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Human Rights and Corruption in Settling the Accounts of the Past

Human Rights and Corruption in Settling the Accounts of the Past 1IntroductionIn a 2007 press interview, Ifdhal Kasim, then head of the Komisi Nasional Hak Asasi Manusia (Komnas-HAM, National Human Rights Commission), argued that anti-corruption action was one of the most significant factors affecting the negative public view of the commission. According to him, the Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono administration had prioritized the pursuit of an anti-corruption agenda over human rights. The primary obstacle to the progress of past (and recent) human rights cases was said to be the political circumstances, in which political elites cared more about economic problems and the eradication of corruption, collusion, and nepotism (known as KKN) than about human rights abuses.1If this assessment were correct, an effective strategy for human rights supporters would be to dampen the anti-corruption sentiment so that their issue becomes visible. As much as it sounds strange, the idea that the issue of competition between human rights and corruption justice worked to the detriment of the former was shared by others in the Indonesian human rights community. When I visited a disappearance victims’ association in 2010, the activists there lamented that the political situation was ‘not very good for’ their disappearance case. ‘Now it’s all about corruption’, they complained. My question about the possibility that the bringing to justice of corruption cases could help human rights cases was sceptically dismissed.2The relationship between human rights abuses and corruption is one of the lesser-understood aspects of transitional justice, or the ‘settling of the past accounts’ of the previous authoritarian regime. This study examines how two post-authoritarian accountability issues—human rights and corruption—intersected in three new democracies in East and Southeast Asia: the Philippines, South Korea, and Indonesia. Rather than competing and conflicting with each other, these issues could have had mutually supportive and facilitating effects. The pursuit of an anti-corruption agenda worked as a catalyst for the achievement of milestones in transitional justice—these being the Philippine reparations law for the victims of the Marcos regime and the South Korean trials of former presidents—as I will explain below.Furthermore, in the Philippines and South Korea, these two issues have often been perceived as overlapping or related legacies of authoritarian rule by the policymakers who designed the transitional justice measures. In Indonesia, by contrast, the two issues have been strictly separated and rarely intersect in the policy-making process.The three countries under consideration were chosen because, among the ‘third-wave’ democracies (Huntington 1991) of the region, they did not experience regime reversal, and their authoritarian regimes had a strong personalist tendency.3 In the Philippines, the ‘People Power’ protests ousted President Marcos in 1986. In the following year (1987), similar protests erupted in South Korea, leading to a presidential election based on a new constitution. In Indonesia, long-time president Soeharto stepped down in 1998 after the East Asian financial crisis. Recent trends in Indonesia and the Philippines show a decline in the quality of democracy, to the extent that concerns have been raised over the feasibility of transitional justice (Setiawan and Tomsa 2022:202–18; Lamchek and Radics 2021). Despite this, it is meaningful to discuss post-authoritarian justice in all three countries because there have not been significant ruptures that have rendered policy continuity in transitional justice impossible.This comparative case study draws upon written sources and interviews. Interviews were conducted in the Philippines (August 2018) and Indonesia (February 2019) for this research, and are supplemented by knowledge gained from my visits to Jakarta for related projects since 2009. The South Korean context has been studied primarily through written sources. The now-defunct online presidential archive was particularly useful in locating Indonesian newspaper articles on anti-corruption measures during the transitional period.4This article first provides a background for understanding the relationship between human rights and corruption issues in terms of authoritarian legacies in new democracies. It then discusses how the measures against past human rights abuses and corruption in the three post-authoritarian countries unravelled during the transitional and post-transitional periods. Each case study analyses the authoritarian legacies and the transitional period, the relationship between corruption and human rights, and the current state of post-authoritarian justice.2Human Rights and Corruption in the ‘Politics of the Past’Transitional justice can be broadly defined as judicial and non-judicial accountability measures to redress past wrongs, especially serious human rights abuses, after the transition away from authoritarian and conflict situations. Teitel (2003) characterized the evolution of transitional justice conceptions as originating during the post-Second World War war crimes tribunals (Phase I) and then diversifying in the post-Cold War ‘third-wave’ democratic transitions (Phase II). The term ‘transitional justice’ was coined in this second phase, with a series of international conferences taking place between 1988 and 1994 (Arthur 2009). Over time, transitional justice models around the world have become homogenized and standardized as the ‘templatisation of best practices around which most professional international TJ [transitional justice] nongovernmental organisations (NGO s) converge’ (Subotić 2012:106). In the third and final phase of Teitel’s (2003) genealogy, which is symbolized by the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), transitional justice became ‘normalized’ as the conflation of international criminal justice with the transitional justice occurred in the new humanitarian regimes (Teitel 2003).The ‘fourth-generation’ arguments of transitional justice (Lambourne 2009; Sharp 2012, 2013) criticize the disconnect between human rights norms and the socio-economic dimension created in the development of transitional justice. They call for a broader conception of transitional justice that incorporates violations of economic and social rights and corruption, in addition to the traditional focus on physical violence.While the ‘fourth-generation’ attention paid to the socio-economic dimension of transitional justice is highly appreciable, it should be noted that the economic dimension was not wholly lost in the post-authoritarian transitions, which Teitel (2003) would call the early second phase of transitional justice. Scholars of comparative politics and memory studies remind us that a ‘broader “politics of the past” in contemporary democracies’, that is, ‘an ongoing process in which both elites and society under democratic rule revise the meaning of the authoritarian past and act on its legacies’ (Pinto 2010:340), existed in the earlier democratic transitions of Southern Europe and Latin America before the upholding of human rights became the dominant idea (Barahona de Brito, González-Enríquez, and Aguilar 2001:22).Even before the ‘fourth-generation’ concerns were raised, transitional societies had attempted to settle past accounts of human rights abuses and corruption simultaneously. Judicial and non-judicial mechanisms had been mobilized against the corruption of the outgoing regime and other aspects of economic justice, such as the fulfilment of lost socio-economic rights. In Latin America, Peru and Chile filed corruption charges against former dictators as well as charges related to human rights abuses. In Africa, countries such as Chad, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Kenya included the misappropriation of public resources by the outgoing regime elites and other economic crimes perpetrated by individual plunderers and companies in the mandates of their truth commissions (Carranza 2008; Andrieu 2012; I. Robinson 2015). García Martín (2020:172) shows that a series of Argentine laws from the mid 1980s addressed the issue of restoring labour rights.The emergence or re-emergence of socio-economic wrongs in transitional justice has not been universally welcomed. Waldorf (2012) supports the separation of past socio-economic wrongs from human rights abuses. Aboueldahab (2017:128) argues that the emphasis on accountability for corruption in Egypt and Tunisia was an attempt to avoid the prosecution of abusers of civil and political rights. Thus, in her view, the inclusion of corruption in transitional justice is a ‘scapegoating’ strategy and does not lead to a more comprehensive justice (Aboueldahab 2017:152).By contrast, Lutz and Reiger (2009) found that corruption trials could facilitate human rights trials at a later stage. Studies on Latin American transitions have noted that corruption has a more substantial delegitimizing effect on rulers of both authoritarian and democratic regimes (Seligson 2002; Cavallaro and Albuja 2008). In Asia, it is even more crucial to illuminate the intersection of the two issues because human rights prosecution is relatively rare in the region, whereas the prosecution of former leaders for corruption is not (Lutz and Reiger 2009). In the Asian case studies, I highlight older methods of dealing with economic violence that existed before transitional justice as a specialist field grew out of its ‘parent field’ of international human rights in the 1990s (Arthur 2009; Sharp 2013). The experiences of the Philippines and South Korea indicate that the strict separation of human rights and corruption in transitional justice is a later development—characteristically shown in the Indonesian case—and was not an inherent feature of post-authoritarian justice. In the Philippines and South Korea, human rights abuses and corruption were perceived as a pair of legacies of the outgoing authoritarian regimes; for three decades, the trajectories of settling these two legacies overlapped in critical ways. Measures to tackle corruption ultimately led to the recognition of victimhood—and more—in the Philippines and South Korea. By contrast, the two processes in Indonesia went their separate ways and rarely intersected. Rather than being perceived as a set of authoritarian legacies, they were treated as special crimes that have occurred continually across time.The different timings of the transitions in the context of the global development of transitional justice have played a role in the different approaches taken to human rights and corruption among early and later democratizers. The characteristic of the ‘world time’ factor is that its effect is non-linear, with 1995–1999 marking the height of transitional justice trials and domestic human rights prosecutions (Dancy and Michel 2016:180–2); the fall of the Indonesian authoritarian regime occurred during this period. The late 1990s was also a period when the norms of international criminal justice—a field of international law that calls for individual accountability for grave human rights abuses in international courts—were developed significantly, paving the way for what Teitel (2003) described as the ‘normalization’ phase of transitional justice. From the early 1990s, alongside the specialist field of transitional justice, anti-corruption groups developed anti-corruption norms in parallel and separately. These groups were generally reluctant to engage in the kleptocracy of the past regimes, which thereby facilitated the ‘compartmentalization’ of justice into the separate issue-specific areas of corruption and human rights abuses (Kim and Sharman 2014; Carranza 2008).By contrast, South Korea and the Philippines began to navigate towards democratic transitions when the norms and models of transitional justice and international criminal justice were nascent. The term ‘transitional justice’ did not even exist at this time. Both countries were relatively isolated from the transitional justice scene that was developing globally.5 Therefore, they were able to develop measures of transitional justice in which human rights and corruption were not strictly compartmentalized.To assert that the intersection between human rights and corruption is the most critical factor in explaining transitional justice outcomes is not the goal of this article. To fully explain the outcomes, other factors such as political dynamics, the role of civil society, the nature of the preceding regime, and the nature of the abuses must be considered. I intend to show that the salience of corruption issues does not necessarily impede the progress of transitional justice for human rights abuses and that early democratizers viewed the relationship between the two issues quite differently from the standardized approach of the later period.3Philippines: Pursuit of Ill-Gotten Wealth Leads to State Recognition of SufferingsFerdinand Marcos Sr was elected president for the first time in 1965. He put the country under martial law in 1972 and ruled until 1986, when he was overthrown as a result of the People Power protests. Martial rule under Marcos was full of political violence. McCoy (2001) estimates that 3,257 people were victims of extrajudicial killings between 1972 and 1986, and of these, 2,520 were ‘salvaged’—‘tortured, mutilated, and dumped on a roadside for public display’ (McCoy 2001:131). In addition, 35,000 people were tortured and 70,000 were jailed (McCoy 2001).6 Ruling through fear, the Marcos family and their cronies plundered the Philippine economy using various strategies, including the takeover of private industry, holding monopolies on profitable industries, money laundering