Too little, too late?

At long last a verdict has been pronounced on Mohamad "Bob" Hasan, the timber tycoon who is well-known to the Indonesian public as former president Soeharto's golfing buddy and one of his most prominent business associates. The Central Jakarta District Court last Thursday, in a session that lasted well into the night, found the former chairman of the Indonesian Forest Concessionaires Association guilty of having stolen US$75 million in funds belonging to the Ministry of Forestry.

But the court exonerated the defendant from charges of fraudulent use of $168 million for aerial mapping conducted between 1989 and 1999 by his company PT Mapindo Parama on consideration that the matter constituted a civil case between the company and the association. Furthermore, the court reasoned that because a good part of the state's losses could be recouped from the sale of assets belonging to PT Mapindo, the defendant would have to pay only Rp 14 billion ($1.48 million) in compensation, even though the state suffered an estimated loss of $75 million.

These assets include three cars, three plots of land as well as the buildings on it on Jl. Dewi Sartika in East Jakarta, a plot of land in Ceger in the Tangerang area, and three cameras used for aerial mapping. The court also ordered the defendant to pay a Rp 15 million fine or spend another six months in jail.

As can be seen, Thursday's court sentence falls well short of the penalties demanded by the public prosecutor in the case, Arnold Angkow, who had urged the court to sentence Hasan to eight years in jail and order him to pay $244 million in compensation. The prosecutor further demanded the defendant be fined Rp 30 million or be made to spend an additional six months in jail.

Since Hasan has already spent the past 10 months in a state detention center in Jakarta, what Thursday's court sentence means, aside from the compensation and fine, is that the defendant will only have to spend another 14 months in jail. In deciding the sentence, the court considered three mitigating facts: that the defendant was polite throughout the trial, that he was elderly, and that he had dedicated himself to the promotion of national sports.

For all its perceived shortcomings, Bob Hasan's trial is important because he is the first of several individuals whom the public perceives as ex-president Soeharto's big time cronies to face trial. The recovery of stolen money aside, court trials must be fair and impartial if Indonesians are sincere in their demand that the country's judiciary be cleansed of corruption and political bias.

The problem with the Bob Hasan trial is that few Indonesians are likely to feel that justice has been done. The evidence presented may be adequate, the arguments fair. Yet, as far as the public is concerned, the sentence was insignificant in the light of the amount of public money that they "know" was stolen during the Soeharto years by the ex-president's family and cronies.

In other words, the evidence presented and the arguments made were insubstantial as far as the people are concerned. After all, the huge privileges which the Soeharto family members and cronies enjoyed during the ex-president's rule are well-known. It is of course up to the court and the lawyers to see that justice is meted out in cases such as this. What we are trying to say is that it is important at this stage of the nation's history to convince the Indonesian people that fairness and justice was served in the Bob Hasan trial, although the court's verdict might have fallen well short of their expectation.

President Abdurrahman Wahid's promise that he will pursue the cause of total reform without leniency to offenders could flounder if the public perceives that injustice and compromise with New Order elements are continuing. What the long-term effects of such a state of affairs would be is hard to imagine.