In a virtual challenge to the president, a senior attorney general’s department official declared that prosecutors were ready to proceed with a case of extortion against the commissioners, while the police restored their chief detective, General Susno, to duty.
In December 2009 the attorney general’s office announced it was dropping all charges against the two commissioners, whom Yudhoyono then reinstated. Over the next year, the KPK moved against participants in the frame-up conspiracy, including the three-star police general, Susno. The police were reluctant to sack their third-ranking officer. When they did, he negotiated to be replaced by a close ally who was known to have a dubious record of protecting illegal gambling and logging.
It took over three years to put Susno in jail. After exhausting his appeals against his forty-two-month jail sentence for corruption and abuse of power, he took to the hills, broadcasting on YouTube that he was only upholding the law because his detention order had not been delivered properly. He was found in the West Java capital, Bandung, after several days on the run and in the protection of police colleagues, including at the provincial police headquarters, from where he was eventually extracted and taken to prison.
In custody, Susno cooperated with KPK investigators by blowing open many of the rackets involving the police and legal mafias, networks so serious that the anticorruption commission was like “a gecko tackling a crocodile,” he claimed. “Suharto was the smiling general,” he told interviewers, a reference to the title of a hagiographic book about the previous regime head. “I’m the singing general.”
Whether or not Susno’s information actually helped, the KPK did move against corrupt elements in the police and judicial system. The agency gained the conviction of a former Indonesian diplomat who was known as a leading “case broker” in the law courts, a man said to be working with a retired police general. He had offered Susno a big bribe to turn a civil case into a criminal one.
In September 2013 Djoko Susilo became the first serving police general to be convicted for corruption, for which he got ten years in jail. The former head of the Indonesian National Police’s traffic division had gained Rp 32 billion ($2.6 million) from the winner of a tender for providing driving simulators, in a contract inflated by Rp 145 billion ($12 million). The anticorruption agency presented the court with evidence that Djoko had amassed over Rp 100 billion ($8.3 million) in assets over the previous ten years, despite having a salary of only Rp 28 million ($2,300) a month. The ownership of luxury houses across Java and Bali, tour buses, petrol stations, and other properties was put in the names of his three wives and other relatives. On receiving a copy of Djoko’s autobiography during a tear-filled defense plea, the judges were astonished to find a $100 bill slipped between the pages.
By the end of Yudhoyono’s second term, the anticorruption commission was one of the more successful additions to the armory of the newly democratic Indonesian state. Its headquarters and leaders were known to all and sundry. Tens of thousands of tip-offs flowed in each year. Swarms of reporters camped at its front door every day, waiting for fresh news. The anticorruption drive was supported by many of the biggest civil society groups, including NU and Muhammadiyah.
But the KPK had its weaknesses, which are only gradually being addressed. Many of its operational difficulties stemmed from the reluctance of Indonesia’s ministries and agencies to cooperate and share information with other arms of government or even with different branches of their own agency. This continues despite the formation in 2005 of the Interagency Team to Eradicate Corruption. Inaccessible reporting by the two government audit agencies, especially since some 30 percent of government spending is devolved to provinces and regencies, removes a vital support for the anticorruption effort. Speedy access to bank records has been another problem area, as searches require high-level formal requests to the central bank for permission. A new witness protection agency can be employed to keep the anonymity of whistleblowers and informers, but the KPK lacks the power to give immunity from prosecution, lessening the chances of low-level participants in corruption squealing on those higher up. Judges are slowly getting used to new forms of evidence, such as secret recordings, financial data, and retrievals from computer hard drives.
An anti-money-laundering law was passed in 2010, but it is still not used. Indonesian law enforcement agencies remain weak when it comes to following money trails, except when large amounts of cash are hand delivered. Even then, golf instructors, security guards, and even parking attendants are employed to maintain a cutout in the chain of responsibility and to take the rap if necessary. Not having the power to terminate an investigation can make the KPK hesitate to start one. Poor definitions of a “loss to the state” lead courts to conclude that corruption cannot exist without such a proven loss. Conversely, judges and prosecutors often conclude that “losses to the state” must result from corruption rather than from mistaken decisions, such as with loans from state banks that become nonperforming. An extradition treaty was signed in 2007 with Singapore, the bolt-hole where 18,000 Indonesian millionaires resided with total estimated assets at the time of $87 billion. It remains unratified by the Indonesian parliament.
The integration of the corruption court into the general court system under the aegis of the Supreme Court, resulting from a constitutional challenge to a “separate” judicial system, led other agencies to file cases with the corruption court. The Chevron and Indosat prosecutions were two examples in which regular state prosecutors made criminal cases out of what looked to every expert in those fields to be just routine and perfectly legal technical matters. While the KPK continued to have a 100 percent success rate with its cases in the court, the attorney general’s office started recording some acquittals, raising suspicions that some cases had been doctored to fail.
