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Tommy Suharto vs the state: End
game
By Bill Guerin
The O J
Simpson-like trial of Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra,
youngest son of ex-dictator Suharto, has resumed after
being temporarily halted last week because of a timely
bout of gastroenteritis suffered by the onetime
millionaire playboy.
Tommy's indisposition was
suffered in a much more luxurious prison "cell" than
those of his fellow prisoners, some of whom once
threatened to sodomize him, in the Cipinang jail in East
Jakarta. His cell is completely fenced off from the
other 2,491 inmates in an overcrowded jail designed to
hold only 1,700. A private bathroom, a 21-inch
television, cellular phones and air-conditioning no
doubt create conducive conditions for his frequent
five-hour conjugal visits.
On Monday, his 40th
birthday, he was back in court to hear state prosecutors
call for a 15-year jail sentence.
Tommy's story
began on September 26, 2000, when the Supreme Court
overturned two earlier lower-court verdicts and found
him guilty of defrauding the state of US$10.7 million by
swapping a tract of swampy land for a prime site
belonging to the National Logistics Agency (Bulog) to
build his GORO hypermarket.
Tommy applied for a
presidential pardon on October 3, forcing a stay of his
sentence. Then-president Abdurrahman Wahid met Tommy
privately at the Borobudur Hotel on October 7-8, but
later refused to help him.
His lawyers then made
a series of last-ditch efforts to thwart the
authorities. They objected that they had only received a
photocopy, not a carbon copy, of the presidential decree
rejecting clemency; that the police had no search
warrant to search his premises; and that he had received
a death threat just as he was about to surrender to the
authorities. To add to the confusion, National Police
spokesman Brigadier-General Saleh Saaf said the police
had not received an arrest order from prosecutors.
After his lawyers successfully stalled his
prison sentence until early November 2000, Tommy took
the opportunity handed him on a plate and made a run for
it when slow-moving prosecutors, under the orders of an
equally slow-moving Attorney General Marzuki Darusman,
gave him almost three hours' notice that they were
coming to get him.
Tommy surrendered to police
in November 2001 after another Supreme Court panel used
widely criticized grounds to overturn his earlier
corruption conviction and jail sentence. Tommy is now
being tried on charges of ordering the assassination of
Supreme Court justice M Syafiuddin Kartasasmita, illegal
possession of munitions and fleeing justice, and faced a
maximum penalty of death, although the prosecutors have
announced they will not seek it.
When Tommy was
still on the run Syafiuddin, one of three judges who
sentenced Tommy to 18 months in jail for corruption was
gunned down in broad daylight last July 26. The killers
were arrested on August 7 and told police that Tommy had
provided them with guns and paid them Rp100 million
($10,000) to carry out the assassination. The judge's
wife also claims that her husband had refused a $200,000
bribe from Tommy before convicting him.
Tommy's
trial, moved from the Jakarta Fair Ground to the more
mundane Meteorology Bureau headquarters, continues to
draw the crowds. His demeanor runs the whole gamut of
emotions but most of the time he smiles smugly and
slumps back lazily in the cheap canvas seat.
Two
weeks ago the courtroom drama reached a peak when
presiding Judge Amiruddin Zakaria asked the accused,
"Were you often at your own home on Jalan Cendana?"
"Yes, I was even often there," Tommy said,
grinning broadly, and when an astounded Zakaria
exclaimed "Oh my God! But you never got caught, did
you?" Tommy explained, as if answering the question of
an idiot, "There was coordination with the apparatus."
As if to rub salt in the wound, Tommy went on to
say he frequently went home while on the run, saying he
"went home once a month and stayed for two weeks at a
time".
Tommy's lawyer, Juan Felix Tampubolon,
dismissed all this as a joke. "I saw the judges laugh.
Tommy also laughed when he made the statement," said
Juan.
The police found his joke far from funny.
National Police Chief General Da'i Bachtiar was said to
be incensed and gave Jakarta Police Chief Inspector
General Makbul Padmanegara 30 days to find out who
exactly were the "apparatus" Tommy claimed to have
conspired with to keep him away from justice.
The admissions will also be of little use in
bringing charges of harboring a fugitive against his
family, as Article 221 of the Criminal Code gives a
special dispensation to the family of an accused not to
report his hiding place.
Tommy's highly paid
lawyers have tried everything to divert attention from
the accusations against their client, even suggesting he
had been subjected to character assassination by the
Indonesian media.
One lawyer, Elza Syarief,
received no more than a smack on the wrists from the
Indonesian Advocates and Lawyers Association (HAPI),
which said she had violated the association's code of
ethics by influencing witnesses to change their
testimony in the trial.
Those representing Tommy
will need to answer to their own consciences, and
ultimately to God one supposes, but again, there is no
danger of them being charged with failing to disclose
information on the whereabouts of their billionaire
client. Local legal experts say these lawyers can simply
claim that they were never able to meet Tommy directly
when he was on the run or that their client had lied to
them.
Tampubolon himself, who in the past said
Tommy "didn't return to Cendana", now explains, "What I
meant by Cendana was No 10." This is a reference to
ex-president Suharto's house, and Tommy's own mansion is
on the same street at No 12.
The so-called
Cendana complex gets its name from Jalan Cendana in the
leafy suburb of Menteng in Central Jakarta where many of
Suharto's children live. The houses are all
interconnected by long corridors and in some cases even
underground tunnels.
