TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The director community of Ideological Islamic Analyst, Harits Abu Ulya, opined that the statements delivered by two pairs of the president and vice president candidates, Jokowi - Ma'ruf and Prabowo - Sandiaga, in light of terrorism issue during the first election debate was still far from the public expectation. The public is longing for concise, thorough, and fundamental narration.

“The two pairs seemed could not present a comprehensive, sequential, systematic, and simple construction of idea,” said Harits in a written statement, Thursday, January 17.

Harits explained the systematic, simple explanation could uncover terrorism cases from the upstream to the downstream, such as its roots, paradigm, and practical solutions to prevent and take action against radical acts, as well as its relevance to the mandate of the country’s prevailing law on terrorism, human rights, and criminal justice system.

Terrorism issue, according to Harits, was an uninteresting topic because the public was exposed to lack of elaborative report addressed by candidates. This condition, he continued, was likely due to a non-fundamental topic of terrorism in the public, compared to other subjects such as the economy, justice, education, human resources development, nation's moral, and illegal drugs among others.

Limited time was also predicted as one of the factors that the public did not see its relevance to the first election debate which was held on Thursday, January 17, in Bidakara Hotel, South Jakarta.

However, Harits continued, a person’s level of intelligence and communication skills in presenting narration could be seen within a short time.

During the election debate on the segment of terrorism issue, presidential hopeful Prabowo Subianto said that he would make an investment on education and health sectors, while his running mate Sandiaga Uno planned to map Indonesian regions which highly susceptible or exposed to radical ideology and terrorism concept. He also pledged to strengthen law enforcement officers, including police, intelligence agency, and others to early detect such issues in the public.

Meanwhile, the vice presidential candidate number 01 Ma’ruf Amin said that he would focus on the prevention efforts by suppressing intolerance concept and conduct de-radicalization. “Therefore, we will tackle terrorism using humanity approach that does not violate human rights. We call for the mass organization to join us,” Ma’ruf explained.

FRISKI RIANA