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judicial system adopted from colonial rulers is outdated even for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