and tax evasion (Aquino 1987).The first executive order that President Corazon Aquino signed in 1986 created the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), the aim of which was to recover the ill-gotten wealth of the Marcos family and their cronies. Jovito R. Salonga, a lawyer and Partido Liberal (Liberal Party) politician, was appointed as the head of the PCGG. Initially, President Aquino planned to settle authoritarian legacies in an integrated manner by assigning Salonga both to the recovery of ill-gotten wealth and to ‘going after the violators of human rights’ (Salonga 2000:20). As Salonga’s wish to focus on anti-corruption efforts was accepted, a new human rights body was established separately. In other words, anti-corruption measures and transitional justice parted ways because of practical concerns, not because they were regarded as two fundamentally different, specialist, and compartmentalized issues.After Marcos fled to Hawaii, the idea of him being prosecuted in the Philippine court was quickly abandoned, and the stage for restitution turned transnational. The PCGG leaders travelled to the United States and Switzerland. In the US courts, the PCGG filed lawsuits against the Marcos family and their cronies and recovered assets, in some cases as a consequence of out-of-court settlements.7 In Switzerland, the government unilaterally froze Marcos’s assets in 1986 (Salonga 2000). Compared to the experiences of other countries such as Iran, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Panama, which had also attempted to recover the ill-gotten assets of their former dictators,8 the pursuit by the Philippine government represented a good first step (Aquino 1987; Salonga 2000).In contrast to the active overseas strategies of the PCGG, the few existing justice and truth measures for past human rights abuses were weak. The Commission on Human Rights and its predecessor, the Presidential Committee on Human Rights, collected data on the abuses of the Marcos regime. However, this did not lead to public hearings or other systematic follow-up measures (Aquino 1995). President Ramos once established a fact-finding body for the disappeared, which made ‘little visible progress’.9 Only a few low-level officers and soldiers were convicted for the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr. and the Escalante massacre against demonstrating peasants in 1985.As a result of this lack of action, major initiatives for the victims of human rights abuses were also taken on in the United States. When Robert Swift, a lawyer from the US who became interested in the Philippines, persuaded the released detainees to file lawsuits against Marcos by using the Alien Tort Claims Act, the victims agreed (Davidson 2017; Ela 2017). The class-action suit was later integrated with four other lawsuits filed by individual victims. In 1992, a jury in Hawaii concluded that Marcos was liable, which was followed by the verdict that the victims should receive damages amounting to USD 2 billion.At first, it seemed that this verdict would not guarantee the fulfilment of the victims’ rights, as a lengthy legal dispute, involving multiple judicial venues and actors, continued between the Philippine government and the Hawaii claimants over Marcos’s Swiss accounts. However, the severe competition between the PCGG and the Hawaii claimants finally led to a win—the passing of the Republic Act (RA) 10368, or the Human Rights Reparation and Recognition Act of 2013, which recognized state responsibility for past human rights abuses under Marcos’s martial law.10 While the position of the Philippine government that the recovered assets must be used for land reform was firm, the Swiss court asserted that the Philippine government was obliged to disburse all or part of the Swiss assets to the victims of human rights abuses who had made a claim on the assets. In the end, the pursuit of an anti-corruption agenda resulted in reparations for victims with the legislation of the RA 10368. The reparations law allowed Marcos’s human rights victims to benefit from approximately one-third of the recovered Swiss assets, providing a partial solution to the overlapping claims, although it did not end all the legal battles in the US courts (Davidson 2017).11The competing claims helped each other. The Philippine government used the Hawaii court’s judgement when requesting that the Swiss authorities transfer Marcos’s assets (Davidson 2017). Additionally, the victims of human rights abuses benefitted from the PCGG’s active legal strategies against Marcos’s assets. Without these PCGG activities, there would have been no guarantee that any successful transitional justice measure recognizing the state errors in past human rights practices would have been implemented.It is undeniable that domestic political conditions were favourable for the legislation of RA 10368 in 2013. President Benigno Aquino III of the Liberal Party, whose term began in 2010, had allied himself politically with Akbayan, a democratic socialist party that had supported compensation for Marcos-era victims since 1998 (Lamchek and Sanchez 2021; Davidson 2017). Although the fierce competition within the leftist blocs and their priority of impeaching two presidents, Joseph Estrada and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, had prevented the bill from advancing for more than a decade,12 the blocs and President Aquino’s Liberal Party had also finally agreed on the establishment of the Human Rights Victims’ Claims Board (HRVCB), as regulated in RA 10368 (Reyes and Jose 2012–2013b). Second, in the years leading up to the legislation of RA 10368, the Philippines had made a number of legislative efforts related to international human rights instruments. Several of those efforts were successful, resulting in the passing of the 2009 Act on International Humanitarian Law, the 2009 Torture Act, and the 2012 Act on Enforced Disappearance (Palmer 2020), while others, such as the 2010 victim bill, failed to become law (Jaishankar 2014). There is a possibility that such a legislative trend in the late Arroyo years influenced the reparations law,13 although my Philippines interviewees remembered the reparations law as being ‘homegrown’.14More importantly, however, it was the intersection between human rights and corruption that boosted and also characterized the reparations law. The law listed six non-exhaustive categories of state violence as the definition of human rights violations, including arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance; among them, the fifth is the ‘unjust or illegal takeover of a business’ and the ‘confiscation of property’, along with the ‘detention of owner/s and or their families’. By recognizing economic plunder accompanied by coercion as a form of human rights violation, the law put two post-authoritarian legacies under one legal umbrella. The law honoured victims by recognizing the heroism and sacrifices of the martial-law victims and stating that reparations for ‘deaths, injuries, sufferings, deprivations, and damages’ were to be made to restore their dignity.The HRVCB was finally created in 2014. From Marcos’s Swiss assets, PHP 10 billion were provided to the claims board for reparations. Led by Lina C. Sarmiento, a former two-star police general, the board consisted of eight members who were lawyers, academics, and human rights experts. The board was a quasi-judicial body that received and processed claims under RA 10368. In addition to the (incomplete) list of Hawaii claimants and the list provided by the Bantayog ng mga Bayani Foundation (Heroes Monument Foundation; hereafter Bantayog Foundation),15 civil society databases from groups such as the Task Force Detainees of the Philippines and Amnesty International were used for cross-referencing.16 By the time the claims board closed on 12 May 2018, the temporary body had worked for four years, two years longer than initially planned. Out of 75,730 applicants whose status was reviewed and recognized by the claims board, 11,193 victims received PHP 176,000 to 1,760,000.17The reparations law and the claims board could not prevent Marcos’s burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani (National Heroes’ Cemetery) or the successful political careers of the Marcos family members. Nevertheless, the law officially recognized 11,193 people as victims of human rights violations under the Marcos regime, amid outright denials that treated the atrocities that occurred under martial law as fake news (Reyes and Jose 2012–2013a). The Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission—a permanent inter-agency body also established by RA 10368—will continue to engage in memorial works, such as building the Freedom Memorial Museum and providing resources for learners and educators.The reparations law did not bring about the closure of the corruption cases. The PCGG continued its work to recover the ill-gotten wealth of the Marcoses and their cronies. All of the legal battles between the Marcoses and the PCGG originated in the early transition era, between 1986 and 1995. Among others, in 2018 Imelda Marcos, the former first lady and politician, was found guilty of multiple instances of graft at the graft court Sandiganbayan (‘people’s advocate’), in cases initially filed in 1987 and 1995. She was sentenced to a lengthy prison term, which she appealed while on post-conviction bail. In total, the PCGG has recovered almost USD 3.5 billion from the Marcos family and their cronies.18 The recovered assets have been sent to the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), as stipulated in the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law of 1988 (Republic Act 6657).In sum, the democratic transition in the Philippines began in 1986 when few standardized models of transitional justice were available. Thus, the steps to overcome the authoritarian legacies of corruption and human rights abuses were primarily improvised in the wake of the People Power uprising. Anti-corruption measures and human rights claims took parallel courses after President Corazon Aquino’s idea of settling them together did not materialize. Nevertheless, despite the competition over the Marcos family’s assets, the actors involved in the anti-corruption institution and human rights lawsuits eventually assisted each other to take steps towards the passing of the reparations law that recognized the state’s responsibility for the human rights abuses that occurred under Marcos. In turn, the law acknowledge economic plunder as being a type of human rights abuse.4South Korea: Public Anger over Corruption Facilitates Trials of Former PresidentsExcept during a short period of civilian rule in the early 1960s, civil and political liberties in South Korea were limited until 1987. At this point, President Chun Doo Hwan, who had staged coups in 1979 and 1980 amid the tension created by the assassination of President Park Chung Hee, announced that he would resign and introduce a new constitution after massive protests broke out over a university student’s death by torture in police custody. The political opening up of 1987 was the most outstanding democratizing moment that the South Koreans had experienced since General Park Chung Hee had staged a coup against the civilian government in 1961.The repression of real or alleged opposition by the authoritarian regimes of Park and Chun had been particularly severe since 1972, when Park introduced a constitution that drastically curtailed civil and political rights and gave more power to the president. Chun’s regime had begun with a ten-day-long bloody suppression of pro-democracy protesters in the city of Gwangju, where more than two hundred people were killed or went missing in May 1980. The torture of political activists and suspected spies, whose pro-North Korea spy cases were frequently fabricated by the repressive organs of the state to justify the anti-communist authoritarian rule, was prevalent under the Park and Chun regimes (Park and Hong 2021). The authoritarian regimes also punished businesses arbitrarily by confiscating and dissolving disobedient private companies (Koo 2019). Under their authoritarian regimes, the victims of civilian massacres both before and during the Korean War (1950–1953) were not able to voice their concerns out of fear of repression.19Early efforts to overcome these authoritarian legacies can be described as legislature-led reform, and the target was the Chun administration, dubbed ‘the Fifth Republic’ in Korea. In 1987, South Koreans elected Chun’s longstanding colleague Roh Tae Woo as the new president of the democratic era. In the following year’s general election, however, Roh’s party was made a minority in the National Assembly, and three opposition parties immediately decided to establish a special committee on the corruption of the Chun administration. The National Assembly created two special committees—one on the Fifth Republic and another on the events of May 1980 in Gwangju. Human rights abuses under Chun other than those that occurred in May 1980 in Gwangju were regarded as part of more widespread corruption or irregularity (biri). For example, the Samcheong re-education camp and the actions of the notorious torturer Lee Keun-An fell under the mandate of the Fifth Republic Committee, along with other corruption cases.20The National Assembly’s special committees made corruption and human rights abuses visible to the public through televised hearings. The Prosecutor’s Office follow-up team investigated 19 cases: 18 of corruption and one of human rights violation. Forty-seven people were indicted, either as a follow-up to the decisions of the special committees or as part of the Saemaul Undong Centre case, in which Chun’s brother and others had already been indicted before the special committees began their activities. Twenty-eight