Yudhoyono: second term, first crisis
Nov 5th 2009 | Jakarta
THIS was to have been Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s second honeymoon. Inaugurated for a second presidential term last month after a landslide election victory in July, he should have been basking in his recent international popularity and preparing for a regional summit in Singapore. Instead, he has been consumed by the fallout from a political scandal. On November 2nd he set up a team to look into an investigation by the police of members of the Corruption Eradication Commission, known as the KPK. The commission’s high-profile prosecutions had helped improve the country’s corrupt image and boosted the president’s standing.
Mr Yudhoyono was responding to mounting public pressure and street protests that followed the arrest of two KPK deputy chairmen on dubious charges of abuse of power and extortion. This was the culmination of a months-long feud pitting the KPK against the national police and the attorney-general’s office. The two KPK officials, Chandra Hamzah and Bibit Samad Rianto, were accused of taking bribes from Anggoro Widjojo, a corruption suspect, so that he could flee abroad. They say their arrests were part of a plot to frame them and weaken the KPK.
A day after Mr Yudhoyono announced the investigation, a nationally televised court hearing broadcast more than four hours of tapped telephone conversations compiled by the KPK. They featured a man believed to be a state prosecutor, Mr Anggoro’s brother, who is an important police witness, and other unnamed figures. They suggested a plot to frame the KPK officials. Speakers also cited the president as backing the moves against the KPK. Within hours of the broadcast, the two KPK men were freed from jail (but remain under investigation). Mr Anggoro’s brother was detained for questioning.
The scandal is overshadowing all Mr Yudhoyono’s plans for economic reform, and denting the mood of optimism that followed his re-election. His government has run an international television campaign touting Indonesia’s transformation from South-East Asia’s basket-case ten years ago into its leading democracy. The president’s election platform focused on the rule of law, fighting corruption and wooing foreign investment.
Critics say the KPK was seen as going too far, gunning for Mr Yudhoyono’s political enemies and settling old scores with rivals in the police and attorney-general’s office. The fight has been extremely personal: the chief police detective, Susno Duadji, whose phone was tapped by the KPK in another corruption probe, famously compared KPK attempts to take on the police to “a gecko versus a crocodile”. Now Mr Susno himself has resigned under a cloud, as has the deputy attorney-general.
The worry is that the scandal could cripple Mr Yudhoyono’s second-term agenda. Few doubt that it shows how the police and attorney-general’s office, widely regarded as among Indonesia’s most corrupt institutions, need serious reform. Worse, the revelations—including the suggestion that one of the KPK officials might be killed in jail—show that the bad habits of the authoritarian Suharto regime still haunt Indonesia a decade after its fall.
After setting up his investigative team, Mr Yudhoyono promised to “uphold legal supremacy”. But it is still not clear that he grasps the severity of the crisis. He is known for his willingness to share political spoils and his preference for consensus. In this case, however, the public seems to yearn for confrontation: to see him take on the rot in Indonesia’s legal framework, and get rid of it.
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