Civil servants need political freedom: LIPI
JAKARTA (JP): A government-commissioned survey by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) has recommended that civil servants should be allowed to join any political organization.
The survey, made public yesterday, suggested that as long as the six-million-strong Indonesian Civil Servants Corps remained tied to Golkar poor public service standards would persist.
Civil servants are obliged, by decrees, to support the government-backed political grouping although no law requires them to affiliate to any political organization.
Three political organizations are sanctioned in Indonesia to contest general elections: Golkar, the United Development Party (PPP) and the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI).
An alternative recommendation that LIPI offered was that senior bureaucrats of a certain seniority should be allowed to become Golkar members but not executives.
Only if civil servants had the freedom to choose a political organization would the bureaucracy's notoriously discriminative treatment of PPP and PDI members be stopped, the report said.
The survey, conducted in Surabaya, Manado, Jayapura and Banda Aceh, found that civil servants' obligation to support Golkar left their vow to treat all citizens equally as "mere rhetoric".
"The result is widespread corruption, manipulation and primordial attitudes in our bureaucracy," said researcher Sri Yanuarti when presenting the survey.
Leaders of the Moslem-based PPP and the Christian-nationalist PDI have long demanded in vain that the government restore civil servants' rights to join political parties of their choice.
Neutral
They argue that the civil servants' mandatory bond with Golkar has seen bureaucrats favor Golkar although they are supposed to be politically neutral.
The survey confirms that the civil servants corps favors Golkar, which was founded by the Army in 1964 to counter the growing threat of the Indonesian Communist Party.
Although the 1985 Law on political organizations allows civil servants to join any political party, the guarantee does not apply in practice because such moves would be prohibited by their seniors.
"Civil servants who won't listen to their supervisors are subject to punitive action ranging from warnings to dismissal," Yanuarti said.
The government has instilled in civil servants the perception that they should vote for Golkar in every election if they want development programs to continue, she said.
"Explicitly or implicitly, the other political parties (PPP and PDI) are portrayed as 'evil spirits' in the political and development processes," the report said.
Civil servants are mobilized to promote Golkar, especially during elections.
"Teachers and headmasters have an additional burden to help Golkar win the election in their respective neighborhoods. They are supposed to persuade students to apply for Golkar membership," Yanuarti reported.
Ryas Rasyid, rector of the state Institute for Public Administration, said there was nothing wrong with the prevailing system in which civil servants supported Golkar.
He said that what needed to be done was to improve civil servants' impartiality rather than give them the freedom to join political organizations other than Golkar.
Civil servants are pragmatic in that they choose to affiliate with Golkar because they know the political grouping has brought about prosperity for them and the public.
Besides, he added, their support was needed to ensure the government remained strong -- something that all countries needed to guarantee sustainable development. (pan)
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