people served prison sentences.21 With the absolution of a few core members of the previous regime and the promise of rehabilitation and reparations for the victims of the events of May 1980 in Gwangju, the four major parties agreed to dissolve the special committees after 18 months.22 President Roh pardoned most of those convicted, including Chun’s brother, at the end of his term.The next occasion when the former authoritarian regime’s corruption and human rights abuses intersected was at the trials of the former presidents Chun and Roh in 1995 and 1996. In the intervening years, it seemed that justice for the victims of Gwangju would end with reparations and rehabilitation, just as had been agreed among the major parties in 1989. Street protests calling for judicial accountability continued, and individual citizens reported Chun to the Prosecutor’s Office. Nevertheless, all such reports ended without indictment. After civilian president Kim Young Sam was elected, the former high-ranking military generals whom Chun’s coup had ousted also reported Chun to the Prosecutor’s Office, focusing on the illegality of the 1979–1980 coup. However, President Kim believed that judgement on the coup would have to be made by history rather than by legal branches of government. In other words, he opposed the holding of trials over the coup. The Seoul District Public Prosecutor’s Office decided that although the series of coups in 1979 and 1980 constituted a military rebellion, the office did not have the authority to indict because one cannot be punished for a successful coup.Roh and Chun were arrested only after a new scandal revealed the former’s hidden assets (Lee 2003). Then the National Assembly passed a special law that enabled the punishment of the wrongdoers in the events of May 1980 in Gwangju. Trials against Chun, Roh, and other high-ranking generals of the Fifth Republic were soon held. Chun was first sentenced to death and then, on appeal, to life imprisonment for treason (for the coup) and murder for the purpose of treason (for the massacre). Other generals were sentenced to three-and-a-half to eight years in prison for their involvement in the coup. However, for the sake of national reconciliation, in 1997 President Kim Young Sam and in 1998 President Kim Dae Jung pardoned all the high-ranking officials of the Chun regime, including Chun and Roh.23In the courtroom, South Korea attempted to deal with the authoritarian legacies as a whole, from the treasonous beginning to the abuses of power. The illegality of the coup, the mass killings in Gwangju, and corruption were all treated in an integrated manner in the trials of the former presidents. Although the corruption was not related directly to the coups and massacres, it was a significant catalyst for the trials and remained at the centre of public attention and legal proceedings. The bribery trials for Chun and Roh happened in parallel with the treason trials. In the Supreme Court decision of 1997, the trials were integrated.24In sum, during the first decade of democratization after 1987, South Korea treated human rights abuses and corruption as a single set of authoritarian legacies. The opposition politicians in the newly elected National Assembly created committees to inquire into the previous regime’s corruption and human rights abuses, which were often regarded as abuses of a similar nature. The trials of the two former presidents, Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, were made possible due to public anger over corruption.After the trials, the efforts to tackle the ill-gotten wealth of the former presidents and human rights abuses went their separate ways. To tackle the past abuses, victim-centred approaches such as rehabilitation, reparations, and truth-seeking were mobilized. President Kim Dae Jung (1998–2003) established bodies responsible for truth-seeking and rehabilitation for various groups of victims. The setting up of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Korea (TRCK, 2006–2010) was regarded as offering closure for the patchwork of truth-seeking mechanisms. Originally set up as an attempt to investigate large-scale massacres before and during the Korean War, the commission received a broad mandate to investigate six categories of incidents, including civilian massacres and human rights violations. Based on the findings of the TRCK and other truth-seeking commissions, many victims filed lawsuits and successfully demanded reparations from the state. In 2008, President Roh Moo Hyun offered a comprehensive apology to the victims of former state wrongdoings, including the victims of wartime massacres; this marked a defining moment of state recognition of past human rights abuses.The TRCK embraced economic crimes with a unique interpretation of the term ‘gross human rights violations’. In addition to violations of bodily integrity, such as arbitrary detention and torture, the TRCK defined multifaceted violations of human rights as gross violations. According to the TRCK, the violation of both the property and labour rights of the same person constitutes a gross violation—in contrast to a case in which only labour rights were violated—and, thus, falls under the mandate of the commission, with or without harm to the individual’s physical integrity (TRCK 2010:91). This interpretation made it possible for the commission to cover violations of socio-economic rights under the authoritarian regime.The efforts of the South Korean government to recover ill-gotten wealth were predominantly domestic, although there were efforts to learn from successful experiences overseas. For example, the NGO Chamyeoyeondae (People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy) invited Senator Salonga from the Philippines for a lecture, and a victim’s family sued Chun in a US federal court, copying the Marcos victims’ strategy.25 A widely held belief is that a large part of the Chun family assets is located overseas, primarily in the US. Nevertheless, the South Korean government has not conducted serious overseas investigations, although it briefly worked with the US government to confiscate USD 1.2 million from Chun’s son and his wife in 2014.The search for illegal wealth did not advance beyond the fines imposed during the trials in the 1990s. There was no additional prosecution of Chun or his officials. No investigation into corruption under President Park Chung Hee has been attempted, although it is well known that Chun copied Park’s pattern of forcing ‘donations’ from private businesses (Wedeman 1997). As of November 2021, the government had collected 57 % of the total fines, which amounted to KRW 220.5 billion.26Progress is being made with reparations and truth-seeking. The TRCK was revived in 2020 to serve groups that had not benefitted from the efforts of the previous commission. The victims who had been marginalized from the existing mechanisms would be able to rely upon the reports of the second TRCK and other ongoing truth-seeking commissions to receive recognition and monetary compensation.27 As collective reparations, the government has sponsored large-scale memorials such as the May 18 Memorial Park in Gwangju, the Jeju 4.3 Peace Park, and the No Gun Ri Peace Park, among many others.28Unlike in the Philippines, South Korean state reparations did not come from the confiscated assets. Nevertheless, the first phase of reparations was linked to corruption-related measures. The first post-authoritarian reparations scheme for the victims of human rights abuses, the Gwangju reparations of the 1990s, was a follow-up measure of the aforementioned special committees of the National Assembly. Although South Korean transitional justice did not include redistributive measures, it paid attention to the authoritarian regimes’ violations of socio-economic rights, including labour rights.5Indonesia: Separate Paths for Human Rights Abuses and CorruptionIn the aftermath of the failed ‘coup attempt’ by the Gerakan 30 September (30 September Movement) in 1965 (Roosa 2006), the Indonesian military under General Soeharto seized and consolidated power. Soeharto’s rule began with a major blood-stained event in Indonesia: the communist purge of 1965–1966, in which hundreds of thousands of people were detained and massacred in operations that the army coordinated and orchestrated.29 The violence continued with the suppression of opposition forces, particularly in areas of internal armed conflict such as Papua and Aceh. The human rights record of the Indonesian government gained international notoriety with its occupation of East Timor in 1975 and the massacre of protesters in Dili in 1991 (Amnesty International 1994; G. Robinson 2010). Soeharto’s Orde Baru (New Order) regime lasted more than three decades until he stepped down in May 1998 amid an economic crisis, student protests, and riots in the capital (Van Dijk 2001).Meanwhile, with abundant resources ripe for development and authoritarian rule without checks and balances, high-ranking generals in the military and top bureaucrats—including Soeharto—and their business partners became super-rich by, for example, sapping public enterprises and managing business licences. As Soeharto’s control over the whole system became more robust, the businesses of the Soeharto family multiplied (Robison and Hadiz 2004; Winters 2011; Borsuk and Chng 2014).After more than three decades in power, Indonesia’s Soeharto resigned in 1998, handing power to his vice-president Habibie and opening the political space for reformasi (reform). Calls for the punishment of those responsible for the corruption and human rights abuses under the Soeharto regime were common protest slogans during the Reformasi era. In particular, public anger over Soeharto’s corruption, collusion, and nepotism was too intense to be ignored. The Habibie administration began a criminal investigation into Soeharto’s foundations, which had received ‘donations’ from various sources, including state institutions and crony businesses, and channelled them to political clients, business partners, and other beneficiaries. This investigation was carefully managed. Prosecutor General Soedjono, who reported his investigation into Soeharto’s foundations to President Habibie on 15 June 1998, was dismissed five hours after that meeting (Crouch 2010:201). The investigation over Soeharto’s foundations was resumed later that year. The new Prosecutor General intended to indict only one person—Soeharto—and narrow the focus of the investigation to corruption involving his foundations rather than comprehensively examining the control of business permits and licences, land deals, procurement, joint business enterprises, and so on, under the New Order regime by Soeharto’s family members, cronies, and top bureaucrats in the military and civilian service.30Assigning the Soeharto-era corruption cases to the Kejaksaan Agung (Prosecutor’s Office) was not the only option available. The Indonesian elites of the transitional period were aware of the transitional justice and post-authoritarian economic justice experiences of the early democratizers in the region. Amien Rais, a leading opposition figure, mentioned the South Korean case, suggesting that Soeharto should be pardoned after his future conviction (Van Dijk 2001:273). The Habibie administration invited prominent non-government figures to form a Philippine-style independent commission with the power to investigate Soeharto-era corruption cases, summon witnesses, and seize assets.31 However, the plan to create a PCGG-like commission—with a focus on seizing assets rather than prosecution—was cancelled at the last minute (Van Dijk 2001:282).32In the end, the Indonesian elites chose the prosecutorial strategy that relied on the existing Prosecutor’s Office without creating a special commission to investigate Soeharto-era corruption. The Soeharto case was not very successful. Although the Swiss authorities offered to help freeze Soeharto’s assets, all transnational efforts to recover the overseas assets of the Soeharto family failed.33 The case was terminated because of insufficient evidence in October 1999, and later revived by the Wahid administration; it was later indefinitely delayed because of the alleged health problems of the former dictator.Other Soeharto-era corruption cases made it to court. Bob Hasan, a Soeharto crony known as the ‘plywood king’, was sentenced to six years in prison for misusing a forestry fund in the 1990s (Robison and Hadiz 2004:208). Soeharto’s half-brother Probosutedjo was also sentenced to four years in prison for misuse of the forestry fund. Of the family members and Soeharto cronies who benefitted from monopolies and cheap loans, only these two were actually jailed for corruption (Crouch 2010:203). The case of Soeharto’s son Hutomo Mandala Putra is a bit more complicated. The Mahkamah Agung (Supreme Court) sentenced him in absentia to 18 months in prison for a conviction related to a land swap deal between the Badan Urusan Logistik (Bulog, Indonesian Logistics Bureau) and his company PT Goro; he remained on the run, however, until he was arrested again for masterminding the murder of a judge who had ruled unfavourably against him. Because Hutomo’s corruption case was later reversed, he only served a prison sentence for the murder conviction (Crouch 2010:202).As the Asian financial crisis doomed the late-Soeharto period, new corruption scandals involving Soeharto family members—including Hutomo and his elder sister Siti Hardijanti Rukmana—and cronies unfolded. The Bantuan Likuiditas Bank Indonesia (BLBI, Bank of Indonesia Liquidity Assistance) scheme was launched in July 1997 for banks overwhelmed by non-performing loans. The Badan Penyehatan Perbankan Nasional (BPPN, Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency), active from January 1998 to February 2004, later took over the handling of