Dita Indah Sari is a 24-year-old woman serving five years in an Indonesian jail for her struggle to defend workers rights in Indonesia. In July 1996, she took part in a peaceful demonstration in the East Java town of Surabaya to call for a rise in the minimum wage.
It was not the first time she had taken to the streets in a bid to improve the lot of her fellow workers. As leader of a non-governmental organisation, the Centre for Indonesian Workers Struggle, Indah Sari had been to the forefront in demanding better pay and conditions. She was among nine students arrested and beaten up that day when their demonstration was broken up violently by army and police. Indah Sari and Coen Husein Pontoh were kept in custody accused, bizarrely, of riots in Jakarta which took place when they were both in custody. An appeal reduced her sentence to five years and that of Coen Pontoh to three-and-a-half years. The Indonesian government still imposes heavy restrictions on the right to form trade unions.