What has made us reluctant to investigate?

By Adrianus Meliala

BRISBANE, Australia (JP): In the words of Rendra, one of the most important artists in contemporary Indonesia, this country has developed a "reluctance to investigate" mentality (Kompas, Oct. 27 1998). At the root of it, he suspects, is our failure to respect the supremacy of the law and the principle of legal certainty as standing above anything else. Because of that, many cases worth investigating have passed unresolved and left big question marks over what really happened.

Rendra was definitely right when he said that by ignoring the need to find out the truth behind the riots, disasters, accidents, scandals or tragedies and so on, basically we have undermined the law. In all those events, there was always the possibility that one or more persons acted purposely for certain reasons. Even if the persons who caused those incidents did so mainly on account of their own recklessness or ignorance, a proper investigation would still have been worth making. At least, through this effort, and followed up with a final settlement involving legal, economic or political actions, the victim or the family of the victim could rest a little more comfortable having observed that justice had been done.

However, to say that people have undermined the law by failing to investigate cases clearly oversimplifies the problem. In fact, Rendra seems to have failed to realize that people or society as a whole have very limited means of conducting a thorough examination.

The more than thirty riot cases starting with Situbondo (1996) and going on to Bagansiapiapi (1998), for example, were too enormous in scope to be investigated by just a few people. Another example: efforts to analyze an engineered systematic elimination of local thugs around Java in 1982, popularly referred to as "Operasi Petrus", was also too complex for a few individuals to investigate.

My opinion is that it has to be more than just "people" to initiate the investigation of cases as big as those to discover what actually lies behind the situation. Asking the media or non- government organizations to carry out an independent inquiry, in some cases, is maybe a good way out although often they have a very limited capability for doing so.

In such circumstances, the public normally expects the state to start an inquiry. There is a reason why I use the expression "the state" and not "the government". Political scientists, especially, have strongly suggested a differentiation between the two. The state, as a bigger entity than government should be neutral, full of statesmanship and less politicking than the government. When there is a suspicion that the government or a high-ranking officer in the government can be connected, directly or indirectly, with an atrocity, the parliament or the senate may use their power to investigate the case.

It is easy to find a comparison. Kenneth Starr's report on the investigation into the scandal involving President Clinton is the most recent example. Still in the United States, we can look to the Kefauver Commission whose recommendations were utilized by the Congress as guidance for the government in fighting organized crime.

This state system of seeking out the substantial truth has clearly been crippled in the New Order period. During 32 years with Soeharto in power, we can count on the fingers of one hand the efforts formally supported by the government to investigate cases such as these. The government was not used to such exercises, common in democratic countries, either by setting up a special commission, a task force or a work group whose duty is to make clear about why and how an event or a phenomenon has already occurred .

To my knowledge, the only commission set up by Soeharto was the Komite Wilopo (1972) whose program was to prevent corruption. Alas, this committee immediately faded away due to the lack of support given by its founder. Twenty years after Komite Wilopo, Soeharto set up another commission called the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM), in 1992, which until now has actively conducted objective and impartial documentation relating to violations of human rights.

However, Komnas HAM is only a commission with around ten members. Besides, Soeharto left too much home work for them to do. For example, the allegations of corruption in Pertamina, the state-owned oil company which involved Ibnu Sutowo, its former chief, had not been clarified even at the moment Soeharto resigned. Also, the question why the Tampomas, a passenger ship, sank in 1978 with the loss of hundreds of lives was never answered.

In the same way we cannot expect clarity in cases which are closely tied up with politics. The public has never known what exactly happened during the killings in Lampung (1991), the massacre in Tanjung Priok (1984) or the ethnic troubles in Pontianak (1997). These are all examples of events which were widely discussed by people, though no one had exact information on them.

The pre-eminent role of the intelligence services during the Soeharto era was also another factor that made incidents more difficult to interpret. Lay people seem always to be in doubt whether an incident occurred spontaneously or whether it was engineered for political ends.

Moreover, no one had enough courage to discover the truth, let alone set up a fact-finding committee during the Soeharto era. Even parliament never showed enough guts to push the government into doing so. When H.R. Dharsono, a noted member of Petisi 50, a consistent opposition group to Soeharto's government, issued a document known as Lembaran Putih (White Paper) regarding what actually happened in the Tanjung Priok case, he ended up in jail for 15 years.

There are explanations which might enlighten us regarding that. First, Soeharto in his capacity as an ordinary Indonesian also suffered from the "reluctance to investigate" mentality and preferred to avoid the possibility of uncovering someone's mistake and causing the person or persons involved to lose face or be sentenced. Second, Soeharto had his own manner of seeking justice. People or officers who were known to be responsible for a mistake or incident would be punished by either being transferred to an isolated and "dry" job (a position with no opportunity to gain extra income), sent abroad to a diplomatic position or, worst of all, discharged from their jobs. Third, rather than confronting the basic root or source of the controversies, Soeharto was more familiar with his own style of extemporizing in the expectation that the incident would be forgotten as time went by.

On the other hand, slowly but surely, people developed a perception that since the state or the government was the mastermind of all these cases, it was understandable that they never allowed them to be opened up and examined.

Now that Soeharto's rule is over, it is time for people to carry out their long-suppressed intention of revealing the truth. This is why we can understand that people have become so eager in demanding the re-examination of the attack on the PDI headquarters (1996) and also of the Tanjung Priok case.

Due to the findings of Komnas HAM, the Armed Forces was forced to admit that military activities in Aceh during this decade have taken hundreds of innocent civilian casualties.

The public also seem no longer to have the patience to wait for the disclosure of many economic-related issues such as the investigation of Soeharto's wealth, the scandal of the contract with Freeport and also efforts to find evidence of corruption- collusion-nepotism (KKN) elsewhere due to the difficulties of bringing those involved to trial.

The tendency to defer efforts to seek the truth can be found elsewhere. To take one example, the kidnappings masterminded by then Lt. Gen. Prabowo and his Army Special Forces (Kopassus) are not a settled matter since there are still 14 political activists missing whose whereabouts the Armed Forces still denies knowledge of.

Similarly, people became skeptical when the current government showed signs of reluctance to be more serious in investigating Soeharto, his cronies and his wealth. This is not surprising since from the beginning many people have regarded the present Habibie government as reluctant to create problems for its former patron, but at least this indicates that the mentality of letting miscreants carry on as before and never meting out the justice they deserve is still there.

The reason why people often doubt current proclaimed efforts to uncover the truth behind certain controversial cases is not because they suspect that the result would be -- as usual -- engineered. The doubt is mostly related to the cultural tendency of not being straightforward in terms of pointing out the real players behind those cases.

The writer is a criminologist at the University of Indonesia, currently undertaking a PhD program at the University of Queensland, Australia.