“Huh?” was the initial reaction of many Indonesians upon hearing President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s long-awaited announcements regarding the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) and the Bank Century bailout scandal controversies.
However, a closer look at the transcript of his long-winded address late Monday revealed his conclusion on the prosecution of the KPK deputies:
“A better solution and option … would be that the police and prosecutors do not take this case to court …. but instead immediately undertake corrective measures [within] the police, Attorney General’s Office and the KPK.”
Though protests and shouts of disappointment followed the President’s address, at the end of the day Yudhoyono seemed to have regained the guts to defy his own men’s demands to follow their agenda.
Eventually the President did try to allay the disappointment and even anger of people who wanted him to stop the criminalization the two KPK deputies.
Did the President make a half-hearted decision? Was the mild-sounding suggestion “of a better solution” too little, too late? Let’s give him a chance.
On Monday evening, Yudhoyono stopped short of bowing to public demand to stop the criminalization of the two KPK deputies — Police Ins. Gen. (ret) Bibit Samad Rianto and Chandra M.Hamzah — insisting that stopping investigations and prosecutions was beyond his authority.
The public widely expected Yudhoyono to sack National Police chief Gen. Bambang Hendarso Danuri and Attorney General Hendarman Supandji, whether their imminent dismissal would be part of the “internal reforms” he recommended, is far from clear.
We believe that as long as these two senior state officials — and their trusted aides who had no shame in publicly acting as if their decisions were always absolutely right and the public was wrong — are in charge of such strategic positions, we have little hope in the government’s war against corruption. Citing legal reasons, some senior police officers and senior prosecutors made statements that could be perceived as belittling the President as the democratically elected leader of this country.
But again, let us give Yudhoyono the opportunity to regain his own people’s trust, which he himself has severely damaged purely because he was not able to get rid of people around him whose vested interests were, or would be, harmed by the KPK. Yudhoyono was entrusted by 60 percent of more than 120 million voters to lead this nation until 2014, and to fulfill his promise to eradicate the country’s most chronic disease: corruption. He deserves more time.
We also welcome Yudhoyono’s promise to allow law enforcers to thoroughly investigate the Bank Century bailout scandal, which cost the state Rp 6.7 trillion (US$716 million). He strongly denied rumors that he, his family or his Democratic Party had benefitted from the bank bailout.
The Democratic Party changed position on Monday and supported the House of Representatives’ ongoing inquiry into the scandal. We need to remind Yudhoyono again that if he fails to realize his promise to punish anyone responsible for the massive criminal loss of public funds he will lose any remaining shred of public trust.
The President will only have himself to blame if the bullet-proof trust he enjoyed during his first five-year term, as proved by his landslide victory in the July presidential election, never returns to its former glory. People still have high expectations of the President. They deserve concrete evidence that he is a true anticorruption warrior, as he likes to assert before national and international audiences.