From his sister Tutut's
house on the adjoining street, where his wife Tata and
their two children lived on the upper floors, Tommy
could have visited his other sister Titiek in her house,
crept along to see his father at No 10, gone next door
to elder brother Sigit Hardjojudanto's house or even to
the home of his nephew Ari Sigit.
The police
lost the game when the family was able to bar them from
access during one high-profile but concerted attempt to
raid the complex. Tommy's eldest sister, Siti Hardiyanti
"Tutut" Rukmana, insisted the family lawyers were
present before police could move in, and by the time
they arrived Tommy had bolted once again.
As far
as evidence is concerned there appears to be no
shortage. Lieutenant-Colonel Homsi Safrian Simin from
the National Police forensics division said the bullet
that killed Kartasasmita came from a 9mm Beretta handgun
found when police raided two Jakarta residences used by
Tommy. These were a rented house in Pondok Indah, South
Jakarta, and Tommy's unit in the Cemara Apartment in
Menteng, Central Jakarta. Sainah, a former housemaid at
the Cemara apartments testified she had seen Tommy there
when he was on the run and also swore that her employer,
Hetty, manageress of the building, told her that the
firearms seized by the police at the building were
Tommy's property.
Tommy stoutly denies illegal
possession of firearms, bullets and explosives. When the
judge asked him about the firearms found at the Cemara
apartment, he simply said: "I have no idea why those
goods were there."
He was laid back over the
charges of his involvement in the assassination and
said, "I couldn't possibly do it. When we met at his
house, Syafiuddin was okay."
Conspiracy theories
abound, with the most persistent one being that the
assassination of Kartasasmita was engineered by military
elements. Thus, the theorists suggest, Tommy is being
made a scapegoat for the murder, and the masterminds are
high-placed generals who were warning judges off against
bringing them to account over human-rights violations of
the past as well as the East Timor scorched-earth
policy.
As it happens Syafiuddin had actually
been working on this and, at the time of his death, was
in charge of the committee that was setting up the
special human-rights court, currently under way in
Jakarta, to try those accused of orchestrating the orgy
of arson and murder that took place ahead of and after
East Timor's vote to secede from Indonesia.
Those who adhere to this theory ask why Tommy
Suharto would have waited 10 months before seeking to
kill only one judge out of the three, instead of
immediately after he went on the run.
They could
have added, just as stupidly, that it is also odd that a
man who is clearly a coward, who let it be known through
his family that he fled because he had received threats
about what would happen to him in prison, should expose
himself to a life sentence or even capital punishment by
setting up the murder of Kartasasmita.
A more
plausible theory is that the murder was an attempt to
strike terror into the hearts of law enforcers, with the
idea that when a judge can be shot dead just like that,
no one is safe. The aim would then have been once again
to instill the fearsome tradition of terror in
Indonesia.
If found guilty of murder, Tommy
could face the death penalty but no one in his or her
right mind believes this is in any way possible, as
illustrated by the prosecutors' demand only for a
15-year jail sentence. Last year Jakarta police
spokesman Anton Bachrul Alam, in a statement that fooled
nobody, said Tommy would be shot on sight if he tried to
escape when located by police. "As a criminal who is
armed and dangerous, we would automatically shoot to
hamper him but not to kill," he thundered. No Indonesian
believes any policeman would dare to shoot to kill if
confronted by Tommy Suharto.
The lack of
government transparency and the murder of democracy
under Suharto and his elite, married to the widespread
violations of the original hopes and goals of freedom,
leave a legacy of suffering to this day. Once again,
Tommy Suharto is deeply implicated in this, in the eyes
of the people.
Notwithstanding the prosecutors'
sentence demand, local analysts suggest the most likely
outcome is that Tommy will be found guilty on the lesser
charge of fleeing justice and receive a token sentence
equal to the amount of time he has already been in
custody. This could well be the final test case. If it
is botched and fails, the students, let alone the
public, may finally rebel.
The will to reform,
what the Trisakti students died for, is under the
microscope.
If there were a People's Court to
debate and pronounce on justice, it might well ask
President Megawati Sukarnoputri and her party PDI-P to
explain just how they expect the people to believe that
they carry the beacon of reformation, which was, after
all, why they won election in the first place.
There are many who believe the trial is nothing
but a showpiece, and that a lenient sentence has already
been negotiated at the highest level.
After
assuming power last July 23, Megawati made a point of
pledging that police would capture Tommy and put him in
jail. She ordered police to "immediately arrest" Tommy,
thus begging the question as to how she expected them to
carry out this order unless she was aware that the
police generals did indeed know where the fugitive was
hiding.
There is little, if any, political
justice for those "ordinary people" who voted in their
millions in June 1999 for a party they believed was
truly reformist and would sweep away the New Order
evils.
Lawyer Frans Hendra Winata, an outspoken
and widely respected advocate of judicial reform, puts
the matter in a nutshell. "This is a battle between good
and evil," Winata argues, adding: "If you can't put him
in jail, don't talk about reform anymore. It will mean
the New Order is still there, still in power, but in
another form."
The dreadful image, let alone the
"believability" of the Indonesian legal system, will
suffer a mortal blow if Tommy gets off lightly. Would-be
foreign investors have for months seen the lack of legal
supremacy as the No 1 obstacle to taking the country
seriously.
The recent Manulife fiasco, while
doing tremendous damage to the capacity of Indonesia to
encourage more foreign investment, will pale into
insignificance if the state versus Tommy Suharto results
in a victory for power, money, elitism and downright
corruption over justice.
(©2002 Asia Times
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