Manajemen | Fakultas Ekonomi Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji 00074910802395328
Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies
ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20
INDONESIAN POLITICS IN 2008: THE AMBIGUITIES
OF DEMOCRATIC CHANGE
Gerry van Klinken
To cite this article: Gerry van Klinken (2008) INDONESIAN POLITICS IN 2008: THE AMBIGUITIES
OF DEMOCRATIC CHANGE, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 44:3, 365-381, DOI:
10.1080/00074910802395328
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074910802395328
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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2008: 365–81
INDONESIAN POLITICS IN 2008:
THE AMBIGUITIES OF DEMOCRATIC CHANGE
Gerry van Klinken*
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Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), Leiden
The ‘normal’ politics of 2008, in between the big electoral events of 2004 and 2009,
illustrated the ambiguities of democratic change. Hung gubernatorial elections in
North Maluku and South Sulawesi led local elites to ask Jakarta to intervene. A long
campaign of demonstrations and violent intimidation by fundamentalist groups
against the unorthodox Islamic group Ahmadiyah persuaded the government to
impose a semi-ban on the group. At the same time, a senior intelligence officer was
put on trial over the 2004 murder of the human rights activist Munir. And the Corruption Eradication Commission continued to arrest powerful people for corruption, although these arrests also began to stimulate increasingly organised resistance. All in all, politics in 2008 demonstrated an openness, and even a willingness
to learn, that augurs well for the future.
INTRODUCTION
Indonesia has made an astonishing transformation in the last 10 years. Since 1998
it has become a decentralised democracy, a ‘normal country’ as MacIntyre and
Ramage (2008) put it. The greater fluidity of politics today continues to create
space for popular reforms, while also enabling the re-emergence of some less than
democratic patterns of action. This paper focuses on four controversial issues
that created headlines in 2008. Two of them saw groups within society apparently yearning for the centralised power and even the capacity for repressive
intolerance of the Soeharto era. Deep divisions in provincial civil societies in two
places caused them to turn to Jakarta for mediation when gubernatorial elections
were hung. This led some observers to think the decentralisation movement had
reached a certain limit. Militant religious fundamentalists, long repressed under
the New Order, learned how to invoke old patterns of cultural authoritarianism
when they succeeded in obtaining a semi-ban on the long-standing unorthodox
Islamic movement Ahmadiyah.
Two other developments, meanwhile, made it clear that the reformasi energy
for breaking with the past is by no means all spent. Popular and diplomatic pressure on the government to take action against military impunity led to the trial
* klinken@kitlv.nl. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Indonesia Update conference, Australian National University, 19 September 2008. With thanks to Ross
McLeod, Chris Manning, Ken Ward, Sebastiaan Pompe, Mas Achmad Santosa, Marcus
Mietzner, Indonesia Corruption Watch and Greg Churchill for helpful discussions. The
responsibility, naturally, remains mine.
ISSN 0007-4918 print/ISSN 1472-7234 online/08/030365-17
DOI: 10.1080/00074910802395328
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of a senior intelligence officer for the 2004 murder of human rights activist Munir
Said Thalib. And the campaign against corruption continued to score successes
throughout the year, although it also faced increasing resistance in powerful
places. This last topic dominated the headlines, not least because the politicians
were gearing up for elections in 2009, and it will take up most of our attention
below.
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TWO HUNG GUBERNATORIAL ELECTIONS
We begin with the first of two storylines that suggest local civil societies are not
always up to the increased responsibilities that decentralised governance carries
with it. Democratic decentralisation has brought a new dynamism to provincial
political life. Although revenue collection remains highly centralised, more control
over how revenues are spent now resides with local elected assemblies, district
heads and provincial governors. Free elections for local government heads and
legislators have become routine, and losers have generally accepted their defeats
peacefully. A niggling question remains: could this apparently well institutionalised process somehow be reversed? The answer is surely: not in the short term,
but the long term is less certain. One possible route to re-centralisation is a local
disagreement that drives the opposing sides to look for a referee in the centre. On
two occasions in the past year, direct gubernatorial elections failed to produce a
clear winner. Local elites were unable to resolve their differences, and they asked
Jakarta to intervene.
North Maluku was the scene of bloody communal conflict among a complex
array of localised and religious factions in 1999 and 2000 (Wilson 2008). The political context was the struggle for control over a new province that had been carved
out of the existing province of Maluku. The winner of that contest, Thaib Armaiyn,
came up for re-election in late 2007. His main opponent was Abdul Gafur, a retired
air force officer and former minister for youth and sport under the late President
Soeharto. Gafur had also been a strong candidate in the disputed election process
of 2001–02. As then, so now both candidates cultivated connections with powerful factions in Jakarta. Thaib was backed by (among others) the Democrat Party of
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), Gafur by the Golkar Party chaired
by Vice President Jusuf Kalla.
A few days after the ballot, the provincial electoral commission (KPUD)
declared Thaib the winner, but the margin was narrow: Thaib received 179,020
votes to Gafur’s 178,157. Complaints about vote-rigging in some districts then led
the national electoral commission (KPU) to take over from the KPUD. This was
an unprecedented move. The KPU announced that the winner was not Thaib but
Gafur. Media reports suggested the KPU chairman owed a political debt to Golkar,
which was backing Gafur (Tempo, 10–16/12/2007; JP, 24/4/2008). Both candidates then rushed to Jakarta. Thaib took the case to the Supreme Court, which in
March 2008 ruled in his favour by declaring the Gafur election invalid. It was now
up to home affairs minister Mardiyanto to make a decision, and he chose Thaib.
This immediately triggered Golkar protests in the national parliament, including a
threat to withdraw support for the president. Golkar had grown increasingly frustrated after losing a number of such local direct elections. All this took place amid
continual demonstrations by rival factions in Ternate, North Maluku’s provincial
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capital. Sometimes these descended into riotous house-burning and blocking of
the airport. It took until 29 September for Thaib to be officially sworn in.
North Maluku’s disputed gubernatorial election illustrated the dependence of
provincial elites on Jakarta, as well as deep divisions in Jakarta a year before the
national elections of 2009. The case of South Sulawesi’s hung gubernatorial election went further because it saw Jakarta install an alternative governor, albeit temporarily. The direct election for provincial governor in November 2007 produced
a close result. The Golkar incumbent, Amin Syam, at 38.7%, was narrowly beaten
by his wealthy challenger Syahrul Yasin Limpo, at 39.5%. Limpo ran on a PDIP
(Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle) ticket, but was a Golkar politician as
well. The result was close enough for the loser to question it. The bureaucracy in
South Sulawesi—important opinion makers for this gubernatorial election—was
evenly divided between Amin Syam and Syahrul Yasin Limpo supporters. Demonstrations and strikes paralysed government for weeks. Amin Syam took the
case to the Supreme Court, which in December 2007 accepted his argument that
there had been ballot-rigging in some districts and ordered a fresh ballot in those
districts. This enraged Syahrul’s supporters, and the local KPUD felt so slighted it
refused to implement the partial re-vote.
In the meantime the incumbent’s term of office expired. In January 2008 the
president appointed an outsider—Major-General Tanribali Lamo, an active military officer—as caretaker.1 Parliamentarians in Jakarta immediately protested
that this was tantamount to bringing the military back into politics. They had a
point. Law 34/2004 on the Indonesian military forbids active officers from taking
part in politics. But the military remains an important part of the establishment in
Indonesia. When the president, himself a retired officer, had to replace his ailing
home affairs minister in August 2007, he chose another ex-military man, retired
Major-General Mardiyanto. The home affairs ministry is the backbone of the
bureaucracy. It has been a military bastion since the New Order (JP, 30/8/2007:
editorial). South Sulawesi’s losing incumbent governor, Amin Syam, was also a
retired military officer, and Syahrul Yasin Limpo has been provincial head of the
Communication Forum for Sons and Daughters of Retired Military and Police
Officers (Buehler 2008). President SBY and Vice President Jusuf Kalla (who comes
from South Sulawesi) agreed that appointing an otherwise uncontroversial military officer was the best way to restore order. In the end, no fresh ballots were held
in South Sulawesi, but a re-count in the disputed districts confirmed the victory of
Syahrul Yasin Limpo, who was installed in April.
The hung gubernatorial elections of North Maluku and South Sulawesi do
not signify a reversal of the decentralisation policy. But in the complex dynamic
between the centre and the regions, it was a reminder that centralising forces can
also come from the provinces, particularly when regional civil societies are deeply
divided.
1 Tanribali Lamo’s father, Ahmad Lamo, also a military officer, had been appointed
caretaker governor of South Sulawesi under similar circumstances of electoral deadlock in
1966 (Tempo, 29/1–4/2/2008).
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THE SEMI-BAN ON AHMADIYAH
The second storyline is about a meeting between authoritarian officialdom and
conservative religious movements. Indonesia has a vibrant religious life. There
are hundreds of sects whose teachings and practices deviate from mainstream
Islamic orthodoxy. Most offer simplifications of the traditional ritual duties, for
example by not requiring fasting, having fewer prayer times, offering prayers
in Indonesian, or performing the haj (pilgrimage) on a local mountain-top. Some
draw inspiration from more recent revelations than the Qur’an. Some of these
practices are old, like the three prayer times in Lombok (Wetu Telu), others more
recent, like the honour Ahmadiyah members pay to Mirza Ghulam Ahmad,
the 19th century founder of the sect in what was to become Pakistan. Most are
rural, but some are urban, like the 1990s ‘Eden Community’ in Jakarta led by Lia
Aminudin that attracted well-known artists and intellectuals.
The New Order was a secular developmentalist regime that had little time
for the theological quibbles lying behind this diversity within the great family
of Southeast Asian Islam. But it did worry that the sects might draw people out
of its ideological reach. They were a security risk. As Major-General Mardiyanto
said when he was commander of the army’s Diponegoro division in Central Java
in the late 1990s, each time a political movement is about to appear, it is preceded
by the spreading of a deviant sect.2 To monitor these ‘deviant’ beliefs, the New
Order government established a coordinating body known as the Coordinating
Agency to Oversee People’s Beliefs (Badan Koordinasi Pengawas Aliran Kepercayaan Masyakarat). Its acronym is Bakor Pakem. Residing in the attorney general’s office (AGO), Bakor Pakem was dominated by military intelligence officers.
