Rap Sheet

by Jill Lapore

Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, who met three years ago in a Hartford drug-treatment center and shared a room in a halfway house in between stints in prison, were both seasoned burglars, though Hayes, a forty-four-year-old crack addict, was quite a bit older than Komisarjevsky, who was twenty-six, and the great-grandson of a Russian princess. In the spring of 2007, both men were paroled. Hayes, whose arrest record stretches back to 1980, had served about three years of a five-year sentence for third-degree burglary, and Komisarjevsky had finished half of a nine-year sentence for burglary in the second degree. Hayes moved in with his mother, in Winsted, in Litchfield County; Komisarjevsky went back to his home town, Cheshire, a suburb about fifteen miles north of New Haven. They kept in touch. On July 23, 2007, authorities say, Hayes and Komisarjevsky broke into the Cheshire home of William Petit, Jr., an endocrinologist, and tortured the family through the night, raping Petit’s wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, and at least one of the couple’s two daughters. In the morning, Hayes and Komisarjevsky are said to have forced Hawke-Petit, a school nurse who suffered from multiple sclerosis, into the family car and taken her to a local bank, where she withdrew fifteen thousand dollars, after which a suspicious teller alerted the police. The two men allegedly then took Hawke-Petit back to the house, killed her, set the house on fire, and fled in the Petits’ S.U.V., though not far: they crashed into a police barricade, just past the driveway.

Inside the house, a four-bedroom Colonial, police found three bodies. Hawke-Petit, forty-eight, had been strangled. Seventeen-year-old Hayley Petit, who, that September, was to start college at Dartmouth, died of smoke inhalation. Her eleven-year-old sister, Michaela, was found tied to a bed, her body badly burned after having been doused with gasoline. Only William Petit, who had been bound with rope, beaten in the head with a baseball bat, and left for dead in the cellar, survived.

Hayes and Komisarjevsky have been charged with kidnapping, sexual assault, arson, and murder. Jury selection for Hayes’s trial is scheduled to begin in January, in New Haven. William Petit, who is expected to testify about what happened that night, had asked not to be put through that ordeal twice, but his request for a single trial was denied. A trial date for Komisarjevsky has not yet been set. The state is seeking the death penalty.

Every murder raises terrible questions that no trial, no law, no punishment can answer. What forces make it possible for one human being to take the life of another? Murders can be solved and even explained—at least, that’s the operating assumption of criminal investigation and the narrative logic behind every whodunit—but to think about a specific murder with any clarity, or for very long, can be difficult, and viscerally painful. Maybe the brisk trade in lurid violence as spectacle has something to do with it: one either watches or averts one’s eyes; dispassionate reflection rarely enters into it. Scholars ranging from theologians and psychologists to evolutionary biologists have offered theories about murder—theories of evil, theories of disease, theories of disposition—but the analytical burden placed on any general discussion of murder, freighted, as it is, with atrocity, is nearly unbearable. Nothing suffices, or can.

Between the convulsive emotional response to a single murder and an elusive general theory of murder lies another kind of contemplation: the study of the murderousness of nations. The United States has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy, nearly four times that of France and the United Kingdom, and six times that of Germany. Why? Historians haven’t often asked this question. Even historians who like to try to solve cold cases usually cede to sociologists and other social scientists the study of what makes murder rates rise and fall, or what might account for why one country is more murderous than another. Only in the nineteen-seventies did historians begin studying homicide in any systematic way. In the United States, that effort was led by Eric Monkkonen, who died in 2005, his promising work unfinished. Monkkonen’s research has been taken up by Randolph Roth, whose book “American Homicide” (Harvard; $45) offers a vast investigation of murder, in the aggregate, and over time. Roth’s argument is profoundly unsettling. There is and always has been, he claims, an American way of murder. It is the price of our politics.

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In the archives, murders are easier to count than other crimes. Rapes go unreported, thefts can be hidden, adultery isn’t necessarily actionable, but murder will nearly always out. Murders enter the historical record through coroners’ inquests, court transcripts, parish ledgers, and even tombstones. “Fell by the hands of William Beadle / an infatuated Man who closed the / horrid sacrifice of his Wife / & Children with his own destruction,” reads the headstone of Lydia Beadle, of Wethersfield, Connecticut, who was murdered, along with her two children, in 1782. The number of uncounted murders, known as the “dark figure,” is thought to be quite small. Given enough archival research, historians can conceivably count, with fair accuracy, the frequency with which people of earlier eras killed one another, with this caveat: the farther back you go in time—and the documentary trail doesn’t go back much farther than 1300—the more fragmentary the record and the bigger the dark figure.

