Demokrasi
Page 20
Cells of Jemaah Islamiyah continued to mount roughly annual major bombings against targets linked to Western influence, including the Australian embassy and the Marriott Hotel. An allied group called Kompak (Komite Aksi Penanggulangan Akibat Krisis, Crisis Management/Prevention Committee) in Poso, Central Sulawesi, kept up terrorist attacks after a short-lived but fierce religious war between local Muslim and Christian communities was ended via the mediation of Jusuf Kalla while a minister in Megawati’s government. But after coordinated suicide bombings against two big hotels in 2009, a steady manhunt by the new Detachment 88 unit from the Indonesian police produced results, with some 400 adherents of Jemaah Islamiyah arrested and 250 convicted. The unrepentant perpetrators of the first Bali bombing had been executed by firing squad at the end of 2008. Scores of others were serving prison sentences. Still, authorities and the police resisted calls from foreign governments for the banning of Jemaah Islamiyah. Better to keep it on the surface, they argued, where they could track its activities.
The Detachment 88 police also took a soft approach to those Jemaah Islamiyah members under arrest. Aware that prisons could be schools that only hardened extreme ideologies, they attempted to “deradicalize” about 200 of the convicts, starting by trying to learn about their motives. This involved senior police eating meals with them, taking them out for limited excursions, and even encouraging marriages for some. “It’s a sign they are coming back from al-hijrah [a mental state of readiness to sacrifice one’s life] to the real world,” one Densus leader said in 2008. Detainees who seemed less committed were separated from hardline mentors. By overcoming suspicion of the thagut, or evil police, investigators aimed to turn detainees from what they called the “lesser jihad”—or a narrow focus on violent methods—to a “greater jihad” of nonviolent or spiritual struggle.
By 2013 the police had arrested about 900 people in their antiterrorism campaign and killed about ninety suspects during raids. Jemaah Islamiyah and its splinter group Jemaah Ansharut Tauhid were disrupted, broken into small cells, largely cut off from sources of funds and technologies, and their bomb-making experts removed. The surviving militant jihadists turned to drive-by assassinations of isolated police officers.
While the threat of terrorism has abated, it has not disappeared. About three-quarters of the terrorists in jail are due for release over the coming decade, many of them still comparatively young. Police think that perhaps 40 percent will have become even more motivated while in prison. In addition, between 150 and 200 Indonesian jihadists are thought to have joined the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria which carved out a “caliphate” across the border of these two countries. Foreign counterpart agencies worry at the lack of a clear “proactive” strategy by Indonesian security agencies to identify and diffuse violent jihadism. The signs are there, they say, in literature, Internet postings, and sermons: what is needed is early intervention with a “counternarrative.” The obstacles to this have been the turf wars between the various police, military, and intelligence agencies; lack of capacity to track student movements to jihadist centers in the Middle East and South Asia; and a protective reaction by the ministries of religious affairs and education when, say, a radical pesantren is identified.
The vagueness of Indonesian law about conspiracy to plan terrorist acts also discourages early intervention. Instead, police feel they must wait until the plotters are ready to strike, hence the high incidence of shootouts and deaths of suspects during arrests. In 2010 Yudhoyono set up the Badan Nasional Penanggulangan Terrorisme (BNPT, National Counter-Terrorism Agency), headed by a retired police general with a retired Kopassus officer as his deputy. It organized meetings known as Klinik Pancasila to educate young Muslims about the national ideology and distributed a pamphlet titled Buku Cinta NKRI (Book of Devotion to the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia).
While the violent attack on Indonesia’s status quo appeared quiescent at the end of Yudhoyono’s presidency, the general picture was one of a nation undergoing an intensification of its conversion to Islam, which started centuries ago but was speeding up in the digital age. The explicitly Islamic parties might have been in decline, but all parties and leaders in a position to take power were taking on an increasingly Islamic character, sought out running mates among respected Muslim figures, and organized Islamic affiliates. The division between santri and abangan was blurring in Java. Alumni of Habibie’s association of Muslim intellectuals were now ministers and potential presidential candidates in ostensibly secular parties.