Many sects were banned throughout the New Order period on the basis of their
beliefs or ritual practices. Most were non-violent in nature. In some cases resistance led to bloody repressive action.
Reformasi put an end to this authoritarian surveillance. Freedom and diversity were major themes in the popular protests of those years. But four years ago
Bakor Pakem was revived (ICG 2008). In January 2005 a meeting of an AGO body
with a function like that of Bakor Pakem (but unnamed in the report on the meeting) recommended that the government should ban the Ahmadiyah movement.
Three years later, on 9 June 2008, retired Major-General Mardiyanto, by then the
home affairs minister, co-signed a ministerial decree, together with the attorney
general and the Minister for Religious Affairs, ‘freezing’ the activities of the sect.
The semi-ban permitted them to congregate but not to ‘disseminate’ their beliefs.
Ahmadiyah is not like the underground or rural movements that were the
target of New Order bannings. It has been in Indonesia since the 1920s. ‘They
fought in the Revolution’, say the group’s civil society sympathisers. Some of its
hundreds of thousands of adherents are quite wealthy. Its veneration for Mirza
Ghulam Ahmad has long irked orthodox Muslims, who believe there can be no
prophet after Muhammad.
A big difference between the current semi-ban and the New Order bannings
is that this time the initiative has come from militant fundamentalist groups
once regarded with suspicion by the establishment in Jakarta. In the past, the
2 ‘Jakarta’s own prophet’, Tempo Magazine, No. 10/VIII, 6–12/11/2007, and other cover
stories in the same edition.
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Soeharto government bound the major Islamic organisations to the corporatist state through the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), set up in 1975. MUI had
issued a fatwa against Ahmadiyah in 1980, to little effect. But after 1998, as part
of the ‘shifting contests over ideology’ described in a previous Indonesia Update
politics paper (McGibbon 2006), several hard-line groups moved to support the
MUI. From being a docile group of religious notables who echoed government
views on communism and national security, MUI has become a strident platform
for conservative moral reform. A recent International Crisis Group report on the
Ahmadiyah decree (ICG 2008) describes the key groups in the activist coalition
Forum Umat Islam (Forum of the Islamic Community), which has been vocal in
its support of the more controversial MUI agenda items. Most of these groups
emerged after 1998, while some had been active underground before then. The
most important of them is Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (Indonesian Liberation Party),
a rather secretive organisation with a highly educated leadership (the international headquarters of Hizbut Tahrir are believed to be in Amman, Jordan).
The radicals within MUI use the techniques of civil society to move public discourse to the right and to build pressure on the government. They have made
alliances with street-level organisations such as the thuggish Islamic Defenders
Front (FPI), which is able to mobilise protesters and often deploys violence. Deviancy—of which Ahmadiyah is supposedly an example—is just one of the issues
MUI has been pushing. The Danish cartoon controversy of 2006 was another, and
MUI’s support for the draft anti-pornography law introduced in 2005 has proved
a sustainable issue that remains on the public agenda today. The oil price hikes
of 2008 have also been an occasion for protest against ‘American imperialists and
Israeli Zionists’. The joint ministerial decree on Ahmadiyah was issued as a massive demonstration calling for a ban took place in front of the presidential palace.
It followed a long campaign of demonstrations, attacks on Ahmadiyah mosques
and, increasingly, clashes with more moderate Muslim groups who resented the
growing influence of the radicals. (A major inspiration for these moderates has
been former President Abdurrahman Wahid of Nahdlatul Ulama.) On 1 June
2008, FPI attacked a large group at the National Monument in Jakarta that had
been demonstrating in favour of religious tolerance, and injured several leading
Muslim figures. The partial ban on Ahmadiyah was a blow to religious tolerance,
but it did not go far enough for the radicals. Both MUI and officials from the Ministry of Religious Affairs have said they want ‘the public’ to monitor Ahmadiyah’s
compliance with the decree. This is tantamount to official acceptance of vigilante
violence and of the flawed logic that Ahmadiyah is the problem and not the violent agitators burning its mosques.
In certain respects this is a new situation. Security officials are appeasing groups
whose ideology they do not share, because they fear that more violence might
erupt if they try to uphold the law. President SBY is forgetting the large mandate
he has from a broadly tolerant public out of a desire to retain the goodwill of a
vocal religious minority. Perhaps thinking of the unhappy General Musharraf of
Pakistan, he fears their influence ahead of the presidential elections in 2009.
However, much else is uncomfortably familiar to students of the New Order.
The tactic of blaming the victims of human rights abuse for the ‘unrest’ they caused
was deployed often under Soeharto. Bakor Pakem, the security-oriented apparatus that monitors beliefs, started a list of ‘deviant sects’ in 1986 that now contains
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250 organisations and is still growing (Tempo Magazine, 6–12/11/2007). Most
disturbing is the tactical alliance that has repeatedly emerged between religious
hardliners and security officials at critical junctures. Of the radical groups now
backing the various MUI campaigns, several have had friendly relations with
military officers such as Soeharto’s former son-in-law, retired Lieutenant-General
Prabowo Subianto, and retired general and former presidential aspirant Wiranto;
and some armed forces generals and police officers have made use of FPI in criminal activities (ICG 2008: 10, 13).
Like the story of the hung gubernatorial elections and decentralisation, the
Ahmadiyah story is not the last word on religious politics in Indonesia. There are
many countervailing forces that stand in the way of the radicals. However, the
meeting that has come to light here between conservative religious militants and
security officials with equally authoritarian instincts shows that democracy can
also create new spaces for groups that are fundamentally anti-democratic.
THE MUNIR MURDER TRIAL
Now we turn to two storylines of the past year that suggest continuing movement
towards greater democracy and better governance. The first may foreshadow an
end to military impunity. The impunity deals that have often been made at the
moment of transition to democracy to protect military human rights abusers tend
to unravel over time. During the 1980s, Argentina enacted a number of laws that
granted the military impunity for the abuses they had committed during the
‘dirty war’ of 1976–83. But in June 2005, under President Nestor Kirchner, the
Supreme Court declared these laws unconstitutional. This led to the prosecution
of former officials involved in the war and the reversal of pardons granted by a
previous president to three military leaders. Similar developments led the Chilean Supreme Court in August 2000 to strip former President Pinochet of his parliamentary immunity. He was ordered to stand trial for the kidnapping in October
1973 of 19 supporters and officials of the government of the late President Salvador Allende.
No formal impunity laws were passed as the New Order era ended in 1998, but
the failure to convict anyone for the abuses committed during the 1965–66 anticommunist pogroms, during counter-insurgency operations in Aceh, Papua and
East Timor, and in the course of many other repressive incidents throughout the
New Order suggests that similar guarantees were indeed made behind the scenes.
If so, the prosecution of retired Major-General Muchdi Purwoprandjono, former
Deputy Director V of the powerful State Intelligence Agency (BIN), for the 2004
murder of human rights activist Munir Said Thalib could be the point at which
such guarantees begin to unravel.
Munir was by far the most prominent human rights activist in Indonesia in 1998.
His relentless pursuit of officers who had caused student activists to disappear
contributed to the dramatic drop in prestige that the armed forces experienced in
those days (Bourchier 1999). Major-General Muchdi was among those demoted for
human rights abuses at the time. Munir was poisoned with arsenic on a flight to
Amsterdam on 7 September 2004. It took only six months for press reports to link
the murder to Muchdi at BIN, through an operative named Pollycarpus Budihari
Priyanto (Laksamana.Net, 25/3/2005). Good police work, persistent pressure by
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civil society and continuous questioning by foreign diplomats led to the trial and
conviction of Pollycarpus in December 2005. The Supreme Court acquitted him
on appeal in October 2006, but then re-opened the case and once more convicted
him in January 2008, increasing the prison sentence from 14 to 20 years. ‘This
country is being destroyed at the hand of the law enforcers’, Pollycarpus shouted
to journalists as he was led off to prison (Tempo Magazine, 29/1–4/2/2008).
In September 2008 Muchdi himself went to trial. Encouragingly, there have
been no military protests on his behalf. And this is despite Muchdi having been
the deputy chairperson of a new political party called Gerindra, which is backing
the presidential aspirations of retired Lieutenant-General Prabowo Subianto. Perhaps the reason is that the (ex-military) president had personally given the nod
for the prosecution to go ahead—something journalists assumed but no official
confirmed. By contrast, senior officers had made defiant ultra-nationalist remarks
about foreign pressure on Indonesia during the East Timor trials of 2002–03. Uniformed men turned up en masse to intimidate judges by sitting in the front rows of
the court-room (Cohen 2003). If the Muchdi process reaches a fair conclusion—by
no means certain, as some witnesses have already withdrawn their testimony in
the absence of strong witness protection (JP, 22/10/2008)—it will be a major milestone for the rule of law in Indonesia.
ANTI-CORRUPTION EFFORTS
The final storyline is also hope-giving, though in the same ambiguous way as the
Muchdi prosecution. Popular protest over corruption was central to the reformasi
movement of 1998. Corruption was among the biggest topics of the past year. In
media terms it is today what human rights were under the New Order.
Political will is the bottom line for all anti-corruption work. The ambiguity
inherent in that slippery concept was nicely symbolised when over 1,000 international delegates at a Bali conference on the UN Convention on Corruption on
28 January 2008 were asked to stand for a minute’s silence in honour of Soeharto,
who had died the day before. Four months previously the World Bank and the
UN had declared the former president the biggest on a list of ten most corrupt
leaders. The Stolen Assets Recovery initiative (StAR), which the two world bodies had established in August 2007, offered to help the Indonesian government
recover the $15–35 billion they estimated Soeharto had salted away. Of the ten,
Soeharto is the only one never declared guilty by his own government. Not so
lucky, for example, were Nigeria’s General Sani Abacha, Peru’s Alberto Fujimori and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines (JP, 28/1/2008; Tempo Magazine,
25/9–1/10/2007). On the contrary, a Supreme Court panel led by a retired majorgeneral in September 2007 ordered Time magazine to compensate Soeharto one
trillion rupiah ($100 million) for a report on corruption that had damaged his
reputation (Tempo Magazine, 18–24/9/2007).
