Skip to main content

Arrest of Antasari Azhar won't hit Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's chances


THE arrest of Indonesia's anti-corruption tsar over a murder will have little impact on President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's re-election campaign, analysts say.This is despite crime fighter Antasari Azhar having been a poster boy for the President. "Corruption is important but, really, the things that are most important are the costs of basic needs, things in relation to poverty," commentator Sunny Tanuwidjaja, from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said yesterday. And members of an Indonesian elite class who might see Mr Azhar's arrest as reflecting poorly on the President's anti-corruption drive were unlikely to have a big influence on the election result, he added. "Maybe intellectuals will make the connection, but the ordinary people, they will look to (the success of) programs such as the BLT and BOS (cash handouts for the poor and a school funding program)," he said. Mr Azhar will face as-yet-unspecified charges relating to the shooting of businessman Nasrudin Zulkarnaen as he left a Jakarta golf course in March. Mr Azhar was arrested on Monday night.

Indonesian media has speculated over a love triangle involving Mr Azhar, Nasrudin and his third wife, golf caddie Rani Juliani. It has been suggested that Mr Azhar was set up over the murder, with evidence reportedly including the secret filming of a sex tape involving him and Ms Juliani in a south Jakarta hotel. Police are expected to allege that Mr Azhar organised Nasrudin's murder to stop the businessman revealing the affair. Mr Azhar has denied any wrongdoing, and Mr Tanuwidjaja said the affair could, ironically, end up strengthening the Corruption Eradication Commission, of which, until last Friday, Mr Azhar was head. "There is positive and negative in this," Mr Tanuwidjaja said. "Questions could be asked about the institution' s credibility, but the way it handles this, the fact it has asked him to step down, could show that it is quite credible and transparent. " Political scientist Syamsuddin Haris predicted little electoral impact from the scandal, saying the Corruption Eradication Commission was "an independent institution" .

The presidential poll, slated for July 8, looks like being a showdown between Mr Yudhoyono, his deputy, Jusuf Kalla, and either former president Megawati Sukarnoputri or her new ally, retired military strongman Prabowo Subianto. Ms Megawati and Mr Prabowo have done a deal to run a joint ticket but have yet to announce which of them will get top billing on it. Ms Megawati's Indonesian Democratic Party for Struggle, which won up to 15 per cent of the vote in last month's parliamentary poll, has a solid enough constituency but Mr Prabowo has a family fortune worth billions of dollars to call on. Mr Yudhoyono confirmed that he had already decided on a running mate but says he will not make his selection known until after results in the parliamentary poll are declared on Saturday. Having made a clear break with Mr Kalla's Golkar party, Mr Yudhoyono now has the option of selecting a political professional or technocrat for his ticket rather than relying on party affiliation. And despite predictions that the recent rearranging of Indonesian politics will push him into the arms of Islamist parties to regain office, Mr Yudhoyono looks likely to win with an even bigger mandate.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens

Billionaires Among Thousands of Indonesians Found in Secret Offshore Documents  By Nicky Hager April 9, 2013, 8:15 pm Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens, holding ownership of more than 190 offshore trusts and companies, secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists show. The nine families, worth an estimated $36 billion among them, are at the top of a wealthy class that dominates Indonesia’s politics and economy. Six were closely tied to the late dictator Suharto, who helped a special circle of Indonesians grow rich during his 31-year rule by granting economic fiefdoms to family and friends. The billionaires are among nearly 2,500 Indonesians found in the files of Singapore-headquart ered offshore services provider Portcullis TrustNet, which ICIJ has been analyzing and began reporting on last week. Although there is no evidence in the files of illegality by any of the ni...
Post a Comment
Read more

Debate Islam in Indonesia

http://www.thejakar taglobe.com/ opinion/interloc utors-of- indonesian- islam/560447 Interlocutors of Indonesian Islam Ahmad Najib Burhani | December 08, 2012 A few months ago, the Japanese anthropologist Mitsuo Nakamura told me that studying Nahdlatul Ulama as an organization was beyond the imagination of any American scholar from the 1950s to the ’70s. But he is not the only academic to have noticed this. George McT. Kahin of Cornell University stated the same thing. Even NU-expert Martin van Bruinessen was not expecting to study NU as his primary focus when he came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s.   During the early decades of Indonesian independence, NU was relatively unorganized and its management was largely based on the authority of religious teachers ( kyai ). Of course there were a number of scholars who studied NU-affiliated religious schools ( pesantren ) and its kyai, but not NU as an organization.   Even though NU was one of the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

is that true in Indonesia there freedom of religion?

The problems began shortly after Tajul Muluk, a Shiite cleric, opened a boarding school in 2004. The school, in a predominantly Sunni Muslim part of East Java, raised local tensions, and in 2006 it was attacked by thousands of villagers. When a mob set fire to the school and several homes last December, many Shiites saw it as just the latest episode in a simmering sectarian conflict — one that they say has been ignored by the police and exploited by Islamists purporting to preserve the purity of the Muslim faith.   Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has long been considered a place where different religious and ethnic groups can live in harmony and where Islam can work with democracy.   But that perception has been repeatedly brought into question lately. In East Java, Sunni leaders are pushing the provincial government to adopt a regulation limiting the spread of Shiite Islam. It would prevent the country’s two major Shiite organizations from ...
Post a Comment
Read more