The Australian government has laid criminal charges against Witness K and lawyer Bernard Collaery over their exposure of the bugging of the East Timorese cabinet. The first court hearing has just been postponed until 12 September in Canberra. If the two are convicted, the maximum sentence is two years’ jail.
21 May marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the dictator Suharto, who ruled Indonesia from 1965 until 1998 – 33 years; a very long time. This 33 years constituted a massive percentage of the time Indonesia has existed. The leadership of the national revolution proclaimed independence on 17 August 1945, but the colonial power, the Netherlands, was not forced to take its soldiers and bureaucrats home until the end of 1949. Its capitalists remained dominant there until they were expelled between 1956 and 1958. The effort to consolidate a new nation and a new state began only in 1950.
It seems fairly certain now that Australian Customs and Navy personnel paid the captain and crew of an Indonesian ship carrying 65 asylum seekers, including children and a pregnant woman, to take the Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis and Burmese back to Indonesia.
The University of Amsterdam chancellery building, the Maagdenhuis, has been occupied since 24 February, when students broke down the door and took over the ground floor. Since then, there has been a constant stream of teach-in discussions and organising activity.
The Indonesian Constitutional Court has rejected all components of a legal challenge by Prabowo Subianto to the July presidential election results.
According to the majority of polling institutions that carried out “quick counts” on 9 July, Joko Widodo won 52-53 percent of the vote in the Indonesian presidential election. Widodo, accompanied by Megawati Sukarnoputri, president of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP), declared himself and his vice president Jusuf Kalla “winner of the quick count”.