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| Nivell Rayda | March 31, 2012 |
But for a brief period in 1998, the street belonged to the student-led pro-democracy movements, and to all those who desired change after 32 years of dictatorial rule under President Suharto, whose New Order planted the seeds of corruption.
Indonesians may have ousted Suharto in the end, but they have failed to quash his insidious legacy of rampant corruption, and the new generation of public servants is now as much a part of the problem as the old.
“Corruptors seem to be getting younger by the day,” said Constitutional Court then-chairman Mahfud M.D. in an interview last August.
Indeed, a new breed of scoundrel is emerging in Indonesia, one that is even greedier than before, more shameless — and unusually precocious.
Two people epitomize this new wave of young corruptors.
Gayus Tambunan, now 32, amassed more than Rp 100 billion ($11.2 million) in wealth with a salary of Rp 9 million per month as a mid-level tax examiner.
Gayus is serving an unprecedented 28 years in prison for bribing law enforcers, bribing his wardens at the Mobile Brigade headquarters where he was detained, falsifying his passport used to travel abroad when he was supposed to be in jail, money laundering and receiving bribes from clients while serving at the tax office — bribes totaling $659,000 and 9 million Singaporean dollars ($7.2 million).
“Gayus must have set some kind of record for greed and corruption,” said his former boss, Tax Court head Tjip Ismail.
“Even during the Suharto days, [$11 million] was a lot of money, and you couldn’t amass that kind of wealth without being heavily connected to power or attracting people’s attention.”
The Attorney General’s Office recently investigated another tax official with huge bank accounts: 38 year-old Dhana Widyatmika.
Then there’s Muhammad Nazaruddin, 33, a former lawmaker, successful entrepreneur and treasurer for the ruling Democratic Party. Arrested last August in Colombia after weeks on the run, he is accused of soliciting Rp 28.8 billion in payoffs — he only managed to get Rp 4.8 billion — from two companies for whom he helped secure a lucrative government project.
Nazaruddin’s wife, Neneng Sri Wahyuni, 30, is now wanted in another tender-rigging case. His nephew Muhammad Syarifuddin, 29, has been detained for abetting Nazaruddin’s 70-day escapade through Asia, Europe and Latin America.
Another Democratic Party lawmaker, Angelina Sondakh, 34, is also accused of receiving funds from the construction of the athletes’ village for the Southeast Asian games.
There is also Puguh Wirawan, a 35-year-old curator overseeing a bankruptcy case who was jailed for providing a judge with a Rp 250 million payoff in exchange for overvaluing his client’s assets by Rp 10 billion.
Failing reforms
Danang Widoyoko, chairman of Indonesia Corruption Watch, the country’s most prominent anti-graft group, said the Gayus and Nazaruddin cases “serve as an example that the government’s bureaucratic reform efforts have failed.”
“For many institutions, reform means more money for officials, but at the same time oversight and transparency [are] virtually nonexistent,” he said.
He added that he believes the key to the rise of this neo-corruption is the preservation of the same corrupt system.
“If the system is unchanged, then new recruits eventually follow the same corrupt habits of their superiors,” he said. “In fact, their tactics are even more sophisticated as they explore new possibilities.”
The Ministry of Finance, where Gayus worked, is one institution that has undergone massive changes in its remuneration system. High-level salaries have risen nearly 1,000 percent since 1998 — but with little internal oversight, public officials like Gayus still find ways to amass ill-gotten wealth.
After the fall of Suharto, Indonesia enacted the Law on Corruption in 1999 and established the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) in 2003.
Investigations by the KPK, which has a very high conviction rate, have shown that graft pervades even the most lofty institutions. The agency has found evidence implicating judges, prosecutors, governors and district heads across the country.
In the House of Representatives, a total of 42 lawmakers have been imprisoned since 2007 in a number of cases ranging from bribery to extortion.
The KPK has also worked on prevention, coordinating an Anti-Corruption Initiative Assessment of public institutions and their progress — or lack thereof — in enacting its recommendations regarding transparency and accountability.
