Today in the Jakarta Post

            On the first five pages of the English language daily Jakarta Post for Friday, December 10, there are 10 stories about corruption of one sort or another, not including the picture of protesters in front of the Headquarters of the Corruption Eradication Commission. (In the photograph, one protestor is wearing a wig mocking Gayus Tambunan, a tax official on trial for graft who was caught on camera, wearing the same wig, at a professional tennis tournament in Bali – he had been bribing the warden of the prison, and the guard, to get out of prison every weekend, bribing them with the remnants of the money he had skimmed off as a tax official. The judge who acquitted Gayus in his first trial, after Gayus bribed him with $40,000, is the subject of the story on page 2: Corrupt judge gets light 2-year sentence.) Everyone is on the take in this country, and every day in the Post is like this, story after story: Crowd demand mayor to resign (in Medan, said mayor having been named by the prosecutor in North Sumatra for embezzling $165,000); Court sentences for officials to a year for skimming money off the top of the family planning program in Central Sumatra); Anticorruption rally ends in chaos, where students in Makassar, in South Sulawesi, threw Molotov cocktails at the police as part of countrywide protests against corruption, and clashed in other parts of Indonesia. Corruption is endemic here, at any level, from the slight $5 bribe you add on to your driver’s license fee to avoid having to take the test, to the exorbitant, such as Gayus’s bribes using embezzled money. It’s how things are done in Indonesia, and it’s excruciating to see how damaging it is to a fledging democracy.

            There are two stories about Indonesia and the Nobel Peace Prize. It was, apparently, extremely important that the Indonesian Ambassador to Norway be recalled to Indonesia so that he could attend the Bali Democracy Forum meeting held at the same time as the ceremony in Oslo (an irony not lost on the attendees at the Bali Democracy Forum, who noted how odd it was for the Indonesian government to flee from a ceremony honoring a persecuted Chinese democratic activist to go to a forum on democracy). Indonesia joins a panoply of other countries apparently strong-armed by China into not attending. They are not strangers to this sort of thing, as one of the articles points out, having organized a boycott by Southeast Asian countries of the 1996 Nobel ceremony, honoring peace activists in Indonesia’s bloody conquest of East Timor (one of whom is now president of the now independent Timor Leste).

            There is a story about the brother of the Sultan of Yogyakarta, the cultural center of Java, who resigned from the democratic party. The Sultan of Yogyakarta is appointed to the governorship of the province, the only appointed governorship in Indonesia, as a reward for the Sultan having allied with revolutionary soldiers during the Indonesian Revolution (1945-1950). The President of Indonesia wants to revoke that status now, because it is undemocratic, to the great consternation of, it would seem, most of Yogyakarta, and of course to the Sultan’s brother. (The Sultan himself has suggested that he will bow to the will of the people.)

            In financial news, the price of rubber is at an all-time high and Islamic bonds are a good investment (I have no idea what this means, but you can buy “Sharia-compliant notes” – I hope somebody in Oklahoma is making sure to ban these investments).

            That’s today in the Jakarta Post. 

Update: Indonesia, bless their fledging democratic souls, decided to send an envoy to the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony. I suspect it was the embarrassment of my publicizing the slight to the 32 followers of our blog that tipped the balance. Pak Kirk, Global Democracy Crusader.