Pieter Spierenburg, a professor of historical criminology at Erasmus University, in Rotterdam, sifts through the evidence in “A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present” (Polity; $24.95). In Europe, homicide rates, conventionally represented as the number of murder victims per hundred thousand people in the population per year, have been falling for centuries. Spierenburg attributes this long decline to what the German sociologist Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process” (shorthand for a whole class of behaviors requiring physical restraint and self-control, right down to using a fork instead of eating with your hands or stabbing at your food with a knife), and to the growing power of the centralizing state to disarm civilians, control violence, enforce law and order, and, broadly, to hold a monopoly on the use of force. (Anthropologists sometimes talk about a related process, the replacement of a culture of honor with a culture of dignity.) In feuding medieval Europe, the murder rate hovered around thirty-five. Duels replaced feuds. Duels are more mannered; they also have a lower body count. By 1500, the murder rate in Western Europe had fallen to about twenty. Courts had replaced duels. By 1700, the murder rate had dropped to five. Today, that rate is generally well below two, where it has held steady, with minor fluctuations, for the past century.

In the United States, the picture could hardly be more different. The American homicide rate has been higher than Europe’s from the start, and higher at just about every stage since. It has also fluctuated, sometimes wildly. During the Colonial period, the homicide rate fell, but in the nineteenth century, while Europe’s kept sinking, the U.S. rate went up and up. In the twentieth century, the rate in the United States dropped to about five during the years following the Second World War, but then rose, reaching about eleven in 1991. It has since fallen once again, to just above five, a rate that is, nevertheless, twice that of any other affluent democracy.

What accounts for this remarkable difference? Guns leap to mind: in 2008, firearms were involved in two-thirds of all murders in the United States. Yet Roth, who supports gun control, insists that the prevalence of guns in America, and our lax gun laws, can’t account for the whole spread, and a few scholars have argued that laws allowing concealed weapons actually lower the murder rate, by deterring assaults. Some Europeans suspect that Americans haven’t undergone the same “civilizing process,” as if, unmoored from Europe, Colonial Americans went murderously adrift. Spierenburg speculates that democracy came too soon to the United States. By the time European states became democracies, the populace had accepted the authority of the state. But the American Revolution happened before Americans had got used to the idea of a state monopoly on force. Americans therefore preserved for themselves not only the right to bear arms—rather than yielding that right to a strong central government—but also medieval manners: impulsiveness, crudeness, and fidelity to a culture of honor. We’re backward, in other words, because we became free before we learned how to control ourselves.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, not everyone buys these arguments, and Monkkonen himself took a different, though equally conjectural, approach. At the time of his death, he had been working on an article called “Homicide: Explaining America’s Exceptionalism,” which hypothesized that four factors accounted for the centuries-long differences between American and European homicide rates: mobility, federalism, slavery, and tolerance. Mobility breaks social ties; federalism is a weak form of government; slavery not only rationalized a culture of violence among white Southerners (where the murder rate has been disproportionately high, as it has, and remains, in many of the so-called law-and-order states) but also infected American culture; and American judges and juries have historically proved less willing than their European counterparts to convict murderers, tolerating, among other crimes, racial murders and killings by jealous spouses.

Roth, who teaches at Ohio State, wants to bring into this debate hard facts and rigorous methods. He rejects arguments about the “civilizing process” by pointing out that people didn’t necessarily intend to murder one another more often in the premodern world; they merely succeeded more often. Given modern medicine—emergency response, trauma surgery, antibiotics, and wound care—three out of every four people murdered before 1850 would probably survive today. Roth heads a collaborative project, dedicated to Monkkonen, called the Historical Violence Database, which has assembled reports of murders in several of the original thirteen colonies; nineteenth-century records from five states, seven cities, and thirty-four counties; and a wealth of twentieth-century statistics, chiefly from the Uniform Crime Reports kept by the F.B.I. beginning in 1930. As a discussion of the available data, “American Homicide” is rich, fascinating, and unrivalled. As an explanation, though, it gets dubious. Roth’s work involves three steps: first, he uses his database to count murders (he’s primarily interested in homicides among unrelated adults); then, using surviving censuses to count people, he calculates the homicide rate; finally, he attempts to explain what factors correlate with that rate, across four centuries. It’s the last step that’s the most wobbly.

Historians haven’t studied murder much, but criminologists have. Although most criminologists trace the homicide rate back only a few decades, Roth takes his lead from their work. The fluctuations in the homicide rate since the nineteen-forties have at least something to do with demography. A vastly disproportionate number of murderers and murder victims are young adult men. When baby boomers reached that age bracket, the homicide rate soared. Now that they’ve aged out of their most lethal years, the rate has fallen. To Roth, the demographic explanation of the postwar crime boom and bust falls short, but, where other social scientists have investigated economic conditions like joblessness or government policies like gun control to fill the explanatory gap, Roth favors the argument made by a criminologist named Gary LaFree, in a book called “Losing Legitimacy: Street Crime and the Decline of Social Institutions in America” (1998). LaFree observed that the crime rate correlates, inversely, with public faith in government and trust in elected officials. So, for instance, the Vietnam era, marked by declining confidence in elected officials, experienced a rising crime rate. He measured that faith and trust by consulting national opinion surveys taken beginning in 1958, which asked questions like “How much of the time can you trust the government to do what is right?”

Roth attempts to graft LaFree’s argument onto all of American history. He has determined that four factors correlate with the homicide rate: faith that government is stable and capable of enforcing just laws; trust in the integrity of legitimately elected officials; solidarity among social groups based on race, religion, or political affiliation; and confidence that the social hierarchy allows for respect to be earned without recourse to violence. When and where people hold these sentiments, the homicide rate is low; when and where they don’t, it’s high.

