The "fiasco" involving the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), police and Attorney General's Office crystallizes an old conflict between two competing views of law enforcement.
One view sees law enforcement as an opportunity for the government to show off its power in order to increase social control, while the other sees law as a means to achieve justice and to promote social progress.
The first view arises because governments, to quote Stuart Hampshire in Spinoza, "seek the indefinite extension of their own power and dominion" since they sense that "as soon as it is shown in experience that the sovereign authority has lost its power to subdue opposition and to make its will effective, it forfeits its authority as sovereign".
Thus, people in government constantly seek to prove their authority and indispensability by identifying and crushing an enemy. If they cannot do this through war against an external enemy, they create an "enemy within" by turning some minority group into a punching bag.
In a religious society like Indonesia, religious minorities make for an easy target. The government simply invents crimes like "blasphemy" and then fixes regulations and policy to enable the persecution of the targeted group.
Governments that theoretically uphold human rights need to be more subtle, so they use strategies such as the war on drugs, which gives them the flexibility to persecute domestic ethnic or social minorities while using military force against foreign communities, such as Latin American Indians, deemed menacing.
To understand this more fully, consider the recent case in the UK where the chairman of the government's Drugs Advisory Council pointed out that Gordon Brown's decision to increase penalties for users of cannabis was based on politics rather than science. For saying this, he was fired. A politician called his statement an "ill-judged intervention in the debate".
For politicians, truth is an "ill-judged intervention" that threatens their right to arbitrarily and unjustly target any enemy that might emerge as a threat to their monopoly of power or other interests. In this light, it is easy to understand why Indonesian law enforcers are so determined to shut down the KPK, which has threatened so blatantly to bring to light the truth and to confine politicians to the pursuit of policies that can be rationally justified for the benefit of society rather than themselves.
The KPK typifies the second approach to law enforcement, which is devoted to justice and social progress. Instead of selecting a victim and then arranging the rules to hurt the victim, this approach involves identifying injustice and then uncovering the perpetrators of the injustice. In the Bank Century case, for instance, the KPK has uncovered a possible crime costly not only to taxpayers but to everyone who suffers the consequences of corruption.
Their investigation is undertaken impartially, even though the wrongdoers might turn out to be politically powerful, as was Aulia Pohan. It is also easy to see why the police have had such trouble coming to terms with public disapproval of their actions. They are only doing what they normally do - selecting their target and fixing the evidence and confessions demanded by the courts.
After years of applying such methods with only a few murmurs of discontent from human rights activists, they could not have expected that the Constitutional Court would suddenly break ranks to expose their habits, or that the public would demand that the President finally prioritize justice over political compromise.
And no wonder the communications minister sees the presentation of a recording revealing the conspiracy to frame the KPK as another "ill-judged intervention" that needs to be prevented from ever happening again.
In sum, the conflict is not a "free-for-all frenzy" peculiar to Indonesia, but a further episode in a conflict between two approaches to law enforcement that has played out in all societies since the dawn of civilization.
John Hargreaves
Jakarta
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