But those most heavily criticized in the assessments rarely act on the feedback, often brushing off the recommendations as “valuable input.”
Changing faces of corruption
The Reformation movement that followed Suharto’s ouster paved the way for the decentralization of power, bringing greater independence to ministries and regional governments. It also gave greater power of oversight to the House of Representatives and its independent commissions.
However, Transparency International Indonesia secretary general Teten Masduki believes corruption has gone from involving a few bureaucratic elites to a widespread phenomenon.
“In the Suharto era, we knew who the players were: the cronies and the well-connected,” Teten said. “But now, everyone can directly involve themselves in the labyrinthine web of graft.
“Corruption now has many faces; it is less systematic but more widespread with a multitude of entry points, be it from the executives, the legislature or the judiciaries.”
Sofyan Wanandi, the chairman of the Indonesian Employers Association (Apindo), said the die-hard culture of corruption in Indonesia could be explained by the simple economic rule of supply and demand.
“For businesses it is simple,” he said. “There is a demand for legal certainty, a demand for swift bureaucratic process, and a demand to end discriminatory treatment for the haves and have-nots.
“If we can devise a system to meet these demands, the need for providing officials with payoffs will die out. But to do that we need a stringent leadership, and that is what’s lacking.”
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has said he believes Indonesia’s fight against corruption “is still on the right track.”
The Ministry of Finance has demonstrated a zero-tolerance attitude toward graft, replacing nearly 3,000 officials since the Gayus scandal broke.
But the ICW’s Danang said anticorruption programs at other government agencies had been less effective and vague.
“How do they expect to curb corruption through anticorruption training and making officials sign ‘integrity pacts’ while doing little to ensure better transparency in public offices?” he said.
The KPK has found that officials are still reluctant to declare their wealth, report gifts that could affect their professional objectivity, report graft or accommodate public demands for scrutiny.
Old problem, new players
Indonesia should have brought former President Suharto to justice, Danang said, noting how much the imprisonment of Hosni Mubarak meant to Egypt after protests toppled his regime in early 2011.
“Suharto behind bars would have sent a powerful message to corruptors,” Danang said. “Instead, his legacy remains embedded in the mentality of the bureaucrats who publicly say they are against graft but secretly long for the Suharto era.”
Indonesia did try to prosecute Suharto shortly after he was removed from office, but with many of his supporters still in power, the attempt failed.
The Suharto family and its cronies own hundreds of companies, including television stations, banks, hotels and mining and logging companies. According to a 2008 article by Worldpress.org, Suharto’s alleged misappropriation is estimated to have been around $73 billion during his regime. Transparency International in 2008 listed Suharto as “the world’s most corrupt leader of all time.”
After Suharto died in 2008, the case was not revived. There remain those who revere Suharto and support efforts to name him as a national hero.
Times change, but as the cases of Gayus and Nazaruddin demonstrate, corruption endures — and it seduces even those of the younger generation that symbolically threw it out.
In December 2011, Indonesia’s anti-money laundering agency, the Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Center (PPATK), announced it had discovered 10 young public officials with suspiciously large bank accounts containing billions of rupiah each.
“I thought the accountholders were conspiring with their superiors, but no. They did it themselves,” PPATK deputy chairman Agus Santoso said. “[Illicit funds] are being funneled to their wives’ accounts, one official’s two-year-old daughter was insured for Rp 2 billion and one official had Rp 5 billion in insurance under his five-year-old son’s name.”
On Jalan Sudirman, a former student activist sipped freshly brewed coffee at a cafe and reflected on the fall of the New Order.
“You don’t suppose Gayus or Nazaruddin were among the students in the movement, do you?”
There was a long pause.
“They couldn’t have been,” he said finally.
“If they ever felt the sting of a rubber bullet or tasted a police baton, there is no way they could’ve done what they did.”
This article first appeared in Global Integrity Report: 2011, a major investigative study of 31 countries released by Global Integrity, an international nonprofit organization that tracks governance and corruption trends globally.
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