ARLINA ARSHAD
November 24, 2009 – 5:19PM

Anti-graft activists say the Indonesian president has made clumsy efforts to whitewash a major corruption scandal involving top police and prosecutors.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono stunned activists late on Monday when he delivered a rambling, barely coherent reply to advice from his own fact-finding team to punish senior law enforcers and reform the rotten judiciary.

The liberal ex-general has been under intense pressure to sack his police chief and attorney-general and order them to drop allegedly bogus criminal cases against two senior investigators from the country’s corruption watchdog.

In a nationally televised speech, Yudhoyono again pledged to reform the justice system but insisted he could not interfere in criminal cases, even though he admitted the public had lost trust in the police and the courts.

“I’m not allowed to, and will not, enter this area because stopping investigations is the domain of the investigating body, the police, and ending prosecutions is the domain of prosecutors,” he said.

But because of the public distrust in the legal system and the threat the scandal posed to “social unity”, he said the “better option and solution … is for the police and prosecutors not to bring this case to court”.

His fact-finding team had recommended disciplinary action against law enforcers implicated in the conspiracy and the withdrawal of all criminal allegations against the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) deputies.

But so far, only a top detective and prosecutor at the heart of the suspected conspiracy have been suspended from duty, and the detective is already back at work as if nothing happened.

Yudhoyono’s comments bewildered anti-corruption activists who had been hoping he would seize his mandate, renewed in a landslide election win in July, to genuinely crack down on rampant corruption.

“The president’s speech was just bullshit,” Indonesia Corruption Watch court monitoring co-ordinator Illian Deta Arta Sari told Agence France-Presse, adding protests were being planned for later this week.

“All the promises about fighting corruption were just jargon to fish for votes to win the election. He has failed in carrying out his duties as president.”

A police spokesman said the president’s speech was a “reference” but no decision had been made to drop the allegedly bogus charges of bribery and abuse of power against KPK deputy heads Bibit Samad Riyanto and Chandra Hamzah.

Explosive KPK wiretaps played in court earlier this month apparently caught senior police and prosecutors conspiring with the brother of a corruption suspect to frame the KPK deputies, fuelling weeks of public outrage.

Yudhoyono, a liberal ex-general and head of the Democratic Party, was mentioned by some of the alleged conspirators as being party to the plot, an accusation he has angrily denied.

Responding to the tapes, he vowed to wipe out what he called the “mafia” of police, judges, prosecutors and brokers who run the country’s courts but has offered no details on how he plans to do so.

The main opposition People’s Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), led by former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, has warned of growing social unrest.

“There’s a worry that there will be an accumulation of public dissatisfaction, which will lead to rallies directed against the president,” PDI-P lawmaker Aria Bima said.

“Yudhoyono should really sack the police chief, the chief detective, the attorney general and the deputy attorney general to prove that he is not connected to the whole issue.”