Avoiding semantic chaos
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.