Foreigners fathered RI's graft

Foreigners fathered RI's graft

By Donna K. Woodward

MEDAN (JP): Indonesia is a country often at the top of the
world's lists of the most corrupt countries. Why?

Is Indonesian culture innately and inevitably corrupt?

Contrary to this popular but superficial view, corruption is
not an endemic part of Indonesia's culture or character.

Indonesians too are appalled and ashamed by the magnitude of
corruption here. To blame corruption on the culture allows
expatriates to feel morally superior, and culturally superior, to
Indonesians.

Blaming corruption on the culture also makes it easy for
Indonesians to absolve themselves of personal responsibility for
doing something about institutionalized corruption.

It is time for us all, expatriates and Indonesians alike, to
move beyond this simplistic and misleading view of corruption as
an inevitable consequence of Indonesian culture.

It is time to abandon the paralyzing clich that corruption is
simply a matter of culture, and instead look for effective ways
to combat this national shame.

Whence came corruption?

Several factors contribute to the subculture of corruption in
Indonesia. Like most Asian countries, Indonesia has a culture
that strongly favors gift-giving, particularly as a means of
expressing gratitude and loyalty to authority figures or to
reward service.

Corruption may be traceable in part to this practice. But
Indonesians themselves distinguish between their traditional
practice of giving gifts to express loyalty and appreciation, and
the extortion practiced by some bureaucrats who exploit this
generous trait.

Corruption is in part a remnant of a feudalistic political
system and a village mentality. Indonesia is not so long removed
from a village-based social structure and economy and a political
system akin to feudalism.

Western nations evolved from feudalism into urbanization and
industrialization slowly, over many generations and centuries.
Now economic development comes much faster to developing
countries. Factories and shopping malls can appear almost
overnight.

In a generation or two, a whole area can be transformed from a
village to an urban town. But corresponding sociopolitical
changes still take several generations. It takes time for
people's attitudes, habits and preferences to catch up with
economic changes.

Even when people's economic lives appear urban, their values
often still reflect a village outlook.

The deference shown to authority figures; the importance of
participating in kinship events, even when doing so requires
significant disruption of one's work-related responsibilities;
the de-emphasis of punctuality and efficiency; the need to
preserve harmony among group members: these values are hallmarks
of a village or feudal culture.

The tendency almost to deify leaders at every level; the sense
of obligation and loyalty toward authority figures; the need to
avoid open conflict on issues about which there is obvious
disagreement; the distaste for imposing punishment or penalties
on in-group members: attitudes such as these create a fertile
field for abuse of power and greed to flourish in.

And corruption has flourished here. Greed, abuse of power,
dishonesty -- these are ingredients of corruption. But they do
not define Indonesian culture any more than they define American,
Dutch, Indian, English or German culture. Let us not misconstrue
what we see. Corruption is a perversion of Indonesian culture,
not its essence.

Corruption grew against a backdrop of poverty, or more
accurately a lack of manufactured possessions, which historically
distinguished the indigenous inhabitants of Indonesia from the
foreigners who landed on their shores.

Imagine the scene as the early Europeans arrived here. Their
vessels were larger than those of the local seafarers. Their
clothing was more elaborate and more effective in protecting them
from the elements. Their foodstuffs were more varied and more
easily obtained (from barrels rather than from trees and fields).
Their trinkets were dazzling and mysterious. And their weapons
were more potent.

Is it any wonder that Europeans seemed wealthy and powerful to
the indigenous population, even to those locals whose own wealth
might have included land or gold or gems enough for a king's
ransom? Is it surprising that foreign explorers (and later
traders and tourists) who thought of themselves as more advanced,
reciprocated the hospitality and assistance they were given with
excessive payments in kind?

Foreigners came to be seen as those-who-bestow. They indulged
their generous instincts and vanity, as well as the needs of the
less materially endowed local populace, by paying local workers
more than they were used to being paid for their labor, advice
and services.

It is not difficult to understand how the two groups, locals
and foreigners, developed a pattern of relating to each other
which cast the foreigners in the role of the suppliers of
material gifts or money, and the local inhabitants in the role of
supplicant.

The roles soon changed, of course, in that the local
population became the suppliers of the labor and local expertise
that the foreigners needed. But the initial pattern remained.
That pattern placed the relationship of foreigners to locals as
benefactors to recipients, as the powerful to the subordinate, as
the wealthy to the poor -- such is the archetypal pattern which
is at the heart of the colonial mentality.

Even now, when the wealthiest individuals and corporations in
Indonesia are Indonesian, the myth of the rich foreigner survives
among Indonesians. The perception is that foreigners have lots of
money and will give it to their less wealthy Indonesian brethren
to get what they want. That is what foreigners did in the past.
And it is what they often still do. Expatriates have the money to
pay to get things done -- and they spend it freely.

Expatriates who would not dream of paying an official to
perform a required service or to bend the laws for them at home,
are quite comfortable doing it here. Rather, they have their
Indonesian associates and agents handle it -- as if the
Indonesians were from a lower caste with lower standards of
propriety than their expatriate associates; the expatriates' very
own "carcass cleaners".

Expatriates, who in another context would object to the fact
that a restaurant automatically add a 15 percent gratuity to the
bill, will uncritically pay Rp 300,000 for a document which
should cost one-fifth that amount. That is, expatriates let their
companies pay. Foreigners whose multinational companies often
have large amounts of 'facilitation' money available, can afford
to pay, and pay well, for speedy results with documents, or for
official neglect of violations of regulations.

Enterprising Indonesians have learned this over the years, and
they exploit this. Yes, expatriates are sometimes exploited by
greedy Indonesians. But the system serves the purposes of
foreigners as much as it serves those of the officials and agents
who take the money.

By now illegal payments are so much a part of the modus
operandi of some companies that they, having long enjoyed
mutually-beneficial arrangements with accommodating officials,
might be reluctant to upset the relationships they've co-
engineered. Without foreigners in the equation, corruption would
be on a whole different, smaller order in Indonesia.

Foreigners' tendency to pay excessively, and Indonesians'
understandable instincts for safeguarding such gratuitous
payments by institutionalizing them, created this system of using
duit (money) to get things done. Feeding certain Indonesian
cultural tendencies and economic vulnerabilities, foreign
arrivistes were an essential part of the genesis of corruption.

Foreigners fathered this culture of corruption, and now prefer
to disown it as if its mother, Indonesia, conceived the monster
on her own. Isn't it time to stop stereotyping Indonesians as a
people whose culture makes them hopelessly corrupt? Isn't it time
to stop thinking of corruption as something practiced by
Indonesians, and foreigners as its hapless victims?

Corruption is not the result of which national or ethnic or
racial culture we belong to. It's a matter of the values we
subscribe to, the decisions we make, the actions we take.

The view that corrupt practices are an inherent part of
Indonesian culture is a corrosive myth. Until the myth is
replaced by a different analysis, there is only a dim hope on
Indonesia's immediate horizon for economic or political reform
and national development. Will Indonesians reject the myth?

The writer, a former American diplomat who came to Indonesia
in 1991, is an attorney with a background in education and
psychology.