The difficulties facing anti-corruption work were illustrated in 2008 through the
aftermath of the banking bail-out of 1998. A 2000 Supreme Audit Agency (BPK)
report on this episode found that ‘last-resort lending’ by Bank Indonesia (BI) to
dozens of commercial banks in the early months of the Asian crisis amounted to
some Rp 144.5 trillion ($14 billion), and that a substantial part of this BI Liquidity Assistance (BLBI) had been used for various illegal purposes by the recipient
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banks (Joedono 2004: 61–172). It was not clear who was responsible for 96% of the
funds disbursed to the banks and, of the dozens of recalcitrant debtors and errant
bankers implicated in the scandal, only three have ever been imprisoned (Crouch
in press [2009]: ch. 6).
The institutional choice is whether to improve the regular judicial system from
the inside or to set up a powerful independent body outside it. Indonesia is doing
both. The regular system has the means to deal with corruption, but it has continued to perform dismally in this area, despite reforms such as the de-politicisation
of the courts and the frequent appointment of new ‘clean’ attorneys general by
successive presidents since 1998. The civil society organisation Indonesia Corruption Watch has detailed the complex of techniques that are deployed by police,
prosecutors and judges at every step of the way to extort bribes from those who
enter the system (Zakiyah et al. 2002). Elements of this complex once more became
painfully public in 2008 in the case of the so-called ‘Lobby Queen’. One of the few
not to escape the threat of prosecution over misuse of BLBI funds was the tycoon
Sjamsul Nursalim, who has chosen to live in Singapore for the time being. The
case against Sjamsul Nursalim has been repeatedly dropped only to be revived
again. Attorney General M.A. Rachman dropped it as a ‘special gift’ in June 2004.
Six months later the new attorney general, Abdul Rahman Saleh, re-opened it. It
took his successor, Hendarman Supandji, actually to form a team to take the case
forward in mid-2007. Heading the team was prosecutor Urip Tri Gunawan. Press
accounts say Sjamsul Nursalim employed Artalyta Suryani, a skilled businesswoman, to try to get the case dropped again. She lobbied effectively through the
busy round of receptions by which members of Indonesia’s elite keep in touch,
focusing on developing a friendship with Deputy Attorney General for Special
Crimes, Kemas Yahya Rahman. On 29 February 2008, Kemas Yahya announced
that the case against Nursalim had been dropped for lack of evidence. Two days
later the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) caught prosecutor Urip, one
of Kemas’s underlings, carrying $660,000. It also arrested Artalyta. The embarrassed attorney general, Hendarman Supandji, made a public apology and
removed Kemas Yahya and another implicated colleague named Muhammad
Salim from office. It was the first time an active deputy attorney general had been
removed. Artalyta was sentenced in July 2008 to five years in prison, and Urip in
September to an unprecedented 20 years. But the attorney general did not resign,
nor was he sacked. He said he might re-open the Nursalim case (Tempo Magazine,
18–24/3/2008, 25–31/3/2008).
The courts are as contaminated as the AGO (Pompe 2006), and two big cases in
the past 12 months did nothing to alter this image. Most corruption cases still go
to the regular district courts, and most of the accused have been regional parliamentarians.3 The regular courts have a high acquittal rate—just over half in 2008
(Jawa Pos, 25/7/2008, quoting Indonesia Corruption Watch). The bulk of West
Sumatra’s provincial parliament was convicted of corruption by a district court
in 2004 for embezzling half a million dollars of state funds two years earlier. But
3 ‘In 2006, there were 265 corruption cases involving local legislative bodies with almost
1,000 suspects handled by prosecutorial offices across Indonesia. In the same year, the same
offices had 46 corruption cases implicating 61 provincial Governors or District Heads’
(Rinaldi, Purnomo and Damayanti 2007: 5).
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upon appeal, the Supreme Court threw out the charges against them all between
late 2007 and mid-2008, without any prison time being served (Tempo Magazine,
6–12/11/2007; Harian Singgalang Online, 12/7/2008).4 In November 2007 the
Medan district court acquitted ‘Timber King’ Adelin Lis of all charges of illegal
logging in North Sumatra’s protected forests. Adelin’s case had been strengthened by a letter from the forestry minister, M.S. Kaban, stating that this case was
‘only’ an administrative matter. On the day of his release, the police announced
they were laying fresh charges against Adelin, for money laundering. However,
he had already slipped out of the country. The Judicial Commission announced it
was preparing to investigate the five judges who ruled on this case (Tempo Magazine, 13–19/11/2007).
Increasingly, office-holders hoping to be re-elected on their record find such
embarrassing failures a political burden. They therefore supported the establishment of an anti-corruption ‘superbody’ outside the regular system (Fenwick
2008). The need for foreign approval also played a role at first. The World Bank
and USAID had done preparatory studies on legal development in the 1990s, and
their recommendations proved influential in designing many reforms in 1998–99.
When Law 31/1999 on the Eradication of Corruption required the establishment
of a Corruption Eradication Commission, the Asian Development Bank helped
with the planning and the International Monetary Fund made success one of its
conditions for continued assistance.5 The law on the KPK and its associated AntiCorruption Court was enacted in 2002, but it took until the last days of former
President Megawati’s term in office in mid-2004 for it to become a reality. The
KPK replaced the Civil Servants Wealth Audit Commission (Komisi Pemeriksa
Kekayaan Penyelenggara Negara, KPKPN), which had made many embarrassing
revelations.
The KPK’s terms of reference are designed to short-circuit problems with the
existing system, such as police–public prosecutor rivalry, excessive prosecutorial
discretion, and judicial procrastination. It has a substantial budget ($25 million in
2007) and around 450 ‘embedded’ staff from the police and the AGO. Even so, it
can only take on the most high-profile among the corruption cases that arise. The
AGO and the police continue to handle the bulk of the cases. The KPK sees itself
as a ‘trigger mechanism’ for further reform.6
4 Similarly, nearly all the members of the Padang municipal assembly were convicted of
corruption in 2005, but were freed by the Supreme Court in August 2008 (Suara Karya,
1/8/2008).
5 The IMF–Indonesia ‘Letters of Intent’ are available at . Loan agreements with the Consultative
Group on Indonesia (CGI) similarly included anti-corruption targets, until the group was
disbanded following a request from Indonesia in January 2007.
6 Other anti-corruption initiatives included the National Law Commission, the National
Ombudsman Commission, the Judicial Commission, the Prosecutorial Commission,
the National Police Commission and the anti-money laundering agency PPATK (Pusat
Pelaporan dan Analisis Transaksi Keuangan, Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis
Centre). Most have been either ineffective or (in PPATK’s case) are still taking shape
(Nasution and Santosa 2008).
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Gerry van Klinken
The outsider presidential candidate Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) made
fighting corruption a central plank of his 2004 election campaign. When he
entered the palace in October 2004 he gave the KPK its head. On the strategy
of starting with ‘low-hanging fruit’, it kicked off by detaining Aceh’s governor,
Abdullah Puteh, that December. The president issued a flurry of instructions
(Inpres 5/2004), plans (RAN-PK) and letters authorising the investigation of
senior officials, and in 2006 he signed the UN Convention Against Corruption
(UNCAC).
Over the period 2005–07, KPK pursued 27 high-profile cases through the special Anti-Corruption Court, located in South Jakarta, and won convictions in every
case that went to trial (Tempo Magazine, 11–17/12/2007). The KPK owes much of
its grit to four deputy directors who come from outside the AGO. Most famous
among them was Amien Sunaryadi, who left the giant multinational business
advisory and auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2003 to join KPK, reportedly taking a 90% pay cut for the privilege. He introduced new forensic auditing
and investigative techniques, which led to some spectacular arrests.
In the past year, however, the KPK has discovered that there are limits to its
autonomy. Indeed, limits are inherent in its formal role of ‘coordination’ with
other anti-corruption agencies. Once again, the liquidity assistance given to the
banks in 1997–98 by the central bank provided the setting for this discovery. BI
was unable to recover much of these loans from the recipient banks. In 2003 it
formulated a draft amendment to the Law on Bank Indonesia that transferred
the repayment obligation to the government. BI knew from experience that the
larger the amount of money involved, the more it would cost to ‘persuade’ parliament of the virtue of this move. ‘BI has been under extortion for so long’, a
source in the central bank told Tempo Magazine. A meeting of the BI board of
governors in June 2003 decided to set aside Rp 100 billion ($10 million). Twothirds was to help several indicted BI officials pay off prosecutors, and a third
was for the parliamentarians. It was borrowed or otherwise appropriated from
an educational fund intended to support the central bank’s training institution, LPPI (Lembaga Pengembangan Perbankan Indonesia, Indonesian Banking
Development Institute).7 On 28 January 2008—the day the Bali convention stood
to honour Soeharto—the bank’s governor, Burhanuddin Abdullah, was arrested
for misappropriating bank funds. This humiliation came just a few months after
Global Finance magazine had named him the best central banker in 2007 and the
Indonesian government had conferred on him the prestigious Mahaputra Award.
In February 2008, KPK placed travel bans on all those present at the 2003 meeting
that had taken the bribing decision along with Burhanuddin. One of them was
deputy bank governor Aulia Pohan, who is related by marriage to President SBY.
He had arranged to obtain the money from the educational fund. Whether being
related to the president is enough to put one beyond the reach of the KPK is suddenly a big question (JP, 11/9/2008).
Other arrests followed that led to further problems for the president. They were
of two members of the parliament’s Commission IX on Finance and Banking,
7 Tempo Magazine, 19–25/2/2008. According to Anwar Nasution, head of BPK and former
senior deputy governor of BI, neither the withdrawal of these funds from LPPI nor their
transfer to BI was recorded in the books of either organisation (Nasution, no date).
