New year bonus for Indonesia's
Chinese By Kalinga Seneviratne
JAKARTA - Indonesia has taken the symbolic
step of reconciling with its minority
ethnic-Chinese community by recognizing Chinese
New Year as a full-blown national festival, a
public celebration it had banned for nearly 30
years. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono attended
the United National Indonesian Imlek
(Chinese New Year) celebrations at the Jakarta
fairground, where his visit was broadcast live on
national television.
Adding new fervor to
the festivities spread over the past few weeks is
the fact that many Chinese-Indonesians are
celebrating as legal Indonesian citizens for the
first time. A new citizenship act
passed by the House of
Representatives last July defines an Indonesian
national as anyone born in the country. The legal
distinction has allowed many Chinese-Indonesians,
who belong to families that have resided in the
country for generations but until now were legally
considered stateless, to become full-fledged
national-identification-card-carrying citizens.
Ethnic Chinese are estimated to represent
about 10 million of Indonesia's 210 million
people, or about 2% of the total population.
During the authoritarian regime of president
Suharto (1967-98), public displays of Chinese
culture were banned, and many Chinese were asked
to change their names to Indonesian ones if they
wished to be eventually considered for
citizenship. "Suharto's government saw Chinese
characters and culture as political. We were not
even allowed to make candles," said Yu Le, a
member of a Buddhist temple.
He said he
now prefers to use his Chinese name rather than
his adopted Indonesian one of Suherman. "Around
the temple there were always police and military.
We could not celebrate Imlek here. People
were afraid to come. We had to do it at home,
hiding."
Inside the same temple, an
elderly Chinese-Indonesian man, who declined to
reveal his name, pointed to the Chinese characters
on the shrine's wall and said: "This was not
allowed to be printed and we could not make these
candles during Suharto's time."
Indonesia's ethnic-Chinese minority had
celebrated the Lunar New Year freely until the
abortive 1965 coup against Suharto's military
regime, which his supporters then claimed was
encouraged by China's communist government. More
than 500,000 people were subsequently killed in an
orgy of violence, including thousands of ethnic
Chinese, aimed at destroying the Indonesia
Communist Party.
After that, anything red,
the color of prosperity for Chinese, or written in
Chinese was seen as a threat to state power.
"I and my Chinese friends shared a good
time. We helped each other," recalled Mustafa
Kamal Ridwan, senior fellow at the Habibie Center,
an Islamic think-tank. "However, there was
[racial] tension under Suharto. I felt I didn't
have any Chinese friends after 1965. We suspected
that Chinese people were members of the Indonesia
Communist Party, and they became enemies for
Muslim people."
Outlawed
expressions The Jakarta municipal
government banned Chinese New Year celebrations in
1967, coincident with Indonesia and China breaking
off official diplomatic relations. Restrictions
covered the use of Chinese language in print and
public discourse as well as public performances of
cultural acts, such as the lion dance.
Diplomatic relations with China were
restored only in 1990, but the restrictions
remained in force. During president Abdurrahman
Wahid's short-lived tenure, these bans were in
2001 finally lifted. Wahid was notably also the
chairman of Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesia's largest
grassroots Muslim organization, with an estimated
40 million members.
His successor as
president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, went a step
further by declaring Imlek a national
holiday.
During Imlek celebrations
this year, national newspapers carried colorful
pictures of the festivities. At the same time,
there were also critical commentaries in daily
newspapers such as the Jakarta Post, which
questioned the level of ethnic-Chinese integration
into mainstream Indonesian society.
Journalist and writer Sima
Gunawan, who only recently publicly disclosed her
Chinese name as Kho Djoen Siem, argued that few
people in Indonesia knew that world badminton
champion Rudy Hartono was actually an ethnic
Chinese. The same goes for renowned film director
Teguh Karya, physicist Yohanes Surya and pop-music
star Agnes Monica, she noted. On the other hand,
she carped, everyone seems to know the right
ethnicity of Chinese-Indonesians who "commit
serious crimes or do something wrong".
In an odd historical
twist, while on one hand cracking down on public
displays of Chinese culture, on the other, the
dictator Suharto tapped several ethnic-Chinese
businessmen to run crucial sections of the
economy, allowing them to amass huge fortunes with
the country's fast economic growth.
The
fact that the Chinese minority 30 years later
still has a strong grip on the national economy is
a cause for resentment among many indigenous
Indonesians, known locally as pribumis.
Those tensions boiled over in the wake the 1997-98
Asian financial crisis, when in May 1998 violence
erupted against ethnic-Chinese interests across
the archipelago, including in Jakarta, Solo and
Medan. Many Chinese complained at the time that
the government condoned the violence.
Under threat, many Chinese-Indonesians
fled Indonesia, including big businessmen who
spirited hundreds of millions of dollars out of
the country and into private accounts in
neighboring Singapore. There are still widespread
local perceptions among that Chinese-run family
businesses favor their own kind in employment and
that they tend to underpay their pribumi
workers.
"If we talk about economic
advantage or how they control economic
opportunity, [the ethnic Chinese] are better
positioned than pribumis," said Marwan
Batubara, a member of the Regional Representative
Council representing Jakarta province. "It is time
for the Chinese community to open up and mingle
with the rest of the people more openly than
before."
The Habibie Center's Ridwan
believes that events such as the national
celebration of the Imlek festival show the
government is trying to reach out to the Chinese
community. He foresees the eventual formation of a
race-based Chinese political party - similar
perhaps to the ones in neighboring Malaysia that
represent the larger Chinese minority community
there.
"It means there is now a
willingness to integrate the Chinese [community]
into Indonesia. [But] it doesn't mean they
integrate with Islamic culture," he said. "They
don't have to be Muslim to be Indonesian.
Imlek is not a religious celebration."
(Inter Press Service, with additional
reporting by Asia Times Online)
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