A spot on Indonesian leader's clean
hands By Bill Guerin
JAKARTA - Just when it seemed Indonesian
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was making
significant progress in tackling the country's
endemic culture of corruption, he and Vice
President Jusuf Kalla have been linked to
allegations that they received illegal off-budget
funds to finance their 2004 election campaign.
Opposition politician Amien Rais, the
onetime champion of the reform movement that
helped bring about dictator Suharto's 1998
downfall, admitted he personally received about
US$60,000 in
illicit campaign funds
through the Fisheries and Marine Resources
Ministry, formerly headed by Rokhmin Dahuri.
Rais dropped a potentially bigger
bombshell when he claimed that Yudhoyono and Kalla
also received illicit funds from Dahuri and that
the General Elections Commission had evidence to
substantiate his claims.
Dahuri is
currently on trial in a Jakarta court over alleged
abuse of public funds, and on the stand he has
owned up to channeling about Rp11.5 billion
(US$1.2 million) from the ministry budget to at
least four political parties between April 2002
and March 2005.
Both politicians have
denied the charges, with Yudhoyono referring to
the allegations as "slander". "I and Jusuf Kalla
clearly never received [funds] and clearly the
claims are misleading and unhealthy," he said at a
press conference last week. Yudhoyono and Rais
later met on Sunday for 10 minutes and appeared to
agree to leave the case in the hands of the
Corruption Eradication Commission rather than
sparring in the public domain.
But the
political controversy the allegations have already
generated in the media have to some degree
undermined public perceptions about the Yudhoyono
government's corruption-busting credentials,
crucially as the country enters a new election
cycle with presidential polls scheduled for 2009.
Significantly, Yudhoyono was elected on a
clean-hands ticket in 2004, underlining the
importance the Indonesian electorate then and
likely now puts on corruption issues.
While the business-minded Kalla has
recently attracted media attention over possible
conflicts of interest related to his family's
non-competitive bidding and winning big-ticket
government projects, the more bureaucratic
Yudhoyono has until now remained above the fray.
If public perceptions turn against his government,
several opposition candidates, including from the
main Islamic party, are poised to present
themselves as graft-busters to voters.
People's Consultative Assembly Speaker
Hidayat Nurwahid said this week, "The president
and the vice president could be impeached if they
are proven guilty of breaching the law." That
seems unlikely, because Kalla's Golkar party
dominates the legislative body, but the risk is
that Yudhoyono and Kalla become in the popular
imagination associated with the corrupt old ways
they promised on election to reform.
Of
course, this would come as no surprise to
Indonesia watchers who remember the furor in
November 2004 when Election Supervision Committee
head Kommarudin Hidayat went on record as saying
investigations had revealed evidence of more than
1,000 serious administrative and criminal
violations of election-campaign regulations
allegedly involving all parties and presidential
candidates.
Bribes, kickbacks and
phantom donors The most serious offenses -
including fictitious donors, vote-buying and
bribing officials - were attributed to both
then-president Megawati Sukarnoputri's Indonesian
Party of Struggle and the military-affiliated
Golkar party, of which Kalla is chairman,
according to Kommarudin Hidayat at the time. But
Rais' allegations represent the first time both
Yudhoyono and Kalla in particular have been
directly accused of electoral fraud.
Draining state funds for electoral
purposes is nothing new for Indonesia. In 1999,
Bank Bali paid local corporation PT Era Giat Prima
(EGP) a "commission" of Rp546 billion (US$60
million) to help it collect Rp946 billion from the
state foodstuffs monopoly, Bulog, which owned it
money. Prosecutors later said the commission went
into the Golkar party's coffers and helped finance
president B J Habibie's 1999 election win. EGP was
partly owned by Golkar's then-deputy treasurer,
Setya Novanto.
Golkar was later
instrumental in pressing for a probe into the next
election scandal, known as Bulogate I, which
entailed the embezzlement of Rp35 billion from the
company and eventually led to former president
Abdurrahman Wahid's political downfall in July
2001.
Bulogate II, disclosed by Wahid's
National Awakening Party, surfaced when former
Bulog chief Rahardi Ramelan told prosecutors he
gave state funds for a food-relief program to
former defense minister and military commander
Wiranto, who was a presidential candidate in the
2004 campaign.
Megawati's reformist
reputation was also sullied by a counter-trade
transaction to buy Russian-made Sukhoi jet
fighters and Mi-35 helicopters. The trade minister
at the time, Rini Soewandi, tasked Bulog with
executing the $129 million deal between Indonesia
and Russia, though she insisted it was the
president herself who gave the green light to what
was later ruled an "improper" deal.
In
less than three years in office, Yudhoyono has
arguably achieved more political and economic
reform than the other three post-Suharto
governments combined. And his corruption-busting
has won his administration kudos both
internationally and, albeit to a lesser degree,
domestically. He recently breathed life into
efforts to go after the Suhartos - which, of
course, raises questions about the timing of the
allegations being leveled against him and Kalla.
Last week, for example, Yudhoyono signed a
special decree ordering state prosecutors to file
a civil lawsuit against former president Suharto,
85. The former strongman has consistently denied
allegations of illegally siphoning off some $600
million through seven foundations and he has in
the past been declared too ill to stand trial. New
Attorney General Hendarman Supanji, appointed by
Yudhoyono during a recent cabinet reshuffle, is
also pursuing cases against Suharto's top son,
Tommy Suharto.
Some contend that
Yudhoyono's move against the Suhartos signals a
renewed will to pursue his so-called "war against
corruption" at the highest-possible levels. At the
same time, there are others who question whether
his move may have been preemptive to divert
attention from the charges leveled against him.
The still-unsubstantiated charges could
not have come at a worse time for Yudhoyono's
government. Recent polls show a sharp decline in
his popularity, which fell from a 67% approval
rating at the end of last year to only 49% in
March. That decline has been led by public
perceptions that his government's economic-reform
programs have failed to lift the masses out of
poverty.
That was notably one big reason
Indonesian voters dumped the self-proclaimed
reformist Megawati for the self-proclaimed clean
hands of Yudhoyono at the 2004 polls. Yet exactly
nine years after Suharto's downfall and the birth
of Indonesia's democratic era, it's still open
whether any Indonesian politician can remain
completely above the fray of money politics.
Bill Guerin, a Jakarta
correspondent for Asia Times Online since 2000,
has been in Indonesia for more than 20 years,
mostly in journalism and editorial positions. He
specializes in Indonesian political, business and
economic analysis, and hosts a weekly television
political talk show, Face to Face,
broadcast on two Indonesia-based satellite
channels. He can be reached at
softsell@prima.net.id.
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