Elisabeth Kramer and Michele Ford

Activists protest the Bank Century corruption scandal at the International Anti-Corruption Day rally Elisabeth Kramer

Discussions about corruption are nothing new in Indonesia. Over the decades since independence Indonesia has developed a global reputation for corrupt practices that shows no sign of diminishing. Currently, the issue is so pervasive that it is impossible to avoid. Knowledge of cases and figures embroiled in corruption scandals become part of your consciousness, whether or not you make an effort to seek out information about them. And while particular cases come and go, the theme of corruption continues to dominate discussion of current events in Indonesia.

There is a general acknowledgment that corruption permeates both public and private spheres. To get bureaucratic tasks done promptly has long required an informal payment of some sort. To get anything done in the parliament appears to be no different, with ‘envelope’ politics a common phenomenon. While anti-corruption initiatives such as the establishment of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) and various projects by civil society groups attempt to change the status quo, the reach of corruption seems undeniable, even if it has now taken on new forms.

Ask any Indonesian on the street and you will find that this is common knowledge. So in this edition of Inside Indonesia, we set out to find some more

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Kikue Hamayotsu

Many rank-and-file members of the PPP are unhappy with growing elitism of the current leadership Kikue Hamayotsu

Compared to other party congresses of recent years, the United Development Party’s (PPP) five-yearly congress (Muktamar) in July 2011 was a low-spirited and poorly organised event. While the widely-publicised opening ceremony was well-attended, most of the sessions that followed were either half empty or frequently interrupted by angry party members shouting at the executives on the podium. Chaos unfolded outside the congress venue, Bandung’s Panghegar Hotel, as a number of lower-ranking party cadres from all over the archipelago were denied entry into the hotel by overzealous security guards.

Rather than sending a positive signal of change and reform, the congress merely reinforced the perception that the PPP is a party in decline. But party elites are determined to alter this perception and are convinced that a reassertion of Islamic values, along with organisational renewal, is the key to securing the party’s future.

The decline of the PPP

At the outset of Indonesia’s democratic transition, many observers predicted that the PPP would quickly vanish from the political scene. The PPP was, after all, a creation of the authoritarian New Order regime, formed through the forced fusion of four major Islamic parties and organisations – the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) Party, the Islamic Education Movement (Perti), the Indonesian Muslim Party

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Tiffany Tsao

Green and white glass bottles on the exterior of Epicentrum Walk give off eco-friendly vibes Tiffany Tsao

Amidst the concrete edifices, congested roads and polluted canals of Jakarta, environmentalism is taking hold. The Bike 2 Work Indonesia Community promotes cycling as a replacement for driving cars or motorbikes. The members of Jakarta Berkebun have launched a pilot project to convert unused land into community gardens. The car-free zones imposed by the city government around the capital every Sunday are aimed at reducing pollution and freeing up streets for cycling, walking, playing sports or just hanging out. But lately, efforts to ‘green’ the Greater Jakarta Metropolitan Area have received support from a highly unexpected quarter: malls.

An outgrowth of economic liberalisation under the Suharto regime, malls increased dramatically in number, size and luxuriousness during the 1990s and have continued to do so since. In fact, the city government passed a moratorium in October 2011 on the issuance of building permits for large malls through 2012 in an attempt to check their rampant proliferation: the reason cited was the lack of tenants in existing malls. According to estimates made by Yayat Supriatna, a city planner interviewed by several newspapers about the moratorium, there are about 170 malls in the Greater Jakarta Metropolitan Area (which includes Jakarta, Bogor, Depok, Tangerang and Bekasi).

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Muhammad Iqbal

Hisanori Kato has managed to gather a unique compilation of articles that covers the issue of ijtihad from two diametrically opposing views: those held by liberal and fundamentalist Muslims in Indonesia. Simply speaking, ijtihad is the use of human reasoning in interpreting Islamic teachings. In his own words, Kato put this volume together to show the different ways Muslims interpret Islamic teachings, and just how diverse the umat, or congregation, is.

The book begins with an introduction to its central theme: a conflict between liberal Muslims and their fundamentalist counterparts. This is a conflict that arose among Indonesian Muslims and Muslims around the world, due to differences over interpretations of Islam. On the surface it would be easy to attribute this solely to the actions of human agents in their usage or interpretation of ijtihad, which Kato describes as human reasoning. However, Kato argues, and rightly so, that there is more to it than that. His introductory chapter draws from sociology, employing Ernst Gellner’s explanation of social change to argue his case. Kato puts forth the idea that social context is extremely crucial in shaping one’s interpretation and therefore one’s expression, of religion. Thus, the social context of the society in which a religion is located is important

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Benjamin Hegarty

Situated between poverty and wealth, modernity and tradition, history and the future, Indonesia is in the midst of rapid change. The people affected most by this situation are the country’s poor rural migrants who have moved to the cities in search of success. Living in the shadows of conspicuous wealth and modernity, they are rarely represented as active agents framing and reframing their identities in the context of globalisation.

