By Cindy Shiner
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, April 28, 1998; Page A13 JAKARTA, Indonesia, April 27A prominent opposition figure who reportedly was abducted for two months earlier this year said today that his captors beat him and administered electric shocks in an attempt to discover details of his political activities.
Pius Lustrilanang, 30, who had not spoken with reporters since he was freed on April 2, made the disclosure as he was preparing to board a plane for Amsterdam. "I say this to the public with the risk of being killed," he said. "They said they will be looking for me and would find me if I spoke out about my experience."
Lustrilanang also called on other political activists who had been treated as he had to speak out, and he urged the Indonesian Commission on Human Rights, which helped him leave the country, to protect his family.
Lustrilanang, head of a group that supports opposition leaders Megawati Sukarnoputri and Amien Rais, is one of about a dozen political activists who disappeared earlier this year just as the government began cracking down on opponents in the midst of the country's most serious political and economic crisis in 30 years.
Sukarnoputri is the daughter of Indonesia's founding president, Sukarno, and a symbol of resistance to President Suharto, who pushed her father from power in 1966. Rais, who leads one of Indonesia's largest Muslim organizations, will be in Washington this week as part of a National Council of Churches lobbying effort to combat worldwide religious persecution.
A handful of the activists abducted this year have been released, but others are still missing, including at least one whom Lustrilanang said occupied a cell adjacent to the one in which he was held. Sixteen political activists who disappeared during a government crackdown in July 1996 are still missing.
Lustrilanang said he was seized by armed men on Feb. 4 after visiting a friend at a Jakarta hospital. During his two months in captivity, he said, he was either blindfolded or his captors wore hoods, and he never saw their faces. But he felt their abuse, he said, through beatings and electric shocks to his hands and feet.
One Western diplomat called for swift government action. "The system is now obliged . . . to find and punish the offenders or else it deserves the blame it's going to receive," the diplomat said.
Other Western officials have indicated that a sharp escalation of human rights abuses by Indonesian authorities could jeopardize a $43 billion bailout package that the International Monetary Fund has agreed to provide Indonesia to ease its economic crisis.
The country's politically powerful military has denied any involvement in the disappearances and says it has ordered police to search for the missing activists.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
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