Plot or justice?

Plot or justice?

It took months of listening to testimonies filled with
falsehood and deception. But on Thursday, finally, the Central
Jakarta District Court came out with a verdict that is likely to
leave the case as controversial as it was. In a judgment that
took more than eight hours to read out, the Central Jakarta
District Court pronounced Akbar Tandjung, our debonair House of
Representatives Speaker and chairman of the once ruling Golkar
Party, guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt of corruption. The court
sentenced him to three years in prison, but he is free pending a
decision by the court of appeals. His two codefendants in the
case, Dadang Sukandar and Winfried Simatupang, got away with 18
months in prison.

The three defendants received a lenient verdict considering
that the maximum penalty for corruption is 20 years. But with the
demise of morals in practically all fields of public life in this
country in the late 1950s, our judiciary is known for getting
cold feet when it comes to meting out justice on the powerful.
And after all, the money -- all the Rp 40 billion -- had been
duly, if mysteriously, returned by Simatupang, who in an earlier
testimony swore he had used it to buy emergency supplies to
assist the needy. The money, Simatupang told the court in an
earlier testimony, had somehow been found, intact, stashed away
among his belongings. Oddly, the court never bothered to
investigate where the cash came from.

In any case, with hundreds of protesters for and against Akbar
clashing outside the improvised court hall, the council of judges
said Akbar, as minister/state secretary in 1999, together with
two codefendants Dadang Sukandar and Winfried Simatupang, had
been proven guilty, "legitimately and convincingly", of misusing
Rp 40 billion in non-budgetary funds of the State Logistics
Agency (Bulog).

The three, the court said, had willfully inflicted losses on
the state, impeded national development, caused harm to the poor,
made use of an Islamic foundation to carry out their crime and
damaged the government's credibility. Oddly, there was no mention
of Akbar's having abused his authority as minister and state
secretary at the time the crime was committed. Neither did they
pursue what precisely had happened to the money, after it was
first "spent" and then "found" again.

Given the high-profile nature of Akbar's graft case and the
logic-defying twists and turns that it took during the court
hearings, it is only to be expected that in spite of the time and
effort that it took for the court to come to a verdict, the whole
procedure remains suspect in the eyes of many observers.

According to Legal Aid and Human Rights Association (PBHI)
director Hendardi, it shows that the law enforcers are not
serious in eradicating corruption. And according to Indonesian
Corruption Watch chairman Teten Masduki the lenient sentence was
part of a political compromise between President Megawati
Soekarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI
Perjuangan) and Akbar's Golkar party. Many even suspect the
existence of a plot to eventually set Akbar free.

Given the circumstances, it is difficult not to draw a
parallel between Akbar's case and that of central bank governor
Sjahril Sabirin, who was found guilty of corruption by a Jakarta
district court, but who was only recently absolved by the Jakarta
High Court of all charges. In all this the government, through
Minister of Justice Yusril Ihza Mahendra, maintains it respects
the independence of the judiciary and will therefore not
interfere in judicial procedures.

Since nobody doubts the minister's integrity, that may well be
true. Nevertheless, it seems that a lot of work still remains to
be done in order to restore public trust in the judiciary.
Obviously, this is a crucial goal to achieve, for within it hangs
the evolution of what could perhaps be called the Indonesian
dream -- which is the attainment of a just and prosperous
society.

In this very context it is unfortunate indeed that the case of
the state against Akbar Tandjung should have been distorted by so
many irregularities as to render the court's verdict suspect in
the eyes of the public.