Position Among the Stars (Stand van de sterren) is the final film in a documentary trilogy by cinema verité filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich, which delves into the troubling themes of globalisation, modernity, tradition and social conflict from the perspective of Jakarta’s urban poor. In literature and film the lives of the poor are often framed by two things – middle class apathy or government representations – which focus on the victimhood of the poor. This documentary-style exploration of an Indonesian family breaks out of these two frames by exploring the complexities and agency of those on the periphery of Indonesian society with a humanistic lens.

This is verité film-making at its best. Written without narration or voice-over the performance of the Sjamsuddin family, poor migrants from rural Java, is captivating and emotionally raw. The family is at ease in front of the camera, allowing the audience to share

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Edward Aspinall

Workers of Indonesia unite! Henri Ismail/Poros Photo

For more than 45 years, Indonesia has been a country without a powerful left. In the mid-1960s, the military and its fellow-travellers eliminated the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) and its allies in a tremendous bloodbath. Over thirty years of extreme anti-communist vigilance followed under President Suharto’s ‘New Order’ regime, resulting in the proscription of virtually all forms of left-wing politics.

The legacies of these years of repression have been hard to shake. In the late New Order years, radical politics began to revive, and there was a fluorescence of activism after the regime collapsed in 1998. Instead of bringing radical social change, however, it often seems that Indonesia’s democracy is just as dominated by the rich and the powerful as was the old regime. Capitalism is booming, and left-wing forces internationally – especially in the surrounding Southeast Asian region – have been in long retreat.

In Indonesia, groups aiming at the empowerment of the poor, redistribution, and greater social justice are cast into shadow by the spectacles of money politics and corruption that play out at the centre. They are often kept there by the politics of intimidation and thuggery that occur in the gloomy margins of Indonesian political life. Conservative brands of religious and ethnic politics seem to have greater appeal to poor people

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Michael Buehler

Syahrul Yasin Limpo, an unlikely democratic hero semestainsitute.com

Every year, the development industry in Jakarta churns out ‘update’, ‘stock-taking’ and ‘rapid appraisal’ reports about the progress of democratisation and decentralisation in Indonesian local politics. Often these reports deal with the great complexity of their topic by focusing on the behaviour of individual politicians. Virtually every report picks out a few ‘reform-minded’ individuals and portrays them as leaders who are both ‘responsive’ and ‘responsible’ to citizen demands. These heroes of reform are then celebrated as pushing forward Indonesia’s democratisation and decentralisation against the interests of ‘old elites’ and ‘entrenched interests’.

In provinces, districts and municipalities that have been blessed with such ‘good leadership’ change is happening, so the story goes. In localities where ‘bosses’, ‘little kings’ and ‘predatory forces’ rule, in contrast, progress is depicted as stagnating. In this context, multilateral organisations have outdone each other over the past decade in their praise for half a dozen so-called reformers running the executive government of places such as Gorontalo (Sulawesi), Jembrana (Bali), Solok (West Sumatra), Sragen and Kebumen (both Central Java). Frequently discussed in the expatriate bars in Jakarta but rarely visited for in-depth research, these places loom large in the minds of development consultants. Stories abound of how the executive government heads in these few regions place the

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Chris Wilson

Tidung men during the riot Anonymous

For several days in late September 2010 a riot paralysed the island municipality of Tarakan in northeast East Kalimantan. The official death toll from the fighting was seven, but locals, including police officers and newspaper journalists, claim the number was under-reported to avoid further retaliation. More were injured, several houses badly damaged and 40,000 people temporarily displaced by the violence.

As occurred during the major ethno-religious conflicts in Indonesia a decade ago, a small, violent incident triggered the rioting. Abdullah, a Tidung community and religious leader in rural northern Tarakan, was stabbed and killed after retaliating against youths who had beaten his son. The youths were Bugis Letta, a sub-ethnic group of the Bugis, originating primarily from South Sulawesi’s Pinrang district. In response, a Tidung mob ransacked local Bugis homes.

