Payoffs hold back progress

Persistent corruption threatens to erode democratic gains in Indonesia, analysts said after the nation’s first direct presidential election earlier this month.

None of the five major candidates, including incumbent President Megawati Sukarnoputri, won a clear majority in the July 5 election, forcing a runoff in September between Mrs. Megawati and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a former security official.

Since Indonesia became a democracy in 1999, corruption is probably at a “higher level” than it had been under Suharto, the military dictator who ruled the country until his ouster in 1998, said Karl Jackson, director of the Asian Studies Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Corruption is at “Olympic levels” and occurs at all levels of the government, Mr. Jackson said during a discussion Tuesday at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

If corruption, or “koruptsi,” continues after the Sept. 20 runoff election, “this is the sulfuric acid that corrodes democratic institutions,” Mr. Jackson said.

Transparency International, an anti-corruption nongovernmental organization, has named Indonesia among the world’s most corrupt nations.

Bribery, influence peddling and other forms of corruption have cost the country more than $1 billion annually in recent years, according to some estimates.

“All the assets that could be stolen from the Indonesian Bank and Restructuring Authority have now been stolen,” Mr. Jackson said.

Forty percent of respondents in a national survey conducted last year said that “the president should possess economic competence and the ability to stamp out corruption and maintain security,” said Muhammad Qodari, director of research at the Indonesian Survey Institute.

The major presidential candidates picked up on Indonesians’ dissatisfaction with endemic corruption, and all promised to fight it.