The issue of the nation’s “Arabization” became a running topic. Devout Muslims were fixated with the Middle East as the center of Islam. New media were transforming the culture of learning, as observers like the sociologist Yudi Latif noted. “The ulama had been the cultural broker or interpreter who adjusted the signal from the Middle East in a harmonious way [that was] within the capacity of local culture to absorb,” Latif says. “The new media have bypassed the local ulama. There is a transnational Islamic movement. The new-age Muslims tend to be cut off from the roots of Indonesian historical tradition and attach themselves to Middle Eastern epistemology.” To many worried minorities and more secular Muslims, it seemed that the goal of the “greater jihad,” a process of deepening faith that would eventually lead to a voluntary embrace of Islamic law and governance, was possibly underway among a large majority of Indonesians.
Yet the example of the PKS showed that a great moderation of the Islamist signal follows when an Islamic grouping shifts into the formal power structure from the outside. The move toward Syari’ah law by Indonesia’s empowered regional governments was also running out of steam in the later years of the century’s first decade, no more so than in Aceh, where it had been applied as a concession to mollify the GAM rebels during Wahid’s presidency. Like other senior GAM figures who had always seen their struggle as primarily a nationalist one, Shadia Mahaban is appalled at the religious zealotry this unfettered. Local newspapers continue to report groups of ulema burning stacks of jeans, which religious police seize from passing women and replace with skirts, or proselytizing on the sinfulness of women straddling motor scooters as drivers (rather than riding sidesaddle as pillion passengers), and generally urging women to retreat from public office.
Such purification campaigns bemuse those who know Acehnese history. The old sultanate had a string of female rulers. Houses were always passed to daughters, along with nearby rice paddies, so their husbands were virtual guests. Acehnese women—notably, the heroine Cut Nha Dhien—fought alongside their menfolk in wars, to the consternation of the more sensitive Dutch soldiers. Uniquely among women of the Malay archipelago, the Acehnese female dress included loose pantaloons, not the tight and hobbling sarongs worn elsewhere. As Mahaban declares, trousers and jeans were thus more authentically Acehnese than the loose skirts handed out by the ulema like prudish nineteenth-century Christian missionaries. Mohammed Nur Djuli says he was branded a “Westernised orientalist” when he wrote about this in the main local newspaper.
Mahaban sees the promotion of Syari’ah as part of a wider struggle for cultural dominance and power that has ramifications across Indonesia. “They are trying to tell the whole of Indonesia, ‘We’re doing this, we’re still powerful,’” she says. “I hate to say it, but it was Gus Dur’s fault. It was his biggest fault, allowing this to happen here, without thinking about Indonesia as a whole. If you look at it culturally, anthropologically, in Aceh it was never like that. This is something very new. It’s like a born-again Islam or something.”
Without the Aceh precedent, the enforcement of Syari’ah by local administrations in parts of West Java and Kalimantan might not have progressed. “It’s not working here, so what makes you think it will work in West Java?” Mahaban asks. “There’s no such thing like this in South-East Asia. It’s something very new. Some kind of identity you want to show, something that we lost during the Suharto era, the Dutch period: the on
ly identity is by showing how religious you are.”
Perhaps this suggests that Indonesia’s long contest between custom and religion is as much a struggle with its feminine side as with anything else. It may be too early to write off the influence of the beautiful Queen of the South Sea, Nyai Loro Kidul.
10
Korupsi
Geckos versus Crocodiles
As Indonesia began its era of direct elections at central and regional levels, it soon became apparent that funding democracy would be an expensive exercise. Soon after Yudhoyono’s installation as president, his coalition member party, Golkar, held a congress in December 2004 at which the vice president, Jusuf Kalla, wrestled the party leadership from the incumbent, Akbar Tanjung. Though a veteran from the Suharto era, Tanjung was widely respected as someone who had adjusted happily enough to the new era. But he was hopelessly outgunned by the money Kalla threw at the party election.