The following day, a large crowd of Tidung, Dayak, Berau and other indigenous groups gathered in the city in front of the office of the United Indigenous Peoples of Kalimantan Organisation (PUSAKA). Led by PUSAKA representatives – including the organisation’s war commander, Panglima Kumbang, who had flown in from Central Kalimantan – the mob proceeded to the municipality police station. The crowd’s anger was directed primarily at the Letta, a large group of whom had gathered to guard the house of the

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Klas Lundström

A future of industry? A boy inspects the river from the doorstep of his house where river boats pull up to unload. Klas Lundström

At dawn, small freighter ships return to the port of Samarinda with loads of coal and timber from the heart of Kalimantan. The brown coal is sorted into huge piles: tons of fuel to meet the world’s demand for energy. In the port, all the coal is prepared for its journeys to Japan, China or Europe. Kalimantan’s coal – along with its palm oil and logging– contributes to Indonesia’s record-setting growth, which hit 6.5 per cent in 2011.

This is the Mahakam River, the heart of Kalimantan, the name for Indonesian Borneo. On the map the Mahakam is a winding snake, the longest river of East Kalimantan, travelling 900 kilometres from the coast to the green highlands of the interior. Today, the river is brown, filled with garbage and eroded soil from cleared forests, and it has become the highway for the coal coming from the rainforest and ending up in growing economies outside Indonesia. Fifty years ago, this water was clear; now it’s deeply stained, although the river remains the only source of washing and drinking water for thousands of people.

During the course of one hour, at least ten freighters pass by. That is the everyday view from

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Elisabeth Kramer

Media headlines targeting the war on corruption Elisabeth Kramer

On 5 November 2011, the Jakarta Post ran a small, unassuming editorial titled ‘Defeat in the war on graft’. The editorial outlined the public disappointment at the failure of regional anti-corruption courts to convict a number of people accused of corruption, in stark contrast to the Jakarta based anti-corruption court which had a 100 per cent conviction rate. It lamented this failure, which it said was clear evidence that the government was losing the war against corruption – a war that, it claimed, is vital to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s ongoing legitimacy.

Buried among many other articles, the editorial was short and not particularly significant. But it provides an excellent example of the way in which corruption and efforts to combat it are portrayed by the Indonesian media. Rather than recognising corruption as a deeply embedded issue that has historical, political, and even cultural roots, it is often painted simplistically as the battlefield in a war of ‘good vs. evil’. The keen media interest in corruption often takes the form of sensationalised articles about individuals, continuing an historical trend in Indonesia’s debate surrounding corruption in the form of a never-ending search for heroes and villains.

The heroes in the war against corruption are portrayed

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Nils Bubandt

Clay pots containing the spirits dispatched to an anti-corruption demonstration Nils Bubandt

The clay pots and gourds that contain the spirits are aligned neatly on shelves in the bamboo compound. There are perhaps a few dozen of them in the otherwise apparently empty enclosure, but KM Muzakkin, leader of Dzikrussyifa’ Asma Berojomusti, an Islamic boarding school in East Java, says that a thousand spirits dwell there. One of more than 4400 such schools registered in East Java alone, this pesantren stands out because it is the only one where the spirits are the only students. ‘This’, as Pak Muzakkin proudly told me, ‘is the only spirit pesantren in the world.’

In front of the school a home-painted placard informs passers-by that the school ‘rehabilitates sufferers of mental illness, drug abusers, criminals, and street children’. In addition, Pak Muzakkin offers a range of other cures against problems stemming from the visible as well as the invisible world. This includes protection against magic and misfortune, various charms as well as solutions to sexual problems and the setting of broken bones. Since he was a child, Pak Muzakkin has had the ability to cure illness – especially illness associated with the mystical world – and in 2000 set up his Islamic boarding school around his traditional medical practice where he

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Luky Djani

Campaign poster for local Garut elections in 2009 Luky Djani

In early January 2012, former DPR member Sofyan Usman of the United Development Party (PPP) told the anti-corruption special court that he did not deserve to be punished, even though he was clearly guilty of receiving travellers’ cheques as bribes. While reading his statement, he urged the court to dismiss the charges against him because all the money he obtained from the Batam Industrial Development Authority (approximately Rp. 1 billion or $A 110,000) had been spent on building a mosque for the local community. This argument was unsuccessful, and the anti-corruption special court sentenced the politician to 14 months imprisonment.