government bailouts. The BLBI scandal incurred enormous losses for the state because a large part of the funds had been misused, and many debtors refused to repay the assistance (Crouch 2010:205–6).During the Reformasi era, President Habibie did not propose forming a body responsible for investigating both human rights violations and corruption, as the Philippine president Cory Aquino had done in 1986. Nor did the Indonesian legislature establish a special inquiry committee to examine the human rights abuses and corruption of the Soeharto regime as a set of wrongdoings, as the South Korean National Assembly had done in 1988. At the time of transition, Indonesia already had the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas-HAM), which Soeharto had created in 1993. Independent inquiries by the Komnas-HAM were an essential part of the standard investigation following cases of well-publicized extrajudicial killings by the military (Honna 2003). The legislative efforts of the transitional period focused on strengthening the role of the Komnas-HAM by providing a legal basis for its activities with the passing in 1999 of the human rights law and giving the commission the new role of investigating past human rights abuses with the human rights court law passed in 2000 (Setiawan 2016).34The human rights court was at the centre of the special judicial system for human rights abuses that Indonesia developed. The Indonesian government created the court in response to international pressure over the 1999 referendum violence in East Timor. The Indonesian human rights court has jurisdiction over crimes that can be classified as genocide or crimes against humanity. The 2000 law closely follows the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted in 1998, although with differences, such as the omission of war crimes (Setiawan 2019). Unlike the Rome Statute, which does not have a clause covering retroactivity or retrospectivity, the Indonesian human rights court can be a venue for trying crimes that occurred before the law’s enactment if the president and the parliament agree to establish an ad hoc human rights court. In parallel, the Komisi Kebenaran dan Rekonsiliasi (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, TRC) was planned to operate as a quasi-judicial substitute for an ad hoc human rights court. It was designed to address the same cases as the ad hoc human rights courts, that is, instances of genocide and crimes against humanity that had occurred before November 2000, and nothing more.The Indonesian policymakers were able to use the norms of international criminal justice, which had not existed at the time of democratization in the Philippines and South Korea, to build a system acceptable to both the international community and domestic constituencies. Indonesia did not have to rely on improvised ad hoc measures as early democratizers had done over the decades. The system did not, however, address socio-economic rights or plunder of property, as the South Korean and Philippine commissions had done.In 2006, responding to a request for a judicial review of problematic amnesty clauses, the Mahkamah Konstitusi (Constitutional Court) annulled the entirety of the TRC law (Suh 2015:101–2, 109). Thus no TRC was established at all until the special autonomous region of Aceh created a local TRC in 2016. Because the TRC did not exist, the human rights court system was the only institution on which victims of human rights abuses could rely to seek reparations. The human rights court system has regulations for reparations, which could only be disbursed with convictions. Until the trial for the 2014 killing of protesters in Paniai, Papua, opened in September 2022, only three cases—two ‘past’ cases of the 1999 East Timor militia violence and the 1984 shootings of Islamic protesters in Tanjung Priok, Jakarta, and one permanent court case on violent police repression in Abepura, Papua—had gone through the system, with all the perpetrators being set free on appeal. Although the Komnas-HAM has compiled reports on more than ten cases suspected of having elements of gross human rights violations, including the 1965–1966 purge, the Prosecutor’s Office refuses to launch official investigations into such cases.Since 2012, the victims of cases deemed by the Komnas-HAM as having elements of gross human rights violations have been able to receive financial assistance from the Lembaga Perlindungan Saksi dan Korban (LPSK, Witness and Victim Protection Agency) if the Komnas-HAM issues a letter confirming their victim status.35 This aid has been helpful for those victims who need such assistance. Nevertheless, the distribution of this aid cannot be regarded in the same way as a regular reparation because there was no prior official acknowledgement that human rights abuses were committed. It was only in January 2023 that President Joko Widodo acknowledged the occurrence of gross human rights violations in twelve of these cases, a decade after the LPSK programme was launched.Indonesia’s anti-corruption agency, the Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK, Corruption Eradication Commission), was created in 2003. Heightened anti-corruption awareness was boosted by donations to support governance reform in developing countries, which resonated with the intense anti-corruption campaigns in civil society (Setiyono and McLeod 2010:353). The KPK’s creation was one of the achievements of the Reformasi period. With its investigative power, the independent agency successfully targeted many high-level individuals suspected of corruption. The commission’s work does not cover Soeharto-era corruption, because it lacks a retroactivity mandate. Nevertheless, its activities have helped corruption cases that go back to the late Soeharto period by revealing judicial corruption that occurred after 2003. In 2005, KPK officers arrested Probosutedjo’s lawyer, who was carrying a large amount of cash in the company of Supreme Court staff members. The new Supreme Court panel sentenced Probosutedjo, who appealed his two-year sentence, to four years in prison (Crouch 2010:221–3). In 2008, the KPK caught a prosecutor carrying a large amount of cash outside BLBI convict Sjamsul Nursalim’s house (Djani 2008). The KPK continued to investigate the BLBI case but terminated Sjamsul Nursalim’s debt exoneration after the BPPN chairperson who instructed the exoneration was set free by the Supreme Court in 2021.The termination of this exoneration reinvigorated the languishing anti-corruption front to an extent. After the Prosecutor’s Office terminated the Soeharto case on 10 May 2006, so that the ailing former president could leave the country for treatment, the only significant move against his family was the civil lawsuits filed by the Prosecutor’s Office against Soeharto and the Supersemar Foundation, which gathered the profits of state banks for scholarships and channelled a large part of the funds to crony businesses. The protracted legal dispute over the state losses to the foundation began in 2007 after the Prosecutor’s Office dropped its criminal charges against Soeharto.36 The Prosecutor’s Office targeted only one foundation among many, and only Soeharto—and his heirs, after his death in 2008—was deemed liable. Eventually, the court relieved the family members of liability. It was decided that only the Supersemar Foundation was liable. The Supreme Court confirmed this 2008 judgement in 2015, and in 2017, the amount that the Supersemar Foundation must pay—IDR 4.4 trillion—was finalized. In 2018, the Prosecutor’s Office seized the Granadi building in Jakarta and a villa in Bogor. IDR 242 billion from the Supersemar Foundation’s accounts was also confiscated.37In 2021, after the KPK announced the termination of the BLBI case, the government created a joint task force for tracing and seizing ill-gotten assets related to the BLBI case. It set a target of recovering IDR 110 trillion from 48 debtors, including Soeharto’s son Hutomo. The team seized properties from some BLBI debtors who had failed to repay the bailout. Hutomo’s land in Karawang, West Java, was seized in exchange for debt incurred by Hutomo’s disastrous Timor Car business (Robison and Hadiz 2004:91–2).38 Separately, the government took on the management of the Taman Mini park from the Harapan Kita Foundation and urged Hutomo’s brother Bambang Trihatmodjo to pay back the loss incurred by the 1997 Southeast Asian Games Consortium, of which he was the director.39 The full impact of the new government strategy of pursuing ill-gotten assets from past corruption without a criminal prosecution has yet to be seen.In sum, although anti-Soeharto protesters called for punishment for the perpetrators of the New Order’s crimes of corruption and human rights abuses, Indonesian policymakers did not regard these two issues as a pair of authoritarian legacies. Human rights and anti-corruption actions soon became the responsibilities of specialist institutions. With the help of international human rights and good-governance models, Indonesia was able to introduce specialist institutions relatively quickly. The Komnas-HAM had already been established during the authoritarian regime. After the Reformasi, the mandate of the Komnas-HAM was strengthened, and the preliminary investigations for the new human rights court system added to its functions. The investigative reports became the basis for aid for the victims of abuses when no reparations were available for victims. While the Komnas-HAM can investigate cases from the past, the KPK cannot, and the New Order corruption trials remain in the hands of the Prosecutor’s Office. Recently, based on the KPK’s efforts on a related case, the Indonesian government beefed up efforts to recover ill-gotten assets, including those originating from Soeharto-era corruption. Thus, it is through specialist institutions that Indonesian post-authoritarian justice has made progress.6ConclusionsHuman rights abuses and corruption during authoritarian rule are rooted in the arbitrary and coercive use of power. It is not surprising that anti-authoritarian protesters raise the two issues together. The post-authoritarian trajectories of three Asian countries indicate that the issues of human rights abuses and anti-corruption do not ultimately conflict. The pursuit of an anti-kleptocracy agenda in the Philippines and South Korea promoted transitional justice measures by offering the monetary resource of reparations and galvanizing public anger against the past regime. Anti-corruption measures cannot create demands for human rights where they are scarce. However, as the two early democratizers show, anti-corruption measures are more likely to be helpful for the progress of a human rights agenda than not, often in an unexpected manner. The absence of a human rights agenda in some instances of Arab and African transitional justice is more attributable to the absence of favourable conditions, such as full democratization, than to the prioritization of anti-corruption agendas.The aim of this article is not to classify the Philippines and South Korea as success cases and Indonesia as a failure in transitional justice. All three countries refused to punish the wrongdoers on an extensive scale, and victim-oriented measures were often ad hoc and not well-known to the public. The Philippines waited 27 years to enact a law that acknowledged the sacrifices of Marcos’s victims. In South Korea, where the need for ‘historical rectification’ had a deeper history, a presidential apology for the victims of the massacres of the Korean War period was issued in 2008, 21 years after a direct presidential election under the new constitution. What has been attempted is a comparison of the characteristic trajectories that the three countries followed for dealing with past legacies. Specialist institutions helped Indonesia to deal with the human rights abuses and corruption of the authoritarian era. President Jokowi’s expression of regret over past human rights violations was based on the findings of the Komnas-HAM reports.In Indonesia, the Jokowi administration has publicly pledged to resolve past human rights abuse cases and has explored various institutional possibilities (McGregor and Setiawan 2019). Despite Jokowi’s recent acknowledgement, 25 years after Suharto’s fall, of past human rights abuses in twelve cases, his approach to past abuses has been criticized for being limited in its scope and boldness. A new ‘fourth-generation’ perspective on the past might be helpful to advance Indonesian transitional justice. The possible intersections between human rights abuses and economic justice have received attention in recent years. Hamid (2018) discusses how corruption and military violence have intersected in the land of Papua.40 A large part of the ongoing human rights abuse in Papua is rooted in the exploitation of natural resources. The 1965 purge victims and their families have experienced discrimination when seeking employment, as noted by the commander of the Indonesian Armed Forces, General Andika Perkasa, in his comment that descendants of communist families can now join the military.41 Paying attention to socio-economic rights in Papua and other Indonesian regions might be a way of pursuing transitional justice on a fuller basis.AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A5A8027524). The author wishes to offer her heartfelt thanks to all the anonymous interviewees and reviewers, as well as to Mary Aileen D. Bacalso, Miriam Coronel Ferrer, Wilson, Zaenal Muttaqin, Gianna Catolico, and Kim Nam-eun for their help and assistance. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Bijdragen tot de Land-, Taal- en Volkenkunde Brill

Human Rights and Corruption in Settling the Accounts of the Past

Bijdragen tot de Land-, Taal- en Volkenkunde , Volume 179 (1): 29 – Mar 21, 2023

