Jakarta, Feb 25: A police clamp-down against hoarding of basic essentials has rattled Indonesian commodity players who say the government has not issued a clear definition of the crime.Police last week arrested 13 people suspected of hoarding food and other essentials and pledged to arrest more.
The anti-hoarding drive came as soaring prices of essential goods, triggered by the sharp fall in the rupiah, led authorities to believe traders had begun stockpiling goods.
``Everybody is cautious now. Last week, military officers came to my storehouses and accused me of hoarding rice. That's stupid because I am selling cocoa,'' one cocoa trader in Ujung Pandang, capital of south Sulawesi, said on Wednesday.
``The thing is the government has never made it clear what it means by hoarding. I can be accused easily of hoarding stocks only because I keep my corn in the storehouses,'' said a corn trader in Surabaya, the provincial capital of east Java.
Police and other government officials could not be reachedfor comment on the issue.
Last week, a spokesman for the attorney general's office, Agung Bahari, was quoted by the official Antara news agency as saying that hoarders could be sentenced to death.
Bahari said the government could use a 1965 law on store houses that allows for the death penalty for hoarders.
His comment followed the discovery by the military of nearly 3,000 tonnes of rice, 11,000 tonnes of sugar and 31,274 tonnes of soybeans at a number of storehouses in Jakarta and the nearby Tangerang area.
The incident worried traders, who fear they may be next.``I have received so many complaints from distributors lately regarding this continued clamp-down,'' said a Jakarta-based palm olein trader. Olein is used as cooking oil.
``Military officers came to the store houses to find out if they are hoarding stocks. They came in without any warrant, took pictures and videotaped the storehouses. The activities continue,'' she said.
``Distributors become nervous and they are reluctant to buy olein,''said the trader. The clamp-down has flattened palm olein trade.
``What we do now is look for customers for reasons different from the situation a few months ago. Then, buyers were scarce because prices were high,'' she said.
Cooking oil has become a sensitive issue in Indonesia and its scarcity has prompted the government to impose an indefinite ban on the export of crude palm oil, the raw material for cooking oil, in order to reduce prices.
Indonesia has been rocked by riots over rising food prices, unemployment and shortages of goods and materials as the country battles its worst economic crisis in decades.
Police said the 13 people suspected of hoarding stocks were being questioned in central Java, Yogyakarta, Bali and Jakarta.
The leading English-language newspaper, the Jakarta Post,said in a recent editorial that the hoarding accusation had been levelled indiscriminately. ``In East Java, rice processors have been attacked by people angered at seeing piles of rice in their barns.
Some of thewarehouses broken into by the authorities contained stockpiles of goods simply because that is the purpose for which they were constructed -- to store goods awaiting distribution,'' it said. ``The divisive nature of the economic crisis is rearing its ugly head amid bitter accusations of hoarding.''
Copyright(c)1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
