Over the last few years, Jakarta has laid down legal infrastructure that discriminates against religious minorities, allowing Islamists to take the law into their own hands
By Pallavi Aiyar
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Photo: Pallavi Aiyar
MELTING POT TO CAULDRON: An Ahmadi peers out of the sealed door of a mosque in Bekasi where he has been holed up for over two months. |
The marble minaret of
Jakarta’s largest mosque, the Istiqlal, and the cast iron steeples of the
city’s Catholic Cathedral, jointly punctuate the city-centre’s skyline. The
adjacent location of these two places of worship is a powerful, sensory
manifestation of Indonesia’s multi-religious and tolerant ethos.
Indonesia is the
world’s most populous Muslim country. Although around 87 per cent of the
population, or 210 million Indonesians, self-identify as Muslims, the nation is
a tapestry of religions from Hinduism and Christianity to Confucianism and
Animism. Scan any newspaper and the names that pop up — Teddy Anwar,
Suryadharma Ali, Veronica Colondam — confirm the syncretism that has long
defined this part of the world.
As a Muslim-majority,
democratic republic, whose constitution guarantees the right of citizens to
freedom of religious belief and practice, Indonesia is a rare creature. The
U.S.-based Appeal of Conscience Foundation, awarded Indonesian President Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono a high-profile prize for promoting tolerance just last month.
The country is, moreover, regularly feted by world leaders, as a beacon of
moderate Islam and a model for the Muslim world.
And yet only a few
dozen kilometres east of Jakarta, in the suburb of Bekasi, a group of 18 Ahmadis
has been holed up inside a fenced-off mosque for over two months. They
barricaded themselves inside in early April, after local police sealed it,
placing locks on the entrances and erecting a fence of corrugated metal sheets.
They refuse to come
out until the mosque is allowed to reopen and serve as a place of prayer for
the area’s 400-odd Ahmadis. Until then, their only contact with the outside
world is through a square slat that opens in a back door to the mosque. It is
through this opening that food is passed to them and through which they talk
daily with Mohammad Iqbal, the leader of the congregation, about his attempts
to secure redress. All efforts, he says, have so far failed.
Outside the mosque, a
local government-planted hoarding refers to a number of anti-Ahmaddiya decrees
and resolutions passed by religious and central governmental authorities.
Intolerance since 2005
In 2005, the Majelis
Ulama Indonesia (MUI), a coalition of Muslim organisations, issued a fatwa
condemning the Ahmaddiya community as religiously “deviant.” Mohammad Iqbal
dates the start of his communities’ problems to that year, with some members
receiving threatening text messages on their mobile phones.
But the real
harassment began later, after 2008. That year, President Yudhoyono signed off
on a decree issued jointly by the Religious Affairs Ministry, Home Ministry and
Attorney General, which ordered the Ahmaddiya community to stop all activities
that “propagated” its beliefs. The vagueness of the decree’s wording has emboldened
some regional governments to interpret the law as an outright ban on the
practice of the Ahmadiyya faith.
The Ahmadis are not
the only ones to have fallen victim to growing intolerance. On a recent evening
in Jakarta, this reporter spent several hours talking with victims of religious
violence and discrimination from across the country. Their complaints ranged
from administrative inconveniences, to intimidation, violence and even murder
at the hand of hard line Sunni Muslims. The vast majority of Indonesia’s
Muslims are Sunni.
Muhammad Zaini, a
22-year-old Shia from Madura, in East Java, spoke of 600-odd Shias being forced
out of their homes from two villages in the area, when a 200-strong mob of
Sunni Muslims attacked their homes in August 2012. Several houses were burnt
down and Zaini’s paternal uncle was killed. The Shias are currently camped out
in a refugee camp in a sports stadium. Local Sunni authorities have issued
edicts against allowing their return.
Permits for churches
Reverend Palti
Panjaitan, of the HKBP-Filadelfia protestant church, talked about the seven
churches in the Bekasi area (where Ahmaddiyas were also under attack) that had
been forcibly closed or demolished by local authorities since 2005. Christian
congregations across the country have been having a difficult time in recent
years securing permits for the construction of churches. There are an estimated
22 million Christians in Indonesia, comprising over nine per cent of the
population.
