Urbanus Pardede (born c. 1903) was an Indonesian Communist and newspaper editor from Sumatra, active both in the Dutch East Indies and independence eras.
[3] He left that paper in 1925 to found a Malay language newspaper called Soeara Kita (our voice) with a co-editor named Mangkoeto Sulaiman.
[7] Finally in July 1927 Pardede and 8 co-conspirators were detained without charge by the police in Medan, on the accusation that he was planning a "terrorist" action among contract workers from more than 20 plantations in Simalungun Regency.
[11] In March 1928 a conservative Batak member of the Volksraad, Mangaradja Soangkoepon, asked the government why Pardede, his comrades and other Sumatran leftists had been arrested and jailed without charge, some since late 1926.
[14][1] Nonetheless, even after he had already been deported, the issue made its way to the House of Representatives in the Netherlands where a committee examined the treatment of Pardede and those who had been detained with him in Medan.
They determined that it was unsatisfactory according to Western legal norms that anyone should be imprisoned for more than six months without being interrogated, and referred the matter to the minister in charge for examination of causes and redresses for the injustices they had experienced.
[22] In addition, in the press it was observed that the lower level colonial officials in 1926 and 1927 had been under pressure to discover "dangerous communists" on short notice and may have rounded up people like Pardede without basis.