H.E. Abduraman Wahid
President
Office of the President
15 Jalan Merdeka Utara
10110
Jakarta
Indonesia

Vienna, 4 December 2000

Your Excellency,

The International Press Institute (IPI), the global network of editors and media executives, strongly condemns the arrest of a Swiss journalist by Indonesian police in Jayapura, capital of the Indonesia province of Irian Jaya, on 2 December.

According to our sources, Oswald Iten, a veteran reporter for the Swiss daily newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, was detained for taking photographs after having entered the country with a tourist visa. We are informed that the authorities used Immigration Law No. 9/1996, which stipulates that journalists may not practice their profession freely unless they have special permission, to incarcerate Mr. Iten.

This latest violation of press freedom appears to be part of a concentrated effort to control coverage of events unfolding in Indonesia. Immigration Law No. 9/1996 appears to be a law that was created by one of your predecessors in order to ensure only favourable reporting by foreign journalists visiting your country.

IPI considers this discrimination of journalists to be a flagrant violation of everyone’s right to “seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers” as guaranteed by Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We therefore call upon Your Excellency to ensure that Mr. Iten is released immediately and unconditionally. We further urge you to do everything in your power to ensure that Immigration Law No. 9/1996 is revoked, and that journalists reporting on events in Indonesia are allowed to carry out their profession safely and without further harassment.

We thank you for your attention.

Yours sincerely,

Johann P. Fritz
Director