Susan Sim, Jakarta – It is not an equation that the angry young demonstrators give two hoots about, but the donor countries probably care more about the fate of the Indonesian orangutan than whether former President Suharto goes to jail.
When the Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI) meets in mid-October to decide on Jakarta's request for a loan of US$4.8 billion, member nations are going to assess, after receiving due satisfaction on the issue of militia disarmament in West Timor and sectarian strife in Maluku, Indonesia's progress in legal reform, among other things.
Legal reform starts with institution-building, with the overhaul of a corrupt judiciary and law enforcement bodies. Without strengthening and staffing these institutions with competent prosecutors, judges and policemen with moral fibre, no government can, say, hope to stop the illegal logging of Kalimantan's forests – another issue of increasing concern to the world for obvious environmental reasons and because this is the natural habitat of the fast-dwindling orangutan.
The connection between Jakarta's ability to cut the cosy ties between politics and organised crime and where a senile Suharto spends the twilight of his life is a little more tenuous.
Attorney-General Marzuki Darusman says charging him for ripping off the country while ruling with an iron fist has great symbolic value in reversing the culture of lawlessness here. In terms of setting salutary examples, there is indeed nothing like making a former president appear as vulnerable as the average Budi.
But instead, Indonesians have just been treated to another show of Mr Suharto and his lawyers cocking a snook at the law. He did not even bother to show up to plead his physical and mental incapacitation to answer the charges. It is this deliberate snubbing of the courts and, by extension, the society he and his clan have no more right to lord over, that hurts most.
In some ways there is a certain inevitability to this sandiwara, this operatic farce. Whatever the merit of allegations of corrupt courts, or judges intimidated by death threats in the Suharto case, the fact is that the Abdurrahman government has yet to root out the rot in the judicial system.
The general assumption is that the new government rushed into a narrowly-defined, lightweight case against Suharto – thereby earning the ire of those who want him condemned for human rights abuses – to demonstrate its reformist credentials.
As a recent Wall Street Journal editorial rationalised on behalf of Mr Abdurrahman, "bringing the former first family to justice is seen as a necessary part of the process of solidifying democratic gains".
But, it went on to argue in "Trial by Fire', "there are reasons to doubt that this in fact should be the government's highest priority if it threatens to destroy efforts to unify the country and establish civilian control over the military".
Singapore's Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew put it more bluntly: the Suharto trial is not crucial to Indonesia's peace and stability. "It's a country where the power structure is in transition and we may not know what it will look like in a steady state for quite a while. The Suharto trial has nothing to do with this," he said at a pre-launch press conference on his memoirs a fortnight ago.
Why was Jakarta in such a rush to prosecute Mr Suharto? The fabled Suharto billions, his enjoyment of which gnaw at the public imagination. Even some in the president's inner circle wonder if he too caught that bug, if only to be in a surer position to shore up his own political base.
Witness his clemency for money offers some months ago. Witness too the manner in which he sent then-Mines Minister Susilo Bambang Yudhyuno to negotiate a secret political settlement in return for the return of at least half of the family fortunes.
Suharto daughter Siti "Tutut" Hardiyanti Rukmana lost no time telling her contacts in the government that the president also sent his own daughter Yenny to watch over Mr Bambang.
One Cabinet minister, tipped off by her before Mr Abdurrahman scuttled the talks by boasting prematurely about its success in New York, wonders to this day in what capacity Mr Bambang was sent by the president – on behalf of the state or himself.
"This trial is about the money. Gus Dur wants to get hold of the money, so he's applying pressure on Suharto and his children," the minister claims.
The Supreme Court judgment sentencing Mr Suharto's favourite son Tommy to 18 months' jail barely 48 hours before Thursday's trial also appears too coincidental to be accidental.
Did the government know the Suharto case would be tossed out on medical grounds and so offered Tommy up as a sacrificial goat to the altar of public opinion, to slake public anger? If that is the case, then what would it take to bow to the lynch mob that has already convicted the entire clan, trial or no trial, due process or otherwise?
If trying Suharto is really vital to breaking the culture of impunity, to restoring a sense of justice to Indonesians, then there are other legal avenues other parts of the government should be exploring.
What is to stop the people's representatives from summoning the former president to parliament instead of merely blaming the A-G for mishandling the case? Legislators could symbolically repudiate Mr Suharto and all the evils he stood for through one of the highest legal instruments of the land, an Act of parliament.
Never happen? Then perhaps a national rethink on what the Suharto case represents to Indonesians and Indonesia is in order.