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which was responsible for handling the BI law amendment (Tempo Magazine,
8–14/7/2008). During hearings of the case at the Anti-Corruption Court in
August 2008, one of the two, Hamka Yandhu, acknowledged he had handled the
money, and proceeded to name those to whom he had distributed it. Envelopes
contained between Rp 300 million and Rp 1 billion, depending on the seniority
of the recipients. Fat envelopes are a common sight in the parliament building.8
Among the recipients this time were two members of parliament who are now in
cabinet. M.S. Kaban is the forestry minister. Paskah Suzetta, who joined cabinet
in a December 2005 reshuffle, is chief of the National Planning Agency and State
Minister for National Development Planning. In 2003 he was the chairman of the
working committee in charge of the BI law amendment. Forestry minister Kaban
is close to the timber industry. Tackling illegal logging had been one of SBY’s
core election promises, but when in 2007 police arrested loggers who had accumulated a gigantic stockpile of illegal timber in Riau province, Kaban accused
national police chief General Sutanto of threatening an industry that had created
thousands of jobs and was generating foreign reserves. At about this time he also
wrote his glowing letter in support of illegal logging suspect Adelin Lis (Tempo
Magazine, 11–17/9/2007, 13–19/11/2007).
How would SBY react to these allegations? Another of his election promises
had been to sack any minister tainted by corruption. He had actually done this
in May 2007, when he dismissed the State Secretary, Yusril Mahendra, and the
Minister for Justice and Human Rights, Hamid Awaluddin, after allegations
that they had helped Tommy Soeharto transfer corruptly obtained money. He
now called Kaban and Suzetta into his office to explain. ‘Being veteran politicians’ (as Tempo put it), they each said they knew nothing about it. Afterwards
the president said he would not suspend them (Tempo Magazine, 12–18/8/2008).
Commentators thought that, less than a year before elections, he had acted cautiously in order not to endanger support from their parties. President Yudhoyono’s cabinet has representatives from eight different parties, with PDIP being
the only large non-participant (Baswedan 2007: 325). Paskah Suzetta is deputy
treasurer for the Golkar Party; Kaban chairs the (Muslim) Star and Crescent
Party (PBB).
KPK’s daring actions are beginning to stimulate resistance among the politicians who approved its mandate in the first place. In 2008, KPK arrested six
active parliamentarians in various cases. Some had been involved with the BI
draft law bribery case mentioned above. Another was arrested over corruption
in relation to the re-zoning of a mangrove forest and protected forest (this once
more involved forestry minister Kaban as well), and yet another over bribery in
the procurement of patrol boats. The most dramatic arrest of the year was that of
a member of parliamentary Commission IV in charge of forestry. Al Amin Nasution belonged to the Islamic party PPP (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan, United
8 The official anti-money-laundering agency PPATK recently made revelations about
another case involving envelopes. It identified 480 travel cheques, each worth Rp 50 million,
apparently distributed to members of Commission IX in June 2004. They were related to
a campaign by central banker Miranda Goeltom to be appointed senior deputy governor
of the central bank. A Tempo investigative report suggests the money came from business
interests. KPK is questioning the parliamentarians (Tempo Magazine, 23–29/9/2008).
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Gerry van Klinken
Development Party). He had demanded Rp 2.2 billion ($242,000) to expedite the
issue of a permit to convert protected forest land on Bintan Island so as to allow
an office construction project. The money was to be distributed to all committee
members, in the usual way. In April 2008, KPK officers arrested him at midnight
in a luxurious Jakarta hotel, in the company of a prostitute and with the cash and
paperwork in his car, afterwards releasing transcripts of tapped phone conversations (JP, 22/8/2008).
The jolt of this public shaming caused many parliamentarians to stop carrying
large amounts of cash to lunchtime meetings, and to modify their mobile phone
habits. Some started speaking out against the KPK. PPP faction head Lukman
Hakim Saifuddin said angrily: ‘That extraordinary authority [of the KPK] must
be controlled.’ Commission III (legal affairs) called the KPK in for a closed-door
session to answer questions about possible violations during the arrests of parliamentarians. Commission chairman Trimedya Panjaitan ‘warned the KPK against
attempting to discredit the legislative institution’. The commission had begun in
May 2008 to draft a law to restrict phone tapping (JP, 4/7/2008, 16/8/2008; Tempo
Magazine, 19–25/8/2008). Even the president felt compelled to join the condemnation of KPK’s strategy. In an opening speech to the National Law Convention
in Jakarta on 15 April 2008 he told KPK, along with the Supreme Audit Agency
and the AGO, to avoid ‘entrapping’ citizens by taking advantage of their ignorance of laws and regulations on corruption. They should give priority to preventive measures over legal action, he said. Parliamentarians in the audience emitted
loud cries of ‘Amen!’ (JP, 17/4/2008). The Al Amin Nasution arrest had triggered
the kind of failure of political nerve that has long worried anti-corruption experts
at the World Bank.9
The major parties, meanwhile, appear to think of the KPK mainly as a political
weapon in the hands of their opponents. The opposition party PDIP has complained the loudest (Asia Times, 29/3/2007). In March 2007, a joint KPK and AGO
team arrested Widjanarko, chief of the food logistics agency, Bulog, for diverting
cash from an Australian cattle import scheme. He was a PDIP member with powerful connections. Like most of the large state enterprises, Bulog has long been a
political cash cow. The government immediately replaced Widjanarko, but with a
Golkar man—former Aceh caretaker governor Mustafa Abubakar. PDIP secretarygeneral Pramono Anung said the KPK was doing the government’s bidding in
undermining the PDIP ahead of 2009 elections (Tempo Magazine, 27/3–2/4/2007:
editorial). Commission III chairperson Trimedya Panjaitan, also from PDIP, echoed the sentiment. PDIP was exaggerating: in reality, plenty of prominent Golkar
members have also been imprisoned (Tempo Magazine, 4–11/3/2008: editorial).
But there is no doubt that when corrupt practices are as universal as they are in
Indonesia, any efforts to combat them inevitably become partisan and produce
‘Why me?’ reactions.
The other side of the selective prosecutions ‘coin’ is selective lack of action.
Even the KPK does not dare to touch certain people. Vice President Jusuf Kalla
in 2005 became embroiled in controversy after the irregular purchase of 40 used
9 A 2003 World Bank study expressed pessimism about the prospects of the Corruption
Eradication Commission, citing ‘unfavorable global experience with such agencies’ (World
Bank 2003: xiii). Weak political support is the biggest risk factor.
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German military helicopters. Governor Abdullah Puteh got 10 years in prison for
the shoddy purchase of just one helicopter, but in the Kalla case, so far, nothing
has been done (Gatra, 6/11/2006; Tempo Magazine, 27/3/2007).
The future of the KPK–Anti-Corruption Court package is threatened from a
wholly different direction as well, albeit indirectly and for a good reason. The
Constitutional Court ruled in late 2006 that the Anti-Corruption Court was unconstitutional because it created ‘legal uncertainty’ for defendants, who could not be
sure whether they would be sent to this court or to the regular district court. It
gave parliament three years, until the end of 2009, to prepare fresh legislation.
If parliament is unable to complete the new law in time to meet the December
2009 deadline, the Anti-Corruption Court will disappear by default. This would
not end the effort to eradicate corruption, but anti-graft work could once more
become a lucrative part of a predatory bureaucratic system. To its credit, the government drafting committee resisted pressure to reduce the role of non-career ad
hoc judges, who currently hold three of the five positions on the court and are less
subject than career judges to corrupt inducements within the system. But the draft
now being discussed in parliament creates anti-corruption courts in every one
of the over 450 districts, where they would fall under the regular district court.
Non-career talent may be scarce there. The big question now is whether parliament retains its appetite for a strong Anti-Corruption Court, or whether it will
neuter this special body, as has been the fate of other such bodies in the past (JP,
9/9/2008; Tempo Interaktif, 4/7/2008).
As corruption greases wheels all over the world, anti-corruption efforts arguably seize them up again. Vice President Jusuf Kalla has openly suggested as
much. He has repeatedly expressed scepticism about the value of a punitive
anti-corruption drive. ‘In the first five years, the KPK frightened us. That is
important. However, in the future, the KPK cannot remain a frightening entity’,
he said in late 2007. A year earlier he told a KPK seminar that the nation’s antigraft drive was hindering the economy (Tempo Magazine, 11–17/12/2007; JP,
26/12/2006). Though not particularly helpful to his president’s campaign, his
words contain some truth. Unspent development funds more than doubled
between late 2004 and early 2006, and one credible explanation is that the anticorruption drive was discouraging government officials from making procurement decisions (Manning and Roesad 2006: 154). Unpalatable as it is to the
public, a punitive anti-corruption program in a weak institutional setting can
wreak real dislocation. Corrupt exchanges between agencies—such as the BI payments to parliamentarians—build ties that enable control in a fragmented and
politicised state machinery. The problem of political control has become more
complex in recent years. Indonesia’s political system is experiencing increasing competition, greater institutional differentiation and rising expectations of
accountability. Anti-corruption theory considers such broad changes to herald
the gradual shift from corrupt clientelism to a more institutionalised political
order (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007: 1–49). But if the underlying institutions do
not gradually become more effective, then hastening the process with punitive
anti-corruption action could in fact make the system less governable. Politicians
know this. Indeed, independent observers have also argued that promoting an
anti-corruption program as an end in itself could in fact do more harm than
good (Dick 2007; Naim 2005).
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Gerry van Klinken
THE ELECTION CAMPAIGN
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s anti-corruption campaign has thus run
into some serious and growing resistance. Nevertheless, I think it is fair to say
that the most realistic hopes for the anti-corruption campaign still lie with his
re-election in 2009. Few believe he is personally corrupt. He and his wife have no
personal foundations of the kind Soeharto used as slush funds. But incumbency
weighs on his image. He is today no longer the outsider who can promise a fresh
start, but the incumbent who let fuel and food prices rise. Contrary to the image
created by his 2004 campaign, he turned out to be a reluctant public communicator. In his four years in office he has given just six interviews, four of them to
foreign media (New Straits Times, 18/7/2008).
More problematic, as we have seen, is SBY’s need for political and business
allies working towards his re-election. His own Democrat Party remains small.
