Markus Junianto Sihaloho & Heru Andriyanto, Jakarta – In the six years that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has been in power, he has increasingly failed to make good on his pledges to battle corruption, critics said on Sunday.

Indonesia Corruption Watch, the country's leading watchdog on graft, said the president had instead allowed rivalries between law-enforcement agencies to escalate and had gone easy on members of his Democratic Party implicated in graft cases.

"The president should make his party an example of his commitment to eradicate corruption, by showing that even his close aides can't escape the antigraft program," ICW official Febridiansyah said.

He added that Yudhoyono had made 17 pledges related to the anticorruption drive, but had only made good on three of them.

"The president's statements are only lip service that clearly shows his political style of public image trumping concrete achievements," he said. "It also explains why the president panders to corruption convicts by handing remissions to 341 of them, parole to 318 and clemency for one of them."

Separately, J Kristiadi, a political analyst from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the president had been too busy building his personal image to see the rising trend of regional heads building their own mini dynasties and thus solidifying the culture of corruption. "The president shouldn't run the government on auto-pilot," he said. "More importantly, he should stop preening because the people are tired of that."

Achmad Rifai, a lawyer, said the Justice and Human Rights Ministry and law-enforcement agencies such as the National Police and the Attorney General's Office had fared poorly in fighting graft under the president's leadership.

"Take the case of [anticorruption commissioners] Bibit Samad Rianto and Chandra Hamzah," said Rifai, the legal counsel for the two Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) deputy chairmen.

"The police charged them without any evidence, and prosecutors took up the case immediately," he said. "The Justice Ministry has done no better," he added. "The KPK works very hard to arrest and prosecute graft suspects, but once they're convicted, the ministry grants them sentence cuts."

However, Achmad Mubarok, a member of Yudhoyono's Democratic Party, blamed the perceived shielding of corruption suspects on the limited resources available to combat graft. "If you've got 1,000 trees to chop down, but you only have three axes, you've got to start prioritizing," he said. "We have to select a few at first, but it's better than doing nothing."

One of the high-profile Democrats implicated in graft but never prosecuted is Djufri, former mayor of Bukittinggi, West Sumatra, and chairman of the party's provincial branch, who is suspected of embezzling Rp 1.2 billion ($135,000) from the city budget.

Another is Bengkulu Governor Agusrin Najamuddin, who was allowed to compete in the gubernatorial election this year despite being named a suspect in a Rp 21.3 billion embezzlement case in 2009.

Similarly, Sukawi Sutarip, the former mayor of Semarang was in 2008 named a suspect for embezzling Rp 5 billion from the municipal budget, but was never brought trial.

Police require the president's permission to arrest and investigate regional heads. But in these cases, Yudhoyono never granted his consent.