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.