Prabowo camp offers legal aid to libelous tabloid

JAKARTA. Presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto’s campaign has offered legal assistance to the editors of Obor Rakyat, a tabloid accused of publishing libelous content about rival candidate Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.

Prabowo campaign lawyer Habiburokhman has said that he “sympathized” with the Obor Rakyat editors. The attorney, a failed legislative candidate with Prabowo’s Gerindra Party, belittled the Jokowi camp’s allegations of libel.

“The Obor Rakyat [police report] is nothing. It’s different from libel. If friends from Obor Rakyat ask, I am ready to help them,” Habiburokhman said on Tuesday.

He described the Jokowi legal team as having “overreacted” by filing a police report against the publication. “Just because they have close connections to the police, they reported the case.”

A day before, Jokowi lawyers presented their case against the tabloid to the National Police’s crime investigations division.

The legal team is accusing Obor Rakyat of libel for publishing blatant falsehoods about the candidate, such as that he is a Christian of Chinese descent, not a Javanese Muslim.

The tabloid, which was first published a few weeks ago, appears to be a smear campaign directly targeting Jokowi.

Separately, National Police chief Gen. Sutarman gave assurances that the political standing of tabloid co-founder Setiyardi Boediono, who is an assistant to special presidential staff in the Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono administration, would not prevent the police from processing the case.

“There is no hindrance. Everyone should be equal before the law,” he said at Halim Perdanakusuma Airport in East Jakarta on Tuesday.

The National Police crime investigations division head, Comr. Gen. Suhardi Alius, however, put the onus on the Elections Monitoring Agency (Bawaslu) for failing to prosecute the case when the Jokowi camp brought it to them.

“They [Bawaslu] said the case had expired. That is because when they accepted the report, they did not immediately bring it to Sentra Gakumdu [their Law Enforcement Center]. The center has police and prosecutors, so why didn’t they involve them?” he said.

Obor Rakyat, founded by Setiyardi and Darmawan Sepriyossa, has been distributed for free to scores of Islamic boarding schools across Java.

The tabloid founders insist that Obor Rakyat is a publication of quality journalism protected under the 1999 Press Law.

The Press Council quickly rebuffed that claim, saying that the tabloid fell far short of journalistic standards and ethics.

Setiyardi currently serves as an assistant to presidential special staffer Velix Wanggai. President Yudhoyono has expressed outrage over the involvement of his staff in the publication, though he has not taken any immediate action against Setiyardi.

Meanwhile, the brewing legal battle has not prevented the publication of Obor Rakyat. On Tuesday, kompas.com reported that unknown individuals had sent copies of the tabloid’s third edition to a number of Islamic boarding schools in Jember, East Java.

Separately, on Tuesday in Karawang, West Java, Jokowi suggested that the “libelous” tabloid printing “baseless” information about him, was quite clearly linked to the political elite.

“It is a fact that the tabloid’s chief editor is staff in the President’s office — what else should I say?” Jokowi told reporters in Karawang, on the sidelines of a six-day campaign trip.

Jokowi, however, declined to comment when asked if the tabloid served as proof that the current government was launching a smear campaign against him.

“I won’t answer that. But the fact is that he is a Palace man.”

(Yuliasri P, Ina Parlina, Bagus BT Saragih)