The antigraft law

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.