The vote was taken from the 484 provincial and district delegations, each with equal weight. Kalla’s team, according to credible reporting by American embassy officials on the scene, offered each district delegate Rp 200 million (then about $22,000) and each provincial board Rp 500 million or more. There was a cash down payment, with the balance to be delivered after the vote for Kalla came in. The DPR speaker, Agung Laksono, had Rp 50 billion ($5.5 million) to spend, and the wealthy businessman-politician Aburizal Bakrie, who was the economic coordinating minister in Yudhoyono’s cabinet, splashed out Rp 70 billion ($8 million) to secure Kalla’s win.
It was a happy event. As well as collecting their cash and enjoying a good time in the capital’s top hotels at someone else’s expense, the delegates who had backed Kalla could look forward to being closely tied to the government and to receiving support for their own political careers as gubernatorial and bupati candidates. And this was just an internal party election, although admittedly it was in the party traditionally closest to the business plutocracy, which included in its top council some big tycoons, like Bakrie and the Acehnese media entrepreneur Surya Paloh, as well as smaller ones, like Kalla.
As the Yudhoyono decade progressed, it became apparent that politicians and their party machines had an almost insatiable appetite for funding. The new Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK, Corruption Eradication Commission), which had been set up by law in 2002 and had begun operations in 2004, soon found some of its most egregious suspects among ministers and legislators. As scams and fraud were brought to light, and successful prosecutions launched in a special corruption court, public opinion surveys showed that the parliament was regarded as the most corrupt institution in the country. Positions in the DPR “commissions” (or committees) that oversaw the various ministries became ever more highly coveted. Membership meant having a say in whether an allocation for a particular program or purchase should be passed or adjusted upward, and in whether a particular contractor or supplier should be approved. The DPR member involved stood to gain kickbacks both from the ministry that proposed the budgetary allocation and from the supplier who benefited.
The new generation of democratic politicians (who, in many cases, were simply recycled authoritarian spear-carriers) found many willing partners in the bureaucracy and a flexible culture of fiscal probity. Many, if not most, civil servants did not think it unethical, if their department’s outside requirements could be supplied at a cost below the budgeted amount, to keep the difference themselves by arrangement with the contractor. From there, it was but a short step to inflating the budget estimates so that there would definitely be such a margin. This applied to everything from purchases of stationery to high-tech items, such as aircraft and power plants. Kickbacks of 10 to 15 percent were routine in government procurement, the World Bank reported, and contributed about 40 percent of official corruption. In late 2013, as Yudhoyono’s ten years in office neared their end, an even more alarming claim was made by his own former party treasurer, Muhammad Nazaruddin, a former member of the DPR budget committee who was now serving a jail term for rigging a tender. Nazaruddin alleged that an allocation of Rp 5.8 trillion ($523 million) for a new electronic identity card system included a markup of 45 percent, resulting in $500,000 bribes all round for the politicians who approved it.
Satrio Budihardjo Joedono, an economist who served as trade minister and ambassador to Paris in the last years of the Suharto government, was made head of the National Audit Agency by President Habibie in 1999, with a mission to pinpoint financial irregularities in the government apparatus. “You were surprised when anything is not corrupt,” Joedono recalls of his five years in the position. “It was very unusual if you did not find anything.” What he found was a pervasive blurring of the distinction between state property and private property, an attitude carried over from premodern political systems and intensified by the “traditional feudal system” that Suharto had built. “Activities which in a modern legal system would be corrupt, here were not,” Joedono says. All his predecessors since 1945 had signed off on these practices.
The cases rolled on. A former minister of fisheries in the Megawati government was charged over a 32 billion rupiah ($3.5 million) “off-budget” fund derived from funds siphoned out of his ministry budget, plus contributions from fishing industry figures. A former minister for religious affairs, Said Agil Hussein Al Munawar, and his former director general for Islamic guidance and hajj affairs, Taufiq Kamil, were convicted of embezzling nearly $71 million in funds earmarked for Indonesians performing the hajj. Former Investment Coordinating Board chairman Theo F. Toemion was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for misappropriating $2.5 million from the budget for promoting foreign investment. A former election commissioner, Daan Dimara, was given four years for rigging procurement contracts in the 2004 elections.
