Asia Times: Indonesian justice on trial


	November 30, 2001	atimes.com

Southeast Asia

Indonesian justice on trial
By Bill Guerin

JAKARTA - Dusk in Jakarta. Shouts, screams, yelling and bawling punctuate the muggy night from crowds massed in front of the National Police Headquarters in central Jakarta. No, it is not a repeat of last month's Defenders of Islam (FPI) assault on the sanctity of the compound; it is all because of an issue much closer to the average Indonesian's heart than the need to sweep away foreigners.

The steel bars being erected are to keep swarms of reporters firmly outside as, yes, ex-president Haji Muhammad Suharto's youngest son, Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra, has indeed been arrested.

A stout, chubby-faced, smiling figure emerges from a blue van. Is it really he? Or is it a lookalike? Didn't he have a beard before, when he was meant to be "Ibrahim"? But no, it was certainly Tommy, desperately seeking to rise mentally above the ignominy of being dragged, however politely and subtly, through a melee of reporters, to his overdue appointment with the police.

The ongoing comedy of errors, which has shamed a nation, appeared on Wednesday night to have reached its final act but in Indonesia surface appearances frequently belie events behind the bamboo curtain.

The world is quick to condemn Indonesia for the slow pace of action over the last 12 months, but anything impacting on Suharto, and his children and cronies, is excruciatingly complex to resolve. The political machinations in Indonesia are solidly and unshakably based on the "elite pact" brotherhood that means only minor corruptors are thrown to the wolves.

The singular exception to this was the imprisonment on Indonesia's own "Devil's Island" of Suharto's favorite crony, Bob Hasan. But even Bob, though doing a "Papillon" for the time being, got off very lightly and was, in the end, sentenced to only two years' imprisonment. It is educational to know that, in deciding the sentence, the court considered three mitigating facts: that the defendant was polite, that he was elderly and that he dedicated himself to national sports.

However, this time it is Suharto's own flesh and blood, and Tommy's arrest presents President Megawati Sukarnoputri with the greatest dilemma possible, although also the greatest opportunity to rise to a level of sainthood close to that of her father, the founding first president of Indonesia, "Bung" Karno.

The processes under way now will determine how the Tommy Suharto case will be settled. Will the police eventually reveal, for example, whether Tommy really took off on a whim, or was it all along an arranged political deal with the elite that has now gone sour? Were his family, mainly his eldest sister Siti Hardiyanti "Tutut" Rukmana, together with top brass in the armed forces and police, involved in securing his safety and apparent immunity from arrest for so long? Middle sister Siti "Titiek" Hediati Hariyadi and Tommy's wife, Ardhia Pramesti Regita "Tata" Cahyani, are also widely suspected of having known more than they were willing to reveal.

With the connivance of his lawyers, this fugitive from justice successfully flouted the law and the wishes of the government and people of Indonesia for more than a year. And yet, by an astonishing coincidence, he was "captured" on the last day in office of General Bimantoro, the national police chief, who beamed last night: "What a great gift."

Neighbors said that there had been police activity around the massive rented house in Bintaro for more than a week, and the police say the arrest follows two weeks of intensive surveillance. Was the go-ahead given then, as some bright sparks suggest, by the president herself, to reward Bimantoro for his loyalty to her (and his singular lack of loyalty to then-president Abdurrahman Wahid, who publicly criticized Bimantoro for frequently running to Megawati to inform her on various issues)?

The police were thought to have lost the appetite for a Tommy manhunt after Wahid's impulsive attempt to dismiss the National Police chief and order his arrest. Another school of thought has it that Megawati may have given the green light when she did to ensure that the substantial number of senior policemen loyal to Bimantoro did not cause problems for her own choice for police chief, the incoming Da'i Bachtiar, who himself only passed the parliamentary vetting a few days ago.

Any such suggestion that Megawati has been aware of Tommy's vulnerability to capture and delayed it, or otherwise impacted on police authority, could be extremely damaging for her.

City police spokesman Senior Commander Anton Bachrul Alam was quick to deny speculation that Tommy's arrest was engineered by the police as a show of support for Bimantoro. "Don't speculate. Police did not engineer the arrest," he said stoutly.

Bambang Widjojanto, from the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation (YLBHI), sums up the many mysteries that need to be cleared up. He called on the police to reveal the network that had protected the fugitive for so long. Significantly, he pointed out that the arrest of Tommy could possibly have been prompted by the disappointment of the police over a deal struck with the fugitive. "Consequently, the police should also investigate anyone involved in any [possible] deal," Bambang said.

Numerous controversial figures will no doubt be "investigated", at least superficially, including Tommy's lawyer Nudirman Munir, Tommy's confidante, bomb suspect Elize Maria Tuwahatu, Tommy's wife Tata, and his former girlfriend, ex-model Lani Banjaranti, now eight months pregnant.

