MPR urged to campaign against corruption

MPR urged to campaign against corruption

A'an Suryana, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Academics and non-governmental organizations demanded on Monday
that the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) declare war on
corruption in its final recommendation to be released at the end
of its current Annual Session.

In separate meetings with the Reform faction and the National
Awakening faction of the MPR, they also called on President
Megawati Soekarnoputri to establish the planned anticorruption
commission immediately.

The meetings between the MPR factions and a group of
academics-activists calling itself the People's Anticorruption
Movement (Garansi), were held on the sidelines of the MPR annual
meeting here. The group was led by rights activist Bambang
Widjojanto, who is also a former chairman of the Indonesian Legal
Aid Foundation (YLBHI).

The MPR annual meeting is scheduled to end on Thursday.

"We want to avail of this opportunity to raise awareness among
the public and government officials that corruption is an
extraordinary crime that demeans the dignity of Indonesians, and
therefore we must start fighting all out against corruption,"
Bambang told reporters after the meeting with the Reform faction.

Political analyst Eep Saefulloh Fatah asserted that the war on
corruption be enshrined in a special decree issued by the MPR at
the end of its ongoing session.

"It may be unrealistic, but at the very least the MPR should
accommodate the feelings of most ordinary Indonesians, who want
corruption to be uprooted from Indonesian soil," he said.

Bambang stressed that the issue of corruption was still of
great importance today and needed to always be highlighted due to
the fact that the efforts made so far to fight corruption had
yielded no results five years after the start of the reform
movement.

The reform movement swept the nation in 1998, with the
combating of corruption being one of its ultimate goals.

Corruption would likely increase ahead of the general election
and the country's first ever direct presidential election in
2004.

"The parties will be competing to win as many seats as
possible, and the 2004 election contest will likely be rife with
corruption," said Bambang during a press conference here.

Also during the press conference, Revrisond Baswir, a lecturer
at the Yogyakarta-based Gadjah Mada University, led his fellow
academics and NGO activists in reading out a declaration urging a
war on corruption.

The declaration called on all elements of the nation to free
themselves from corruption immediately. It also demanded that the
government immediately establish the anticorruption commission
and that an extraordinary court be set up to prosecute suspected
corruptors.

According to the declaration, the war against corruption must
be started immediately as it was still rampant in the country.
Corruption was also a crime against humanity that hurt the
economy and drove people into poverty.

The academics and activists complained that the process of
establishing the anticorruption commission was being carried out
at a snail's pace.

The Anticorruption Law No. 30/2002, which was passed in
November of last year, stipulates that an anticorruption
commission must have started working by Dec. 27 of this year at
the latest.

"But, so far the government has only started proposing the
names of people who will serve on the committee to select the
candidate members of the anticorruption commission," Garansi said
in a release made available to the media.

Given the slow pace involved in the establishing of the
anticorruption commission, the group demanded that the President
pick up the names of the committee members by Aug. 16 of this
year at the latest.