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.