Indonesia's Islamists flex their
muscles By Gary LaMoshi
DENPASAR, Bali - Fallout from the October
1 Bali bombings put a damper on the local Hindu
Galungan and Kuningan holidays celebrating the
triumph of good over evil in heroic times.
Bali could use a hero at the moment as
tourist arrivals and hotel occupancy plummeted
following the blasts. And as Indonesia's estimated
190 million Muslims wrap up the holy month of
Ramadan, the entire country could use some heroes
in the religious sphere.
No group has
claimed responsibility for the strikes against
Saturday night diners in Kuta and Jimbaran Bay. No
one has dared identify the neatly severed heads of
the apparent suicide bombers. (Investigators now
regret identifying the heads as those of suspected
terrorists. "If we say the three men are victims
and not suspects, I strongly believe that their
families would be willing
to come forward
and help us," a police source told a local
newsweekly.)
But the tactics and targeting
suggest the work of Islamic fanatics who were also
behind the October 2002 Bali bombings that left
202 dead. Regardless of who planted the October 1
bombs, there's no doubt that violent religious
extremism is on the rise in Indonesia, and it
presents a greater challenge to democracy and
freedom than spectacular acts of terrorism. In
July, thousands of vigilantes attacked a complex
housing 700 members of the Ahmadiyah sect in
Bogor, a hill town outside Jakarta where President
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono makes his family
home.
The attackers called themselves
Indonesian Muslim Solidarity and cloaked
themselves in an obscure 1980 Indonesian Ulema
Council (known by its Indonesian acronym MUI)
fatwa against the Muslim splinter group,
which believes there have been prophets since
Muhammad (specifically, Ahmadiyah's founder).
Thugs beat residents and set fire to buildings.
Police made no arrests because religious issues
are fraught with politics, so police require
political guidance to act.
Blaming the
victim The central government and
mainstream Muslim leaders tut-tutted about the
attacks but showed no stomach for taking on the
mob or its instigators. The attorney general's
office, without apparent shame, said it would look
into banning Ahmadiyah as "disruptive to the
public order", even though a leader in the
district including the complex told reporters,
"We're more afraid of those protestors."
Authorities in Bogor, without apparent irony,
decided the best way to protect Ahmadiyah was to
shutter the complex and evict its inhabitants.
MUI opened a national convention, held
once every five years, days after the attacks amid
calls to rescind its fatwa against
Ahmadiyah. Delegates to the convention were in a
feisty mood, though. "We are proud to report there
is not one single church in Cilegon [West Java]
and this is how we intend to keep it," a delegate
bragged. Another delegation reported with regret
that despite a population that's 90% Muslim, a
non-Muslim had won a local election. "We will make
sure it won't happen next time," the delegates
promised.
Not only did MUI's convention
reiterate its fatwa against Ahmadiyah, it
issued a new set of draconian edicts condemning
pluralism, secularism and liberal Islam. The
chairman of MUI's Fatwa Commission warned
of liberal Islam, "All of their teachings are
deviant ... Their principles are dangerous and
misleading because they believe in only [what]
they think is right and use pure rationale as
justification." One fatwa ordered Muslims
to consider Islam as the only true religion and
all other religions as wrong.
Fatwa fallout This
fatwa barrage brought swift condemnation
from inter-faith and liberal Islamic circles. Just
as predictably, it brought new attacks on
Ahmadiyah followers, as well as threats of mob
violence against the Liberal Islamic Network, a
leading progressive group, and the closing of at
least 23 churches by hardline groups. Prosecutors
in Malang, a city in East Java, presented a case
to prosecutors against Muhammad Yusman Roy for
leading prayers in Indonesian rather than Arabic.
The court documents cited MUI's fatwa
against the practice as their justification, even
though MUI rulings do not hold any legal status.
Yudhoyono's government, despite the
constitutional guarantee of religious freedom, has
been cowardly against the zealots. The Ministry of
Religious Affairs stuck its head in the sand by
saying there were no church closings, only
terminations of "illegal assemblies", based on the
technicality that houses of worship can only be
opened with official approval. Religious
minorities generally find it impossible to obtain
permits, so must worship in illegal assemblies.
