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Flogging for Islamic
law
By Bill Guerin
JAKARTA - More than a dozen men accused of
placing Rp1,000 ($0.10) bets in an illegal lottery
were flogged in public last week in tsunami-struck
Aceh for violating Islamic (Sharia) law, marking
the first public canning since the staunchly
Muslim province adopted such laws in 2003.
The offenders, who had already been
detained for 22 days without the chance to be
represented by lawyers, each received between six
and 10 strokes of a rattan cane across the back
from a masked and hooded algojo, or
flogger. A noisy crowd of about 2,000 people
witnessed the floggings, held outside the main
mosque in Biruen after Friday prayers.
Aceh is the only province in Indonesia to
implement Sharia law, a freedom granted to the
courts as part of an autonomy package offered by
Jakarta in an effort to quell separatism in the
province. Despite the fact that Indonesia is the
world's largest Muslim country (some 88% of its
230 million population are registered as Muslims),
Islam has never been declared the national
religion.
Sharia law is a comprehensive
set of laws that govern everything from banking to
prayer, theft and adultery. But among Muslim
groups there is no single interpretation of
Sharia, as it is based on teachings from many
noted scholars (ulemas) who have different
interpretations of the two main sources of Islamic
law - Islam's holy text, the Koran, and
hadith (the traditions and sayings
attributed to the Prophet Mohammed).
Saudi
Arabia administers Sharia to the full. Thieves
have their hands chopped off as punishment - the
so-called hudud laws - while adulteresses
are stoned to death. Though caning is frequently
practiced in Singapore and Malaysia as a judicial
punishment, it is not carried out in public.
There seems little danger of Sharia
spreading to other provinces in Indonesia. But the
question remains: is the gentle caning of a few
small-time punters in a province that suffered the
loss of more than 128,000 people and saw much of
the government infrastructure destroyed by last
year's tsunami, the thin edge of the wedge?
No Islamic state
The founding
fathers dismissed demands for an Islamic state at
independence in 1945, but the Acehnese, who saw
the revolution against the Dutch in the 1940s as
an Islamic struggle, felt that Sukarno, the
country's first president, had let them down by
going back on his earlier promise to allow the
province to fully implement Sharia.
They
had to wait until January 2001 before being
granted permission to implement Sharia as part of
a broad autonomy offered by then-president
Abdurrahman Wahid that allowed the province to
implement partial Sharia law and have its own
Sharia police and education system.
Although Aceh holds the world's richest
onshore reserves of natural gas, estimated at 40
billion cubic meters, and provided an estimated
11% of the country's total exports in 2001, less
than 10% of this wealth was reinvested in the
province. Critics said the autonomy package and
the right to implement Sharia, which would also
give Aceh a greater share of revenue from these
rich resources, was simply aimed at dampening
separatist sentiment in the province.
However, the move formed the basis of a
ceasefire deal signed in December 2002 between the
government, then led by president Megawati
Sukarnoputri, daughter of the country's first
president, and pro-independence Free Aceh Movement
(GAM) rebels, who have waged a guerrilla war since
1976 in which more than 12,000 people, mostly
civilians, have been killed.
GAM, however,
has made it clear they are not fighting for an
Islamic state, and Hasballah Sa'ad, a former
minister for human rights who is Acehnese himself,
said Sharia would do nothing to appease GAM and
other independence activists.
"We know the
people of Aceh have wanted to apply Sharia since
the 1950s, but GAM never asked for Sharia," Sa'ad
said. Although the peace process broke down in May
2003 and a full-scale military offensive was
simultaneously launched against GAM, the local
government nevertheless went on to implement new
laws banning adultery, drinking alcohol and
gambling - the law those flogged last Friday were
accused of violating.
At first the local
administration concerned itself with simple
issues, such as Muslims who failed to attend
Friday prayers, or those who sold food or
cigarettes during the fasting month of Ramadan.
Some 20 district religious courts were set up to
deal with issues such as divorce.
Flogging for corruptors?
Majelis
Permusyawaratan Ulama (MPU) - the consultative
assembly of religious leaders in Aceh, laid down
the punishment for the unfortunates who were caned
last week after acting Governor Azwar Abubakar
signed the law approving the flogging. According
to Mustofa Gelanggang, the mayor of Biruen, the
governor will sign off on more legislation in the
coming weeks that will expand the use of caning to
punish other crimes.