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Publisher
Brill
Copyright
Copyright © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
0006-2294
eISSN
2213-4379
DOI
10.1163/22134379-bja10049
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See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

1IntroductionIn a 2007 press interview, Ifdhal Kasim, then head of the Komisi Nasional Hak Asasi Manusia (Komnas-HAM, National Human Rights Commission), argued that anti-corruption action was one of the most significant factors affecting the negative public view of the commission. According to him, the Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono administration had prioritized the pursuit of an anti-corruption agenda over human rights. The primary obstacle to the progress of past (and recent) human rights cases was said to be the political circumstances, in which political elites cared more about economic problems and the eradication of corruption, collusion, and nepotism (known as KKN) than about human rights abuses.1If this assessment were correct, an effective strategy for human rights supporters would be to dampen the anti-corruption sentiment so that their issue becomes visible. As much as it sounds strange, the idea that the issue of competition between human rights and corruption justice worked to the detriment of the former was shared by others in the Indonesian human rights community. When I visited a disappearance victims’ association in 2010, the activists there lamented that the political situation was ‘not very good for’ their disappearance case. ‘Now it’s all about corruption’, they complained. My question about the possibility that the bringing to justice of corruption cases could help human rights cases was sceptically dismissed.2The relationship between human rights abuses and corruption is one of the lesser-understood aspects of transitional justice, or the ‘settling of the past accounts’ of the previous authoritarian regime. This study examines how two post-authoritarian accountability issues—human rights and corruption—intersected in three new democracies in East and Southeast Asia: the Philippines, South Korea, and Indonesia. Rather than competing and conflicting with each other, these issues could have had mutually supportive and facilitating effects. The pursuit of an anti-corruption agenda worked as a catalyst for the achievement of milestones in transitional justice—these being the Philippine reparations law for the victims of the Marcos regime and the South Korean trials of former presidents—as I will explain below.Furthermore, in the Philippines and South Korea, these two issues have often been perceived as overlapping or related legacies of authoritarian rule by the policymakers who designed the transitional justice measures. In Indonesia, by contrast, the two issues have been strictly separated and rarely intersect in the policy-making process.The three countries under consideration were chosen because, among the ‘third-wave’ democracies (Huntington 1991) of the region, they did not experience regime reversal, and their authoritarian regimes had a strong personalist tendency.3 In the Philippines, the ‘People Power’ protests ousted President Marcos in 1986. In the following year (1987), similar protests erupted in South Korea, leading to a presidential election based on a new constitution. In Indonesia, long-time president Soeharto stepped down in 1998 after the East Asian financial crisis. Recent trends in Indonesia and the Philippines show a decline in the quality of democracy, to the extent that concerns have been raised over the feasibility of transitional justice (Setiawan and Tomsa 2022:202–18; Lamchek and Radics 2021). Despite this, it is meaningful to discuss post-authoritarian justice in all three countries because there have not been significant ruptures that have rendered policy continuity in transitional justice impossible.This comparative case study draws upon written sources and interviews. Interviews were conducted in the Philippines (August 2018) and Indonesia (February 2019) for this research, and are supplemented by knowledge gained from my visits to Jakarta for related projects since 2009. The South Korean context has been studied primarily through written sources. The now-defunct online presidential archive was particularly useful in locating Indonesian newspaper articles on anti-corruption measures during the transitional period.4This article first provides a background for understanding the relationship between human rights and corruption issues in terms of authoritarian legacies in new democracies. It then discusses how the measures against past human rights abuses and corruption in the three post-authoritarian countries unravelled during the transitional and post-transitional periods. Each case study analyses the authoritarian legacies and the transitional period, the relationship between corruption and human rights, and the current state of post-authoritarian justice.2Human Rights and Corruption in the ‘Politics of the Past’Transitional justice can be broadly defined as judicial and non-judicial accountability measures to redress past wrongs, especially serious human rights abuses, after the transition away from authoritarian and conflict situations. Teitel (2003) characterized the evolution of transitional justice conceptions as originating during the post-Second World War war crimes tribunals (Phase I) and then diversifying in the post-Cold War ‘third-wave’ democratic transitions (Phase II). The term ‘transitional justice’ was coined in this second phase, with a series of international conferences taking place between 1988 and 1994 (Arthur 2009). Over time, transitional justice models around the world have become homogenized and standardized as the ‘templatisation of best practices around which most professional international TJ [transitional justice] nongovernmental organisations (NGO s) converge’ (Subotić 2012:106). In the third and final phase of Teitel’s (2003) genealogy, which is symbolized by the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), transitional justice became ‘normalized’ as the conflation of international criminal justice with the transitional justice occurred in the new humanitarian regimes (Teitel 2003).The ‘fourth-generation’ arguments of transitional justice (Lambourne 2009; Sharp 2012, 2013) criticize the disconnect between human rights norms and the socio-economic dimension created in the development of transitional justice. They call for a broader conception of transitional justice that incorporates violations of economic and social rights and corruption, in addition to the traditional focus on physical violence.While the ‘fourth-generation’ attention paid to the socio-economic dimension of transitional justice is highly appreciable, it should be noted that the economic dimension was not wholly lost in the post-authoritarian transitions, which Teitel (2003) would call the early second phase of transitional justice. Scholars of comparative politics and memory studies remind us that a ‘broader “politics of the past” in contemporary democracies’, that is, ‘an ongoing process in which both elites and society under democratic rule revise the meaning of the authoritarian past and act on its legacies’ (Pinto 2010:340), existed in the earlier democratic transitions of Southern Europe and Latin America before the upholding of human rights became the dominant idea (Barahona de Brito, González-Enríquez, and Aguilar 2001:22).Even before the ‘fourth-generation’ concerns were raised, transitional societies had attempted to settle past accounts of human rights abuses and corruption simultaneously. Judicial and non-judicial mechanisms had been mobilized against the corruption of the outgoing regime and other aspects of economic justice, such as the fulfilment of lost socio-economic rights. In Latin America, Peru and Chile filed corruption charges against former dictators as well as charges related to human rights abuses. In Africa, countries such as Chad, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Kenya included the misappropriation of public resources by the outgoing regime elites and other economic crimes perpetrated by individual plunderers and companies in the mandates of their truth commissions (Carranza 2008; Andrieu 2012; I. Robinson 2015). García Martín (2020:172) shows that a series of Argentine laws from the mid 1980s addressed the issue of restoring labour rights.The emergence or re-emergence of socio-economic wrongs in transitional justice has not been universally welcomed. Waldorf (2012) supports the separation of past socio-economic wrongs from human rights abuses. Aboueldahab (2017:128) argues that the emphasis on accountability for corruption in Egypt and Tunisia was an attempt to avoid the prosecution of abusers of civil and political rights. Thus, in her view, the inclusion of corruption in transitional justice is a ‘scapegoating’ strategy and does not lead to a more comprehensive justice (Aboueldahab 2017:152).By contrast, Lutz and Reiger (2009) found that corruption trials could facilitate human rights trials at a later stage. Studies on Latin American transitions have noted that corruption has a more substantial delegitimizing effect on rulers of both authoritarian and democratic regimes (Seligson 2002; Cavallaro and Albuja 2008). In Asia, it is even more crucial to illuminate the intersection of the two issues because human rights prosecution is relatively rare in the region, whereas the prosecution of former leaders for corruption is not (Lutz and Reiger 2009). In the Asian case studies, I highlight older methods of dealing with economic violence that existed before transitional justice as a specialist field grew out of its ‘parent field’ of international human rights in the 1990s (Arthur 2009; Sharp 2013). The experiences of the Philippines and South Korea indicate that the strict separation of human rights and corruption in transitional justice is a later development—characteristically shown in the Indonesian case—and was not an inherent feature of post-authoritarian justice. In the Philippines and South Korea, human rights abuses and corruption were perceived as a pair of legacies of the outgoing authoritarian regimes; for three decades, the trajectories of settling these two legacies overlapped in critical ways. Measures to tackle corruption ultimately led to the recognition of victimhood—and more—in the Philippines and South Korea. By contrast, the two processes in Indonesia went their separate ways and rarely intersected. Rather than being perceived as a set of authoritarian legacies, they were treated as special crimes that have occurred continually across time.The different timings of the transitions in the context of the global development of transitional justice have played a role in the different approaches taken to human rights and corruption among early and later democratizers. The characteristic of the ‘world time’ factor is that its effect is non-linear, with 1995–1999 marking the height of transitional justice trials and domestic human rights prosecutions (Dancy and Michel 2016:180–2); the fall of the Indonesian authoritarian regime occurred during this period. The late 1990s was also a period when the norms of international criminal justice—a field of international law that calls for individual accountability for grave human rights abuses in international courts—were developed significantly, paving the way for what Teitel (2003) described as the ‘normalization’ phase of transitional justice. From the early 1990s, alongside the specialist field of transitional justice, anti-corruption groups developed anti-corruption norms in parallel and separately. These groups were generally reluctant to engage in the kleptocracy of the past regimes, which thereby facilitated the ‘compartmentalization’ of justice into the separate issue-specific areas of corruption and human rights abuses (Kim and Sharman 2014; Carranza 2008).By contrast, South Korea and the Philippines began to navigate towards democratic transitions when the norms and models of transitional justice and international criminal justice were nascent. The term ‘transitional justice’ did not even exist at this time. Both countries were relatively isolated from the transitional justice scene that was developing globally.5 Therefore, they were able to develop measures of transitional justice in which human rights and corruption were not strictly compartmentalized.To assert that the intersection between human rights and corruption is the most critical factor in explaining transitional justice outcomes is not the goal of this article. To fully explain the outcomes, other factors such as political dynamics, the role of civil society, the nature of the preceding regime, and the nature of the abuses must be considered. I intend to show that the salience of corruption issues does not necessarily impede the progress of transitional justice for human rights abuses and that early democratizers viewed the relationship between the two issues quite differently from the standardized approach of the later period.3Philippines: Pursuit of Ill-Gotten Wealth Leads to State Recognition of SufferingsFerdinand Marcos Sr was elected president for the first time in 1965. He put the country under martial law in 1972 and ruled until 1986, when he was overthrown as a result of the People Power protests. Martial rule under Marcos was full of political violence. McCoy (2001) estimates that 3,257 people were victims of extrajudicial killings between 1972 and 1986, and of these, 2,520 were ‘salvaged’—‘tortured, mutilated, and dumped on a roadside for public display’ (McCoy 2001:131). In addition, 35,000 people were tortured and 70,000 were jailed (McCoy 2001).6 Ruling through fear, the Marcos family and their cronies plundered the Philippine economy using various