Page 158 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Media and Civil Society 143

mechanisms of accountability, particularly the introduction of “quick counts” on poll-
ing day, curtailed manipulation. Freed in 2006 from the threat of criminal penalties for
insulting the president and vice president, the media became increasingly aggressive
in pursuing stories that implicated incumbents, which in turn undermined the ability
of ruling parties and their coalitions to maintain control of the executive. As Indone-
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sian democracy struggled toward a slow consolidation during this critical decade, the
media became vehicles of proreform mobilization, as well as sites of partisan contes-
tation and personal vendetta, together maintaining the transparency and uncertainty
necessary for further democratization.
Despite these advances, the transition continued to face an unremitting pull
toward reversal. Even as democratic attitudes and media practices took root and
unpredictability became the norm, political actors continued to maneuver to insu-
late themselves from the uncertainty of fair and open contestation. This decade saw
a notable increase in cross-party alliances among legislative candidates that led the
country into a state of political development that Daniel Slater and Erica Simmons call
“collusive democracy.” Such a system, they argue, is marked by the effective merger of
all major parties into a cartel, as actors try to reduce the uncertainty of genuine com-
petition, entering into “promiscuous” power-sharing arrangements that make elected
representatives virtually interchangeable. This collusion also forecloses the possibility
of a viable political opposition, as legislators undermine democratic accountability by
making themselves “collectively irremoveable through the ballot box.”
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If democratization requires widespread acceptance of competitive contests and
their uncertain outcomes, efforts by Indonesia’s representatives to insulate them-
selves between elections were a serious setback. Through such power sharing and
lack of transparency in legislative decision-making, parliament became, by 2009,
largely unaccountable to voters. Much of the country’s judiciary also colluded to pro-
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tect themselves (and their financial patrons) from exposure and accountability. Even
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as media revelations of malfeasance and chains of reciprocal incrimination began to
expose individual wrongdoing, institutional accountability remained minimal.
Members of the judiciary and the legislature also colluded in 2004–14 by using
new and old laws to discourage the airing of criticism that could damage their reputa-
tions or threaten their incumbency. Among these regulations, the most chilling were
the country’s plaintiff-friendly defamation laws. Despite abolition of the New Order’s
notorious “hate-sowing articles,” passage of the 1999 Press Law, and enactment of
constitutional amendments protecting free expression, a maze of civil and criminal
defamation statutes remained in place to allow litigation against reporters and ordi-
nary citizens for speech nominally protected by these higher laws.
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Journalists charged with libel under the criminal code petitioned the courts to use
the Press Law, which, they argued, should override legislation from the colonial and
authoritarian eras. Accordingly, in 2006 the Supreme Court overturned the conviction
of Tempo ’s chief editor, Bambang Harymurti, for a report suggesting that the business
magnate Tomy Winata had been responsible for a textile market fire in 2003. The
court ruled unanimously that the defendant should have been tried under the Press
Law, not the criminal code. It stopped short, however, of issuing a blanket injunction
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barring the use of the criminal code against journalists in such cases. Since Indonesian
higher court rulings do not serve as binding precedent for lower courts, this decision
offered journalists little protection from future criminal convictions in similar cases.
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These defamation laws protected politicians who used them to avoid scrutiny.
In 2008, parliamentarians went further, passing five new laws to silence critical