Whatever you think about the value of public-opinion polls, LaFree at least had them. Roth doesn’t. How do you measure the belief that government is stable in 1695 or 1786 or 1814 or 1902? You can’t. You can only look at what was happening in those years and tell a story about what you think people believed about their government, and, if you know what the homicide rate is, it’s easy to find a story that fits your data. The homicide rate in New England fell from a high, in 1637, of a hundred and twenty to under one, in 1800, chiefly by dropping, rather dramatically, after the Pequot War and King Philip’s War. Roth argues that the rate fell, over all, as judicial institutions were established and people developed faith in them, and that the rate fell, sharply, after these wars because conflicts with hostile neighbors brought the colonists together. But it seems equally plausible to argue that the homicide rate in Colonial New England tracks the European decline quite nicely, over all, and drops, in a stepwise fashion, after wars because they diminish the population of young men, leaving fewer potential murderers and murder victims around. Both interpretations make sense; neither has been demonstrated.

The implications of Roth’s argument are, as he realizes, distressing. Democracy requires dissent. If a high American murder rate is a function of not placing our trust in government, are we doomed to endure a high murder rate? Roth takes his case all the way to the White House: “The statistics make it clear that in the twentieth century, homicide rates have fallen during the terms of presidents who have inspired the poor or have governed from the center with a popular mandate, and they have risen during the terms of presidents who presided over political and economic crises, abused their power, or engaged in unpopular wars.” The homicide rate appears to correlate with Presidential approval ratings. If Roth is right, electing a bad President is dangerous and inciting people to hate any President, good or bad, could be deadly. But which is the cart, and which the horse? The Presidential approval rate might be a proxy for all sorts of measures of a well or poorly adjusted society. Or maybe there’s another horse, somewhere, some third factor, that determines both the Presidential approval rate and the homicide rate. It’s hard to say, partly because, in using quantitative methods to make an argument about the human condition, Roth has wandered into a no man’s land between the social sciences and the humanities. After a while, arguments made in that no man’s land tend to devolve into meaninglessness: good government is good, bad government is bad, and everything’s better when everything’s better. Correlating murder with a lack of faith and trust may contain its horror, but only because, in a bar graph, atrocity yields to banality.

Every September, the F.B.I. issues a report on crime, a compilation of statistics for the previous year. It does not offer an interpretation of this immense quantity of data. “We leave that up to the academics and the criminologists and the sociologists,” an F.B.I. spokesman said, upon the release of this year’s report. For all the number crunching, it’s clear that there is no such thing as an average murder. Even if there were, what happened at the Petits’ house in Cheshire, Connecticut, on July 23, 2007, wouldn’t be it, and not just because of that crime’s particular depravity. Much about the case is out of the ordinary. The victims were white and wealthy; murder victims are disproportionately black and poor. Exceptional, high-profile crimes often lead to legislative action driven by citizen initiative. California’s controversial three-strikes law, a ballot measure, was proposed by a Fresno photographer whose daughter was murdered. Last year, after the Petit murders, the Connecticut legislature doubled and tripled mandatory penalties for second- and third-time offenders. “Big cases make bad laws” is a criminological axiom, and one with which Mark A. R. Kleiman agrees, in “When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment” (Princeton; $29.95).* Kleiman blames big cases and bad laws for another distinctive feature of American life: 2.3 million people are currently behind bars in the United States. That works out to nearly one in every hundred adults, the highest rate anywhere in the world, and four times the world average. Prison crowding may have been one reason that Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky were paroled. Although the crime rate today is fifteen per cent lower than it was twenty-five years ago, the incarceration rate is four times as high. At what point, Kleiman wonders, will incarceration be a greater social ill than crime? He proposes, for lesser offenders, punishments that are swift and certain but not necessarily severe: a night in jail, instead of a warning, for missing a meeting with a parole officer, say, and ten nights the next time. Whether or not Kleiman’s recommendations are practical, Connecticut, reeling from the Petit murders, is heading in the opposite direction.

The F.B.I. may leave the analysis of crime to academics, but, in the past few decades, the government has, increasingly, left the punishment of criminals up to public opinion. William Petit and his sister* Johanna Petit-Chapman serve as the honorary co-chairs of Three Strikes Now, a grass-roots organization lobbying the state legislature to adopt California-style mandatory sentencing of life without the possibility of parole for third-time violent offenders. The Cheshire case has also dominated the state’s death-penalty debate, a debate that, nationwide, has long centered on race. In Connecticut, whose population is eighty-four per cent white, six of the ten men on death row are black. (Both Hayes and Komisarjevsky are white.) Earlier this year, the Connecticut legislature voted to abolish the death penalty. William Petit publicly denounced the bill, and Jodi Rell, the state’s governor, a Republican, vetoed it.

