'Public urged to combat KKN'

Moch. N. Kurniawan, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Demands for public participation should increase to keep the reform movement going forward, and particularly to combat corruption, collusion and nepotism (KKN), experts said on Wednesday.

Chairman Todung Mulya Lubis of the Supervisory Board of Transparency International Indonesia said public involvement was mandatory to monitor KKN, which was on the rise at national and provincial levels.

"Public participation must be increased to bring changes to, among others, the existing rulings regarding corruption, to enforce good record keeping systems, to demand access to information and to create a code of conduct for public officials as well as businesses," he said.

He was addressing participants of a symposium on public policy and its challenges here.

Todung said that public participation at the national level was quite strong through civil society movements, but it remained weak on the local level despite the autonomy era.

The autonomy laws had given the regency or mayoralty administration officials more opportunities to enrich themselves, he added.

Another speaker, legislator Harry Akhmadi from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan) also said the reformists needed dialog among various parties including central and regional authorities, civil society groups and the business community.

"What is needed in the future is a process of consensus building through democratic consolidation among those parties," he said.

He said there was an increasing trend that executive, legislative and judicial power at the regency or mayoralty levels, expected to deliver public services to the people, were becoming more absorbed in power struggles.

At the provincial levels, governors no longer had the authority to coordinate either regencies or mayoralties, creating more trouble, he added.

"At the end of the day, the interests of society are sacrificed...," he said.

Harry admitted that in the short run, a possibly unstable political situation would prevail, but he hoped it would not hurt economic reform.

Indonesia's reform era began following the fall of President Soeharto in mid-1998 due to the severe economic crisis and oppression by the government.

A number of reform movement issues, including KKN eradication, decentralization of power from the central government to regional administrations were declared at that time to help rebuild the country.

But now, many believe that the situation had become far worse than the Soeharto era as KKN was increasing in many sectors.

Harkristuti Harkrisnowo, noted lecturer from the University of Indonesia said that for legal reform to take root, a strong and visionary leader was necessary to lead the reform agenda.

"The leader must be able to work for the people not only for his or her own group, so that he or she can be emulated by Indonesian people," she said.

She also said public participation was needed to carry out reform legislation.

The other factors needed for legal reforms were to provide a coherent, clear, inviolable, synchronized law with strong regulations that were supported by professional legal personnel, she added.