The parliament, whose members were so often in the sights of the KPK, also jumped into the corruption hunt for evident political purposes, notably in the long-running Bank Century case. The medium-sized bank was showing signs of failure as the global financial crisis unfolded after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Fearing contagion in the Indonesian banking system should Century also fold, Yudhoyono’s coordinating economic minister, Sri Mulyani, and the Bank Indonesia governor, Boediono, decided in November 2008 on emergency capital injections amounting to $677 million. After Yudhoyono’s sweeping election win the following year, during which he replaced Jusuf Kalla with Boediono as vice president, the bailout became a weapon used against Yudhoyono.
Kalla led criticisms that the rescue money had been diverted for nefarious purposes, including the financing of Yudhoyono’s election campaign. Indeed, well-connected big corporations and state enterprises had gotten their money out quickly, and the bank’s two owners, Rafat Ali Rizvi and Hesham Al-Warraq, disappeared; both were later given fifteen-year jail terms for embezzlement.
Another target of the parliamentary claque was Sri Mulyani, who had reverted to finance minister in the second-term government. As we have seen, she was pursuing the leading figure Aburizal Bakrie’s business group for large unpaid taxes, was refusing to put government money into his financially troubled coal mine, and would not certify the Lapindo “mud volcano” in East Java as a natural disaster rather than an accident. The parliamentary uproar did not dislodge Yudhoyono or Boediono, but it did claim the scalp of Sri Mulyani for Bakrie. The news that she was moving to the World Bank in May 2010 shattered confidence that Yudhoyono’s second term would see him move ahead with serious reform and stamped him as a weak, consensual leader. Five years later, the parliament, the KPK, and the state auditors were still looking for any evidence that Sri Mulyani and Boediono acted out of any motive other than preventing a general bank run, or that they might have known about fraud in Bank Century at the time, and were not finding it.
A decade on from the start of Indonesia’s era of direct elections and political devolution, big corruption cases kept coming.
Perhaps the most stunning fall from grace was the involvement of top figures in the PKS, a party of pragmatic work and faith that was based on the Muslim Brotherhood model in Egypt and Turkey. Campaigning on personal ethics and zero tolerance of corruption, it had won the fourth-biggest block of seats in the 2009 parliamentary election. In January 2013, KPK investigators raided a Jakarta hotel room to find one Ahmad Fathanah, a naked female student, and a suitcase containing Rp 1 billion. Ahmad turned out to be a secretary to Luthfi Hasan Ishaaq, chairman of the PKS. The case developed into a corruption scandal that reached up into the PKS and the agriculture ministry, one of the appointments allotted to the party in Yudhoyono’s ruling coalition. Money was coming via Ahmad from a company given a larger quota to import beef, a foodstuff in short supply. Millions were being raised with an eye to funding the approaching elections in 2014, less sizeable amounts siphoned off in passing by individuals for cars and gifts to female models.
Yudhoyono himself managed to get to the end of his decade in office without a financial scandal hanging over him personally, which was no mean achievement. But by then his own PD had taken a big blow. In 2012 his youth and sports minister, Andi Mallarangeng, had been forced to resign over alleged kickbacks from a contract to build a sports complex at Hambalang, in West Java. In early 2013 the anticorruption commission had also listed as a suspect Anas Urbaningrum, the party’s chairman in the parliament and a rising star who was being mentioned as a possible successor to Yudhoyono as presidential candidate.
From one point of view, the parade of big corruption cases rising higher and higher in the political world was a good sign for Indonesia. From another and more depressing angle, it seemed to show that years of active anticorruption detection and punishment were not deterring people from the most brazen misbehavior. One foreign business adviser in Jakarta for decades has likened the corruption load to the annual migration of wildebeest across the Mara River in Kenya. Most get safely across in the rush, but a few who are exposed on the flanks fall to the lurking crocodiles—in this analogy, the KPK.
Pushing the demand for bribes and extorted payments are low official salaries and the widening income gaps that are all too visible in Indonesian cities. Decision-making processes within government agencies have grown complicated precisely in order to extract fees from outside customers and from colleagues. Efforts to speed up and make transparent the more routine processing of permits and documents succeed where online and other methods can be employed. Sharply increased budget allocations to core agencies, such as the Indonesian National Police and the Ministry of Finance, are still not raising salaries enough to remove the need for moonlighting in second jobs or the temptation of corruption among the 5 million state-sector employees.
Five years after Sri Mulyani carried out a sweeping replacement of corrupt personnel in the finance ministry’s income tax and customs departments, tax officers were still soliciting bribes to reduce exorbitant opening tax assessments from big foreign companies. New recruits to the noncommissioned ranks of the police were still expected to pay some Rp 50 million ($4,100) for acceptance, to commence a job that paid just Rp 250,000 ($21) a month—below the poverty line—for the first six years. The fee for entry to the officer cadre was much higher. In August 2013, Sofian Effendi, from the Independent Team for Bureaucracy Reform, an activist group, estimated that, on average, a candidate for a civil service position had to pay Rp 150 million ($12,500) to be accepted.
Governors, bupatis, and mayors used these payments to recoup election expenses and to fund patronage. Karyono Wibowo of the Indonesian Public Institute, a think tank, said running for mayor or bupati could cost around Rp 5 billion ($416,000), depending on the region’s economic strength. Running for provincial governor could cost above Rp 100 billion ($832,000). Between 1999 and mid-2013, 298 governors, bupati, and city mayors (from the nation’s thirty-three provinces and nearly 500 regions and municipalities) were jailed for corruption.