Five years ago, each aspiring presidential team spent around $10 million (Tempo
Magazine, 15–21/6/2004). Jusuf Kalla is among the most important of his allies,
both as head of Golkar and as Indonesia’s 30th rich
ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20
INDONESIAN POLITICS IN 2008: THE AMBIGUITIES
OF DEMOCRATIC CHANGE
Gerry van Klinken
To cite this article: Gerry van Klinken (2008) INDONESIAN POLITICS IN 2008: THE AMBIGUITIES
OF DEMOCRATIC CHANGE, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 44:3, 365-381, DOI:
10.1080/00074910802395328
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074910802395328
Published online: 06 Nov 2008.
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Date: 18 January 2016, At: 19:58
Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2008: 365–81
INDONESIAN POLITICS IN 2008:
THE AMBIGUITIES OF DEMOCRATIC CHANGE
Gerry van Klinken*
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Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), Leiden
The ‘normal’ politics of 2008, in between the big electoral events of 2004 and 2009,
illustrated the ambiguities of democratic change. Hung gubernatorial elections in
North Maluku and South Sulawesi led local elites to ask Jakarta to intervene. A long
campaign of demonstrations and violent intimidation by fundamentalist groups
against the unorthodox Islamic group Ahmadiyah persuaded the government to
impose a semi-ban on the group. At the same time, a senior intelligence officer was
put on trial over the 2004 murder of the human rights activist Munir. And the Corruption Eradication Commission continued to arrest powerful people for corruption, although these arrests also began to stimulate increasingly organised resistance. All in all, politics in 2008 demonstrated an openness, and even a willingness
to learn, that augurs well for the future.
INTRODUCTION
Indonesia has made an astonishing transformation in the last 10 years. Since 1998
it has become a decentralised democracy, a ‘normal country’ as MacIntyre and
Ramage (2008) put it. The greater fluidity of politics today continues to create
space for popular reforms, while also enabling the re-emergence of some less than
democratic patterns of action. This paper focuses on four controversial issues
that created headlines in 2008. Two of them saw groups within society apparently yearning for the centralised power and even the capacity for repressive
intolerance of the Soeharto era. Deep divisions in provincial civil societies in two
places caused them to turn to Jakarta for mediation when gubernatorial elections
were hung. This led some observers to think the decentralisation movement had
reached a certain limit. Militant religious fundamentalists, long repressed under
the New Order, learned how to invoke old patterns of cultural authoritarianism
when they succeeded in obtaining a semi-ban on the long-standing unorthodox
Islamic movement Ahmadiyah.
Two other developments, meanwhile, made it clear that the reformasi energy
for breaking with the past is by no means all spent. Popular and diplomatic pressure on the government to take action against military impunity led to the trial
* klinken@kitlv.nl. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Indonesia Update conference, Australian National University, 19 September 2008. With thanks to Ross
McLeod, Chris Manning, Ken Ward, Sebastiaan Pompe, Mas Achmad Santosa, Marcus
Mietzner, Indonesia Corruption Watch and Greg Churchill for helpful discussions. The
responsibility, naturally, remains mine.
ISSN 0007-4918 print/ISSN 1472-7234 online/08/030365-17
DOI: 10.1080/00074910802395328
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of a senior intelligence officer for the 2004 murder of human rights activist Munir
Said Thalib. And the campaign against corruption continued to score successes
throughout the year, although it also faced increasing resistance in powerful
places. This last topic dominated the headlines, not least because the politicians
were gearing up for elections in 2009, and it will take up most of our attention
below.
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TWO HUNG GUBERNATORIAL ELECTIONS
We begin with the first of two storylines that suggest local civil societies are not
always up to the increased responsibilities that decentralised governance carries
with it. Democratic decentralisation has brought a new dynamism to provincial
political life. Although revenue collection remains highly centralised, more control
over how revenues are spent now resides with local elected assemblies, district
heads and provincial governors. Free elections for local government heads and
legislators have become routine, and losers have generally accepted their defeats
peacefully. A niggling question remains: could this apparently well institutionalised process somehow be reversed? The answer is surely: not in the short term,
but the long term is less certain. One possible route to re-centralisation is a local
disagreement that drives the opposing sides to look for a referee in the centre. On
two occasions in the past year, direct gubernatorial elections failed to produce a
clear winner. Local elites were unable to resolve their differences, and they asked
Jakarta to intervene.
North Maluku was the scene of bloody communal conflict among a complex
array of localised and religious factions in 1999 and 2000 (Wilson 2008). The political context was the struggle for control over a new province that had been carved
out of the existing province of Maluku. The winner of that contest, Thaib Armaiyn,
came up for re-election in late 2007. His main opponent was Abdul Gafur, a retired
air force officer and former minister for youth and sport under the late President
Soeharto. Gafur had also been a strong candidate in the disputed election process
of 2001–02. As then, so now both candidates cultivated connections with powerful factions in Jakarta. Thaib was backed by (among others) the Democrat Party of
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), Gafur by the Golkar Party chaired
by Vice President Jusuf Kalla.
A few days after the ballot, the provincial electoral commission (KPUD)
declared Thaib the winner, but the margin was narrow: Thaib received 179,020
votes to Gafur’s 178,157. Complaints about vote-rigging in some districts then led
the national electoral commission (KPU) to take over from the KPUD. This was
an unprecedented move. The KPU announced that the winner was not Thaib but
Gafur. Media reports suggested the KPU chairman owed a political debt to Golkar,
which was backing Gafur (Tempo, 10–16/12/2007; JP, 24/4/2008). Both candidates then rushed to Jakarta. Thaib took the case to the Supreme Court, which in
March 2008 ruled in his favour by declaring the Gafur election invalid. It was now
up to home affairs minister Mardiyanto to make a decision, and he chose Thaib.
This immediately triggered Golkar protests in the national parliament, including a
threat to withdraw support for the president. Golkar had grown increasingly frustrated after losing a number of such local direct elections. All this took place amid
continual demonstrations by rival factions in Ternate, North Maluku’s provincial
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capital. Sometimes these descended into riotous house-burning and blocking of
the airport. It took until 29 September for Thaib to be officially sworn in.
North Maluku’s disputed gubernatorial election illustrated the dependence of
provincial elites on Jakarta, as well as deep divisions in Jakarta a year before the
national elections of 2009. The case of South Sulawesi’s hung gubernatorial election went further because it saw Jakarta install an alternative governor, albeit temporarily. The direct election for provincial governor in November 2007 produced
a close result. The Golkar incumbent, Amin Syam, at 38.7%, was narrowly beaten
by his wealthy challenger Syahrul Yasin Limpo, at 39.5%. Limpo ran on a PDIP
(Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle) ticket, but was a Golkar politician as
well. The result was close enough for the loser to question it. The bureaucracy in
South Sulawesi—important opinion makers for this gubernatorial election—was
evenly divided between Amin Syam and Syahrul Yasin Limpo supporters. Demonstrations and strikes paralysed government for weeks. Amin Syam took the
case to the Supreme Court, which in December 2007 accepted his argument that
there had been ballot-rigging in some districts and ordered a fresh ballot in those
districts. This enraged Syahrul’s supporters, and the local KPUD felt so slighted it
refused to implement the partial re-vote.
In the meantime the incumbent’s term of office expired. In January 2008 the
president appointed an outsider—Major-General Tanribali Lamo, an active military officer—as caretaker.1 Parliamentarians in Jakarta immediately protested
that this was tantamount to bringing the military back into politics. They had a
point. Law 34/2004 on the Indonesian military forbids active officers from taking
part in politics. But the military remains an important part of the establishment in
Indonesia. When the president, himself a retired officer, had to replace his ailing
home affairs minister in August 2007, he chose another ex-military man, retired
Major-General Mardiyanto. The home affairs ministry is the backbone of the
bureaucracy. It has been a military bastion since the New Order (JP, 30/8/2007:
editorial). South Sulawesi’s losing incumbent governor, Amin Syam, was also a
retired military officer, and Syahrul Yasin Limpo has been provincial head of the
Communication Forum for Sons and Daughters of Retired Military and Police
Officers (Buehler 2008). President SBY and Vice President Jusuf Kalla (who comes
from South Sulawesi) agreed that appointing an otherwise uncontroversial military officer was the best way to restore order. In the end, no fresh ballots were held
in South Sulawesi, but a re-count in the disputed districts confirmed the victory of
Syahrul Yasin Limpo, who was installed in April.
The hung gubernatorial elections of North Maluku and South Sulawesi do
not signify a reversal of the decentralisation policy. But in the complex dynamic
between the centre and the regions, it was a reminder that centralising forces can
also come from the provinces, particularly when regional civil societies are deeply
divided.
1 Tanribali Lamo’s father, Ahmad Lamo, also a military officer, had been appointed
caretaker governor of South Sulawesi under similar circumstances of electoral deadlock in
1966 (Tempo, 29/1–4/2/2008).
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Gerry van Klinken
THE SEMI-BAN ON AHMADIYAH
The second storyline is about a meeting between authoritarian officialdom and
conservative religious movements. Indonesia has a vibrant religious life. There
are hundreds of sects whose teachings and practices deviate from mainstream
Islamic orthodoxy. Most offer simplifications of the traditional ritual duties, for
example by not requiring fasting, having fewer prayer times, offering prayers
in Indonesian, or performing the haj (pilgrimage) on a local mountain-top. Some
draw inspiration from more recent revelations than the Qur’an. Some of these
practices are old, like the three prayer times in Lombok (Wetu Telu), others more
recent, like the honour Ahmadiyah members pay to Mirza Ghulam Ahmad,
the 19th century founder of the sect in what was to become Pakistan. Most are
rural, but some are urban, like the 1990s ‘Eden Community’ in Jakarta led by Lia
Aminudin that attracted well-known artists and intellectuals.
The New Order was a secular developmentalist regime that had little time
for the theological quibbles lying behind this diversity within the great family
of Southeast Asian Islam. But it did worry that the sects might draw people out
of its ideological reach. They were a security risk. As Major-General Mardiyanto
said when he was commander of the army’s Diponegoro division in Central Java
in the late 1990s, each time a political movement is about to appear, it is preceded
by the spreading of a deviant sect.2 To monitor these ‘deviant’ beliefs, the New
Order government established a coordinating body known as the Coordinating
Agency to Oversee People’s Beliefs (Badan Koordinasi Pengawas Aliran Kepercayaan Masyakarat). Its acronym is Bakor Pakem. Residing in the attorney general’s office (AGO), Bakor Pakem was dominated by military intelligence officers.
