Page 45 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

30 Chapter 1

Harmoko’s perspective and led the association to become increasingly politicized, or
“Golkarized,” under his leadership.
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In 1993, Harmoko became the party’s chairperson in parliament; he also served as
minister of information from 1983 to 1998. In moving to the ministry, he gave up the
PWI leadership but maintained influence in choosing its officers as well as the mem-
bers of the National Press Council. Through such machinations, Simanjuntak argues,
the PWI came to constitute “the long arm of Golkar.”
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At first glance, the PWI’s story is its absorption into the state apparatus and the
larger system that embodied integralism—with four theoretically separate institu-
tions (the Ministry of Information, the National Press Council, Golkar, and the
PWI) incorporated in an interlocking matrix of controls under Golkar. At another
level, the story illuminates the inner workings of a licensing system that gave all
stakeholders, from publishers to working journalists, a rentier status. Unlike the
externalized controls of state-run media, Suharto’s use of licensing to “create jour-
nalists” in privately owned media encouraged them, along with their employers,
to buy into a corrupt bargain that limited competition for staff positions by estab-
lishing a rent for those lucky enough to gain employment. Government control
through licensing over these nominally independent journalists incentivized what
were essentially collusive media that strengthened the Suharto regime. More criti-
cally over the long term, it also normalized—among journalists and owners—the
practice of colluding with the powerful, particularly the ruling party. Combined
with the increasing crony ownership of media, this normalization would create a
legacy more enduring than the media’s bureaucratic incorporation into the formal
state apparatus.
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Consequences
The consequences of Suharto’s gradual “taming” of the media were myriad.
The co-optation or elimination of competing centers of power helped Suharto insu-
late himself from the uncertainties of political contestation. The media outlets that
stayed in business cooperated, exchanging their editorial independence for market
protection and survival, enabling his regime’s escalating corruption and human
rights abuses.
With media and parliament tightly managed by the mid-1980s, Suharto amassed
one of the world’s largest fortunes, which Forbes magazine estimated in his last months
in power at between $10 and $40 billion, making him the third wealthiest person in
the world. Though Suharto began this accumulation during his first years of office,
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much of the plunder came during the last decade of the New Order, through what
was, in retrospect, fairly obvious manipulation of executive powers that might have
been checked by a critical media.
The Suharto empire grew, in part, through commissions the family collected as
middlemen between the state and those wishing to do business in Indonesia. After
Suharto’s fall, the Ministry of Mines and Energy identified 159 companies engaged in
contracts with the state oil and gas company, Pertamina, that had links to his inner
circle. In other lucrative deals, government offices arranged for Suharto’s children
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to purchase shares of state-owned companies at below-market value, which the chil-
dren then sold for windfall profits.
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Finally, presidential decrees allowed Suharto’s children and cronies to siphon mil-
lions in “loans” from state reserves, such as the Ministry of Forestry and Plantations’s