Inequality before the law

President Abdurrahman Wahid has made a complete mockery of the country's legal process by ordering the Attorney General's Office to delay the prosecution of three prominent tycoons on account of their supposedly huge contribution to exports, and hence to the process of Indonesia's economic recovery.

We have long sensed something amiss in the failure to bring to trial the many businesspeople who through their misdeeds brought the country to its present state of near bankruptcy. We assumed the problem was in finding evidence against these businesspeople that would stand up in court. The President's startling disclosure, made in Seoul on Thursday, confirmed lingering suspicions of not only a lack of political will to prosecute these businesspeople, but also of a deliberate policy to delay prosecution, a policy that comes from the very top.

President Abdurrahman could not have dropped a worse bombshell to mark the first anniversary of his administration, which fell on Friday. His instruction to delay the prosecution amounted to an unwarranted intervention in the judicial process. We leave it to constitutional law experts to determine whether his behavior amounts to an impeachable offense, but he has surely given an additional potent bullet to his opponents in the House of Representatives who are bent on bringing down his administration.

The country's legal system, when it comes to trying large corruptors, is already cumbersome and frustratingly slow without presidential intervention. This is especially true for the big debtors who forced the government to turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for money to bailout their businesses, which collapsed in the wake of the 1997 financial crisis. To this date, not one of them has been tried, let alone convicted, for misdeeds and the mismanagement of their companies, going back to the 1990s.

The government's failure to prosecute these people, and now the President's disclosure, has sent the message that when it comes to the law, some people in this country are more equal than others. People have been convicted for petty theft, but conglomerates receive impunity for grand theft.

That the President should single out three businessmen -- Texmaco Group chairman Marimutu Sinivasan, Barito Pacific Group chairman Prajogo Pangestu and the chairman of the Gadjah Tunggal Group, Syamsul Nursalim -- further indicates that he is playing favorites when applying the law.

Using the President's logic that they should be spared prosecution because of their contributions to the country's exports, the same privilege should be extended to the other tycoons. He should even include Mohammad "Bob" Hasan and former president Soeharto's son Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra on the list. The fact that only three have been selected for such preferential treatment has sparked speculation about a new cronyism developing in the presidential palace.

In any event, it is highly debatable whether the three, or any of the other conglomerates for that matter, really make such a large contribution to the economy that they should be immune before the law. The economic crisis of the last three years has shown that it is the small and medium-sized enterprises that really helped sustain the economy, and are now leading the recovery process.

It is these small and medium-sized enterprises which have made the largest contribution to exports, and one would assume, to the creation of new jobs. By the same logic, it is the small and medium-sized enterprises, and not the big conglomerates, that should receive government assistance.

The single biggest contribution the conglomerates have made to this country, through their mismanagement and crony capitalism, has been in bringing the country to bankruptcy and the present state of economic crisis. They have contributed trillions and trillions to the new national debt -- accumulated through new IMF borrowings and the issuance of government bonds that were needed to bail them out. Surely, there can be no more compelling reason than this to speed up the legal process and bring these people to court before they inflict further damage on the country.