The Sydney Morning Herald, December 27 2003
Soeharto sidekick's wife seeks asylum
By Leonie Lamont
The wife of a former Soeharto government minister, the tycoon Mohamad "Bob"
Hasan, is seeking refugee status in Australia, claiming she fears persecution as a
former crony of the regime if she is forced to return to Indonesia.
The woman, now 61, came to Australia within months of president Soeharto's downfall
in May 1998, to visit her three children, who were all living in Australia on student
visas.
Known in court documents as VFAP of 2002, she said she feared that if she were
arrested and jailed in Indonesia, she would experience excessive and arbitrary
punishment because of her family links.
Hasan, one of Indonesia's richest men, with interests in timber, media, the automotive
industry and banking, is serving a six-year prison sentence for corruption stemming
from a $492 million scam over a state forestry mapping project.
An ethnic Chinese who converted to Islam, he was one of Soeharto's golfing mates,
and was also a member of the International Olympic Committee.
The Federal Court last week upheld the woman's appeal against earlier decisions of
an immigration official, the Refugee Review Tribunal and the Federal Magistrates
court, all of which had rejected her application.
Justice Shane Marshall said all had failed to deal with her claim that she had a
well-founded fear of political persecution as a Soeharto crony because her husband
had been exposed to excessive or arbitrary punishment while in prison. Justice
Marshall ordered that her claim be examined by the tribunal.
Evidence was given to the court that in 2001 Hasan was transferred from the
low-security Cipinang penitentiary in central Jakarta to the notorious
maximum-security prison on Nusakambangan island. The Jakarta Post reported the
then justice minister, Baharuddin Lopa, saying the move was aimed at deterring the
corrupt, and as a security measure.
The woman claimed her husband "faces a real chance of being disproportionally
punished on political grounds and exposed to excessive or arbitrary punishment . . .
he was subject as a scapegoat for the excesses of the Soeharto regime.
"He was prosecuted as a pretext for punishing him, and has been singled out from a
group of wealthy non-family associates of former president Soeharto rather than
simply being prosecuted and liable to face punishment in conformity with the general
law of Indonesia [which] amounts to discriminatory persecution."
The woman said she feared she would be persecuted in the same manner.
Copyright © 2003. The Sydney Morning Herald
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