strategies, including the takeover of private industry, holding monopolies on profitable industries, money laundering and tax evasion (Aquino 1987).The first executive order that President Corazon Aquino signed in 1986 created the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), the aim of which was to recover the ill-gotten wealth of the Marcos family and their cronies. Jovito R. Salonga, a lawyer and Partido Liberal (Liberal Party) politician, was appointed as the head of the PCGG. Initially, President Aquino planned to settle authoritarian legacies in an integrated manner by assigning Salonga both to the recovery of ill-gotten wealth and to ‘going after the violators of human rights’ (Salonga 2000:20). As Salonga’s wish to focus on anti-corruption efforts was accepted, a new human rights body was established separately. In other words, anti-corruption measures and transitional justice parted ways because of practical concerns, not because they were regarded as two fundamentally different, specialist, and compartmentalized issues.After Marcos fled to Hawaii, the idea of him being prosecuted in the Philippine court was quickly abandoned, and the stage for restitution turned transnational. The PCGG leaders travelled to the United States and Switzerland. In the US courts, the PCGG filed lawsuits against the Marcos family and their cronies and recovered assets, in some cases as a consequence of out-of-court settlements.7 In Switzerland, the government unilaterally froze Marcos’s assets in 1986 (Salonga 2000). Compared to the experiences of other countries such as Iran, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Panama, which had also attempted to recover the ill-gotten assets of their former dictators,8 the pursuit by the Philippine government represented a good first step (Aquino 1987; Salonga 2000).In contrast to the active overseas strategies of the PCGG, the few existing justice and truth measures for past human rights abuses were weak. The Commission on Human Rights and its predecessor, the Presidential Committee on Human Rights, collected data on the abuses of the Marcos regime. However, this did not lead to public hearings or other systematic follow-up measures (Aquino 1995). President Ramos once established a fact-finding body for the disappeared, which made ‘little visible progress’.9 Only a few low-level officers and soldiers were convicted for the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr. and the Escalante massacre against demonstrating peasants in 1985.As a result of this lack of action, major initiatives for the victims of human rights abuses were also taken on in the United States. When Robert Swift, a lawyer from the US who became interested in the Philippines, persuaded the released detainees to file lawsuits against Marcos by using the Alien Tort Claims Act, the victims agreed (Davidson 2017; Ela 2017). The class-action suit was later integrated with four other lawsuits filed by individual victims. In 1992, a jury in Hawaii concluded that Marcos was liable, which was followed by the verdict that the victims should receive damages amounting to USD 2 billion.At first, it seemed that this verdict would not guarantee the fulfilment of the victims’ rights, as a lengthy legal dispute, involving multiple judicial venues and actors, continued between the Philippine government and the Hawaii claimants over Marcos’s Swiss accounts. However, the severe competition between the PCGG and the Hawaii claimants finally led to a win—the passing of the Republic Act (RA) 10368, or the Human Rights Reparation and Recognition Act of 2013, which recognized state responsibility for past human rights abuses under Marcos’s martial law.10 While the position of the Philippine government that the recovered assets must be used for land reform was firm, the Swiss court asserted that the Philippine government was obliged to disburse all or part of the Swiss assets to the victims of human rights abuses who had made a claim on the assets. In the end, the pursuit of an anti-corruption agenda resulted in reparations for victims with the legislation of the RA 10368. The reparations law allowed Marcos’s human rights victims to benefit from approximately one-third of the recovered Swiss assets, providing a partial solution to the overlapping claims, although it did not end all the legal battles in the US courts (Davidson 2017).11The competing claims helped each other. The Philippine government used the Hawaii court’s judgement when requesting that the Swiss authorities transfer Marcos’s assets (Davidson 2017). Additionally, the victims of human rights abuses benefitted from the PCGG’s active legal strategies against Marcos’s assets. Without these PCGG activities, there would have been no guarantee that any successful transitional justice measure recognizing the state errors in past human rights practices would have been implemented.It is undeniable that domestic political conditions were favourable for the legislation of RA 10368 in 2013. President Benigno Aquino III of the Liberal Party, whose term began in 2010, had allied himself politically with Akbayan, a democratic socialist party that had supported compensation for Marcos-era victims since 1998 (Lamchek and Sanchez 2021; Davidson 2017). Although the fierce competition within the leftist blocs and their priority of impeaching two presidents, Joseph Estrada and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, had prevented the bill from advancing for more than a decade,12 the blocs and President Aquino’s Liberal Party had also finally agreed on the establishment of the Human Rights Victims’ Claims Board (HRVCB), as regulated in RA 10368 (Reyes and Jose 2012–2013b). Second, in the years leading up to the legislation of RA 10368, the Philippines had made a number of legislative efforts related to international human rights instruments. Several of those efforts were successful, resulting in the passing of the 2009 Act on International Humanitarian Law, the 2009 Torture Act, and the 2012 Act on Enforced Disappearance (Palmer 2020), while others, such as the 2010 victim bill, failed to become law (Jaishankar 2014). There is a possibility that such a legislative trend in the late Arroyo years influenced the reparations law,13 although my Philippines interviewees remembered the reparations law as being ‘homegrown’.14More importantly, however, it was the intersection between human rights and corruption that boosted and also characterized the reparations law. The law listed six non-exhaustive categories of state violence as the definition of human rights violations, including arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance; among them, the fifth is the ‘unjust or illegal takeover of a business’ and the ‘confiscation of property’, along with the ‘detention of owner/s and or their families’. By recognizing economic plunder accompanied by coercion as a form of human rights violation, the law put two post-authoritarian legacies under one legal umbrella. The law honoured victims by recognizing the heroism and sacrifices of the martial-law victims and stating that reparations for ‘deaths, injuries, sufferings, deprivations, and damages’ were to be made to restore their dignity.The HRVCB was finally created in 2014. From Marcos’s Swiss assets, PHP 10 billion were provided to the claims board for reparations. Led by Lina C. Sarmiento, a former two-star police general, the board consisted of eight members who were lawyers, academics, and human rights experts. The board was a quasi-judicial body that received and processed claims under RA 10368. In addition to the (incomplete) list of Hawaii claimants and the list provided by the Bantayog ng mga Bayani Foundation (Heroes Monument Foundation; hereafter Bantayog Foundation),15 civil society databases from groups such as the Task Force Detainees of the Philippines and Amnesty International were used for cross-referencing.16 By the time the claims board closed on 12 May 2018, the temporary body had worked for four years, two years longer than initially planned. Out of 75,730 applicants whose status was reviewed and recognized by the claims board, 11,193 victims received PHP 176,000 to 1,760,000.17The reparations law and the claims board could not prevent Marcos’s burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani (National Heroes’ Cemetery) or the successful political careers of the Marcos family members. Nevertheless, the law officially recognized 11,193 people as victims of human rights violations under the Marcos regime, amid outright denials that treated the atrocities that occurred under martial law as fake news (Reyes and Jose 2012–2013a). The Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission—a permanent inter-agency body also established by RA 10368—will continue to engage in memorial works, such as building the Freedom Memorial Museum and providing resources for learners and educators.The reparations law did not bring about the closure of the corruption cases. The PCGG continued its work to recover the ill-gotten wealth of the Marcoses and their cronies. All of the legal battles between the Marcoses and the PCGG originated in the early transition era, between 1986 and 1995. Among others, in 2018 Imelda Marcos, the former first lady and politician, was found guilty of multiple instances of graft at the graft court Sandiganbayan (‘people’s advocate’), in cases initially filed in 1987 and 1995. She was sentenced to a lengthy prison term, which she appealed while on post-conviction bail. In total, the PCGG has recovered almost USD 3.5 billion from the Marcos family and their cronies.18 The recovered assets have been sent to the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), as stipulated in the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law of 1988 (Republic Act 6657).In sum, the democratic transition in the Philippines began in 1986 when few standardized models of transitional justice were available. Thus, the steps to overcome the authoritarian legacies of corruption and human rights abuses were primarily improvised in the wake of the People Power uprising. Anti-corruption measures and human rights claims took parallel courses after President Corazon Aquino’s idea of settling them together did not materialize. Nevertheless, despite the competition over the Marcos family’s assets, the actors involved in the anti-corruption institution and human rights lawsuits eventually assisted each other to take steps towards the passing of the reparations law that recognized the state’s responsibility for the human rights abuses that occurred under Marcos. In turn, the law acknowledge economic plunder as being a type of human rights abuse.4South Korea: Public Anger over Corruption Facilitates Trials of Former PresidentsExcept during a short period of civilian rule in the early 1960s, civil and political liberties in South Korea were limited until 1987. At this point, President Chun Doo Hwan, who had staged coups in 1979 and 1980 amid the tension created by the assassination of President Park Chung Hee, announced that he would resign and introduce a new constitution after massive protests broke out over a university student’s death by torture in police custody. The political opening up of 1987 was the most outstanding democratizing moment that the South Koreans had experienced since General Park Chung Hee had staged a coup against the civilian government in 1961.The repression of real or alleged opposition by the authoritarian regimes of Park and Chun had been particularly severe since 1972, when Park introduced a constitution that drastically curtailed civil and political rights and gave more power to the president. Chun’s regime had begun with a ten-day-long bloody suppression of pro-democracy protesters in the city of Gwangju, where more than two hundred people were killed or went missing in May 1980. The torture of political activists and suspected spies, whose pro-North Korea spy cases were frequently fabricated by the repressive organs of the state to justify the anti-communist authoritarian rule, was prevalent under the Park and Chun regimes (Park and Hong 2021). The authoritarian regimes also punished businesses arbitrarily by confiscating and dissolving disobedient private companies (Koo 2019). Under their authoritarian regimes, the victims of civilian massacres both before and during the Korean War (1950–1953) were not able to voice their concerns out of fear of repression.19Early efforts to overcome these authoritarian legacies can be described as legislature-led reform, and the target was the Chun administration, dubbed ‘the Fifth Republic’ in Korea. In 1987, South Koreans elected Chun’s longstanding colleague Roh Tae Woo as the new president of the democratic era. In the following year’s general election, however, Roh’s party was made a minority in the National Assembly, and three opposition parties immediately decided to establish a special committee on the corruption of the Chun administration. The National Assembly created two special committees—one on the Fifth Republic and another on the events of May 1980 in Gwangju. Human rights abuses under Chun other than those that occurred in May 1980 in Gwangju were regarded as part of more widespread corruption or irregularity (biri). For example, the Samcheong re-education camp and the actions of the notorious torturer Lee Keun-An fell under the mandate of the Fifth Republic Committee, along with other corruption cases.20The National Assembly’s special committees made corruption and human rights abuses visible to the public through televised hearings. The Prosecutor’s Office follow-up team investigated 19 cases: 18 of corruption and one of human rights violation. Forty-seven people were indicted, either as a follow-up to the decisions of the special committees or as part of the Saemaul Undong Centre case, in which