People urged to empower themselves

A'an Suryana, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Empowerment of civil society and strict law enforcement are needed to counter moral degradation, experts say.

They are also needed to rehabilitate formal social institutions, which are suffering from "serious damage and structural decay."

As structural decay brings down formal institutions, people must seek alternatives by establishing extragovernmental institutions to act as moral watchdogs in society, sociologist Tamrin Amal Tomagola from the University of Indonesia said here on Friday.

People have lost their trust in formal social institutions as they are so corrupt, he said.

"Therefore, people must empower themselves by establishing extragovernmental institutions to raise and to nurture morals in our society," he told The Jakarta Post.

The establishment of organizations like Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW), which has managed to become a moral watchdog for society, is encouraging, he said.

Another sociologist, Erry Seda, emphasized the need for legal certainty.

"People's respect for the legal system will grow if there are assurances that the law is being applied impartially," said Erry, who has just received her doctorate from the U.S.-based Wisconsin-Madison University.

The experts were asked to comment on a recent meeting between top religious leaders, who agreed that the nation was in a state of dire moral degradation. The meeting was unprecedented as it included representatives of virtually all religions strands in the country. The leaders pledged to cooperate to pull the country out of the mire.

Erry said that once the respect was there, the moral quality of the people would be enhanced.

Prominent sociologist Ignas Kleden said that the people's trust in formal institutions must be elevated through "a carrot and stick mechanism".

"Within the confines of such a mechanism, people who do bad things would be stiffly punished. Therefore, they will be afraid to commit those bad deeds in the future. While, on the other hand, people will compete in doing good deeds for the rewards they will get," he said.

The government, he said, must work hard to implement such a mechanism.

What is happening now is just the opposite, he said.

"Instead of giving a reward to the person who reports corruption, the person in question is investigated by the police, while the alleged corruptors get off scot-free," he said, referring to one recent case in Jakarta.

Ignas acknowledged that moral functions prevailing in the formal institutions had been severely damaged. Hence these institutions' structural decay.

"Law enforcement, punishment processes, which are our moral guard and benchmark, have been ruined. Alleged corruptors have always been protected by the presumption of innocence principle as, for example, in the case of Akbar Tandjung," he said referring to the House Speaker who was named a suspect in a high profile Rp 40 billion scandal last week.

Akbar has repeatedly refused to step down from his post, saying that he would not resign unless he was declared guilty by the court.

The pressure has been mounting for him to resign, however, on the grounds of ethical conduct.

Tamrin said that the ongoing structural decay in the legal and other institutions would endanger the moral fiber of society.

"People often consider our leaders as role models. If the damage to our formal institutions persists without stiff and fair punishment for the wrongdoers, society at large will accept moral violations as truth," he said.

He added that this would be dangerous since the moral norms were powerless to govern the life of society.

The results are that "people often feel they have done good deeds, but in fact they have committed bad deeds," he said.

"Indeed, this is happening in the whole cross-section of society. Illegal levies are rampant at every level of government bureaucracy, and they consider it normal practice," he said.