Crime never pays
Crime never pays
Arief Budiman's article Why should bad guys always win? on May 20, 1996 is at best disappointing, especially from the pen of a sociologist and researcher. Arief Budiman has not given adequate weight to the political will to combat the "rent seeking system". The trial of Eddy Tansil which resulted in his prison sentence of 20 years, the imprisonment of officials of Bank Pembangunan Indonesia and denting the image of the ministers who honestly believed in the sincerity of this businessman, speaks volumes of this willingness.
The political willingness can destroy the rent seeking system. Arief Budiman writes: "The many victims of the Eddy Tansil saga prove that collusion is a group crime, it is not the responsibility of one individual. It constitutes cooperation between the bad and the good guys, working together within the rent seeking system." Budiman's evaluation may be economically true. Opinion on this can vary from one extreme to the other. Another opinion could be that the bad guys were extremely careful in selecting their group, totally eliminating the good guys from the operation. Otherwise, there would have been a definite leak about Eddy Tansil's plan to escape.
Another factor overlooked by Arief Budiman is the jurisprudence in the country. In most developing countries, the sad truth is that the judicial machinery is grossly inadequate to investigate and give fair trial to even small-time petty thieves, let alone big-time operators. In my opinion, a radical change is needed in the jurisprudence of most developing countries. The judicial system adopted from colonial rulers is outdated even for rural societies, not to mention industrial and postindustrial societies. With massive industrialization, societies are becoming increasingly complex and politically conscious and people's grievances are far from traditional. It is now public knowledge that the judiciary needs a crucial facelift. Without undergoing thorough reform, no amount of tinkering with the jurisprudence will solve deep-rooted problems in society. It is true that in the old days the job of the court was to interpret the law, and prosecution was the job of the executive branch of the government. A better jurisprudence cannot afford to ignore the way of prosecution.
In Italy, an enterprising magistrate broke the unspoken code, crumbling a rotten system of political culture in which bribes and mafia connections were rife. Police and bureaucrats cooperated in a tacit conspiracy not to bring each other down, as each had many secrets to hide. Similarly, when four ordinary citizens filed a public interest suit in the Supreme Court in India, Justice J.S. Varma ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to go ahead and lay charges. The result: 65 politicians belonging to virtually all parties are being investigated for taking bribes totaling US$18 million from a business family.
To support this argument, I take the case of Eddy Tansil from a different angle. Unlike self-power built on morals, character and principles, ego-based power lasts only as long as the object of reference exists. If the source of power is money, the power will not go away by confining a man in a prison. As soon as his money goes, so does his power. I may not be wrong when I say that Eddy Tansil has the power; power of money while he was in jail and this power he used to escape. Primary punishment for Eddy Tansil would have been the effective implementation of stripping him of all his money-based power and carefully observing his connections.
Finally, Eddy Tansil is a loser, not a winner. Bad guys always lose, at least in the long run.
D. PRABHAKAR
Jakarta