Each year 170,000 new state employees are recruited. The new civil service recruits, having paid so much for their jobs, in turn squeeze their clients or accept bribes, according to Emerson Yuntho of the activist group Indonesia Corruption Watch: “They will start to do whatever it takes to get their money back. And once they enjoy the easy money, they will continue to accept bribes or stolen state money.”*
Johan Budi, the KPK’s public spokesman, argues that low salaries are not the only factor, or even the main one. He points to the stream of high-income officials coming before the courts for corruption. In August, for example, Budi’s agency arrested the head of the oil and gas ministry’s agency in charge of sales of surplus production to the state’s refining capacity, Rudi Rubiandini, as he received a $600,000 payment from agents of a Singapore oil trading firm. “Rudi would be on a salary of Rp 200 million [$18,000] or more per month. How much is enough?” Budi asked. A good argument, but public conjecture was that Rudi, previously a professor of petroleum engineering at the Bandung Institute of Technology, was perhaps simply a naive newcomer to a wider fundraising network within the ministry, known as the “oil mafia.”
Along with continued detection and law enforcement, and more transparent processes in government, a significant drop in corruption probably depends on a steady reduction in the size of the bureaucracy, a large proportion of which is idle for much of its working day anyway, accompanied by a rise in productivity and salary levels based on promotion by merit. That might be funded either by improved revenues or by part of the proceeds from cuts in subsidies for goods consumed mostly by higher-income groups. Planning for such a bold reform was delegated to Boediono in Yudhoyono’s second term but was abandoned as too hard.
At the KPK, Johan Budi admits the anticorruption fight will be “a never-ending story.” Meanwhile, any foreign investor will find it hard to avoid demands for payments from a baffling multiplicity of gatekeepers. Under Suharto, big and medium business at least knew who had to be satisfied: the doors then opened, and appeals could be made against any obstacles. Now their executives also remain at risk from police and the legal mafia, who insert themselves into commercial, environmental, and labor disputes, and extort money by putting staff in cells. The smaller the enterprise, the bigger the risk, but the Chevron case shows that size alone brings no immunity.
Indonesians are less and less accepting of the idea that corruption is part of their culture. Dozens of nongovernmental organizations, such as Indonesia Corruption Watch and Transparency International, are publicizing cases of malfeasance at the local and regional levels, bringing them to national attention, sometimes at great risk to their activists. The media relentlessly publicize investigations and trials. The quick rise of the “cleanskin” politician Joko Widodo from mayor of a small city to governor of the capital—and successful presidential candidate—shows that there is a hunger among the Indonesian public for honesty and moderation on the part of their leaders.
Notes
*Yuli, Krisna, Novy Lumanauw & Robertus Wardi, “Paying the Price for a Slack Civil Service,” The Jakarta Globe, August 29, 2013.
11
The Eastern Margin
The official crossing between Southeast Asia and the South Pacific is at a place called Skouw, on the north coast of New Guinea. From the nearest big town to the west, Jayapura, it’s reached by a two-hour drive that starts around spectacular bays and hills and ends in a straight run through thick jungle. At Skouw there is a collection of customs and immigration buildings and beyond them an archway notifying you of your exit from Indonesian territory. On a rise a bit further on, the jungle has been cut back, yielding glimpses of a blue sea to the left and green mountains to the right. A wire mesh fence marks the start of Papua New Guinea. A sign declares it a nation guided by Jesus Christ. Another, in Tok Pisin, urges care against HIV infection: Lukautim yu, yet lukautim famili.
Asymmetries abound. On the Indonesian approaches are the base camps and forward po
sts of an army battalion, one of four kept along the border with Papua New Guinea, on rotation from other parts of Indonesia. Indonesian officials and army officers drive around in new-model luxury four-wheel drives. On the Papua New Guinean side, at Vanimo, the nearest town, is a single company drawn from one of the only two battalions in the entire Papua New Guinea defense force. The company’s forward deployment is a platoon of a dozen soldiers, stationed at the village of Wutung, near the border post. The official vehicles are basic Toyota Land Cruisers with bench seats.
Although Papua New Guinea has only 7.2 million people, compared to the 240 million of Indonesia, its border post flies a more diverse array of flags: the national flag, with its bird of paradise and the Southern Cross, flaps above the flags of the country’s twenty provinces. Along the Indonesian perimeter every flagpole hoists the same emblem: the red and white of the Negara Kesatuan Republic Indonesia. In this “unitary state,” symbols of regional loyalties are seen as a threat, even if they are tolerated for the time being at the other end of the archipelago in Aceh.
The border itself—the result of Dutch, German, and British officials far away in Europe drawing a line down the 141st meridian of longitude on a map in the late nineteenth century—is not much of a barrier. Every day, hundreds of people walk from Papua New Guinea through the Skouw border post into Indonesia, flashing a local identity card, so they can tend food gardens on their traditional lands or buy household supplies at cheaper prices than in Vanimo’s shops, while many Indonesian peddlers cross the other way.
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