Ary Hermawan, Jakarta – Legal and human rights groups are giving President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono low marks for law enforcement, citing the unsolved murder of noted human rights activist Munir and the administration's failure to prosecute former president Soeharto on graft charges.
The groups said Yudhoyono's pledges to punish human rights violators and root out corruption have proven to be superficial and inconsistently applied during his first two years in office. Yudhoyono, who was elected in a direct vote in 2004, will mark his second anniversary in office on Friday.
"His administration's commitment to enforcing the law is merely cosmetic. It looks cute on the surface, but it's rotten inside," Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation (YLBHI) chairman Patra M. Zen told a news conference Wednesday.
The YLBHI said the government's main failure was in the battle against corruption, despite the jailing and prosecution of numerous local lawmakers and executives.
The President has repeatedly expressed his commitment to fighting graft, but the government has dealt with corruption cases unevenly, particularly those involving suspects with strong political backing.
Patra said Attorney General Abdul Rahman Saleh's decision to halt the graft prosecution of Soeharto showed that the government was focusing on petty cases instead of bringing the "big fishes" to court.
Prosecutors were also accused of being reluctant to charge justice minister Hamid Awaluddin with corruption in connection with the inflated price of ballot seals for the 2004 presidential election.
Patra said the war on corruption was being waged sporadically and lacked strategy and clear priorities. He charged the administration with overlooking the importance of reforming the graft-ridden police force.
"The Yudhoyono administration should have made the BNI corruption case, which implicates top police officials, an avalanche to wipe out corruption from the force," he said.
A court here last week sentenced former National Police chief of detectives Comr. Gen. Suyitno Landung Sudjono to 18 months in prison for taking a bribe while investigating the 2002-2003 BNI lending scam.
The Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras) also slammed the government for being inconsistent in solving human rights cases over the last two years.
Kontras said the government's failure to find those responsible for the 2004 murder of Munir showed it was not serious about shedding light on the nation's troubled human rights history.
"In the first year of his term, Yudhoyono said the Munir case was a test case to find out whether the nation had changed. But there were no concrete results. In the second year, he became more passive," Kontras operational director Indria Fernida said in a statement.
She blamed the Supreme Court's exoneration of pilot Pollycarpus Budihari Priyanto, the sole suspect in the case, on Yudhoyono's attitude. "And the case goes back to zero," she said.
The government was also criticized for failing to reform the military. Activists said there had not been enough progress toward allowing soldiers to be tried in civilian courts for criminal offenses, as well as forcing the military to give up the businesses it controls.
The military has also been accused of covering up a scandal involving a large stash of arms discivered at the home of a deceased army general, Brig. Gen. Koesmayadi.