Chun’s brother and others had already been indicted before the special committees began their activities. Twenty-eight people served prison sentences.21 With the absolution of a few core members of the previous regime and the promise of rehabilitation and reparations for the victims of the events of May 1980 in Gwangju, the four major parties agreed to dissolve the special committees after 18 months.22 President Roh pardoned most of those convicted, including Chun’s brother, at the end of his term.The next occasion when the former authoritarian regime’s corruption and human rights abuses intersected was at the trials of the former presidents Chun and Roh in 1995 and 1996. In the intervening years, it seemed that justice for the victims of Gwangju would end with reparations and rehabilitation, just as had been agreed among the major parties in 1989. Street protests calling for judicial accountability continued, and individual citizens reported Chun to the Prosecutor’s Office. Nevertheless, all such reports ended without indictment. After civilian president Kim Young Sam was elected, the former high-ranking military generals whom Chun’s coup had ousted also reported Chun to the Prosecutor’s Office, focusing on the illegality of the 1979–1980 coup. However, President Kim believed that judgement on the coup would have to be made by history rather than by legal branches of government. In other words, he opposed the holding of trials over the coup. The Seoul District Public Prosecutor’s Office decided that although the series of coups in 1979 and 1980 constituted a military rebellion, the office did not have the authority to indict because one cannot be punished for a successful coup.Roh and Chun were arrested only after a new scandal revealed the former’s hidden assets (Lee 2003). Then the National Assembly passed a special law that enabled the punishment of the wrongdoers in the events of May 1980 in Gwangju. Trials against Chun, Roh, and other high-ranking generals of the Fifth Republic were soon held. Chun was first sentenced to death and then, on appeal, to life imprisonment for treason (for the coup) and murder for the purpose of treason (for the massacre). Other generals were sentenced to three-and-a-half to eight years in prison for their involvement in the coup. However, for the sake of national reconciliation, in 1997 President Kim Young Sam and in 1998 President Kim Dae Jung pardoned all the high-ranking officials of the Chun regime, including Chun and Roh.23In the courtroom, South Korea attempted to deal with the authoritarian legacies as a whole, from the treasonous beginning to the abuses of power. The illegality of the coup, the mass killings in Gwangju, and corruption were all treated in an integrated manner in the trials of the former presidents. Although the corruption was not related directly to the coups and massacres, it was a significant catalyst for the trials and remained at the centre of public attention and legal proceedings. The bribery trials for Chun and Roh happened in parallel with the treason trials. In the Supreme Court decision of 1997, the trials were integrated.24In sum, during the first decade of democratization after 1987, South Korea treated human rights abuses and corruption as a single set of authoritarian legacies. The opposition politicians in the newly elected National Assembly created committees to inquire into the previous regime’s corruption and human rights abuses, which were often regarded as abuses of a similar nature. The trials of the two former presidents, Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, were made possible due to public anger over corruption.After the trials, the efforts to tackle the ill-gotten wealth of the former presidents and human rights abuses went their separate ways. To tackle the past abuses, victim-centred approaches such as rehabilitation, reparations, and truth-seeking were mobilized. President Kim Dae Jung (1998–2003) established bodies responsible for truth-seeking and rehabilitation for various groups of victims. The setting up of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Korea (TRCK, 2006–2010) was regarded as offering closure for the patchwork of truth-seeking mechanisms. Originally set up as an attempt to investigate large-scale massacres before and during the Korean War, the commission received a broad mandate to investigate six categories of incidents, including civilian massacres and human rights violations. Based on the findings of the TRCK and other truth-seeking commissions, many victims filed lawsuits and successfully demanded reparations from the state. In 2008, President Roh Moo Hyun offered a comprehensive apology to the victims of former state wrongdoings, including the victims of wartime massacres; this marked a defining moment of state recognition of past human rights abuses.The TRCK embraced economic crimes with a unique interpretation of the term ‘gross human rights violations’. In addition to violations of bodily integrity, such as arbitrary detention and torture, the TRCK defined multifaceted violations of human rights as gross violations. According to the TRCK, the violation of both the property and labour rights of the same person constitutes a gross violation—in contrast to a case in which only labour rights were violated—and, thus, falls under the mandate of the commission, with or without harm to the individual’s physical integrity (TRCK 2010:91). This interpretation made it possible for the commission to cover violations of socio-economic rights under the authoritarian regime.The efforts of the South Korean government to recover ill-gotten wealth were predominantly domestic, although there were efforts to learn from successful experiences overseas. For example, the NGO Chamyeoyeondae (People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy) invited Senator Salonga from the Philippines for a lecture, and a victim’s family sued Chun in a US federal court, copying the Marcos victims’ strategy.25 A widely held belief is that a large part of the Chun family assets is located overseas, primarily in the US. Nevertheless, the South Korean government has not conducted serious overseas investigations, although it briefly worked with the US government to confiscate USD 1.2 million from Chun’s son and his wife in 2014.The search for illegal wealth did not advance beyond the fines imposed during the trials in the 1990s. There was no additional prosecution of Chun or his officials. No investigation into corruption under President Park Chung Hee has been attempted, although it is well known that Chun copied Park’s pattern of forcing ‘donations’ from private businesses (Wedeman 1997). As of November 2021, the government had collected 57 % of the total fines, which amounted to KRW 220.5 billion.26Progress is being made with reparations and truth-seeking. The TRCK was revived in 2020 to serve groups that had not benefitted from the efforts of the previous commission. The victims who had been marginalized from the existing mechanisms would be able to rely upon the reports of the second TRCK and other ongoing truth-seeking commissions to receive recognition and monetary compensation.27 As collective reparations, the government has sponsored large-scale memorials such as the May 18 Memorial Park in Gwangju, the Jeju 4.3 Peace Park, and the No Gun Ri Peace Park, among many others.28Unlike in the Philippines, South Korean state reparations did not come from the confiscated assets. Nevertheless, the first phase of reparations was linked to corruption-related measures. The first post-authoritarian reparations scheme for the victims of human rights abuses, the Gwangju reparations of the 1990s, was a follow-up measure of the aforementioned special committees of the National Assembly. Although South Korean transitional justice did not include redistributive measures, it paid attention to the authoritarian regimes’ violations of socio-economic rights, including labour rights.5Indonesia: Separate Paths for Human Rights Abuses and CorruptionIn the aftermath of the failed ‘coup attempt’ by the Gerakan 30 September (30 September Movement) in 1965 (Roosa 2006), the Indonesian military under General Soeharto seized and consolidated power. Soeharto’s rule began with a major blood-stained event in Indonesia: the communist purge of 1965–1966, in which hundreds of thousands of people were detained and massacred in operations that the army coordinated and orchestrated.29 The violence continued with the suppression of opposition forces, particularly in areas of internal armed conflict such as Papua and Aceh. The human rights record of the Indonesian government gained international notoriety with its occupation of East Timor in 1975 and the massacre of protesters in Dili in 1991 (Amnesty International 1994; G. Robinson 2010). Soeharto’s Orde Baru (New Order) regime lasted more than three decades until he stepped down in May 1998 amid an economic crisis, student protests, and riots in the capital (Van Dijk 2001).Meanwhile, with abundant resources ripe for development and authoritarian rule without checks and balances, high-ranking generals in the military and top bureaucrats—including Soeharto—and their business partners became super-rich by, for example, sapping public enterprises and managing business licences. As Soeharto’s control over the whole system became more robust, the businesses of the Soeharto family multiplied (Robison and Hadiz 2004; Winters 2011; Borsuk and Chng 2014).After more than three decades in power, Indonesia’s Soeharto resigned in 1998, handing power to his vice-president Habibie and opening the political space for reformasi (reform). Calls for the punishment of those responsible for the corruption and human rights abuses under the Soeharto regime were common protest slogans during the Reformasi era. In particular, public anger over Soeharto’s corruption, collusion, and nepotism was too intense to be ignored. The Habibie administration began a criminal investigation into Soeharto’s foundations, which had received ‘donations’ from various sources, including state institutions and crony businesses, and channelled them to political clients, business partners, and other beneficiaries. This investigation was carefully managed. Prosecutor General Soedjono, who reported his investigation into Soeharto’s foundations to President Habibie on 15 June 1998, was dismissed five hours after that meeting (Crouch 2010:201). The investigation over Soeharto’s foundations was resumed later that year. The new Prosecutor General intended to indict only one person—Soeharto—and narrow the focus of the investigation to corruption involving his foundations rather than comprehensively examining the control of business permits and licences, land deals, procurement, joint business enterprises, and so on, under the New Order regime by Soeharto’s family members, cronies, and top bureaucrats in the military and civilian service.30Assigning the Soeharto-era corruption cases to the Kejaksaan Agung (Prosecutor’s Office) was not the only option available. The Indonesian elites of the transitional period were aware of the transitional justice and post-authoritarian economic justice experiences of the early democratizers in the region. Amien Rais, a leading opposition figure, mentioned the South Korean case, suggesting that Soeharto should be pardoned after his future conviction (Van Dijk 2001:273). The Habibie administration invited prominent non-government figures to form a Philippine-style independent commission with the power to investigate Soeharto-era corruption cases, summon witnesses, and seize assets.31 However, the plan to create a PCGG-like commission—with a focus on seizing assets rather than prosecution—was cancelled at the last minute (Van Dijk 2001:282).32In the end, the Indonesian elites chose the prosecutorial strategy that relied on the existing Prosecutor’s Office without creating a special commission to investigate Soeharto-era corruption. The Soeharto case was not very successful. Although the Swiss authorities offered to help freeze Soeharto’s assets, all transnational efforts to recover the overseas assets of the Soeharto family failed.33 The case was terminated because of insufficient evidence in October 1999, and later revived by the Wahid administration; it was later indefinitely delayed because of the alleged health problems of the former dictator.Other Soeharto-era corruption cases made it to court. Bob Hasan, a Soeharto crony known as the ‘plywood king’, was sentenced to six years in prison for misusing a forestry fund in the 1990s (Robison and Hadiz 2004:208). Soeharto’s half-brother Probosutedjo was also sentenced to four years in prison for misuse of the forestry fund. Of the family members and Soeharto cronies who benefitted from monopolies and cheap loans, only these two were actually jailed for corruption (Crouch 2010:203). The case of Soeharto’s son Hutomo Mandala Putra is a bit more complicated. The Mahkamah Agung (Supreme Court) sentenced him in absentia to 18 months in prison for a conviction related to a land swap deal between the Badan Urusan Logistik (Bulog, Indonesian Logistics Bureau) and his company PT Goro; he remained on the run, however, until he was arrested again for masterminding the murder of a judge who had ruled unfavourably against him. Because Hutomo’s corruption case was later reversed, he only served a prison sentence for the murder conviction (Crouch 2010:202).As the Asian financial crisis doomed the late-Soeharto period, new corruption scandals involving Soeharto family members—including Hutomo and his elder sister Siti Hardijanti Rukmana—and cronies unfolded. The Bantuan Likuiditas Bank Indonesia (BLBI, Bank of Indonesia Liquidity Assistance) scheme was launched in July 1997 for banks overwhelmed by non-performing loans. The Badan Penyehatan Perbankan Nasional (BPPN, Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency), active from January 1998 to February 2004, later took over the handling of government bailouts. The BLBI scandal incurred enormous losses for the state because a large part of the funds had been misused, and many debtors refused to repay the assistance (Crouch 2010:205–6).During the Reformasi era, President Habibie did not propose forming a body responsible for investigating both human rights violations and corruption, as the Philippine president Cory Aquino had done in 1986. Nor did the Indonesian legislature establish a special inquiry committee to examine the human rights abuses and corruption of the Soeharto regime as a set of wrongdoings, as the South Korean National Assembly had done in 1988. At the time of transition, Indonesia already had the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas-HAM), which Soeharto had created in 1993. Independent inquiries by the Komnas-HAM were an essential part of the standard investigation following cases of well-publicized extrajudicial killings by the military (Honna 2003). The legislative efforts of the transitional period focused on strengthening the role of the Komnas-HAM by providing a legal basis for its activities with the passing in 1999 of the human rights law and giving the commission the new role of investigating past human rights abuses with the human rights court law passed in 2000 (Setiawan 2016).34The human rights court was at the centre of the special judicial system for human rights abuses that Indonesia developed. The Indonesian government created the court in response to international pressure over the 1999 referendum violence in East Timor. The Indonesian human rights court has jurisdiction over crimes that can be classified as genocide or crimes against humanity. The 2000 law closely follows the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted in 1998, although with differences, such as the omission of war crimes (Setiawan 2019). Unlike the Rome Statute, which does not have a clause covering retroactivity or retrospectivity, the Indonesian human rights court can be a venue for trying crimes that occurred before the law’s enactment if the president and the parliament agree to establish an ad hoc human rights court. In parallel, the Komisi Kebenaran dan Rekonsiliasi (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, TRC) was planned to operate as a quasi-judicial substitute for an ad hoc human rights court. It was designed to address the same cases as the ad hoc human rights courts, that is, instances of genocide and crimes against humanity that had occurred before November 2000, and nothing more.The Indonesian policymakers were able to use the norms of international criminal justice, which had not existed at the time of democratization in the Philippines and South Korea, to build a system acceptable to both the international community and domestic constituencies. Indonesia did not have to rely on improvised ad hoc measures as early democratizers had done over the decades. The system did not, however, address socio-economic rights or plunder of property, as the South Korean and Philippine commissions had done.In 2006, responding to a request for a judicial review of problematic amnesty clauses, the Mahkamah Konstitusi (Constitutional Court) annulled the entirety of the TRC law (Suh 2015:101–2, 109). Thus no TRC was established at all until the special autonomous region of Aceh created a local TRC in 2016. Because the TRC did not exist, the human rights court system was the only institution on which victims of human rights abuses could rely to seek reparations. The human rights court system has regulations for reparations, which could only be disbursed with convictions. Until the trial for the 2014 killing of protesters in Paniai, Papua, opened in September 2022, only three cases—two ‘past’ cases of the 1999 East Timor militia violence and the 1984 shootings of Islamic protesters in Tanjung Priok, Jakarta, and one permanent court case on violent police repression in Abepura, Papua—had gone through the system, with all the perpetrators being set free on appeal. Although the Komnas-HAM has compiled reports on more than ten cases suspected of having elements of gross human rights violations, including the 1965–1966 purge, the Prosecutor’s Office refuses to launch official investigations into such cases.Since 2012, the victims of cases deemed by the Komnas-HAM as having elements of gross human rights violations have been able to receive financial assistance from the Lembaga Perlindungan Saksi dan Korban (LPSK, Witness and Victim Protection Agency) if the Komnas-HAM issues a letter confirming their victim status.35 This aid has been helpful for those victims who need such assistance. Nevertheless, the distribution of this aid cannot be regarded in the same way as a regular reparation because there was no prior official acknowledgement that human rights abuses were committed. It was only in January 2023 that President Joko Widodo acknowledged the occurrence of gross human rights violations in twelve of these cases, a decade after the LPSK programme was launched.Indonesia’s anti-corruption agency, the Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK, Corruption Eradication Commission), was created in 2003. Heightened anti-corruption awareness was boosted by donations to support governance reform in developing countries, which resonated with the intense anti-corruption campaigns in civil society (Setiyono and McLeod 2010:353). The KPK’s creation was one of the achievements of the Reformasi period. With its investigative power, the independent agency successfully targeted many high-level individuals suspected of corruption. The commission’s work does not cover Soeharto-era corruption, because it lacks a retroactivity mandate. Nevertheless, its activities have helped corruption cases that go back to the late Soeharto period by revealing judicial corruption that occurred after 2003. In 2005, KPK officers arrested Probosutedjo’s lawyer, who was carrying a large amount of cash in the company of Supreme Court staff members. The new Supreme Court panel sentenced Probosutedjo, who appealed his two-year sentence, to four years in prison (Crouch 2010:221–3). In 2008, the KPK caught a prosecutor carrying a large amount of cash outside BLBI convict Sjamsul Nursalim’s house (Djani 2008). The KPK continued to investigate the BLBI case but terminated Sjamsul Nursalim’s debt exoneration after the BPPN chairperson who instructed the exoneration was set free by the Supreme Court in 2021.The termination of this exoneration reinvigorated the languishing anti-corruption front to an extent. After the Prosecutor’s Office terminated the Soeharto case on 10 May 2006, so that the ailing former president could leave the country for treatment, the only significant move against his family was the civil lawsuits filed by the Prosecutor’s Office against Soeharto and the Supersemar Foundation, which gathered the profits of state banks for scholarships and channelled a large part of the funds to crony businesses. The protracted legal dispute over the state losses to the foundation began in 2007 after the Prosecutor’s Office dropped its criminal charges against Soeharto.36 The Prosecutor’s Office targeted only one foundation among many, and only Soeharto—and his heirs, after his death in 2008—was deemed liable. Eventually, the court relieved the family members of liability. It was decided that only the Supersemar Foundation was liable. The Supreme Court confirmed this 2008 judgement in 2015, and in 2017, the amount that the Supersemar Foundation must pay—IDR 4.4 trillion—was finalized. In 2018, the Prosecutor’s Office seized the Granadi building in Jakarta and a villa in Bogor. IDR 242 billion from the Supersemar Foundation’s accounts was also confiscated.37In 2021, after the KPK announced the termination of the BLBI case, the government created a joint task force for tracing and seizing ill-gotten assets related to the BLBI case. It set a target of recovering IDR 110 trillion from 48 debtors, including Soeharto’s son Hutomo. The team seized properties from some BLBI debtors who had failed to repay the bailout. Hutomo’s land in Karawang, West Java, was seized in exchange for debt incurred by Hutomo’s disastrous Timor Car business (Robison and Hadiz 2004:91–2).38 Separately, the government took on the management of the Taman Mini park from the Harapan Kita Foundation and urged Hutomo’s brother Bambang Trihatmodjo to pay back the loss incurred by the 1997 Southeast Asian Games Consortium, of which he was the director.39 The full impact of the new government strategy of pursuing ill-gotten assets from past corruption without a criminal prosecution has yet to be seen.In sum, although anti-Soeharto protesters called for punishment for the perpetrators of the New Order’s crimes of corruption and human rights abuses, Indonesian policymakers did not regard these two issues as a pair of authoritarian legacies. Human rights and anti-corruption actions soon became the responsibilities of specialist institutions. With the help of international human rights and good-governance models, Indonesia was able to introduce specialist institutions relatively quickly. The Komnas-HAM had already been established during the authoritarian regime. After the Reformasi, the mandate of the Komnas-HAM was strengthened, and the preliminary investigations for the new human rights court system added to its functions. The investigative reports became the basis for aid for the victims of abuses when no reparations were available for victims. While the Komnas-HAM can investigate cases from the past, the KPK cannot, and the New Order corruption trials remain in the hands of the Prosecutor’s Office. Recently, based on the KPK’s efforts on a related case, the Indonesian government beefed up efforts to recover ill-gotten assets, including those originating from Soeharto-era corruption. Thus, it is through specialist institutions that Indonesian post-authoritarian justice has made progress.6ConclusionsHuman rights abuses and corruption during authoritarian rule are rooted in the arbitrary and coercive use of power. It is not surprising that anti-authoritarian protesters raise the two issues together. The post-authoritarian trajectories of three Asian countries indicate that the issues of human rights abuses and anti-corruption do not ultimately conflict. The pursuit of an anti-kleptocracy agenda in the Philippines and South Korea promoted transitional justice measures by offering the monetary resource of reparations and galvanizing public anger against the past regime. Anti-corruption measures cannot create demands for human rights where they are scarce. However, as the two early democratizers show, anti-corruption measures are more likely to be helpful for the progress of a human rights agenda than not, often in an unexpected manner. The absence of a human rights agenda in some instances of Arab and African transitional justice is more attributable to the absence of favourable conditions, such as full democratization, than to the prioritization of anti-corruption agendas.The aim of this article is not to classify the Philippines and South Korea as success cases and Indonesia as a failure in transitional justice. All three countries refused to punish the wrongdoers on an extensive scale, and victim-oriented measures were often ad hoc and not well-known to the public. The Philippines waited 27 years to enact a law that acknowledged the sacrifices of Marcos’s victims. In South Korea, where the need for ‘historical rectification’ had a deeper history, a presidential apology for the victims of the massacres of the Korean War period was issued in 2008, 21 years after a direct presidential election under the new constitution. What has been attempted is a comparison of the characteristic trajectories that the three countries followed for dealing with past legacies. Specialist institutions helped Indonesia to deal with the human rights abuses and corruption of the authoritarian era. President Jokowi’s expression of regret over past human rights violations was based on the findings of the Komnas-HAM reports.In Indonesia, the Jokowi administration has publicly pledged to resolve past human rights abuse cases and has explored various institutional possibilities (McGregor and Setiawan 2019). Despite Jokowi’s recent acknowledgement, 25 years after Suharto’s fall, of past human rights abuses in twelve cases, his approach to past abuses has been criticized for being limited in its scope and boldness. A new ‘fourth-generation’ perspective on the past might be helpful to advance Indonesian transitional justice. The possible intersections between human rights abuses and economic justice have received attention in recent years. Hamid (2018) discusses how corruption and military violence have intersected in the land of Papua.40 A large part of the ongoing human rights abuse in Papua is rooted in the exploitation of natural resources. The 1965 purge victims and their families have experienced discrimination when seeking employment, as noted by the commander of the Indonesian Armed Forces, General Andika Perkasa, in his comment that descendants of communist families can now join the military.41 Paying attention to socio-economic rights in Papua and other Indonesian regions might be a way of pursuing transitional justice on a fuller basis.AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A5A8027524). The author wishes to offer her heartfelt thanks to all the anonymous interviewees and reviewers, as well as to Mary Aileen D. Bacalso, Miriam Coronel Ferrer, Wilson, Zaenal Muttaqin, Gianna Catolico, and Kim Nam-eun for their help and assistance.

Journal

Bijdragen tot de Land-, Taal- en VolkenkundeBrill

Published: Mar 21, 2023

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