Ezra Sihite – Golkar Party legislators have lashed out at their colleagues from other parties as hypocrites for appearing to publicly oppose moves to curb the antigraft agency's powers while officially supporting the bid.
Aziz Syamsuddin, deputy chairman of the House of Representatives' Commission III, overseeing legal affairs, said on Tuesday that seven of the nine parties in the commission agreed to amend the law on the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK).
"My colleagues said one thing at a plenary meeting, and something else in the media, so it's not clear which one is correct. It's mind-boggling," he said. He added that the draft amendment would not have made it to the House Legislative Body for deliberation if it lacked widespread support among legislators.
Bambang Soesatyo, another Commission III member, identified the ruling Democratic Party as the draft's key backer, and expressed surprise that the party's members were the most outspoken public critics of the revision.
"If there are parties or individual legislators from House Commission III who claim they are unaware of the proposed amendment or oppose it, I find that very odd," he said. "If anything, they probably skipped a lot of meetings at the commission and aren't aware of their party's decisions."
Bambang added that the legislators now rejecting the proposed changes were the ones who were most vocal in pushing for the law to be revised in the first place.
Minutes from the plenary session that approved the draft amendment for deliberation show that only the opposition Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) and the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) were against revising the law.
The PDI-P's argument was that the KPK was functioning well and there was no need to change how it worked, while the PKS said it had consistently refused to take a stance on the issue.
The planned amendments include revoking the KPK's authority to prosecute corruption suspects, and imposing restrictions on its power to tap phone lines without a court warrant.
Bambang hinted that the Democrats were leading the charge to curtail the KPK's powers after several of the party's members were either charged or implicated in corruption cases.
"We all know that these decisions are signed off by the commission chairman, and the Commission III chairman is not from Golkar," he said. The legal affairs commission is headed by the Democrats' Gede Pasek Suardika.
Nurhayati Ali Assegaf, the Democrat chairwoman at the House, claimed that her party had initially supported the bid to amend the KPK law, but changed its mind because it believed the move was aimed at undermining the antigraft body.