Capital punishment has been on the books in Connecticut since 1642. Three strikes has been tried before, too. In Colonial America, many crimes, including murder, were punishable by death and, for lesser crimes, Connecticut, like many colonies, mandated the death penalty for third-time offenders. That began to change on September 7, 1768, when a burglar named Isaac Frasier was hanged in Fairfield. Frasier had shown early evidence of a “thievish Disposition.” “Men go from one degree of wickedness to another,” the town’s minister said in a sermon at the gallows titled “Excessive Wickedness, the Way to an untimely Death.” Convicted of burglary in New Haven, Frasier was whipped and branded and had his ears cropped. Caught again in Fairfield in 1766, he received the same punishment “and was solemnly warned . . . that death would be his punishment on a third Conviction.” When Frasier robbed another house, he was sentenced to death. “The Government of Connecticut have always been remarkably tender of putting persons to Death,” one observer noted. But when Frasier applied to the legislature for clemency, he was denied. Said the pastor at the gallows, “Justice requires that you should suffer.”

An outcry followed. Two weeks after Frasier’s death, a Hartford newspaper published an essay called “An Answer to a very important Question, viz. Whether any community has a right to punish any species of theft with death?” The writer’s answer—an emphatic no—borrowed extensively from Cesare Beccaria’s treatise “On Crimes and Punishments,” published in 1764. Beccaria, an Italian nobleman, argued against capital punishment—which was, at the time, widespread in Europe, too—on two grounds: first, in a republic men do not forfeit their lives to the government; and, second, capital punishment does not deter crime. Beccaria argued (and Kleiman has merely revisited that argument) that punishments, to be effective, must be swift and certain but not necessarily severe. Punishments, he insisted, should be proportionate to crimes, whose dangerousness could be measured, in “degrees,” by their injury to society. For the crime of murder, Beccaria considered life in prison to be both more just and a more effective deterrent than execution.

The first American edition of Beccaria’s treatise was published in 1777, and it reached a wide audience in Connecticut beginning in 1786, when it was serialized in a New Haven newspaper. “If we glance at the pages of history, we will find that laws, which surely are, or ought to be, compacts of free men, have been, for the most part, a mere tool for the passions of some,” Beccaria wrote. This argument held particular appeal for a people who had just finished waging a war against the passions of King George; adopting Beccaria’s recommendations came to seem, in a fundamental sense, American, as if the United States had a special role to play, as a republic, in the abolition of capital punishment. In 1784, the Yale senior class debated whether the death penalty was “too severe & rigorous in the United States for the present Stage of Society.”

In the seventeen-nineties, five states abolished the death penalty for all crimes except murder. By the eighteen-twenties, all Northern states reserved capital punishment for first-degree murder. When incarceration replaced all corporal and most capital punishment, Americans built prisons, and sentenced criminals to jail time. In 1846, Michigan became the first state to abolish the death penalty. Twice, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the governor of Connecticut asked the state’s legislature to do the same, to no avail.

In the course of the twentieth century, capital punishment was abolished in much of the world, including all of Western Europe, but not in the United States. Germany, Austria, and Italy stopped executing criminals after the Second World War. Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, other European countries began limiting capital punishment. Denmark abolished it entirely in 1978; the Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealand in the nineteen-eighties; Britain, Canada, and Belgium in the nineteen-nineties. In many parts of the United States, the death penalty was, if not outlawed, abandoned. Except for a serial murderer named Michael Ross, who was killed by lethal injection in 2005, after he waived his right to appeal because he wanted to die, no one has been executed in Connecticut, or anywhere else in New England, since 1960.

Not so elsewhere. Since 1976, more than a thousand people have been executed in the United States, a third of them in Texas. If Hayes and Komisarjevsky are found guilty and sentenced to death instead of life in prison without the possibility of parole, they will be killed by lethal injection. China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia execute more criminals, but, among affluent democracies, the death penalty, like the U.S. homicide and incarceration rates, marks an American exception, or, looked at another way, an anachronism.

Long ago, Beccaria pointed out the meaningfulness of the correspondence, over time, between crime and punishment, between one kind of violence and another. If the history of murder contains a lesson, Beccaria believed, it was this: “The countries and times most notorious for severity of punishment have always been those in which the bloodiest and most inhumane of deeds were committed.”

Murder has a history, but it isn’t always edifying, and sometimes the history of crime and punishment has a chilling sameness. The prospect of death didn’t deter Barnett Davenport, a Connecticut murderer who was hanged in 1780, at the age of nineteen. “No man becomes a devil in a minute,” Davenport said, in a confession made a week before he mounted the gallows. His life of crime began when, at the age of twelve, he stole some watermelons from a neighbor’s garden. More than once, he was caught. But by the time he was eighteen he had advanced from pilfering eggs and potatoes to stealing horses. He fought in the Revolution and then deserted. He went to live in the house of a man named Caleb Mallery, near Litchfield. On February 3, 1780, “a night big with uncommon horror” (and a year with an elevated homicide rate), Davenport killed Mallery, Mallery’s wife, and their seven-year-old granddaughter, beating their heads in with a pestle and a rifle. Next, he pried open the family’s money chest and took from it a pile of bills and a handful of coins. Then he set the house on fire, leaving inside two more children, ages six and four. He was captured, and swiftly hanged. In his confession, he recalled that Caleb Mallery had cried out, in between blows, “Tell me what you do it for!” History does not record the murderer’s reply.

