The antigraft law

The government seems to be very boastful about the new anticorruption law approved by the House of Representatives last week. By sponsoring the bill, B.J. Habibie's administration must have wanted to demonstrate its seriousness in the anticorruption drive, which has actually been going on for almost three decades.

Learning from the failure of the same campaign supposedly carried out by the Soeharto regime, the new law stipulates that a death sentence will be handed down to those found to have committed corruption more than once, to those involved in major embezzlement cases and to those who take advantage of situations during national disasters, a state of emergency or economic crises. It also welcomes public participation in the drive.

All the stipulations sound powerful enough to put an end to corruption, which has been gnawing at the government since the early years of Soeharto's corrupt and despotic rule. Habibie might have been told that Soeharto's anticorruption campaign was neither serious nor well-planned and had made corruption grow at high speed.

The regime of former president Soeharto, whom Habibie said was his teacher, was known throughout the world as one of the most corrupt. Foreign corruption watchers compared it to those of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos, the former shah of Iran and Zairean tyrant Mobutu. God was so judgmatic that all of them died in disgrace.

Today, even with an effective concept, this nation will need years before it can make a good start on the anticorruption drive. Habibie, who is campaigning for reelection, seemed to understand this need and by making the law wanted to convince the populace that he is also the right leader to lead the crusade.

And the rubber-stamp House of Representatives, by approving the government-sponsored bill, wanted to demonstrate itself as no less a serious fighter for clean governance.

In this era of social change and reform, the House wishes to be remembered as the initial infrastructure for democracy, at least as good as any future House.

Many people might be optimistic about the law. There are some who believe the government's seriousness and believe that with the law, the antigraft drive will be triumphantly successful. Perhaps these people are hoping to help the authorities build new prisons for the innumerable number of people to be convicted of corruption.

But thinking people believe the law's invitation to the people to take part in the anticorruption campaign will hardly have a positive response because of past trauma. In this country, reporting an alleged corruption case to the authorities has always been equivalent to self-inflicted pain, because it is hard to identify who is corrupt and who is not among law-enforcing officers and officials of judicial bodies.

Moreover, Habibie has never tried to convince anybody that he has the mentality to create clean governance. He has long been part of the corrupt regime. And the new law was passed against the backdrop of his lack of seriousness to investigate the alleged corruption cases of his predecessor, Soeharto, and his ill-fated attorney general Andi Mohammad Ghalib.