This is just one of an increasing number of examples where religious justifications have been invoked in corruption cases. Defendants are also increasingly making use of religious symbols like clothing and language in the hope that their overt display of religiosity will protect them from public criticism. Take the case of Yulianis, the deputy finance director of PT. Permai Group, a holding company owned by former Democrat Party treasurer Nazaruddin. Yulianis was taken in to custody after the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) caught the firm’s marketing director trying to bribe Wafid Muharam, the secretary of the Ministry of Youth and Sports. During her trial,

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Budi Setiyono

Civil Society protesters hold an anti-corruption rally Budi Setiyono

Anti-corruption agendas have been a catch-cry of each of Indonesia’s post-Suharto administrations, all of which have promised to initiate new, more effective anti-corruption strategies. These promises included formulating more transparent fiscal management systems, reforming the legal system, reforming civil service management and creating a set of new oversight institutions and anti-corruption task forces. Efforts, however, have generally not been very successful, thwarted by the massive scale of the problem, with difficulties in developing a coherent program across different government agencies. The absence of clear, measurable goals has also attracted widespread criticism, leading to a public perception that the government is merely paying lip-service to the fight against corruption, and cherry-picking the cases and causes it wishes to pursue.

In the face of this lack of commitment, civil society organisations (CSOs) have stepped up to force the government to make changes. Since 2000, hundreds of organisations have been formed, along with various nation-wide anti-corruption networks, many of them attracting international support. These CSOs generally work to fight corruption at both the strategic and practical levels. At the strategic level, they advocate a better legal and institutional framework for dealing with corruption. At the practical level, they monitor and investigate corruption, and campaign for the punishment of corrupt officials, trying to

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Sylvia Tidey

A construction site in Eastern Indonesia Sylvia Tidey

The construction industry in Indonesia is renowned for its dodgy dealings and backroom exchanges. Corruption is such an issue in the industry that a presidential decree was passed in 2003 to standardise the procurement of goods and services by both central and regional governments. These changes stipulated stricter tendering requirements for projects, involving eleven stages to be finalised within 23 working days. Additionally, contractors no longer need to be a member of the national Chamber of Commerce, but only require a license with an existing business association.

These revisions were designed to close some of the systemic loopholes thought to facilitate corrupt practices, and to encourage a more competitive and transparent tendering process. But some cases suggest that the reforms have not only failed, but have actually fostered new forms of corruption. One of these cases involves the Department of Public Works in a small town in Eastern Indonesia.

Running scared

In the outer provinces, you might expect to find a general disregard – or simple lack of knowledge – of tender rules and regulations amidst flourishing corrupt practices in the construction industry. This, however, is not quite the case. In this particular small town, a well-respected local contractor was convicted and incarcerated in 2008 for corruption, as punishment for failing to finish an infrastructure project.

As a

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Fiona Downs

An anti-bribery poster at the Ministry of Forestry Fiona Downs

In September 2011, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono dedicated the final years of his presidency to delivering results that will help sustain the forests of Indonesia. Large sums of international funding, under the banner of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, added momentum to the cause. Many non-government organisations (NGOs), researchers and even government reports claimed that a direct link exists between corruption and deforestation, and so attempts to save the forests are useless unless corruption in Indonesia’s forest sector can be significantly reduced.

Changes to forest regulation and responsibilities since decentralisation have altered the nature of corruption in Indonesia’s forest sector. It now involves different types of activities, done by different actors, with diverse motivations and with complex consequences for forests. The link between any particular bribe or other act of corruption and deforestation may not be as clear as it seems. Most discussions about corruption focus on the behaviour of governments but corruption can also involve the private sector, NGOs and communities.

A battle for control

The history of forest management in Indonesia, particularly during the Suharto era, is one of almost unrestrained corruption, contributing to widespread deforestation and forest degradation. During Suharto’s 32-year rule, the president and his closest allies used public office to secure very profitable timber concessions for the military

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Simon Butt

An anti-corruption mural in JakartaAn anti-corruption mural in Jakarta Jemma Parsons

In November 2009 Indonesia's national parliament ordered the Supreme Court to establish regional anti-corruption (Tipikor) courts – one in the district court of each provincial capital – to join the central anti-corruption court in Jakarta, operating since 2004. At first glance, this might have seemed like a good idea. The Jakarta Tipikor court had performed remarkably well. It had convicted in every case it had tried – around 150 of them. Those convicted included serving and former parliamentarians, former ministers, Bank Indonesia officials, senior local government officials, law enforcement officials, even the father of the daughter-in-law of the President. This was an extraordinary achievement in a country with notoriously high levels of corruption. It seemed that the tides of impunity – the norm for those with political connections or with the money to bribe their way out of trouble – were turning. If these successes could be replicated outside of Jakarta, then surely significant progress could be made in the ‘fight against corruption’.

