Page 149 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

134 Chapter 7

Ramelan’s trial was Lalu Mariyun, famed for excusing the former president Suharto
from standing trial and later for acquitting his son Tommy in a land scam case.
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In the middle of Soerjadi’s unexpected line of questioning, Justice Mariyun
abruptly announced an early lunch break. Soerjadi, however, preempted any such
maneuver by using the media to make his revelations public, relating details of the
scheme to reporters and producing sensational headlines, such as “Akbar Tried to
Make Me Lie.” As the press kept up its coverage, Tempo was still leading, with a
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feature headlined “Buloggate II: Forty Billion Lies.” On June 4, hundreds of demon-
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strators from civic and student organizations renewed pressure on PDIP to support a
parliamentary probe of Buloggate II, forcing party leaders to move a planned meeting
to another location.
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Ongoing testimony against Tanjung in his own trial also continued to hurt his
case, particularly Simatupang’s confession on May 7, 2002, that his return of the
Rp40 billion in March had only been a part of a “scenario” to clear Tanjung. Then on
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May 20, former president Habibie inflicted further damage, sending written testimony
with incriminating details from his home in Germany.
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On July 24, the Central Jakarta District Court convicted Tanjung for his part in
Buloggate II. The prosecution asked for the minimum four-year jail term, but the
court decided to be even more lenient, sentencing him to only three years. After filing
an appeal, Tanjung remained at liberty and retained both his leadership positions.
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Two years later, in February 2004, the Supreme Court ended the controversy by over-
turning Tanjung’s conviction, freeing him to run for president in future elections.
Throughout these cycles of media-driven scandals, Golkar’s use of political black-
mail to avoid investigation and threaten other parties, particularly PDIP, was a set-
back for democratization. Tanjung’s tenacity in holding on to his two political posts
became a triumph for him and, in many ways, his party. Yet his ability to influence
court proceedings was checked by the new transparency the media were imposing on
the judicial process. With this transparency, even his ultimate success in the Supreme
Court could not undo the damage to his political career. Before Buloggate II, Tanjung
was a serious contender for the 2004 presidential election; by the time the election
campaign got underway, in the aftermath of all this critical coverage, he could not
even win his party’s nomination. Golkar was also tarnished, faring poorly in the 2004
elections with its new candidate. Two years into the transition, powerful interests still
wielded influence, but the political contests between elections, rocked by media scan-
dals and revenge politics, became increasingly difficult to control.

Megawati and the Press
As the daughter of Indonesia’s fi rst authoritarian president and heir to the cor-
poratist principles of his reign, President Megawati responded to media criticism
with the reimposition of controls in the name of public order. The administration’s
record on democratic reform was, therefore, mixed—marked by a weak commitment
to freedom of speech and an underlying hostility to the media that surfaced in various
manifestations.
One of Megawati’s first acts as president in 2001 was to reestablish the Min-
istry of Information, a key artifact of authoritarian rule abolished by her predeces-
sor, renaming it the Ministry of Communications and Information. She appointed the
Golkar leader Syamsul Mu’arif to head the revived agency but, to appease her crit-
ics, limited his power to the rank of “state minister.” Mu’arif justified the ministry’s