Dian Jennie, a believer
of the indigenous Javanese religion, Sapta Darma, elaborated the routine
harassment faced by faiths not part of the six officially recognised religions
of Indonesia: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Protestantism and
Confucianism. Mandatory state-issued identity cards for all adult citizens that
list the holder’s religion, leave a blank space for those who don’t agree to be
classified under any of the official religions. Citizens with blank spaces on
their IDs are often pilloried as godless. Their children find it difficult to
gain admission to schools and even getting their marriages registered can be
impossible.
“What we are seeing,”
says Andreas Harsono, an activist journalist and researcher for Human Rights
Watch, “is a creeping Pakistanisation of Indonesia.” Harsono claims that like
Indonesia, Pakistan too, was a relatively tolerant country until the 1970s. But
the situation changed dramatically in the 1980s, one clear manifestation of
this shift being Islamabad’s 1984 anti-Ahmaddiya ordinance.
In Indonesia, the
authoritarian regime of General Suharto from 1967-1998, had largely kept
religion’s role in politics under check. Following the transition to democracy,
however, Islamist political parties have been allowed to play an open, legal
role in politics. Radical civil society groups operating outside the formal
political system have also grown in size and influence. The latter include the
notorious Front Pembela Islam, an organisation that was set up in 1998 with
support from government security agencies and whose goons use Islamic edicts to
justify vigilante actions against bars and nightclubs, as well as Christian
churches and the mosques of so-called apostates like Ahmadiyyas and Shias.
More discrimination
“Over the last eight
years the government has basically laid down the legal infrastructure which
discriminates against religious minorities,” claims Harsono. This allows
Islamists to take the law into their own hands, while the police look the other
way. He gives as examples a 2006 decree that has made it harder to obtain
permits to build houses of worship for minorities, and an increasingly cavalier
use of a 1965 blasphemy law.
A spokesperson for the
Ministry of Religious Affairs, Mr. Zubaidi, dusts off such accusations. He
admits that Indonesia has “small (religious) conflicts in a limited area. But
we are a big country and despite everything, we maintain our unity.” He claims
that at the level of policy, matters are improving, rather than deteriorating
for religious minorities. He fails, however, to elaborate when pressed. He does
agree that on “a social level” there might be some cause for concern regarding
increasing intolerance.
It is true that for
the moment at least, Indonesia is a far cry from Pakistan. The most popular
face of Islam in the country is still the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the country’s
(and the world’s) largest Muslim social organisation with 70 million members.
The NU was founded in 1926 and has always defended a moderate and culturally
rooted approach to Islam, in open opposition to more fundamentalist Wahabist
interpretations. Islamist political parties have yet to win a single general
election. In fact their showing at the polls has been worsening in the years
since 1998.
Imam Pituduh, a member
of the NU’s secretariat, looks more like a rock star than a cleric, with dark
shoulder-length hair, shot through with silver, hanging loose about his face.
He says the NU believes Islam in Indonesia can only survive by accepting its
admixture with local traditions. NU imams, for example, use local beliefs in
astrology to help decide on the names of newborns. “The real Islam is what we
represent not what Wahabis claim,” he says. The imam is confident that “the
people” of Indonesia will reject radicalism since it is not a part of their traditions.
Perhaps, but it is
also a fact that religion’s role in Indonesian society has been growing. A new
education bill is about to double the number of hours devoted to religious
education in elementary schools at the expense of science classes. A new criminal
code under discussion is proposing harsh punishments for couples who live
together before marriage, and increasing the maximum prison term for adultery
to five years from the current nine months. According to the Setara Institute,
a non-governmental organisation that monitors religious freedoms, 264 cases of
violent attacks on religious minorities took place in 2012, up from 216 in
2010.
Andreas Harsono
remains deeply concerned. “Once you allow religion to pervade politics and
society, it becomes very difficult to undo it in an Islamic context,” he
concludes.
