Page 125 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

110 Chapter 6

people who are in dire poverty,” said the Jakarta Post , “[which] is what the story of the
Rp546 billion heist at Bank Bali essentially boils down to.” The country’s paper of
23
record, Kompas , breaking from its usual muted style, warned parliamentary investiga-
tors that “disastrous indications with negative effects to the rupiah” would result if
they failed to find “an open and total solution.”
24
The broadcast media turned Pradjoto—who had first exposed the dubious EGP
fee—into a minor celebrity. Pradjoto embraced the spotlight and continued giving
speeches and interviews even after Habibie supporters staged hostile rallies outside
his house and threatened “to shoot his infant daughter in the head.”
25
As Pradjoto faded from view, further leaks and counterleaks reflected a widen-
ing rift inside Golkar between two factions that the media dubbed “Black Golkar”
(Habibie’s supporters) and “White Golkar” (his opponents). Most sensational was
26
a rumor circulated by the Habibie camp that the original whistle-blower, the “Deep
Throat” who had dropped the critical documents on Pradjoto’s doorstep in July was,
in fact, Golkar’s deputy chair Marzuki Darusman.
27
Partisan warfare also escalated as rival factions began buying television airtime to
further competing agendas. Talk show host Wimar Witoelar described this strategy
as part of a growing use of such shows as “political weapons.” When TVRI denied
airtime to a group wishing to debate the Bank Bali scandal, the group bought a slot
on the private station SCTV. The discussion also addressed the military’s bloody ram-
page following East Timor’s independence referendum. “The joke was,” Witoelar
recounted, “that when Suharto moved up to be the chairman of the board, he assigned
the violence division to Wiranto and the corruption division to Habibie. And this was
elaborated on in the panel discussion.”
28
In mid-August, the Habibie government, under pressure from the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), hired PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to conduct an audit of
the institutions implicated in the scandal. On September 6, PwC stated that it had
found “numerous indicators of fraud” in the transaction between Bank Bali and EGP.
29
On September 9, parliament opened hearings on the Bank Bali case. Imposing unprec-
edented transparency on legislative proceedings, two private television stations gained
access and broadcast the entire proceedings live, gavel to gavel.
Though the members of the parliamentary commission were generally ill pre-
pared, the case produced Indonesia’s first televised hearings of an investigation into
official malfeasance. Recalling his time as a student in the United States in the 1970s,
Witoelar said the impact of this coverage for Indonesians “was exactly like watching
the congressional hearings or Senate investigation of Watergate.” He described audi-
ences as “glued to their TV sets for hours and some people are remembering all the
names [of Watergate defendants] like Gordon Liddy. . . . And we had Setya Novanto,
Baramuli, Tanri Abeng.” The result was that people became “so involved . . . that
when the public discussion actually came to the parliament, the public pressure [was]
very significant.”
30
The novelty of front-row access to televised parliamentary deliberations attracted
audiences. In contrast to the silencing of the parliament that had elected Suharto
to a seventh term, the microphones in front of legislators this time were switched
on, broadcasting their voices—and opinions—to the entire country. MPR members,
moreover, were acutely aware that their sessions were airing live nationwide, prompt-
ing some delegates to remind colleagues repeatedly of their public responsibility.
31
The media’s role expanded again when PDIP leaked a private journal detailing
meetings between Bank Bali’s president, Rudy Ramli, and members of Habibie’s