Page 142 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Scandal and Democratic Consolidation 127

step to prevent a “catastrophe.” The same day, Wahid’s attorney general, Marzuki
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Darusman, announced that his office had found no evidence implicating the president
in either Buloggate or Bruneigate.
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The next day, violent demonstrations in support of Wahid broke out in East Java
but did not dissuade the MPR from voting for a special impeachment session. In
response, four thousand Wahid supporters stormed the parliamentary compound. On
June 1, the president dismissed his attorney general and security minister, to whom
he had just granted emergency powers. Two days later, he suspended the chief of
police for opposing a state of emergency. Several cabinet reshuffles followed, and on
July 6, Wahid again threatened a state of emergency.
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On July 21, the MPR began impeachment proceedings by summoning the
president to deliver an accountability speech. Wahid refused, appearing instead on
national television to denounce the parliament’s actions as illegal and argue that
only a new round of elections could resolve the current crisis. Two days later, Wahid
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issued a decree “freezing” both the entire parliament and the former ruling party,
Golkar, and promising new elections within the year. The decree also ordered the
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military to stop the impeachment proceedings, prompting the armed forces com-
mander to announce the military’s unified opposition to the president’s directive.
That same morning, Indonesia’s Supreme Court ruled the president’s decree illegal.
Within hours, Wahid’s vice president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, became Indonesia’s
fifth president.
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One could argue that Wahid’s turn against the media, a precursor to prorogu-
ing parliament, reflected a development common in fragile democracies—a growing
conviction among leaders that they must defer democracy to save it. Instead of exer-
cising his “right of reply,” Wahid justified his plan to impose emergency powers in
part by asserting that controls on the media were necessary to head off destabilizing
intergroup conflict. At the same time, his turn against journalists, as one editorial
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noted, was “completely out of character.” Wahid was, after all, a leader who prided
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himself on advocating free speech and, despite fierce backlash, had fought to end the
country’s three-decade ban on Communist writings and ideas. His volte-face raised
serious questions about the depth of the country’s democratization and showed that
the executive branch itself remained inclined, even under the progressive politics of a
new president, toward restraints on public speech.
By this point in the transition, members of the media were prepared to resist
executive pressure, but they were also trying to survive in a newly competitive envi-
ronment that could give scandals, in a sense, a life of their own. Media ownership
remained an important factor in decision-making. But even after publishing the
alleged Wahid mistress story, editors of Gatra , owned by Suharto’s crony Bob Hasan,
confessed that a primary motive had been to boost circulation. This competitive
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environment, as much as journalistic commitment to a watchdog role or even politi-
cal bias, drove the coverage that helped bring Wahid down. In a media arena now
dominated by market forces, once a news story gained momentum, particularly if
triggered by a leak, narrative tension and the pressure of competition tended to
push it forward, even if individual outlets wished to ignore a revelation damaging
to the president or another public figure. Though an advocate of press freedom in
opposition, Wahid developed an antagonistic, increasingly intolerant stance toward
negative reporting as president, viewing critical coverage, whether negative or con-
structive, as essentially adversarial.