In the middle of the 2006–7 avian influenza epidemic, which killed 159 Indonesians (out of a worldwide total of 359 deaths), the then director general of medical services at the health ministry, Ratna Dewi Umar, marked up the price of the oxygen ventilators that were urgently required to save patients. The contract went to a company owned by Bambang Rudijanto Tanoesoedibjo, brother of the media mogul and politician Hary Tanoesoedibjo. The illegal margin was estimated to have cost the state Rp 12 billion ($1.2 million). The official, who eventually got a five-year jail term, said she’d followed orders from her boss, the then health minister, who continues to be under investigation for allegedly receiving 10 percent of the markup.
Egged on by a public that was accusing it of ignoring the “big fish,” and having been granted more investigative resources, the anticorruption commission took on suspect parliamentarians. In 2008 it made a 2:00 a.m. raid on a luxury hotel, arresting, among others, a DPR member from the PPP. He was nabbed in his car while in possession of Rp 71 million ($8,000) in cash, which he had just been given by another suspect from Riau province who was involved in a plan to rezone a large swathe of national forest for development (for which the developer had allocated $300,000 to pay off politicians). One colleague in the DPR expressed skepticism about the charge because it was “impossible anyone would offer a lawmaker an amount of money that small.”
Another DPR member, from Golkar, was arrested for marking up the price of fire trucks bought while he was previously governor of Riau. Under Megawati, the home ministry had issued an instruction making a single company the only authorized distributor of fire trucks to provincial governments. A member of Yudhoyono’s PD was forced out by the DPR’s own ethics committee for trying to squeeze commissions out of the hajj program.
In August 2007 Nurdin Halid, long a controversial Golkar politician and commodity dealer, became the first sitting DPR member to be jailed (although his two-year jail term was in fact for milking $18 million from a palm-oil fund while he was running the national food-price stabilization body, Bulog, in the late 1990s). That Halid was a longtime associate of the vice president, Jusuf Kalla, made his conviction more significant, as it signaled
that the anticorruption drive was showing less fear and favor. But as well as discomfiting high-level party patrons, the KPK was pushing into dangerous ground.
Indonesians generally do not trust the people who are supposed to look after their safety and punish wrongdoers: police, prosecutors, and judges. Few go to them for help. Out of the 5 million cases that go through Indonesia’s courts each year, about 4.8 million relate to traffic offenses. Almost all the rest are criminal cases. In other words, these are not cases in which citizens are actively applying for remediation via the judiciary. Trust in the legal system, say many experts, is about the same as it was under colonial rule.
During a closed-door session of the American Chamber of Commerce in 2007, an attorney who advised foreign companies in Jakarta described the local legal system as “harrowing” to a visiting senior official from Washington. “He advises clients in commercial disputes that they cannot afford the corrupt court system and will lose because they cannot play the game the Indonesian way,” noted the US embassy. “Western company executives are sometimes jailed in the case of a dispute with a local partner.”
In commercial and other civil cases, taking a dispute to the police or the courts can be an invitation to extortion. In 2013 a large foreign enterprise in Jakarta with an online payments system found that its network had been hacked and that $2 million in credits had been transferred to a domestic bank account. The company’s IT specialists and accountants identified the account and its owners. But the firm’s legal advisers, one of Jakarta’s top law partnerships, recommended against taking this evident fraud case to the police: doing so would put the company in a bidding war with the fraudsters to get a partisan performance from investigators, prosecutors, and judges. Meanwhile, police detectives would browse through the company’s books, looking for unrelated matters that could be blown up into criminal cases, thereby creating further opportunities for extortion. The company and its foreign owner decided to let the $2 million go.