Kyrgyz President Blamed in Homicide

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By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

MOSCOW — A prominent opposition journalist in Kyrgyzstan, whose autocratic president has been courted by the United States as an ally for the war in Afghanistan, died on Tuesday after being thrown last week from a sixth-story window, his arms and legs bound with duct tape.

The journalist, Gennadi Pavlyuk, was on a business trip in Almaty, the commercial capital of neighboring Kazakhstan, when he was attacked on Dec. 16, the authorities said. He was in a coma before dying of severe trauma on Tuesday. His colleagues said he was 40 years old, with a wife and son.

Opposition politicians in Kyrgyzstan blamed the Kyrgyz president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, for the killing, saying that he was escalating his efforts to eliminate dissent in the country. Mr. Bakiyev’s spokesman said the government had nothing to do with the attack on Mr. Pavlyuk.

Since taking power in 2005, Mr. Bakiyev has steadily tightened his grip on Kyrgyzstan, a poor former Soviet republic in the mountains of Central Asia, and in recent years, numerous opposition leaders and journalists have been attacked. Some have died, and rarely if ever has anyone been held accountable.

In just the last few weeks, a well-known political scientist, a former senior official and a journalist were severely beaten in Kyrgyzstan. They all attributed the attacks to the security services, according to local news media.

While human rights groups have assailed Mr. Bakiyev, the United States has largely focused on maintaining good relations with him in order to keep an important air base on the outskirts of Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, that supports NATO’s mission in Afghanistan.

Mr. Bakiyev announced in February that he would evict the United States from the base. After intensive lobbying by the Obama administration, he reversed course in June, in return for additional rent and other concessions.

In July, Mr. Bakiyev easily won another term as president in an election that international monitors said was marred by widespread fraud.

Investigators in Kazakhstan said Mr. Pavlyuk arrived in Almaty on Dec. 16 and checked into a hotel before leaving with an unidentified man. Two hours later, he was pushed out the sixth-floor window of a rented apartment in a residential building, landing on a first-floor canopy.

A roll of the duct tape that had been used to bind his hands and legs was found in the apartment.

Mr. Pavlyuk was the former chief editor of the Bishkek edition of Komsomolskaya Pravda, a major Russian tabloid newspaper based in Moscow.

Over the last year, he had become more politically active, working closely with Omurbek Tekebaev, a former speaker of the Kyrgyz Parliament who is a senior opposition leader.

To support Mr. Tekebaev’s party, Mr. Pavlyuk was planning a new opposition Web site.

Mr. Tekebaev said in a telephone interview that he had no doubt that the Kyrgyz government had ordered Mr. Pavlyuk killed because he had become more outspoken against the president. Mr. Tekebaev said the Kyrgyz security services often lured people to nearby countries and killed them.

“They do that to avoid suspicion. They do their activities outside of Kyrgyzstan,” Mr. Tekebaev said. “This is not the first time that this has happened abroad to a member of the opposition. We believe that this was a political killing directed at intimidating the news media. It is an attempt at frightening society.”

Almaz Turdumamatov, Mr. Bakiyev’s spokesman, said he hoped that the police in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan would conduct a thorough inquiry and bring the culprits to justice.

“The murder of any person, whether a journalist or not, concerns us,” Mr. Turdumamatov said. “Who is responsible for this must be determined by the investigators.”

Asked about the opposition’s allegations that its supporters were being persecuted, he said: “It is unfortunate that this killing happened. But it is wrong to say that this was connected to any kind of political motivation.”

In an interview in July at the presidential residence, Mr. Bakiyev suggested that journalists who had been attacked might have been involved in shady dealings or were perhaps just unlucky.

“Sometimes, things happen by chance,” Mr. Bakiyev said. “For it to have been purposeful from a political point of view, that sort of politics doesn’t exist here.”

Daniil Kislov, chief editor of Ferghana.ru, a Web site based in Moscow that covers Central Asia, said Mr. Pavlyuk’s killing had shocked journalists in the region because it was so brazen, as if it were an organized crime hit.

Mr. Kislov said the killing reminded him of the slaying of another Kyrgyz journalist, Alisher Saipov, who contributed to Ferghana.ru and the Voice of America. Mr. Saipov was shot to death in 2007 while waiting for a taxi in a Kyrgyz city. No one has been arrested in the case.

“These killings are being done by people who are absolutely convinced that they will never be caught and never be punished,” Mr. Kislov said.

Mr. Pavlyuk was chief editor for Komsomolskaya Pravda in Bishkek in 2006 and 2007, said the newspaper’s current chief editor, Aleksandr Rogoza.

Mr. Rogoza said Mr. Pavlyuk had a lifelong affection for Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, which is famous for its beauty and is one of the largest mountain lakes in the world.

“He wrote a lot about the lake,” Mr. Rogoza said. “He built a house there, and he spent a lot of time there. He just loved that place.”

