Avoiding semantic chaos
Since president Soeharto's resignation last month, people have been noisily calling for an end to corruption, collusion and nepotism.
People also discuss ways to avoid a recurrence of such illicit business practices and ridicule those they believe are at the root of the three evil diseases. The topic has become so popular that people here have given the three problems a popular acronym, KKN, standing for 'korupsi', 'kolusi' and 'nepotisme'.
While some people are busy discussing the matter, university students are busy staging antigraft demonstrations. Some have gone so far as to occupy local legislative council premises to press reluctant legislators to support their cause.
Calls for the dismissal of certain officials believed to have been involved in KKN have become so hysterical that it is causing confusion among many bureaucrats. President B. J. Habibie has not been spared from the onslaught. His younger brother Junus Effendy quit his job as the head of the Batam Industrial Development Authority, and his son Ilham resigned as assistant to chief of the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT) in a bid to stanch accusations of nepotism aimed at the senior Habibie.
It is very tempting to speculate which of the three bureaucratic diseases will claim the most casualties. Nepotism is the flavor of the week, mainly because people consider it the easiest charge to prove.
It is quite understandable because in the present political culture -- inherited from the Soeharto era -- corruption has frustratingly challenged law enforcement agencies because corrupt officials have been able to keep the law at bay and intimidate the public into accepting corruption. Proof of the country's corrupt mentality was evident in the nonchalance of local authorities to the results of a survey reported by the Hong Kong- based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd. (PERC) last year proclaiming Indonesia the most corrupt country in Asia.
Besides, probes into corruption and collusion cases have always run aground whenever powerful officials have been involved. The principle of equal justice under the law is still a dream here. There has also been a lack of morality in the handling of corruption cases.
To avoid innocent people falling victim to public outrage, the government said on Thursday it would soon issue comprehensive criteria on what actions constitute corruption, collusion and nepotism.
We can imagine how tricky the job will be. Cabinet members have witnessed how tangled is the illicit web of doing business here and how impotent our legal system is in the face of a corrupt regime. In the recent past, it was common for the president's children to gain government multimillion dollar projects without tender.
Last week, former vice president Sudharmono and two former ministers tried hard to convince the public that all the foundations set up by Soeharto were purely private ventures which gained "voluntary" financial support from many parties.
We believe that Sudharmono and his colleagues must be aware that it was impossible to separate Soeharto from his presidency -- or his ironhanded rule, to be more precise -- or for anybody to turn down his requests because that would be suicidal. The manipulative activities were rampant in the absence of transparency.
What Sudharmono, or Soeharto, seems to have forgotten is a saying by Abraham Lincoln: You can fool some people some time, you can even fool whole people some time, but you cannot fool whole people the whole time.
We hope the government will not resort to this kind of illogical thinking in making the criteria for corruption, collusion and nepotism in order to avoid legal semantic confusion.