These mainly Christian minorities have urged the
government to revise the requirement.
Weeks after the illegal assembly closings,
Yudhoyono weighed in through a spokesman, not
pledging to reopen the churches or revise the
building requirements, but to reiterate the hollow
freedom of religion guarantee and urge people to
resolve their differences without violence.
There's been no action to back up those words,
reflecting the government's deeply rooted conflict
over religion and its place in public policy.
Indonesia is the country with the world's
largest Muslim population, but it is not a Muslim
country. At independence, there was sentiment for
declaring Islam the state religion. Secular-minded
leaders prevailed. But because it was and is a
hot-button issue, the state reserved a role for
itself as regulator in religious matters. For
example, state-sanctioned religious freedom
extends only to five recognized faiths: Islam,
Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic and Christian, a
childishly ignorant term for Protestant.
The Pancasila state philosophy of
Suharto's authoritarian New Order included belief
in one god among its tenets, requiring some fancy
footwork to bring Bali's polytheistic Hinduism
into the tent. The former president's regime
sought to suppress and control religion to keep it
conveniently secondary to the state, but it also
showed great skill in exploiting fanatics. Muslim
zealots were integral in the bloodletting against
alleged communists following the 1965 coup that
brought Suharto to power and then were duped into
reviving armed groups that gave the government a
pretext for repression of hardliners. Indonesian
Islam's reputation as moderate and tolerant may
owe much to those being the qualities the New
Order demanded from Muslims.
Forbidden fruit The
fall of Suharto gave rise to renewed
fundamentalism among previously forbidden fruit:
Top selling books since 1998 have involved either
unrestrained religion or sex. When reformer
Abdurrahman Wahid - a liberal Muslim cleric now at
the forefront of campaigns to foster tolerance -
became president, New Order holdovers stoked
radical Islamic violence that emboldened fanatics,
gave them a public platform and trained them in
jihad useful for violence beyond what their
mentors had in mind. (See Terrorism links in Indonesia point
to military, October 8, 2004)
Radicals such as MUI can exploit their
clerical status, the government's discomfort with
confronting Muslim leaders and a raft of
potentially repressive laws on the books, such as
the statute against "disgracing a religion" that
leaves the door open for radicals to demand legal
action against alleged heretics such as Ahmadiyah
or proselytizing Christians. It's not enough for
these fanatics to be holier than thou; they want
to coerce others into being as holy as they think
they are, even when their zeal to enforce the fine
print shreds the religion's basic principles.
Indonesia's politicians are reluctant to
confront Islamic extremists, even though they
claim these views represent only a tiny minority
of the population. That aversion may stem from the
state's ambiguous role in religious matters,
personal belief or that fanatics represent a
bigger slice of the population than anyone cares
to admit. The issues are complex, and Indonesia's
political classes are far-more skilled at
calculating than governing.
The far-more
simple issue, which lies at the root of virtually
all of Indonesia's woes, is the rule of law. It's
up to Yudhoyono to force religious leaders
including MUI to declare loudly and publicly that
people have a right to believe what they choose
and no one has the right to take the law into
their own hands, not even in the name of Islam.
The possible silver lining in this run of
religious mayhem, or the most dangerous sign of
all, is that this year local residents have begun
resisting the white-robed, club-wielding Islamic
thugs who attack businesses selling alcohol,
legally but offensive to their fanatic
sensibilities, during Ramadan. In Surakarta,
Central Java, the Indonesian Democracy Party,
former president Megawati Sukarnoputri's group,
took up the gauntlet against the extremists. Maybe
the opposition seeing some votes in it will prompt
Yudhoyono's government to belatedly do the right
thing.
Gary LaMoshi
has worked as a broadcast producer and print
writer and editor in the US and Asia. Longtime
editor of investor rights advocate eRaider.com,
he's also a contributor to Slate and
Salon.com. (Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for
information on sales, syndication and republishing.)