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Suicide and Progress in Modern Nusantara

Michael Buehler

The final resting place for every politician Michael Buehler

Sri Hayati was found dead outside the village of Bangunjaya in West Java at 7.30 on the morning of 15 April 2009. Using her headscarf, she had hung herself on a pole in a hut in a rice field. The 24 year old woman had been running for a seat in the parliament of Banjar City for the National Awakening Party but had gathered only ten votes in the general legislative elections that were conducted on 9 April. According to the local media, Hayati, who was four months pregnant, committed suicide due to this dismal result.

In the town of Takalar, South Sulawesi, Saribulan Daeng Singara, a 56 year old housewife, slit her wrist with a razor in her bathroom on 28 April 2009. Again, a failed candidacy for the local parliament had apparently triggered her suicide. After racking up massive debts to finance her political campaign in the elections, Singara saw no other way out, so said the local press.

These were by no means isolated incidents. In the days immediately following the legislative elections, suicides and suicide attempts by political candidates were reported from several places across the far-flung Indonesian archipelago, including the city of Pontianak in West Kalimantan and Kupang in East Nusa Tenggara.

No election-related killings

The reports about the suicides of legislative candidates around the time of the elections contrast with a complete absence of stories about politically-motivated killings during the same period. While there were the occasional articles about electoral violence, usually in the form of voter intimidation, there were no reports whatsoever of candidates killing each other in the competition for seats in the national parliament or sub-national assemblies.

There were no reports whatsoever of candidates killing each other in the competition for seats in the national parliament or sub-national assemblies

This is in stark contrast to other democracies in Southeast Asia. In the 2007 elections in the Philippines, 37 candidates were killed and 24 were wounded, a slight improvement compared to the 2004 elections during which 40 candidates were murdered and 18 candidates were injured, according to data from the Philippine election commission. In addition, 121 people who were not candidates but canvassers, campaign managers or voters were killed in 2007, and 148 were killed in 2004.

Election-related killings of parliamentary candidates are also common in Thailand. Politically-motivated murders amongst candidates became so widespread in the 1980s that some commentators regarded them as an indication of consolidation of the Thai electoral system. Benedict Anderson famously argued in a 1990 article (‘Murder and progress in modern Siam’) that such murders were a sign that national parliament had become a site where power was concentrated, making it worth one’s while for ambitious local political bosses to murder their rivals. More than a dozen political killings were reported in the 2005 elections in Thailand.

The absence of political murders in Indonesian elections is remarkable inasmuch as many of the conditions that are believed to play a role in election-related killings amongst candidates in other Southeast Asian countries – such as weak election commissions, the prevalence of private security organisations and thugs in the political system and the absence of programmatic politics – can be found in Indonesia too.

Why don’t aspiring politicians murder each other in Indonesia? Both institutional and sociological factors play a role. A number of aspects of the institutional design of Indonesia’s new democracy at the local level dampen the winner-take-all dynamic that motivates political killings elsewhere. The absence of a tradition of feuding between oligarchic clans and the political dominance of bureaucrats at the local level have the same effect.

Not worth the trouble?

If we assume that murders of political opponents result from intense competition for highly valued positions, it makes sense that political systems that either lessen the intensity of competition or reduce the value of the prizes will reduce the incentives to kill.

One way to reduce the incentive to kill is to increase the number of political prizes available for each pool of candidates. Despite the increase in the number of electoral districts for the 2009 general election from 69 to 77, the number of electoral districts in Indonesia is still relatively low compared to Thailand with 174 districts or the Philippines, which now has 220 electoral districts. This means that in Indonesia, on average three to ten parliamentary seats are up for grabs per electoral district in legislative elections. In Thailand, the number drops to one to three seats per district. In the Philippines, there is only one seat allocated per electoral district. In short, more seats can be won in Indonesia per election district. Presumably this plays a part in lowering the incentive for candidates to resort to drastic measures such as killing a political opponent, because they believe they have a reasonable chance of winning at least one of the seats on offer.

The civil service background of most Indonesian candidates for executive positions greatly reduces the probability of political murder

It is also possible to argue that seats at both the national parliament and sub-national level do not come with enough powers – and hence, money-making potential – to make them worth killing for. The Regional Governance Law No 32/2004 stripped local parliaments of their rights to impeach district heads, appoint regional secretaries and screen election candidates for executive posts. Various other regulations of past years have shifted power from the legislative to the executive at the national level too and this trend seems to continue. For example, the State Secrecy Bill, should it be adopted in its current form, might deprive the national parliament of its right to investigate any violation allegedly involving the executive government and its officials.

But by the same token, elections for local executive government positions in Indonesia should be bloody affairs. Elections for the key local government positions, notably of district heads (bupati in rural areas, mayors in urban municipalities) operate on a winner-take-all basis. Moreover, the spoils of office are also greater. Already empowered by Indonesia’s post-Suharto decentralisation policies, the Regional Governance Law No 32/2004 increased the power of the district heads even more with regard to matters like appointment procedures for crucial positions in the local bureaucracy. It also gave them greater fiscal powers, for example the power to authorise expenditure and set priorities and ceilings in local budgets. District heads also issue local regulations and taxes in cooperation with local parliaments. As many studies of local government in post-Suharto Indonesia have revealed, such far-reaching responsibilities also open up all kinds of opportunities for self-enrichment.