Many sects were banned throughout the New Order period on the basis of their
beliefs or ritual practices. Most were non-violent in nature. In some cases resistance led to bloody repressive action.
Reformasi put an end to this authoritarian surveillance. Freedom and diversity were major themes in the popular protests of those years. But four years ago
Bakor Pakem was revived (ICG 2008). In January 2005 a meeting of an AGO body
with a function like that of Bakor Pakem (but unnamed in the report on the meeting) recommended that the government should ban the Ahmadiyah movement.
Three years later, on 9 June 2008, retired Major-General Mardiyanto, by then the
home affairs minister, co-signed a ministerial decree, together with the attorney
general and the Minister for Religious Affairs, ‘freezing’ the activities of the sect.
The semi-ban permitted them to congregate but not to ‘disseminate’ their beliefs.
Ahmadiyah is not like the underground or rural movements that were the
target of New Order bannings. It has been in Indonesia since the 1920s. ‘They
fought in the Revolution’, say the group’s civil society sympathisers. Some of its
hundreds of thousands of adherents are quite wealthy. Its veneration for Mirza
Ghulam Ahmad has long irked orthodox Muslims, who believe there can be no
prophet after Muhammad.
A big difference between the current semi-ban and the New Order bannings
is that this time the initiative has come from militant fundamentalist groups
once regarded with suspicion by the establishment in Jakarta. In the past, the
2 ‘Jakarta’s own prophet’, Tempo Magazine, No. 10/VIII, 6–12/11/2007, and other cover
stories in the same edition.
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Soeharto government bound the major Islamic organisations to the corporatist state through the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), set up in 1975. MUI had
issued a fatwa against Ahmadiyah in 1980, to little effect. But after 1998, as part
of the ‘shifting contests over ideology’ described in a previous Indonesia Update
politics paper (McGibbon 2006), several hard-line groups moved to support the
MUI. From being a docile group of religious notables who echoed government
views on communism and national security, MUI has become a strident platform
for conservative moral reform. A recent International Crisis Group report on the
Ahmadiyah decree (ICG 2008) describes the key groups in the activist coalition
Forum Umat Islam (Forum of the Islamic Community), which has been vocal in
its support of the more controversial MUI agenda items. Most of these groups
emerged after 1998, while some had been active underground before then. The
most important of them is Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (Indonesian Liberation Party),
a rather secretive organisation with a highly educated leadership (the international headquarters of Hizbut Tahrir are believed to be in Amman, Jordan).
The radicals within MUI use the techniques of civil society to move public discourse to the right and to build pressure on the government. They have made
alliances with street-level organisations such as the thuggish Islamic Defenders
Front (FPI), which is able to mobilise protesters and often deploys violence. Deviancy—of which Ahmadiyah is supposedly an example—is just one of the issues
MUI has been pushing. The Danish cartoon controversy of 2006 was another, and
MUI’s support for the draft anti-pornography law introduced in 2005 has proved
a sustainable issue that remains on the public agenda today. The oil price hikes
of 2008 have also been an occasion for protest against ‘American imperialists and
Israeli Zionists’. The joint ministerial decree on Ahmadiyah was issued as a massive demonstration calling for a ban took place in front of the presidential palace.
It followed a long campaign of demonstrations, attacks on Ahmadiyah mosques
and, increasingly, clashes with more moderate Muslim groups who resented the
growing influence of the radicals. (A major inspiration for these moderates has
been former President Abdurrahman Wahid of Nahdlatul Ulama.) On 1 June
2008, FPI attacked a large group at the National Monument in Jakarta that had
been demonstrating in favour of religious tolerance, and injured several leading
Muslim figures. The partial ban on Ahmadiyah was a blow to religious tolerance,
but it did not go far enough for the radicals. Both MUI and officials from the Ministry of Religious Affairs have said they want ‘the public’ to monitor Ahmadiyah’s
compliance with the decree. This is tantamount to official acceptance of vigilante
violence and of the flawed logic that Ahmadiyah is the problem and not the violent agitators burning its mosques.
In certain respects this is a new situation. Security officials are appeasing groups
whose ideology they do not share, because they fear that more violence might
erupt if they try to uphold the law. President SBY is forgetting the large mandate
he has from a broadly tolerant public out of a desire to retain the goodwill of a
vocal religious minority. Perhaps thinking of the unhappy General Musharraf of
Pakistan, he fears their influence ahead of the presidential elections in 2009.
However, much else is uncomfortably familiar to students of the New Order.
The tactic of blaming the victims of human rights abuse for the ‘unrest’ they caused
was deployed often under Soeharto. Bakor Pakem, the security-oriented apparatus that monitors beliefs, started a list of ‘deviant sects’ in 1986 that now contains
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250 organisations and is still growing (Tempo Magazine, 6–12/11/2007). Most
disturbing is the tactical alliance that has repeatedly emerged between religious
hardliners and security officials at critical junctures. Of the radical groups now
backing the various MUI campaigns, several have had friendly relations with
military officers such as Soeharto’s former son-in-law, retired Lieutenant-General
Prabowo Subianto, and retired general and former presidential aspirant Wiranto;
and some armed forces generals and police officers have made use of FPI in criminal activities (ICG 2008: 10, 13).
Like the story of the hung gubernatorial elections and decentralisation, the
Ahmadiyah story is not the last word on religious politics in Indonesia. There are
many countervailing forces that stand in the way of the radicals. However, the
meeting that has come to light here between conservative religious militants and
security officials with equally authoritarian instincts shows that democracy can
also create new spaces for groups that are fundamentally anti-democratic.
THE MUNIR MURDER TRIAL
Now we turn to two storylines of the past year that suggest continuing movement
towards greater democracy and better governance. The first may foreshadow an
end to military impunity. The impunity deals that have often been made at the
moment of transition to democracy to protect military human rights abusers tend
to unravel over time. During the 1980s, Argentina enacted a number of laws that
granted the military impunity for the abuses they had committed during the
‘dirty war’ of 1976–83. But in June 2005, under President Nestor Kirchner, the
Supreme Court declared these laws unconstitutional. This led to the prosecution
of former officials involved in the war and the reversal of pardons granted by a
previous president to three military leaders. Similar developments led the Chilean Supreme Court in August 2000 to strip former President Pinochet of his parliamentary immunity. He was ordered to stand trial for the kidnapping in October
1973 of 19 supporters and officials of the government of the late President Salvador Allende.
No formal impunity laws were passed as the New Order era ended in 1998, but
the failure to convict anyone for the abuses committed during the 1965–66 anticommunist pogroms, during counter-insurgency operations in Aceh, Papua and
East Timor, and in the course of many other repressive incidents throughout the
New Order suggests that similar guarantees were indeed made behind the scenes.
If so, the prosecution of retired Major-General Muchdi Purwoprandjono, former
Deputy Director V of the powerful State Intelligence Agency (BIN), for the 2004
murder of human rights activist Munir Said Thalib could be the point at which
such guarantees begin to unravel.
Munir was by far the most prominent human rights activist in Indonesia in 1998.
His relentless pursuit of officers who had caused student activists to disappear
contributed to the dramatic drop in prestige that the armed forces experienced in
those days (Bourchier 1999). Major-General Muchdi was among those demoted for
human rights abuses at the time. Munir was poisoned with arsenic on a flight to
Amsterdam on 7 September 2004. It took only six months for press reports to link
the murder to Muchdi at BIN, through an operative named Pollycarpus Budihari
Priyanto (Laksamana.Net, 25/3/2005). Good police work, persistent pressure by
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civil society and continuous questioning by foreign diplomats led to the trial and
conviction of Pollycarpus in December 2005. The Supreme Court acquitted him
on appeal in October 2006, but then re-opened the case and once more convicted
him in January 2008, increasing the prison sentence from 14 to 20 years. ‘This
country is being destroyed at the hand of the law enforcers’, Pollycarpus shouted
to journalists as he was led off to prison (Tempo Magazine, 29/1–4/2/2008).
In September 2008 Muchdi himself went to trial. Encouragingly, there have
been no military protests on his behalf. And this is despite Muchdi having been
the deputy chairperson of a new political party called Gerindra, which is backing
the presidential aspirations of retired Lieutenant-General Prabowo Subianto. Perhaps the reason is that the (ex-military) president had personally given the nod
for the prosecution to go ahead—something journalists assumed but no official
confirmed. By contrast, senior officers had made defiant ultra-nationalist remarks
about foreign pressure on Indonesia during the East Timor trials of 2002–03. Uniformed men turned up en masse to intimidate judges by sitting in the front rows of
the court-room (Cohen 2003). If the Muchdi process reaches a fair conclusion—by
no means certain, as some witnesses have already withdrawn their testimony in
the absence of strong witness protection (JP, 22/10/2008)—it will be a major milestone for the rule of law in Indonesia.
ANTI-CORRUPTION EFFORTS
The final storyline is also hope-giving, though in the same ambiguous way as the
Muchdi prosecution. Popular protest over corruption was central to the reformasi
movement of 1998. Corruption was among the biggest topics of the past year. In
media terms it is today what human rights were under the New Order.
Political will is the bottom line for all anti-corruption work. The ambiguity
inherent in that slippery concept was nicely symbolised when over 1,000 international delegates at a Bali conference on the UN Convention on Corruption on
28 January 2008 were asked to stand for a minute’s silence in honour of Soeharto,
who had died the day before. Four months previously the World Bank and the
UN had declared the former president the biggest on a list of ten most corrupt
leaders. The Stolen Assets Recovery initiative (StAR), which the two world bodies had established in August 2007, offered to help the Indonesian government
recover the $15–35 billion they estimated Soeharto had salted away. Of the ten,
Soeharto is the only one never declared guilty by his own government. Not so
lucky, for example, were Nigeria’s General Sani Abacha, Peru’s Alberto Fujimori and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines (JP, 28/1/2008; Tempo Magazine,
25/9–1/10/2007). On the contrary, a Supreme Court panel led by a retired majorgeneral in September 2007 ordered Time magazine to compensate Soeharto one
trillion rupiah ($100 million) for a report on corruption that had damaged his
reputation (Tempo Magazine, 18–24/9/2007).
