Page 162 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Media and Civil Society 147

his family. As the commission gained more enemies, Yudhoyono reportedly turned his
back when it came under attack.
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The most dramatic instance of this backlash against the KPK came in early 2009,
when several top police officials colluded to disgrace two of its key members. Starting
just after Yudhoyono’s reelection, when he had little incentive to defend the commis-
sion, the attack threatened to stall, if not reverse, the fight against corruption. The
KPK’s vulnerability without high-level support highlighted the continued fragility
of democratic consolidation. Yet another crisis elicited mass mobilization, this time
through a civil society campaign called Save the KPK.
The controversy arose over an apparent conspiracy by the chief of detectives,
the attorney general’s office, and the brother of a fugitive businessman to frame
two KPK deputy chairmen, Chandra Hamzah and Bibit Samad Rianto. Acting on
charges of extortion and bribery, police arrested the two in July 2009, igniting dem-
onstrations in several Indonesian cities by protesters who took this as an effort to
undermine the KPK. Using their wiretapping powers, however, KPK officers fought
back by monitoring the conspirators’ phones. After insiders leaked some of these
tapes, the media became central actors by airing recorded conversations between
senior police, prosecutors, and the brother of the fugitive businessman who had
fled KPK prosecution in 2008. The tapes revealed an explicit conspiracy to save
the fugitive’s brother by accusing Chandra and Bibit of soliciting bribes from him.
Adding to the drama, other taped conversations contained claims of Yudhoyono’s
involvement.
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Within weeks, the ensuing controversy, known as Cicak vs. Buaya (Gecko versus
Crocodile), grew to Baligate proportions. Even media outlets compromised by busi-
ness interests jumped into the fray, driven, as in Baligate, by a mix of competitive
pressures and civic duty. Following patterns first evident in the alliance between
media and civil society that had defeated the 1999 Security Bill and its martial law
provisions, this new battle required a sustained public mobilization. Members of the
media promoted this turnout, but the critical development that empowered citizens
and the media was their new ability to use the internet to pressure officials.
As the new Constitutional Court opened its hearings on the case, television sta-
tions broadcast excerpts from the tapes and riveted the country with hours of live
proceedings. But the most critical development came when Bibit and Chandra’s sup-
porters launched a Facebook campaign, similar to that in the Prita case, with a target
of one million members. An earlier statement by the police chief implicated in the
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case (“How dare a gecko [the KPK] challenge a crocodile [police and prosecutors]?”)
provided both the nickname and the visual icon of the fight, inspiring a flood of gecko-
and-crocodile images on websites, magazine covers, T-shirts, and bumper stickers.
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By early November, the Facebook campaign had passed its million-member target. On
December 1, the attorney general’s office dropped its charges against the KPK deputy
commissioners, Bibit and Chandra.
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Their release likely saved the KPK itself, whose legislative mandate might not
have been renewed by the president. The KPK continued to face near-constant siege,
as those benefitting from corruption, in the words of one journalist, tried to “sabo-
tage [its] reputation, tie its leaders up in bogus legal cases, cut its financing or
legislate it out of existence.” Despite ongoing attacks, the KPK would survive as
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an institutionalized force for transparency, backed by sympathetic news outlets and
public pressure.