T

he Indonesian media are currently preoccupied with a woman who was born and grew up in the small town of Cilimus on the foothills of Mt. Ciremai, West Java. Non Nurlaela alias Non Saputri, better known as Bunda Putri, hit the political headlines when the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) played a recording of her conversation with Luthfi Hasan Ishaaq, the former president of the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), during the high profile beef import graft case trial.

No legal charges have been laid against Bunda Putri but there have already been hundreds of media articles about this 51-year-old woman, who has never appeared in public or given an interview.

This is elite Indonesian politics at its best; reality and truth are of no value but instead it is the public perception that is important. The unmasking of a carefully crafted political or social image is worse than murder.

The KPK must do its job of course, but the revelation of the public persona of Bunda Putri is extremely interesting. She has revealed a political network, which dates back to the middle of the 1970s when the Golkar Party ruled the roost. It sheds light on the political glory days of Golkar and how people from that era have managed to survive in today'€™s democratic period. Although they live without the privileges that they enjoyed in the past, they have managed to survive and stay rich.

The aspect that has grabbed the attention of the Indonesian public is not just the pictures circulating publicly of the lady in question with diamonds dripping off her fingers and neck. A fact that is now being revealed, is that she managed to jump from being a political operator in Golkar to the PKS and apparently to the ruling Democratic Party (PD).

On Oct. 11, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono lost his temper publicly and told the media: '€œMy personal assistant would have known [if Bunda Putri had ever contacted me]. But I am 100 percent sure that nobody knows about her.'€ That did it! The race was on to unmask the President, the palace and PD by unmasking Bunda Putri.

Many images of the Lady from Cilimus that she and others have created are now circulating in the public sphere. She has been a silent political operator and has become a mysterious woman in Indonesian politics. There have been pictures of her in the media with important people like Trade Minister Gita Wirjawan, Cabinet Secretary Dipo Alam, Defense Minister Purnomo Yusgiantoro and former sports minister Andi Malarangeng, who is now detained pending his graft trial.

Agung Laksono, Golkar deputy chairman and Coordinating People'€™s Welfare Minister, has acknowledged that he has met her and, as the KPK hearing on the beef import scandal has revealed, she is in touch with the top brass of the PKS.

Cilimus, where Bunda Putri grew up, has legends about its founders'€™ expertise in the martial art known as pencak silat and how they took on Dutch colonialism. The name Cilimus, which literally means mango trees by the river, conjures up the image of an ideal, tranquil village at the foothills of a volcanic mountain, a sort of Sundanese Shangri-La, a place to retreat from the madness of life. Media reports suggest that Bunda Putri is currently hiding somewhere in this area.

What has Bunda Putri done wrong so far? Officially and legally nothing, but the damage she has done to the process of democratization in this country is extensive. She is not the only one but most probably one of many who are part of a group of elite political operators who are secretly hijacking democratization in Indonesia. Others like her have not been caught and unmasked.

Whatever weaknesses democracy may have, the game that it plays involves openness and transparency. Democracy operates on the basis of separation between the public and the private spheres. Families, friendships belong to the private sphere while politics and public offices belong to the public sphere. The separation of these spheres in adat (traditions) is horizontal, between the ruler and the subjects. Our adat system does not always establish a clear boundary between the public and private spheres, as there is a grey area in which public and private issues can merge. The likes of Bunda Putri operate in this grey area, using friendships and family networks to access the public and political arenas for personal gains.

People like Bunda Putri look for small windows of opportunity in the democratization process so that they or their masters can obtain economic privileges. It is not difficult to do this at present, given the many loopholes in our laws, regulations and bureaucratic processes.

These loopholes are then exploited to the point where the progress being made by democratization is erased, leaving in its place the worst elements of the left-over parts of the New Order era.

This in turn causes many Indonesians to have serious doubts about democracy and even become despaired. It is this kind of damage to the nation that cannot be quantified or even pointed out officially. Institutions like the KPK, which hopefully will remain neutral and support the struggle for democratization, must tackle problems based on facts and under the rule of law. This is not easy.

The real irony may perhaps be that Bunda Putri does not realize the extent of the damage that she is doing to the nation. After all, the Lady from Cilimus only wants enough money to buy diamonds.

The writer, a former journalist based in Australia, is secretary-general of the Indonesian Community for Democracy (KID).