The difficulties facing anti-corruption work were illustrated in 2008 through the
aftermath of the banking bail-out of 1998. A 2000 Supreme Audit Agency (BPK)
report on this episode found that ‘last-resort lending’ by Bank Indonesia (BI) to
dozens of commercial banks in the early months of the Asian crisis amounted to
some Rp 144.5 trillion ($14 billion), and that a substantial part of this BI Liquidity Assistance (BLBI) had been used for various illegal purposes by the recipient
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banks (Joedono 2004: 61–172). It was not clear who was responsible for 96% of the
funds disbursed to the banks and, of the dozens of recalcitrant debtors and errant
bankers implicated in the scandal, only three have ever been imprisoned (Crouch
in press [2009]: ch. 6).
The institutional choice is whether to improve the regular judicial system from
the inside or to set up a powerful independent body outside it. Indonesia is doing
both. The regular system has the means to deal with corruption, but it has continued to perform dismally in this area, despite reforms such as the de-politicisation
of the courts and the frequent appointment of new ‘clean’ attorneys general by
successive presidents since 1998. The civil society organisation Indonesia Corruption Watch has detailed the complex of techniques that are deployed by police,
prosecutors and judges at every step of the way to extort bribes from those who
enter the system (Zakiyah et al. 2002). Elements of this complex once more became
painfully public in 2008 in the case of the so-called ‘Lobby Queen’. One of the few
not to escape the threat of prosecution over misuse of BLBI funds was the tycoon
Sjamsul Nursalim, who has chosen to live in Singapore for the time being. The
case against Sjamsul Nursalim has been repeatedly dropped only to be revived
again. Attorney General M.A. Rachman dropped it as a ‘special gift’ in June 2004.
Six months later the new attorney general, Abdul Rahman Saleh, re-opened it. It
took his successor, Hendarman Supandji, actually to form a team to take the case
forward in mid-2007. Heading the team was prosecutor Urip Tri Gunawan. Press
accounts say Sjamsul Nursalim employed Artalyta Suryani, a skilled businesswoman, to try to get the case dropped again. She lobbied effectively through the
busy round of receptions by which members of Indonesia’s elite keep in touch,
focusing on developing a friendship with Deputy Attorney General for Special
Crimes, Kemas Yahya Rahman. On 29 February 2008, Kemas Yahya announced
that the case against Nursalim had been dropped for lack of evidence. Two days
later the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) caught prosecutor Urip, one
of Kemas’s underlings, carrying $660,000. It also arrested Artalyta. The embarrassed attorney general, Hendarman Supandji, made a public apology and
removed Kemas Yahya and another implicated colleague named Muhammad
Salim from office. It was the first time an active deputy attorney general had been
removed. Artalyta was sentenced in July 2008 to five years in prison, and Urip in
September to an unprecedented 20 years. But the attorney general did not resign,
nor was he sacked. He said he might re-open the Nursalim case (Tempo Magazine,
18–24/3/2008, 25–31/3/2008).
The courts are as contaminated as the AGO (Pompe 2006), and two big cases in
the past 12 months did nothing to alter this image. Most corruption cases still go
to the regular district courts, and most of the accused have been regional parliamentarians.3 The regular courts have a high acquittal rate—just over half in 2008
(Jawa Pos, 25/7/2008, quoting Indonesia Corruption Watch). The bulk of West
Sumatra’s provincial parliament was convicted of corruption by a district court
in 2004 for embezzling half a million dollars of state funds two years earlier. But
3 ‘In 2006, there were 265 corruption cases involving local legislative bodies with almost
1,000 suspects handled by prosecutorial offices across Indonesia. In the same year, the same
offices had 46 corruption cases implicating 61 provincial Governors or District Heads’
(Rinaldi, Purnomo and Damayanti 2007: 5).
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upon appeal, the Supreme Court threw out the charges against them all between
late 2007 and mid-2008, without any prison time being served (Tempo Magazine,
6–12/11/2007; Harian Singgalang Online, 12/7/2008).4 In November 2007 the
Medan district court acquitted ‘Timber King’ Adelin Lis of all charges of illegal
logging in North Sumatra’s protected forests. Adelin’s case had been strengthened by a letter from the forestry minister, M.S. Kaban, stating that this case was
‘only’ an administrative matter. On the day of his release, the police announced
they were laying fresh charges against Adelin, for money laundering. However,
he had already slipped out of the country. The Judicial Commission announced it
was preparing to investigate the five judges who ruled on this case (Tempo Magazine, 13–19/11/2007).
Increasingly, office-holders hoping to be re-elected on their record find such
embarrassing failures a political burden. They therefore supported the establishment of an anti-corruption ‘superbody’ outside the regular system (Fenwick
2008). The need for foreign approval also played a role at first. The World Bank
and USAID had done preparatory studies on legal development in the 1990s, and
their recommendations proved influential in designing many reforms in 1998–99.
When Law 31/1999 on the Eradication of Corruption required the establishment
of a Corruption Eradication Commission, the Asian Development Bank helped
with the planning and the International Monetary Fund made success one of its
conditions for continued assistance.5 The law on the KPK and its associated AntiCorruption Court was enacted in 2002, but it took until the last days of former
President Megawati’s term in office in mid-2004 for it to become a reality. The
KPK replaced the Civil Servants Wealth Audit Commission (Komisi Pemeriksa
Kekayaan Penyelenggara Negara, KPKPN), which had made many embarrassing
revelations.
The KPK’s terms of reference are designed to short-circuit problems with the
existing system, such as police–public prosecutor rivalry, excessive prosecutorial
discretion, and judicial procrastination. It has a substantial budget ($25 million in
2007) and around 450 ‘embedded’ staff from the police and the AGO. Even so, it
can only take on the most high-profile among the corruption cases that arise. The
AGO and the police continue to handle the bulk of the cases. The KPK sees itself
as a ‘trigger mechanism’ for further reform.6
4 Similarly, nearly all the members of the Padang municipal assembly were convicted of
corruption in 2005, but were freed by the Supreme Court in August 2008 (Suara Karya,
1/8/2008).
5 The IMF–Indonesia ‘Letters of Intent’ are available at . Loan agreements with the Consultative
Group on Indonesia (CGI) similarly included anti-corruption targets, until the group was
disbanded following a request from Indonesia in January 2007.
6 Other anti-corruption initiatives included the National Law Commission, the National
Ombudsman Commission, the Judicial Commission, the Prosecutorial Commission,
the National Police Commission and the anti-money laundering agency PPATK (Pusat
Pelaporan dan Analisis Transaksi Keuangan, Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis
Centre). Most have been either ineffective or (in PPATK’s case) are still taking shape
(Nasution and Santosa 2008).
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The outsider presidential candidate Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) made
fighting corruption a central plank of his 2004 election campaign. When he
entered the palace in October 2004 he gave the KPK its head. On the strategy
of starting with ‘low-hanging fruit’, it kicked off by detaining Aceh’s governor,
Abdullah Puteh, that December. The president issued a flurry of instructions
(Inpres 5/2004), plans (RAN-PK) and letters authorising the investigation of
senior officials, and in 2006 he signed the UN Convention Against Corruption
(UNCAC).
Over the period 2005–07, KPK pursued 27 high-profile cases through the special Anti-Corruption Court, located in South Jakarta, and won convictions in every
case that went to trial (Tempo Magazine, 11–17/12/2007). The KPK owes much of
its grit to four deputy directors who come from outside the AGO. Most famous
among them was Amien Sunaryadi, who left the giant multinational business
advisory and auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2003 to join KPK, reportedly taking a 90% pay cut for the privilege. He introduced new forensic auditing
and investigative techniques, which led to some spectacular arrests.
In the past year, however, the KPK has discovered that there are limits to its
autonomy. Indeed, limits are inherent in its formal role of ‘coordination’ with
other anti-corruption agencies. Once again, the liquidity assistance given to the
banks in 1997–98 by the central bank provided the setting for this discovery. BI
was unable to recover much of these loans from the recipient banks. In 2003 it
formulated a draft amendment to the Law on Bank Indonesia that transferred
the repayment obligation to the government. BI knew from experience that the
larger the amount of money involved, the more it would cost to ‘persuade’ parliament of the virtue of this move. ‘BI has been under extortion for so long’, a
source in the central bank told Tempo Magazine. A meeting of the BI board of
governors in June 2003 decided to set aside Rp 100 billion ($10 million). Twothirds was to help several indicted BI officials pay off prosecutors, and a third
was for the parliamentarians. It was borrowed or otherwise appropriated from
an educational fund intended to support the central bank’s training institution, LPPI (Lembaga Pengembangan Perbankan Indonesia, Indonesian Banking
Development Institute).7 On 28 January 2008—the day the Bali convention stood
to honour Soeharto—the bank’s governor, Burhanuddin Abdullah, was arrested
for misappropriating bank funds. This humiliation came just a few months after
Global Finance magazine had named him the best central banker in 2007 and the
Indonesian government had conferred on him the prestigious Mahaputra Award.
In February 2008, KPK placed travel bans on all those present at the 2003 meeting
that had taken the bribing decision along with Burhanuddin. One of them was
deputy bank governor Aulia Pohan, who is related by marriage to President SBY.
He had arranged to obtain the money from the educational fund. Whether being
related to the president is enough to put one beyond the reach of the KPK is suddenly a big question (JP, 11/9/2008).
Other arrests followed that led to further problems for the president. They were
of two members of the parliament’s Commission IX on Finance and Banking,
7 Tempo Magazine, 19–25/2/2008. According to Anwar Nasution, head of BPK and former
senior deputy governor of BI, neither the withdrawal of these funds from LPPI nor their
transfer to BI was recorded in the books of either organisation (Nasution, no date).