The regional Tipikor courts began operating in early 2011, but by October their reputation was in tatters. They had begun acquitting defendants in corruption cases and had come under fire from civil society organisations, notably Indonesian Corruption Watch. In early

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This local fisherman now struggles to make a living John McLachlan-Karr

Every time I fly out of Surabaya I am amazed by the way the coastal region has been almost entirely transformed into a patchwork of prawn ponds. According to GIS data obtained during a recent AusAID and United Nations assessment of the impacts of the Sidoarjo mud flow, 95 per cent of the mangrove forests and estuarine creeks that once lined the coast have been developed into prawn ponds. Despite initial fears, the nearby mud flow has not had a direct impact on the Sidoarjo ponds, but even before the disaster the prawn farms were already in decline.

Twenty-five years of prawn farming has degraded the ecosystem, to the extent that the Javanese coastal region is now struggling to support the production of both farmed prawns and wild seafood. While for many years these ponds produced lucrative harvests, overdevelopment is now causing decreasing returns to scale, and the environmental and socio-economic consequences of the ponds are becoming more apparent.

Gold rush for prawns

Back in the 1990s, I saw similar coastal scenes in the South American country of Ecuador, where commercial prawn farming started over forty years ago. Sometime in the late 1960s, banana plantation owners noticed that floodwaters trapped behind a levee produced large populations of sizable prawns. People quickly began to engineer

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Arifin draws the line at suicide, but will go a long way to draw attention to his cause

Arifin Wardiyanto

Arifin Wardiyanto first came to my attention in August 2011, when his picture was strewn across the print, internet and television media in response to his one-man show of support for the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) in front of its Jakarta headquarters. The images showed Arifin chained to the building, yelling ‘I am willing to die to fight corruption!’ as he cut himself across his forehead, blood spilling down his face and onto his white dress shirt.

Speaking to Arifin one-on-one provided some insight into the man and his motivations on this particular occasion but also into his broader vigilante approach to seeking justice, as his personal experiences and upbringing have clearly played a key role in shaping his anti-corruption activism.

From wrongly accused to crusader

Arifin’s fight against corruption was not born out of thin air. In the mid-1990s he was a branch manager for Telkom Indonesia – Indonesia’s premier telecommunications company – in the Yogyakarta region. Suspicious of corrupt activities amongst some of his peers, he became a whistleblower, reporting them to the authorities and the media. Instead of being brought to justice, the charges were turned back on him and he was arrested. He spent two

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The school in Hukaea-Laea Linda McRae

In the heart of the Indonesian province of Southeast Sulawesi lies the Rawa Aopa Watumohai National Park. Boasting a broad range of natural habitats including mangroves, savannah, peat swamps, lowland tropical rainforests and sub-montane forests, it is home to hundreds of animal and plant species, including many of Sulawesi’s endemic birds and mammals. The park’s extensive lake and swamp systems were recently declared wetlands of international importance due to their significance as resting points for migratory waterbirds. But what the government failed to recognise was that this pristine natural habitat is not only of importance to animals and plants. A small community of people also lives within the boundaries of the national park.

Following the park’s establishment in 1989, the government tried repeatedly to remove the Moronene people from their ancestral land. Mediation by a group of sympathetic NGO activists eventually helped broker a solution, which granted the Moronene people the right to remain in their homes. But the community still faces a number of challenges. Politically, the Moronene are still waiting for their village of Hukaea-Laea to be formally recognised as a fully-fledged administrative entity. Economically, limited knowledge of modern farming and heavy reliance on diesel generators for electricity keeps them dependant

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How does one recount a life? And especially the life of Herbert Feith? And in a book written, I think, for that large circle which knew and admired him? Jemma Purdey has taken the path of chronicle, and she had stacks of material to support this conception. For Herb saved everything, notes to himself, jottings, drafts of academic papers, news articles that interested him, letters to him and the copies of letters he wrote others. He was a prolific letter writer, no child of the electronic age. Indeed, no such biography will be written again that distils the essence of a man from his letters. Purdey also found Herb in his numerous op-ed and journal articles, in institutional documents, in records of the many causes he supported, in the recollections of family and friends, and in the fabric of the societies and cultures that formed him.

Out of this welter of facts and minutiae of daily life – the ‘ten thousand things’ that make up a man’s life as fellow writer of Indonesian pasts, Maria Dermoût once put it – come two observations from Jemma Purdey that struck me as ringing true. She writes that, in encounters with others, Herb instinctively gauged what interested them and spoke of that. He

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