Surely these powers and potentials make district head posts worth killing for? Yet here again Indonesia confounds the wider Southeast Asian trend. Direct elections for such positions have been largely peaceful ever since they were introduced in 2005.

Again, there are institutional reasons for why this is the case. For instance, the time a district head can spend in office in Indonesia is capped. A district head can only serve two terms in his or her entire life anywhere in the archipelago, each term lasting five years. While there are various districts where out-going heads have tried to replace themselves with their offspring, overall it is much more difficult for Indonesian local elites to entrench themselves in sub-national executive positions than it is in other Southeast Asian countries. In the Philippines, for example, a regent can occupy his post for three consecutive three year terms, get his wife elected for a term, and then run for another three consecutive terms, get his wife elected for a term, setting in train a virtually never-ending cycle that can be passed on to the next generation. The institutional setting in Indonesia results in a more open and fluid system that makes political killings less likely. Political hopefuls have the possibility to gain office by just sitting it out, rather than by trying to break an incumbent’s dominance by murder.

Indonesia’s local elites prefer to share out the spoils of government rather than kill each other for them

Another reason might be that the fragmentation of Indonesia’s administrative structure has enlarged the number of lucrative posts available for competition. Between 1998 and 2009, Indonesian political elites increased the number of districts in the country from 230 to 510. This had the immediate effect of providing more district head positions and local assembly seats for ambitious local politicians. Indeed, there were many cases where candidates who were unsuccessful in election campaigns to become heads of larger districts would then lead lobbying campaigns to split off a smaller district and, when successful on that score, become its head.

More generally, elites in these districts have also gone about creating bloated local state apparatuses. The Regional Governance Law No 32/2004, for example, incorporated the wage bill of local bureaucracies in the formula for calculating how much money is transferred from the national level to sub-national administrative units. The larger the local bureaucracy, the more money the district or municipality concerned will receive from the central government. Receiving more money from the central government, local politicians have greater opportunities to provide jobs, favours and handouts to local elites, including potential rivals. Such structural incentives for rent-seeking thus have the positive impact of easing the competitive pressures on local elites. Basically, there is enough money and opportunities sloshing around in the system to at least partially satisfy everybody who is influential at the local level. Indonesia’s local elites prefer to share out the spoils of government rather than kill each other for them.

Economic factors have reinforced this dynamic. Socio-economic conditions over recent years in Indonesia have lessened the ferocity of elite competition by enlarging the pie of government funds that can be spread around. As the World Bank’s Public Expenditure Review from 2007 shows, Indonesian government spending has risen continuously since the year 2000. Aggregate expenditure increased by 20 per cent and transfers to sub-national governments grew by 32 per cent since 2006 alone, mainly due to the government’s reduction of fuel subsidies that opened up space for additional spending. These favourable conditions are likely going to continue in the immediate future. Despite a global economic downturn, Indonesia’s economy has been doing rather well. Indonesia’s budget will rise from Rp 1,000 trillion in 2009 to about Rp 1,800 trillion in 2014. A large chunk of this money will be pumped into the expansion of the government apparatus. Between 2010 and 2014 an estimated Rp 2000 trillion will be used up for government administration alone. In short, the money passing through the state apparatus is continually enlarging, providing sufficient opportunities for large parts of the political elite to benefit from it in a myriad of formal and informal ways, and thereby easing pressure on political competition.

Local traditions and weak thugs

The strongest explanations for Indonesia’s relatively peaceful electoral scene are sociological. There is no tradition of long-standing family feuds between oligarchic clans in Indonesia unlike in other Southeast Asian countries, where such dynamics explain a great many political killings. As authors like John Sidel have argued, the highly centralised state apparatus of the New Order regime under the dictatorial leadership of Suharto prevented local strongmen from emerging.

Clans and families in Indonesia have become more openly competitive since Suharto’s downfall in 1998. They have resorted to tactics that were unimaginable during the New Order. In 2007, for example, Amin Syam, then governor of South Sulawesi, tried to pressure his main competitor Syahrul Yasin Limpo into aborting his bid for the governorship by leaking a pornographic home movie, which featured the latter prominently. The unwitting movie star was voted into office nevertheless, perhaps expressing the hopes of the electorate that his performance in government would be better than what they had seen in the movie. However, bitterly antagonistic relations between dynasties that can turn elections into a season of vengeance in the Philippines (and to a lesser extent in Thailand) do not yet exist in Indonesia.

Despite the analysis of some commentators, the role of parastatal security forces and thugs in Indonesian political contests is marginal

Moreover, despite the analysis of some commentators, the role of parastatal security forces and thugs in Indonesian political contests is marginal. Professional doomsters like Vedi Hadiz, of the National University of Singapore, have told us that ‘shadowy gangsters and thugs are on the rise’ and that ‘beatings…the use of paramilitary organizations and…bomb threats were pervasive’ during elections in Indonesia. These quotations are from an article written by Hadiz in a 2003 edition of The Pacific Review, in which he also warned of a ‘democracy driven by thuggery’ that was characterised by ‘political violence, vote buying and kidnappings’ recalling ‘some of the experience of countries like Thailand and the Philippines’.

