A power grab cloaked in moralism

A power grab cloaked in moralism

By John Roosa

JAKARTA (JP): One reason for the continuing volatility in
Indonesian politics resides in the fact that the legislature,
almost from the moment it elected Abdurrahman Wahid as President,
has been frenetically busy trying to find some pretext for
unseating him.

Four of the five major factions -- the Indonesian Democratic
Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan), Golkar, United Development
(PP) and Reformasi, and some of the minor ones -- the Crescent
Star Party (PBB) and Justice Party (PK) quickly took a series of
issues and non-issues and blew them up into scandals: the
President travels abroad too much, he talks too much, he insults
Islam and so on.

Their campaign against the president reached a high point last
year when they whipped up a controversy, a largely forgettable
one, over the President's dismissal of two cabinet ministers in
April, Laksmana Sukardi and Yusuf Kalla. By now, it is clear that
if the Brunei and Bulog scandals did not exist they would have to
have been invented.

These scandals that the legislature hopes will deliver the
coup de grace to Abdurrahman's presidency hardly deserve the suffix
"gate" and the implicit comparison to president Nixon's well-
proven criminal actions.

The House of Representatives (DPR) has little evidence of his
involvement in the shady money deals and no evidence would stand
up in court.

The best that the DPR's sub-commission could muster in its
report, after five months of work, was nothing more than what was
apparent at the start, that Abdurrahman "could be suspected" of having
been involved.

That the speakers of both the House and the People's
Consultative Assembly (MPR) have suggested Abdurrahman resign merely
because of a suspicion of corruption begins a dangerous
precedent.

If we are working only on the basis of suspicion, every member
of the House might as well resign. Golkar, for instance, should
have dissolved itself months ago because of the Bank Bali
scandal.

Given that corruption is ubiquitous and routinized in
Indonesia, earning it near-perfect ratings in the annual
Transparency International surveys, one would have to be
pathologically naive to think that any administration ruling at
this time would be free from it.

The question of corruption can not be taken as one of
absolutes, only as one of degrees. And it terms of degrees, these
two cases that the legislature have latched onto should be far
down on the list of priorities.

The total amount of money in question is about US$5 million,
petty cash when compared to the $16 billion for the scandal of
the Bank Liquidity Support Facility, the tens of billions the
Soeharto family is suspected to have squirreled away, the
millions alleged to have been misappropriated from the military's
Kostrad's foundation, and so on.

One must not only think in degrees of corruption, one must
think in terms of the institutional procedures by which cases of
corruption are being addressed. The House has not shown any
compelling reason why it should have intervened in these two
cases when they are in the process of being handled by the police
and the judiciary.

What is happening here is a simple sectarian power grab. The
specifics of the Brunei and Bulog scandals hardly matter to the
opposition parties; the cases are simply pretexts to put the
presidency in crisis.

Those political pundits who pontificate on the need for high
moral standards and demand Gus Dur resign because of the mere
"taint of corruption" are the witting or unwitting accomplices of
this power grab.

Who sincerely believes that an administration under Megawati
Soekarnoputri would be any cleaner given all the cases of
corruption in which PDI Perjuangan members (with their many
business interests) have been involved over the past year?

As Speakers of the MPR and the DPR, Amien Rais and Akbar
Tanjung can take pride in having accomplished little else up to
now but the sabotaging of Abdurrahman's presidency.

The MPR during its annual sitting in August devoted so much of
its time scheming against Abdurrahman that it did not have the time to
seriously discuss the proposed changes to the constitution. It
hurriedly passed 10 decrees on the final day of its sitting,
including a decree containing a clause on the non-retroactivity
of laws that Amien Rais himself later admitted had implications
of which he was unaware.

The DPR has so far done nothing to design a budget that
reflects national priorities, as opposed to the priorities of the
International Monetary Fund for austerity, and nothing to repeal
the discriminative racial laws of the New Order.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the House has waged
an anti-Gus Dur campaign to compensate for its lack of any
program of reform. No wonder that 74 percent of the public, in an
Kompas opinion poll in January 2001, were dissatisfied with the
work of the DPR and 60 percent believed the DPR's main activity
was trying to unseat the president.

So single-minded has been their quest to unseat Gus Dur, the
opposition parties have been wooing the military, the institution
that represents the single greatest threat to democracy.

The MPR extended the military's representation in the
legislature until 2009. The DPR passed a law in November to
establish a human rights court but added a clause on non-
retroactivity (reiterating the MPR's clause) that effectively
granted impunity to the rights violators of the Soeharto era.

The DPR is now planning to reintroduce a bill to codify the
means by which the military can assume control over the
government in case of an emergency.

The opposition parties, with the flap over the "Bulok Rantai
document," connived in the army's sidelining of its only serious
reformers, Agus Wirahadikusumah and Saurip Kadi, who were being
promoted by Gus Dur.

When the House was elected in 1998, there were great hopes
that a new era of democracy had begun. Sadly enough, what
resulted, after a campaign when the money of Soeharto's cronies,
including B.J. Habibie, burst out in floods, was the return of
New Order politicians.

According to one calculation, about 60 percent of the DPR
members are holdovers from the Soeharto government.

The most notable New Order elements are Golkar, whose well-
greased electoral machine won 24 percent of the DPR seats, and
the PPP, consisting of longtime obedient servants of Soeharto,
which won 12 percent.

The PDI Perjuangan, which had a halfway legitimate claim to
being a genuine party of reform, won the plurality of the seats
(31 percent) only to turn around and hand the reins of the party
to New Order stalwarts (Arifin Panigoro, Theo Syafei, etc) and
drive away more reformist members (Eros Djarot, Muchtar Buchori,
etc.).

The political parties seem oblivious to the fact that
Indonesia is a nation in crisis and can not afford unprincipled
power games.

In case their vision is clouded over by their lust for power,
perhaps it is necessary to recall some facts: one million
Indonesians are internal refugees, the country's total foreign
debt is equal to its annual gross national product, the IMF
dictates terms to the government and is imposing an austerity
program that promises to dramatically increase the level of
poverty, the military remains a law unto itself beyond even the
President's control, wars are raging in Aceh, Irian Jaya, and
Ambon, the judiciary is rated the worst in Asia, gangs in the
capital city trash restaurants and discos with impunity, the
Muslim groups who want to turn Indonesia into an "Islamic state"
are becoming increasingly powerful and militant, and evidence
indicates that the fugitive Tommy Soeharto is on a bombing spree.

As President, Gus Dur has not pioneered any solutions to these
problems but he has, at the very least, tried to counter the New
Order politicians and generals who have been overtly and covertly
fueling many of them.

If he is forced out of power, which is almost certain at this
point, it will not mean a victory over corruption, much less a
victory for reform.

It will only mean a new division of the spoils of office and
the rise to power of politicians who have proven themselves even
more bereft of a commitment to a reform agenda.

The writer is a historian of South and Southeast Asia with a
PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the United States,
presently conducting research in Indonesia.