Biruen's district
chief Mustofa Gelanggang said caning as a
punishment was "not about pain, but to shame
people and deter them from doing the same criminal
acts in the future". He was presumably referring
to gambling and adultery, not to corruption. In
April, former Aceh governor Abdullah Puteh was
sentenced to 10 years in jail for stealing state
funds when marking up the purchase of a helicopter
in 2001.
"We want to build a cool image of
Islam in Aceh," Puteh told guests at the opening
ceremony for the first Sharia court in March 2003
when he was still governor. The province will get
about US$6 billion in aid to help with
reconstruction and rehabilitation after the
tsunami, but the Puteh case highlights major
concerns on how transparently the funds will be
disbursed and used, given the levels of corruption
in the country (and in Aceh province
particularly).
Corruptors may yet have
much to worry about even before they end up in the
dock. "People must know there is a punishment for
a crime," warned Aceh's Sharia law chief, Alyasa
Abubakar. Raihan Iskandar, the deputy speaker of
the Aceh provincial council, has said even tougher
punishments are under consideration. The Sharia
Office is deliberating the law on theft, including
corruption offences, Iskandar said.
Radicals against
evangelism
There are also fears that
Islamic fundamentalism has been on the rise since
Aceh was opened up following the tsunami. Dozens
of radical Islamic groups quickly arrived on the
scene then, supposedly to guard against any
liberal influence emanating from foreign relief
workers and troops.
Two days after last
Friday's canings, dozens of Islamic groups and
charities, including hardline organizations such
as the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) and the
Indonesian Mujahideen Council (MMI), as well as
several Islamic-based political parties like Hizb
ut-Tahrir, demonstrated in front of the
Baiturahman grand mosque in Banda Aceh, the
provincial capital. They were protesting what they
called an "evangelism campaign" being perpetrated
by local and foreign non-governmental
organizations.
Though the FPI is infamous
mainly for unleashing paramilitary gangs on
nightspots in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta,
Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned in most Muslim countries
for its calls to unite all Muslims in a single
caliphate and its demands for the restoration of
"Islamic society". Hizb ut-Tahrir rejects
democratic models as a Western invention,
incompatible with Islam, and claims to have a
footprint in 40 countries, but Indonesia is one of
the few where it is allowed to operate openly.
Secular forever
Though it
attracts prominence and dominates the news by
playing to a domestic audience still suspicious of
the West, the Islamic radical fringe in Indonesia
remains a tiny, vocal minority. Were Sharia ever
to gain the support of the majority, and the
country to become an Islamic state, the image of
Indonesia in Western eyes would be starkly
different. The reality, however, is that there is
little risk of this and the country's
constitutional status as a secular state is not
under threat.
The radical groups are
inclined to violence and intimidation to achieve
their goals, but moderate Muslims have had enough
of the violence and terrorism. The country's two
largest Muslim organizations - Muhammadiyah and
Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) - oppose state-imposed
Sharia.
The NU, with about 40 million
members, says Sharia would create disputes between
those of different religions, or even among Muslim
groups. The People's Consultative Assembly has
also overwhelmingly rejected a move to have Sharia
embedded in the constitution.
Nonetheless,
the Indonesian Muslim Congress, in a 14-point
"Jakarta Declaration" issued in April this year,
advocated overcoming the country's problems
through the implementation of Sharia.
Corruption, terrorism and moderate
Islam
Campaigning on an anti-corruption
platform, the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS),
increased its share of the vote in last April's
general election to 7.34% from 1.4% in 1999.
Just before the final run-off in the
presidential election in September 2004, PKS
chairman Hidayat Nur Wahid announced that the
party would support Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
Yudhoyono's supporters argued that his election
offered the best chance for democratic reform,
good governance and an end to corruption. Some PKS
politicians, however, opposed the move because
they saw Yudhoyono as a secular political leader
opposed to implementing Islamic law. There are
those within the party who believe that by 2009
they will be ready to win a much larger share and
boost their hopes of making Indonesia more of an
Islamic state.
Since taking the
presidency, however, Yudhoyono has spoken out
against the misunderstanding that terrorism is
connected to Islam. "I say to my people again and
again there is no relationship between the two,"
he said in a recent interview, adding that he
wanted to strengthen the role of moderate Islam.
"We need moderate religious leaders who won't let
their people be taken hostage by the radicals, by
the terrorists.
"I want people to look at
Indonesia as moderate, Islamic, and peaceful," he
concluded.
Bill Guerin, a
Jakarta correspondent for Asia Times Online since
2000, has worked in Indonesia for 19 years as a
journalist. He has been published by the BBC on
East Timor and specializes in business/economic
and political analysis in Indonesia.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd.
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