Indonesia: Playboy and
hardcore violence By Gary
LaMoshi
The debut of Playboy Indonesia
this month unfolded predictably. The magazine flew
off the shelves despite its premium price of
Rp39,000 (US$4.35). Religious leaders condemned
the publication as immoral, despite its total lack
of pictures of naked women.
The Islam
Defenders Front (FPI, for Front Pembela Islam)
leader Habib Rizieq threatened to "go to war"
against Playboy last week, just before white-robed
protesters pelted the publication's offices with
stones while police watched passively. Muslim
extremists returned the next day, but Playboy's
office had already moved. FPI and other thugs
settled for harassing and intimidating vendors
and seizing the few remaining unsold
copies with impunity.
Reaction to the attack from
Indonesia's leaders was also predictable. Police
Commander Wilardi Wizard, whose officers failed to
stop the violence, urged the magazine to stop
publishing because of the strong public reaction.
Wizard's boss, Police General Firman Gani,
suggested that the publisher leave town.
Din Syamsuddin, chairman of Muhammidyah,
one of Indonesia's allegedly mainstream Muslim
mass organizations with some 30 million members,
blamed Playboy for the violence and called for the
magazine to cease publishing. Political leaders
who dared to speak out apologized for the
constitutional freedoms that allowed Playboy to
publish and pledged to search harder for a pretext
to close the magazine.
Violence, real and
threatened, was a hallmark of the Suharto era, and
the habit has stuck. The Pemuda Pancasila youth
wing that provided goon squads for the New Order
hasn't disappeared; it has been copied by
political parties and religious groups. As
Suharto's corrupt machine lives on without a firm
guiding hand, and law enforcement remains for
sale, there's added opportunity and incentive for
people to take the law into their own hands.
The old power centers of the Suharto era
have not disappeared and remain largely above the
law. The murder of civil-rights activist Munir
Said Thalib that independent investigators linked
to military intelligence officials was a stunning
reminder that might still makes right in
Indonesia's new democratic era (seeArresting decay in
Indonesia, July 7, 2005).
Radical Islam and the Indonesian military
are usually considered to be on opposite sides,
but in fact they have numerous convergent
interests, including undermining civil society and
civil liberties. Each side probably figures that
after eliminating its common enemies it can
prevail over the other.
The Playboy attack
is another sign that strong-arm tactics pay
dividends for Indonesia's Muslim extremists. An
editor admitted on Monday that the magazine might
not publish a second issue, despite strong
advertising and newsstand sales for the premiere
edition.
Whose traditional
values? The Playboy attack also comes amid
a national debate on a proposed anti-pornography
bill, which was energized by Playboy's announced
plans for an Indonesian edition last year (see The politics of bare
flesh, March 18). Ostensibly, the bill
sets common community standards for decency, yet
it is hard to find a common standard in a country
as populous and diverse as Indonesia.
Opponents see the bill as another step in
the creeping Islamization of Indonesia, a nation
that has the world's largest Muslim population but
also a substantial non-Muslim minority. Many
proposed standards, such as requiring women to be
covered head to toe, aren't representative of
Indonesian values and customs but are imported
from the Middle East. "In Java, the tradition is
here," said a Muslim woman, drawing a hand just
above her bust to indicate the cut of native
dress. "And in Bali it's here," she added, drawing
a hand across her waist.
The Prosperous
Justice Party (PKS, for Parti Keadilan Sejahtera),
an Islamic party that made eye-opening gains in
the 2004 general election running on an
anti-corruption platform, is a key player in the
anti-pornography drive. But pushing the extreme
Islamic side of its agenda rather than the clean
government part has already eroded its popularity
(see The decline of political Islam in
Indonesia, March 28).
In
legitimate elections going back as far as 1955,
Islamic parties have consistently polled about 38%
of the vote, with about half of that going to
extremists advocating imposition of sharia law,
such as PKS. Even with its emphasis on civic
virtue, the PKS surge came at the expense of other
Islamic parties nationally, rather than expanding
the base. Limited popular support explains why FPI
and other radicals prefer rocks and sticks to the
ballot box. If violence is as American as apple
pie, then strong-arm tactics to influence public
policy or frighten rivals is as Indonesian as
nasi goreng (fried rice).
The
Muslim-military nexus Links between Muslim
extremists and the military go way back.
After the generals seized power from
president Sukarno in 1965, Islamic groups carried
out many of the estimated 500,000 murders of
reputed communists across the country. Military
agents revived Islamic militias, then scapegoated
them in the 1970s - a key step in radicalizing Abu
Bakar Ba'asyir, the alleged spiritual leader of
the reputedly al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah
group blamed for the 2002 Bali bombing and other
attacks targeting Westerners (see Ba'asyir trial: Wrong war, wrong
time, November 3, 2004).
In
1999 the military supplied and transported jihadi
recruits to Ambon and Sulawesi to escalate
Christian-versus-Muslim violence that cost tens of
thousands of lives. While the recruits likely
fought sincerely in the name of Islam, they were
following the military's game plan to undermine
president Abdurrahman Wahid (see Terrorism links point to Indonesia's
military, October 8, 2004). Similarly,
devotion may motivate FPI raiders that attack
alcohol vendors during Ramadan, but they
reportedly hit only those establishments that skip
payments to local police.
Seeing FPI's antics in terms
of corruption or general lawlessness misses the
bigger picture. As long as police, politicians and
the public continue granting immunity to anyone
wearing a white robe and waving the
Koran, unwelcome questions are raised.
Perpetrators of last July's
assault on a complex of the Ahmadiyah religious
sect in Bogor not only went unpunished but
achieved their objective: the sect left the area
and went underground. Questioned about the
Ahmadiyah attack, Indonesian Ulemas Council deputy
chairman Ma'ruf Amin, also a member of mainstream
Nahdlatul Ulama with 40 million members, shrugged,
"No data [have] been presented to me on that. But
anyway, Ahmadiyah has been widely known as a
heretical sect. Should the government protect
them?"
That remark didn't come at Friday
prayers in Central Java but in an interview in the
Jakarta Post, without a challenge from the public,
religious leaders or the government. In their new
democracy, Indonesians have already shown
themselves to be sophisticated voters, but they
remain less discerning in religious matters.
Indonesia wants to project an image of a
moderate, tolerant Muslim-majority state - a
picture that the US, Australia, Britain and
friends are keen to push as part of their "global
war on terror", as well as counterbalancing
China's growing influence in the region (see Indonesia back on the world
stage, March 30). But to live up to
that ideal, Indonesia can't keep interpreting its
constitutional guarantee of religious freedom as
freedom for Muslims (or local majorities in Hindu
Bali or Catholic Manado in North Sulawesi) to
dominate and suppress other beliefs.
Indonesians also must stop tolerating
violent extremists. A tradition of ignoring
mistreatment and abuse as long as it doesn't
encroach on one's personal circle helps explain
how such an affable nation could have been ranked
as one of the world's leading police states for
more than three decades. National public opinion
didn't decisively oppose terrorist bombers whose
targets ranged from the Jakarta Stock Exchange to
Jimbaran Bay's seafood restaurants on the beach in
Bali until Vice President Jusuf Kalla pressured
Muslim leaders to preach against terror last
October.
This tolerance of Islamic
violence could enable a small minority of radicals
to impose their views on a compliant Indonesian
majority. As in Pakistan, the religious extremists
could find a happy accommodation with the
military. We may come to see the good side of the
Suharto era yet: indulging the strongman's
children and golfing buddies beats pandering
to religious extremists who sow
violence.
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, and a
counselor for Writing Camp
(www.writingcamp.net).
(Copyright 2006
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