his bank account. Maria M. Limaningsih, 56, a kos-owner in Jakarta, understands the difficulties. “People think that owning a kos is convenient and easy,” she said. “But it’s a difficult job,” she said.

Having successfully run two boardinghouses for students in Surabaya, the nation’s second largest city, with a total of 40 rooms, Maria saw the business potential of owning a kos in the capital. She bought an old house on a 300-square-meter site in Setiabudi, Jakarta and converted it into a three-story boardinghouse with 20 rooms, she has called it Griya Amartha.

Maria hired a contractor to design and construct her boardinghouse; a designer for the furnishing; a brand managing company to find a name and logo for her house. She spent a total of Rp 4.7 billion (US$492,000). She charges Rp 3 million a month for a nine-square-meter room with air-conditioner, WiFi, cable television and an ensuite bathroom with hot-water.

“But it’s very troublesome,” she said. She outsources a receptionist and security guards as well as a valet parking attendant. “The parking space is in the basement and it’s difficult to park, so I hired a valet”. She also hired four domestic workers to do the laundry and clean the rooms.

“I have to be on call, if the air-conditioner breaks down, or the water doesn’t run,” she said. She also has to pay for the electricity. “And you can’t tell people not to use too much electricity.”

But it pays, she said, taking home Rp 49 million every month after expenses.

Apartment owner Amin Cheng said he no longer had the patience to run a boardinghouse. He used to have a 17-room boardinghouse for students in Kemanggisan, West Jakarta. “There are always problems of leaks or the water pump not functioning. There are a lot of things to handle,” he said.

Moreover when the government progressively increased the price of electricity, Amin decided to sell his boardinghouse. He has chosen to invest in condominiums and rent them to high-earning families.

There is no exact data on the number of kos in Jakarta. Requests for an interview with the Jakarta deputy governor on housing affairs have not been answered. However, in 1987, the city passed a bylaw on boardinghouses. It obliges kos owners to register their boardinghouses and to report the identity of tenants for registry purposes. Compliance with this bylaw however is questionable at best.

Both Amin and Maria said they did not register their kos despite the bylaw.

Maria said that in her area, it was left up to the individual so she did not feel it was necessary to report even to the local neighborhood leader (RT). “But I do keep a log of the tenants’ identities,” she said.