In fact, though Hadiz writes about the importance of gangsters and violence in Indonesian politics in general terms, most of his research focused on North Sumatra province, where gangsterism in politics traditionally looms large. But even the influence of thugs and the role of violence in North Sumatra’s politics are often exaggerated. There were no political murders in the gangster-infested capital of the province, Medan, during the 1999, 2004 or 2009 elections. True, gangsters have managed to win a few political positions in elections there. Three well known gangsters, Bangkit Sitepu, Moses Tambunan and Martius Latuperissa were elected to the local assembly in the city of Medan in 1999 (each representing different parties). Once in parliament, however, such figures behaved no more violently or corruptly than the average Indonesian parliamentarian. And in most provinces, they hardly feature as prominent political players anyway.

The politically influential ‘big boss’ Olo Panggabean in Medan died peacefully in his bed as a result of complications from diabetes at the age of 68

Moreover, gangster figures, should they find their way into politics, have been unable to escape the new democratic dynamics. While the official results of the legislative elections in Medan in 2009 were not out at the time of writing, it seems that of the three, only Bangkit Sitepu managed to get re-elected in 2009. Of the 50 parliamentarians in the assembly, 39 are new faces. What is most interesting is that in Indonesia even political gangsters seem to accept the election results. Indonesian thugs do not go on killing-sprees even if voted out of office, as is shown by the absence of politically-motivated murders in Medan. The manner of death of politically influential ‘big boss’ Olo Panggabean in Medan a fortnight after the elections is telling. On 30 April 2009, this capo di tutti capi died peacefully in his bed as a result of complications from diabetes at the age of 68.

Bureaucrats as bosses

Probably most important of all in explaining why there is so little violence against electoral candidates is the nature of the candidate pool in Indonesia, which differs markedly from pools in other Southeast Asian countries. In Indonesia it is mostly bureaucrats who compete for district head posts while in the Philippines it is families rooted in landownership or career politicians. In Thailand, at the height of political killings, most competitors for political posts were part of an extra-bureaucratic bourgeoisie consisting of merchants and members of the trading communities in the country’s big cities.

The civil service background of most Indonesian candidates for executive positions greatly reduces the probability of political murder. If a bureaucrat is running in local executive elections, the legal context in Indonesia dictates that such a candidate has to step down from his or her current position as a state official (jabatan). However, he or she remains a member of the bureaucratic apparatus (pegawai negeri sipil), and so retains insurance benefits, access to pension funds and, most importantly, has the opportunity for a future job in the bureaucratic apparatus if he or she fails in the election. A bureaucratic career is a comforting safety net for would-be government heads, creating much less of a winner-takes-all dynamic than one finds in the Philippines or Thailand where businessmen or landlord candidates don’t have bureaucratic careers to fall back on, and where failure might spell financial ruin. As the implications for a failed candidacy are less severe in Indonesia, candidates have less incentive to rely on risky and brutal methods.

Suicides

For whom then do elections in Indonesia turn into a deadly event? There were cases reported from Bali, Semarang and South Aceh of male candidates dying from heart attacks after they were presented with their poor election results. Anecdotal evidence suggests, however, that suicides occur predominantly among women candidates. Put on party lists simply to fulfil the requirement in the election law which says that every third ranking on a party list has to go to a female candidate (the so-called zipper system), many of these women were inexperienced and did not know what to expect when they entered politics. Commenting on Sri Hanyati’s death, the local ward boss of the National Awakening Party, Zaenal Muttaqien simply said: ‘Sri was only a sympathiser of [the party]. She was neither a party functionary nor a member of the party board. Initially, we...just suggested to her that she become a candidate to fulfil our quota of female candidates’. Unfortunately, such women often become heavily indebted in order to finance their election campaigns. When they see their poor results, they not only feel humiliated, they also realise that they have no opportunities to regain the money they spent on their campaigns. For a small number, suicide is the only way out.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that suicides occur predominantly among women candidates

But for this dismal background, it would be tempting to say that it is heartening news that more political candidates in Indonesia die at their own hands than at the hands of their political opponents. These suicides - and the gender politics that give rise to them - are tragic. But it is also worth celebrating the relative rarity of electoral killings in Indonesia, and reflecting on its causes.

Political killings are usually a symptom of difficulties of maintaining a monopoly of power. When political competition is fierce and the stakes are high, killing can be one way of eliminating rivals. In Indonesia, local elites have worked out ways to handle political challenges without bloodshed. Instead of squabbling fatally over the cake of political power, local elites have worked out ways to share it out. It is this dynamic that above all accounts for the fact that if parliamentary candidates in Indonesia meet their maker prematurely, they do so because of suicide not murder. ii

Michael Buehler (mb3120@columbia.edu) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern Southeast Asian Studies at Columbia University and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northern Illinois University.