NOV 7 — For more than four hours this week, a packed Constitutional Court in Jakarta listened transfixed to 67 wiretapped conversations implicating the police and the Attorney-General's Office (AGO) in a plot to fabricate evidence against Indonesia's embattled Anti-Corruption Commission (KPK).
Perhaps it stemmed from the arrogance of power. Perhaps it was the result of profound stupidity. One may well have fed into the other, but the tapes gave Indonesians a riveting and depressing view of a justice system for sale.
Within days of the court drama, Criminal Investigation Division (CID) chief Commissioner Susno Duadji had resigned in a controversy that is certain to bring demands for sweeping reforms and general house-cleaning.
“This illustrates just how bad our law enforcement agencies really are,” said a disgusted former KPK commissioner, Erry Hardjapamekas, who has been leading the fight to save the commission.
With little goodwill to call on at the best of times, the police have dug themselves into an even deeper hole by ignoring the AGO's advice and arresting KPK members Bibit Rianto and Chandra Hamzah on dubious charges of extortion and abuse of power. As complicit as the AGO itself has been in efforts to undermine the KPK, it was at least aware that it was swimming against public opinion.
But not the police. Though the tapes have led to Bibit and Chandra being released, senior police officers said they would continue to pursue the case against the pair, built as it is on the word of disgraced former KPK chief Antasari Azhar.
Legal experts claim Antasari, now on trial for allegedly ordering the murder of a local businessman, is an unreliable witness because he would be willing to say anything to avoid the death penalty.
This is far from an auspicious start for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's second five-year term. The media has been full of the latest twists and turns in the saga.
“Jangan Takut!” (Don't be Afraid!), Koran Tempo bellowed on its front page the other day, quoting former President Abdurrahman Wahid, who arrived at the commission's headquarters in a wheelchair to demonstrate his support.
Yudhoyono has been slow to understand it, but the whole turgid story reveals just how much Indonesia's civil society has grown over the past decade and how determined it is to see that there is no backsliding in the war on corruption.
“It is simply an accumulation of the sickness people feel towards the police and even the government itself,” Hardjapamekas told The Straits Times. “It has been totally spontaneous.”
Yudhoyono initially said he did not want to interfere in the legal process. But as public pressure mounted he found himself having to go outside his own government and seek the advice of four reputable legal and political experts.
That led to the creation of an eight-man independent team. Its work will be made a lot easier by the release of the KPK tapes, most of which came from the bugged phone of the brother of fugitive graft suspect Anggoro Widjojo.
Once again, Indonesians have been given a glimpse of the value of the Constitutional Court which, like the KPK itself, is another institution that has generally performed admirably.
According to a former minister, the core problem lies in the fact that the police CID and the AGO's special crimes unit are both riddled with “squeezers and manipulators”, often in the pay of wealthy businessmen.
Attorney-General Hendarman Supandji, now confronted with the fact that at least two of his deputies are implicated in the plot, is perceived as being what the ex-minister calls a naive “pearl in a lump of mud”.
CID chief Susno had carried on a very public war with the KPK after it wiretapped a conversation in which he allegedly demanded a bribe from a central figure in the high-profile Bank Century corruption case.
Perhaps to his profound regret, National Police chief Bambang Hendarso Danuri had earlier maintained a stout defence of both the CID, where he spent most of his career, and the head he had handpicked.
But he began changing tack even before the tapes were played, appealing to the media not to use Susno's now-notorious remark likening the conflict to one between a crocodile (the police) and a gecko (the KPK).
But even while he was speaking, protesters were using a stuffed crocodile and a stuffed gecko as the main props at a piece of street theatre in the heart of Jakarta. Sadly, the police — and perhaps the President himself — took too long to notice. — Straits Times
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