Indonesia, a country that has long been regarded as one of the world’s most corrupt, has won praise for combating graft in recent years. Leading the charge has been a single powerful government institution — one whose successes have drawn fierce opposition that now threatens its existence.
Armed with tools like warrantless wiretaps, the Corruption Eradication Commission confronted head-on the endemic corruption that remains as a legacy of President Suharto’s 32-year-long kleptocracy. Since it started operating in late 2003, the commission has investigated, prosecuted and achieved a 100-percent conviction rate in 86 cases of bribery and graft related to government procurements and budgets.
Local reporters camp daily outside the commission’s imposing eight-story building here, where high-ranking businessmen, bureaucrats, bankers, governors, diplomats, lawmakers, prosecutors, police officials and other previously untouchable members of Indonesian society have been made to discover a phenomenon new to this country: the perp walk.
One of Indonesia’s most famous rock bands, Slank, even performed outside the building last year to show support. The band took aim at members of Parliament, the institution generally considered the country’s most corrupt, by singing: “Who draws up laws? Draft bills for bucks.”
According to Transparency International, a Berlin-based private organization dedicated to curbing corruption, the modest progress Indonesia has made against corruption in the past half decade has resulted from the commission’s investigations and reforms inside a single ministry, the Ministry of Finance.
But now the nation’s Parliament, police force and attorney general’s office have increasingly been caught in the cross hairs of the anticorruption commission’s investigations, and members of those bodies are trying to undermine the commission, according to commission officials and watchdog groups.
The attacks against the commission grew so intense that Indonesia’s newly re-elected president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, summoned Indonesia’s top law enforcement officials on a recent morning. Sounding sometimes like a marriage counselor, he told them to avoid “friction” through better “communication” and “respect.”
The meeting shone a rare, public spotlight on the particular difficulties of fighting corruption here. At stake, experts say, is the very survival of the anticorruption commission, universally referred to as K.P.K., the initials of its name in Indonesian.
“It’s now a very dangerous time for the K.P.K.,” said Teten Masduki, the secretary general of Transparency International’s chapter in Indonesia. “Whether it’s the police, attorney general’s office or Parliament, there is a systematic agenda to destroy the K.P.K.”
Some critics say that the commission’s powers are too draconian and that defendants receive inadequate protection at a special Corruption Court where they are tried. Even Mr. Yudhoyono, who has made fighting corruption a main theme of his administration, said recently that the commission “seems to be accountable only to God.”
Haryono Umar, one of the commission’s four vice chairmen, said that its investigators were merely following the 2002 law that created it, and that the commission was accountable to Parliament and other government agencies.
“According to the law, corruption is an extraordinary crime, so that’s why it should be handled by extraordinary means,” Mr. Haryono said.
“But because we are handling corruption very aggressively,” he said, “many people are not happy with the K.P.K.” However, he denied that other law enforcement officials were among them.
Likewise, Inspector Gen. Nanan Soekarna, a spokesman for the national police, said, “We have good relations with the K.P.K.”
Current and former commission officials said relations with police officials and prosecutors started off well but grew strained in the past year after corruption investigators began focusing on the police and the attorney general’s office, long considered among the most corrupt institutions here. Last year, a former high-ranking police official was sentenced to two years in prison for misappropriating funds while serving as ambassador to Malaysia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/world/asia/26indo.html
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