Political rumbles after Indonesian blasts
By Patrick Guntensperger
JAKARTA - As the dust settles on last month's terrorist bombings, new political
rumbles threaten to complicate a smooth transition of power after the July
re-election of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to a second five-year term as
president. Official results showed Yudhoyono, popularly known as "SBY", won
60.8% of the vote, widely outpacing runner up Megawati Sukarnoputri, who earned
only 26.8%.
Megawati and the third-placed Jusuf Kalla, who received 12.4% of the votes,
have joined forces to file a legal challenge to the validity of the July 8
presidential polls. Megawati is demanding either a new vote or a two candidate
run-off against Yudhoyono, which
would have been legally required if he had received less than 50% of the vote.
Megawati's legal team allegedly has evidence of 28.5 million fraudulent votes,
including duplicated names, the registering of dead people and infant children
and other irregularities. If all of the alleged bad votes were subtracted from
Yudhoyono's count, the team claims he would have only won 48%, requiring a
second round run-off against the second-placing candidate Megawati with Kalla's
votes in the first round up for grabs.
Megawati's challenge, political analysts say, is not without merit. Whether the
evidence of voter fraud her team presents is sufficient for the Supreme Court
to invalidate the election and call new polls, however, for now seems doubtful.
The General Elections Committee (KPU), the official body that oversees and runs
elections, has taken heavy fire for its perceived poor performance in both the
presidential and national legislative elections that were held in April and
apparently handily won by Yudhoyono's Democratic Party.
At the legislative elections, which 34 different parties contested, there were
clear indications of massive and widespread voter fraud. While there were bound
to be logistical blunders in holding one-day elections for a population of
almost a quarter billion people spread across 17,000 islands and with
infrastructure varying from poor to non-existent, the voters list fiasco was
seen as a systematic attempt to tilt the election result.
The Supreme Court has ordered the KPU to recount the legislative election votes
and as a result seat allocations in the People's Representative Council, or
DPR, have yet to be officially finalized - although the KPU has said the
allocations will stand whatever the ruling or recount results. The KPU has put
the second phase of legislative vote-counting on hold while it deals with the
new legal challenges to the validity of the presidential election. The Supreme
Court will determine whether the evidence rises to the level required to
invalidate the results, which at this point, analysts say, seems unlikely.
Under assault
So far the legal challenge has been orderly, but there is an undercurrent of
tension which was intensified by the suicide bombings last moth of J W Marriott
and Ritz Carlton hotels in Jakarta that killed nine people and maimed many
more. There was initially open speculation - some of it fueled by Yudhoyono's
cryptic speech in the wake of the blasts - that the bombs could have been
politically motivated to take the steam out of Yudhoyono's landslide win.
Now the hunt is on for fugitive terrorist Noordin Top and most analysts say
there is little question that regional terror group Jemaah Islamiyah - or one
of its newly spawned offshoots - rather than Yudhoyono's political opponents
was behind the terrorist attack. Security analysts note that the grade of
explosives and tactics used in the blasts indicated a terrorist rather than
military mastermind.
Yudhoyono's policies, including a highly touted anti-corruption campaign which
is believed to have won him many votes, are more clearly under assault in the
DPR, where his Democrats have marginal influence until the new legislature is
seated. The DPR has dragged its feet on debating a bill that would allow the
specially designated Anti-Corruption Court (ACC) to retain its exclusive
jurisdiction over cases brought by the semi-autonomous Corruption Eradication
Commission (KPK).
The ACC has a 100% conviction rate and has routinely imposed lengthy prison
terms to even politically powerful convicts. Without the bill's passage, the
special court will lose its authority by year's end, a move that would greatly
undermine the KPU's ability to successfully prosecute cases.
The district courts, high courts and Supreme Court, which will handle
corruption cases if the DPR succeeds in closing the ACC, have comparatively
heard 222 corruption cases not filed by the KPK in 2009. Of those, more than
150 defendants were freed without charge, while those found guilty have been
sentenced to an average of only six months in prison, according to statistics
compiled by Indonesia Corruption Watch, an independent monitoring group.
Many political onlookers believed that Yudhoyono's Democrat party win at the
legislative elections and his resounding victory at the July 8 presidential
polls heralded a new era of political stability and good governance in
Indonesia. Analysts noted that the stock market rose even in the wake of the
terrorist bombings and there was still a general sense of optimism about the
country's democratic future even in the wake of the blasts. But less than one
month later, with the legal challenges to the elections' legitimacy, the
political situation is once again unsettled.
Some political observers see Megawati's challenge as her political last gasp
after convincingly losing two consecutive presidential elections. She was known
to be personally bitter after being trounced at the 2004 presidential polls by
her former cabinet minister turned electoral opponent Yudhoyono. That
deep-seated resentment was known to have carried over to the recent campaign
trail, seen visibly when Megawati declined to shake hands with Yudhoyono but
grasped Kalla's during a nationally televised debate.
The electoral loss has left formerly powerful political figures in limbo. Kalla
has said that he will retire to his Sulawesi home, although his Golkar party,
the political machine behind former dictator Suharto's regime, has said that he
will be given a "significant position" within its ranks. Meanwhile Megawati has
failed to capture voters' imagination as democracy has deepened, and it is
notable that the former president has only been appointed and never elected
directly to any office by the Indonesian people.
If Megawati's and Kalla's complaint is handled through legal channels and the
rulings of an independent investigation are honored by both sides, then
Indonesia's young democracy will have passed another important test. But there
still remains the potential for a volatile backlash if electoral fraud is found
to have been both systematic and widespread, as the two election losers have
alleged.
Patrick Guntensperger is a Jakarta-based journalist and teacher of
journalism. His blog can be found at http://pagun-view.blogspot.com
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