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which was responsible for handling the BI law amendment (Tempo Magazine,
8–14/7/2008). During hearings of the case at the Anti-Corruption Court in
August 2008, one of the two, Hamka Yandhu, acknowledged he had handled the
money, and proceeded to name those to whom he had distributed it. Envelopes
contained between Rp 300 million and Rp 1 billion, depending on the seniority
of the recipients. Fat envelopes are a common sight in the parliament building.8
Among the recipients this time were two members of parliament who are now in
cabinet. M.S. Kaban is the forestry minister. Paskah Suzetta, who joined cabinet
in a December 2005 reshuffle, is chief of the National Planning Agency and State
Minister for National Development Planning. In 2003 he was the chairman of the
working committee in charge of the BI law amendment. Forestry minister Kaban
is close to the timber industry. Tackling illegal logging had been one of SBY’s
core election promises, but when in 2007 police arrested loggers who had accumulated a gigantic stockpile of illegal timber in Riau province, Kaban accused
national police chief General Sutanto of threatening an industry that had created
thousands of jobs and was generating foreign reserves. At about this time he also
wrote his glowing letter in support of illegal logging suspect Adelin Lis (Tempo
Magazine, 11–17/9/2007, 13–19/11/2007).
How would SBY react to these allegations? Another of his election promises
had been to sack any minister tainted by corruption. He had actually done this
in May 2007, when he dismissed the State Secretary, Yusril Mahendra, and the
Minister for Justice and Human Rights, Hamid Awaluddin, after allegations
that they had helped Tommy Soeharto transfer corruptly obtained money. He
now called Kaban and Suzetta into his office to explain. ‘Being veteran politicians’ (as Tempo put it), they each said they knew nothing about it. Afterwards
the president said he would not suspend them (Tempo Magazine, 12–18/8/2008).
Commentators thought that, less than a year before elections, he had acted cautiously in order not to endanger support from their parties. President Yudhoyono’s cabinet has representatives from eight different parties, with PDIP being
the only large non-participant (Baswedan 2007: 325). Paskah Suzetta is deputy
treasurer for the Golkar Party; Kaban chairs the (Muslim) Star and Crescent
Party (PBB).
KPK’s daring actions are beginning to stimulate resistance among the politicians who approved its mandate in the first place. In 2008, KPK arrested six
active parliamentarians in various cases. Some had been involved with the BI
draft law bribery case mentioned above. Another was arrested over corruption
in relation to the re-zoning of a mangrove forest and protected forest (this once
more involved forestry minister Kaban as well), and yet another over bribery in
the procurement of patrol boats. The most dramatic arrest of the year was that of
a member of parliamentary Commission IV in charge of forestry. Al Amin Nasution belonged to the Islamic party PPP (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan, United
8 The official anti-money-laundering agency PPATK recently made revelations about
another case involving envelopes. It identified 480 travel cheques, each worth Rp 50 million,
apparently distributed to members of Commission IX in June 2004. They were related to
a campaign by central banker Miranda Goeltom to be appointed senior deputy governor
of the central bank. A Tempo investigative report suggests the money came from business
interests. KPK is questioning the parliamentarians (Tempo Magazine, 23–29/9/2008).
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Development Party). He had demanded Rp 2.2 billion ($242,000) to expedite the
issue of a permit to convert protected forest land on Bintan Island so as to allow
an office construction project. The money was to be distributed to all committee
members, in the usual way. In April 2008, KPK officers arrested him at midnight
in a luxurious Jakarta hotel, in the company of a prostitute and with the cash and
paperwork in his car, afterwards releasing transcripts of tapped phone conversations (JP, 22/8/2008).
The jolt of this public shaming caused many parliamentarians to stop carrying
large amounts of cash to lunchtime meetings, and to modify their mobile phone
habits. Some started speaking out against the KPK. PPP faction head Lukman
Hakim Saifuddin said angrily: ‘That extraordinary authority [of the KPK] must
be controlled.’ Commission III (legal affairs) called the KPK in for a closed-door
session to answer questions about possible violations during the arrests of parliamentarians. Commission chairman Trimedya Panjaitan ‘warned the KPK against
attempting to discredit the legislative institution’. The commission had begun in
May 2008 to draft a law to restrict phone tapping (JP, 4/7/2008, 16/8/2008; Tempo
Magazine, 19–25/8/2008). Even the president felt compelled to join the condemnation of KPK’s strategy. In an opening speech to the National Law Convention
in Jakarta on 15 April 2008 he told KPK, along with the Supreme Audit Agency
and the AGO, to avoid ‘entrapping’ citizens by taking advantage of their ignorance of laws and regulations on corruption. They should give priority to preventive measures over legal action, he said. Parliamentarians in the audience emitted
loud cries of ‘Amen!’ (JP, 17/4/2008). The Al Amin Nasution arrest had triggered
the kind of failure of political nerve that has long worried anti-corruption experts
at the World Bank.9
The major parties, meanwhile, appear to think of the KPK mainly as a political
weapon in the hands of their opponents. The opposition party PDIP has complained the loudest (Asia Times, 29/3/2007). In March 2007, a joint KPK and AGO
team arrested Widjanarko, chief of the food logistics agency, Bulog, for diverting
cash from an Australian cattle import scheme. He was a PDIP member with powerful connections. Like most of the large state enterprises, Bulog has long been a
political cash cow. The government immediately replaced Widjanarko, but with a
Golkar man—former Aceh caretaker governor Mustafa Abubakar. PDIP secretarygeneral Pramono Anung said the KPK was doing the government’s bidding in
undermining the PDIP ahead of 2009 elections (Tempo Magazine, 27/3–2/4/2007:
editorial). Commission III chairperson Trimedya Panjaitan, also from PDIP, echoed the sentiment. PDIP was exaggerating: in reality, plenty of prominent Golkar
members have also been imprisoned (Tempo Magazine, 4–11/3/2008: editorial).
But there is no doubt that when corrupt practices are as universal as they are in
Indonesia, any efforts to combat them inevitably become partisan and produce
‘Why me?’ reactions.
The other side of the selective prosecutions ‘coin’ is selective lack of action.
Even the KPK does not dare to touch certain people. Vice President Jusuf Kalla
in 2005 became embroiled in controversy after the irregular purchase of 40 used
9 A 2003 World Bank study expressed pessimism about the prospects of the Corruption
Eradication Commission, citing ‘unfavorable global experience with such agencies’ (World
Bank 2003: xiii). Weak political support is the biggest risk factor.
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German military helicopters. Governor Abdullah Puteh got 10 years in prison for
the shoddy purchase of just one helicopter, but in the Kalla case, so far, nothing
has been done (Gatra, 6/11/2006; Tempo Magazine, 27/3/2007).
The future of the KPK–Anti-Corruption Court package is threatened from a
wholly different direction as well, albeit indirectly and for a good reason. The
Constitutional Court ruled in late 2006 that the Anti-Corruption Court was unconstitutional because it created ‘legal uncertainty’ for defendants, who could not be
sure whether they would be sent to this court or to the regular district court. It
gave parliament three years, until the end of 2009, to prepare fresh legislation.
If parliament is unable to complete the new law in time to meet the December
2009 deadline, the Anti-Corruption Court will disappear by default. This would
not end the effort to eradicate corruption, but anti-graft work could once more
become a lucrative part of a predatory bureaucratic system. To its credit, the government drafting committee resisted pressure to reduce the role of non-career ad
hoc judges, who currently hold three of the five positions on the court and are less
subject than career judges to corrupt inducements within the system. But the draft
now being discussed in parliament creates anti-corruption courts in every one
of the over 450 districts, where they would fall under the regular district court.
Non-career talent may be scarce there. The big question now is whether parliament retains its appetite for a strong Anti-Corruption Court, or whether it will
neuter this special body, as has been the fate of other such bodies in the past (JP,
9/9/2008; Tempo Interaktif, 4/7/2008).
As corruption greases wheels all over the world, anti-corruption efforts arguably seize them up again. Vice President Jusuf Kalla has openly suggested as
much. He has repeatedly expressed scepticism about the value of a punitive
anti-corruption drive. ‘In the first five years, the KPK frightened us. That is
important. However, in the future, the KPK cannot remain a frightening entity’,
he said in late 2007. A year earlier he told a KPK seminar that the nation’s antigraft drive was hindering the economy (Tempo Magazine, 11–17/12/2007; JP,
26/12/2006). Though not particularly helpful to his president’s campaign, his
words contain some truth. Unspent development funds more than doubled
between late 2004 and early 2006, and one credible explanation is that the anticorruption drive was discouraging government officials from making procurement decisions (Manning and Roesad 2006: 154). Unpalatable as it is to the
public, a punitive anti-corruption program in a weak institutional setting can
wreak real dislocation. Corrupt exchanges between agencies—such as the BI payments to parliamentarians—build ties that enable control in a fragmented and
politicised state machinery. The problem of political control has become more
complex in recent years. Indonesia’s political system is experiencing increasing competition, greater institutional differentiation and rising expectations of
accountability. Anti-corruption theory considers such broad changes to herald
the gradual shift from corrupt clientelism to a more institutionalised political
order (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007: 1–49). But if the underlying institutions do
not gradually become more effective, then hastening the process with punitive
anti-corruption action could in fact make the system less governable. Politicians
know this. Indeed, independent observers have also argued that promoting an
anti-corruption program as an end in itself could in fact do more harm than
good (Dick 2007; Naim 2005).
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Gerry van Klinken
THE ELECTION CAMPAIGN
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s anti-corruption campaign has thus run
into some serious and growing resistance. Nevertheless, I think it is fair to say
that the most realistic hopes for the anti-corruption campaign still lie with his
re-election in 2009. Few believe he is personally corrupt. He and his wife have no
personal foundations of the kind Soeharto used as slush funds. But incumbency
weighs on his image. He is today no longer the outsider who can promise a fresh
start, but the incumbent who let fuel and food prices rise. Contrary to the image
created by his 2004 campaign, he turned out to be a reluctant public communicator. In his four years in office he has given just six interviews, four of them to
foreign media (New Straits Times, 18/7/2008).
More problematic, as we have seen, is SBY’s need for political and business
allies working towards his re-election. His own Democrat Party remains small.
Five years ago, each aspiring presidential team spent around $10 million (Tempo
Magazine, 15–21/6/2004). Jusuf Kalla is among the most important of his allies,
both as head of Golkar and as Indonesia’s 30th rich