POLICE IN INDONESIA DO BATTLE

AGAINST THE RULE OF LAW

October, 2009

(President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has since set up a special task force to combat judicial corruption in indonesia, which will initially focus on rooting out corruption in police and prosecutor offices across the country. Further, the National Police Chief, Bambang Hendarso Danuri, has told regional police chiefs to eradicate so-called 'mafia' practices in their offices.)

Notorious for their corruption and violence, the police in Indonesia are, in trumping up charges against the Corruption Eradication Committee (KPK), perhaps now making their last desperate stand, while outraged members of the public protest in the street in what is seen in Indonesia as a David-versus-Goliath battle between the lizard and the crocodile, with the latter aptly personifying the police.

Should you be arrested and taken to Polda Metro Jaya, Jakarta's central police station, by only looking at the faces and not the attire of the police and those incarcerated as criminals below, you could be forgiven for mistaking the one for the other. Those in the cells, despite the squalor, mostly display a good natured congeniality, whereas the countenances of many of the police look decidedly cruel, surly and shifty. The most sinister of all are the well-preened, fit, tall, gun-slinging, albeit epicene, policemen in plain-clothes, who occasionally saunter in and out of the police station during the long clammy tropical night. It is almost as if the criminals had donned police badges and taken over their offices, locking up the good guys in the dark, dank, rat-infested cells beneath.

Fabricating evidence

In serving its country the intrepid KPK, which has successfully netted corrupt government officials, national lawmakers, public prosecutors, provincial governors and central bankers, had the audacity to wiretap a police chief. Confronted with this threat to its criminality, the police force promptly began waging war against the KPK by reverting to what it thought it did best: fabricating evidence. However, faced with the KPK, the police have clearly been obliged to excel themselves.

Two KPK deputy commissioners, seen as the driving force behind the success of the KPK, have been the victims of a crude ruse. In response to KPK's announcement on 9th September that it was investigating Chief of Police Detective, General Susno Duadji, in connection with missing state funds meant for Bank Century, the police, just six days later named the two deputy KPK commissioners, Chandra Hamzah and Bibit Samad Rianto, as suspects. It was alleged they had misused their power by issuing travel bans on Anggoro Widjaya, a businessman suspected of corruption. Then, on 29th September the police named KPK's chief commissioner, Antasari Azhar – whom they had already charged in May for allegedly arranging the murder of a man trying to blackmail him – as suspected of violating the KPK's ethics code in meeting with Anggoro Widjaya. Not only has the alleged hired assassin, Daniel Daen Sabon, since withdrawn his incriminating testimony claiming he was tortured to extract it, but also the police are now having to strenuously deny there was any conspiracy to frame Antasari Azhar, after revelations to the contrary in the trial of police officer Williardi Wizar. Subsequently, in late October wiretapped recordings were leaked to the media in which Anggoro Widjaya, his brother and senior prosecutors and police officers are heard plotting to frame KPK's leaders, and a few days later Bibit Samad Rianto and Chandra Hamzah were taken into custody on the derisory pretext of "disturbing the investigation” with their press briefings, but not charged. They were freed only after the Constitutional Court had listened to the incriminating recordings.

Although arrested, the deputy commissioners were probably spared from being incarcerated in cell 13A where, often, twenty-three or more prisoners languish on a bare, wooden sleeping platform in a cell meant for eight. Emanating from the single, filthy, far-end latrine that abuts a barred and gauzed aperture reluctantly admitting a little daylight, a stench of urine constantly wafts through filth-coated cobwebs hanging from the cell ceiling. When prisoners light up at night, the place becomes even gloomier and more stifling as a haze of thick cigarette smoke vainly searches for an exit; but, seemingly, these suffocating fumes are not enough to deter the entry of enormous rats that scuttle noisily over the prisoners' plates as the inmates slumber. Unfortunately, while food is relatively scarce in the cells of Polda Metro Jaya, cigarettes are certainly not.

Ten days is the usual term in cell 13A. If ten days fails to elicit a bribe to the guards for transfer out of this mini Black Hole of Calcutta to other cells, the jailers resign themselves to making the transfer anyway.
Crimes of corruption, violence and perverting justice
That the Indonesian police commit crimes of corruption and violence, perverting justice against the very people they should be protecting is not in doubt. The abject dysfunction of the Indonesian criminal justice system was confirmed to U.N. Special Rapporteur from the Human Rights Commission, Professor Manfred Nowak, who visited Indonesia in November, 2007. He received “numerous and consistent allegations that corruption is deeply ingrained in the criminal justice system. Several sources indicated that at every stage, starting from the police and the judiciary to the detention centres and prisons, corruption is a quasi-institutionalised practice”. Failure to pay, for example, a prosecutor up to the £23,500 some demand in drug cases, often in collusion with judges and lawyers, may even lead to the innocent being executed by firing squad on the remote island of Nusa Kambangan.
Not only does legal system corruption routinely undermine fair trials in Indonesia, so does torture, particularly in cities. Professor Nowak, found that by far the majority of the detainees he met had been subject to abuse and torture to extract confessions that were later used in court proceedings and accepted as valid evidence. Beatings with fists, shoes, sticks, chains, iron bars, hammers and cables, gun shots through the calf and electrocution were all reported to him and confirmed forensically. In addition to baring the bullet holes in human flesh and the black-and-blue blanket-bruising that result from such treatment, inmates talk of screw drivers being thrust in ears, car jacks being used to prise apart body joints and limbs being broken, all in the cause of extracting confessions.
Amnesty International's recent report, 'Unfinished Business: Police Accountability in Indonesia', confirms this pattern of abuse and singles out drug users, repeat offenders and women, including sex workers, as being particularly vulnerable, with many of these reporting demands for bribes and sexual favours by police in exchange for better conditions and lenient sentencing.
Currently, in connection with the attempt by the police to undermine their enemy, the KPK, the Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, in response to strong public protests, has set up a fact-finding team to investigate the matter.
Effect on foreign investment and commerce
Nevertheless, the disgraceful behaviour of the Indonesian police in relation to the KPK is patently aimed at covering up serious crimes and demonstrates all too clearly the rottenness of certain elements in the force. In so doing it does anything but boost the confidence of foreign investors just at a time when President Yudhoyono is planning to improve the country's infrastructure using foreign capital, and when Indonesia and the European Union have signed a Partnership and Cooperation Agreement in recognition of the more than €20 billion trade between the two that is growing at some six percent per annum. Since the rule of law is almost non-existent in Indonesia, foreign companies that plan to operate within the country have little choice but to bribe legal system officials in order to survive, even though this is in breach of extra-territorial laws that make such corruption prosecutable in certain EU states and in nations such as Japan, Canada and South Korea, that are important investors and trading partners for Indonesia.
Support the brave bid
This, then, is an instance when the lizard must defeat the crocodile, for not to do so means that the Indonesian police will continue to contribute to the retardation of a vast nation that is making a very brave bid, after many traumatic decades, to become democratic, developed and respectful of human dignity. It is a bid that demands our full support.