Few believe that Tommy Suharto will not escape prosecution. Large amounts of money may change hands, and evidence may be conveniently lost, or even rewritten, as the power machine moves smoothly into action. This is all par for the course, except for the crucial difference that, unlike her predecessor Abdurrahman Wahid, Megawati will be unable even to think about a political deal to let Tommy off the hook, even if she wanted to.

From the outset, very soon after assuming power on July 23, Megwati made a point of pledging that police would capture Tommy and put him in jail. She ordered police to arrest Tommy "immediately". Lawyer Frans Hendra Winata, an outspoken and widely respected advocate of judicial reform, puts her predicament now in a nutshell. "This is a battle between good and evil. If you can't put him in jail, don't talk about reform any more. It will mean the New Order is still there, still in power, but in another form."

Central bank governor Sjahril Sabirin, himself undergoing a long investigation and trial process, accused of complicity in the massive Bank Indonesia Liquidity Support money machine, unintentionally highlighted the massive gap between those who get protection from the law and those who believe that the law in Indonesia is beyond redemption. Apparently straight-faced, he said that the rupiah might strengthen after Tommy's arrest, because "people see it as the state apparatus upholding the law".

Although the Supreme Court last month reversed its own decision to imprison Tommy for corruption in the Bulog land scam, he is alleged to have ordered the murder of one of four judges who sentenced him last year. Will Megawati's government be serious in prosecuting the suspect if, indeed, he has been involved in the murder of Justice Syafiuddin Kartasasmita, one of four judges who sentenced him to a modest 18 months in prison?

Police have also linked Tommy to a spate of unsolved bombing cases, especially the explosion that killed 17 people in the Jakarta Stock Exchange and, incredibly, have accused him of being involved with the usual suspects in Jakarta bomb blasts, the separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM), whose leaders derided any idea that they would ever even sit down next to a Suharto. This extremely tenuous link made by the police between Tommy and the Aceh freedom fighters has yet to be proved.

Strong rumors at the time of the judge's assassination suggested that Tommy might be a scapegoat for the murder, and that the masterminds are high-placed generals who are warning judges off in case the planned special tribunal goes ahead and brings 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 setting up this very same special ad hoc human-rights tribunal.

Why would Tommy have waited 10 months before seeking to kill only one judge out of the three, instead of immediately after he went on the run? And why anyway would he expose himself to a certain life sentence or even capital punishment by setting up the murder of Judge Kartasasmita? This man is a coward, after all, who let it be known through his family that he fled because he had received threats about what would happen to him in prison.

Family members now want the world to know they believe that, with God's help, justice will prevail. Tutut's asides that the problem is now in the hand of "great and almighty God", and "we leave it all to legal processes based on justice", obscures the cold facts that her version of justice varies enormously from that understood by the Indonesians to whom she addressed her words.

Tommy Suharto and Tutut herself, in the eyes of the people, represent an elite that for more than three decades has lived off the fat of the land and grown fat on the proceeds of corruption.

Lawyers representing Tommy Suharto will need to answer to their own consciences, and ultimately to God. They used every trick in the book to delay the day when their man had to go to jail. There are countless other instances where lawyers went over the top in defending their clients and, on many occasions, they won their cases, thanks to weaknesses in the law and the legal system, as well as the incompetence of government prosecutors.

What will Tommy and his high-profile lawyers, who know the law much better than the lowly paid state prosecutors themselves, come up with to answer the allegations against their high flying client? In Indonesia, unless of course you are one of the millions of poor and impoverished, the new subculture seems to be to use the law as a bludgeon, something like: if the law is on your side, pound on the law; if the facts are on your side, pound on the facts; if neither is on your side, pound on the table. Ambrose Bierce's delightful The Devil's Dictionary defines a lawyer (noun) as being "one skilled in the circumvention of the law". She probably had Indonesian lawyers in mind.

But this is now fairly and squarely in Megawati's lap. This is about the will to reform. It is what the Trisakti students died for. If the Tommy case is resolved politically, as many suspect it will be, rather than by a transparent judicial process, Megawati will lose most of her popular support and her party may find itself banished to the wilderness in the 2004 elections.

On the other hand, it represents her greatest opportunity to become a hero in contemporary Indonesian history. Reform? Can she start to deliver reform by ensuring that the youngest son of a man who, one way or another, caused much suffering to Megawati herself and to her political ambitions and her Democratic Party of Indonesia, is very openly tried for any crimes for which the police have evidence?

Can she get her people, and the Indonesia watchers outside, to believe that at last, reformation is under way in Indonesia?

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