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Moderate Indonesia?
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Indonesia -- the world's largest Muslim
country by population (with over 200 million Muslims constituting a
demographic of just under 90 percent of the population) -- is often held up
as an example of a modern, moderate Islamic democracy.
Indeed, this is precisely how David Cameron -- the current UK prime minister --
characterized Indonesia in a visit to the capital Jakarta back in April,
addressing students there with the following remarks: "The people of
Indonesia can show through democracy there is an alternative to dictatorship
and extremism. That here in the country with the biggest Muslim population on
the planet, religion and democracy need not be in conflict."
But is this conventional wisdom accurate? To
begin with, it is worth noting that as of this year, Indonesia is still
denoted "Free" by Freedom House, scoring (on a descending
scale of 1 to 7) 2 for political rights and 3 for civil liberties. A report
by the think-tank from last year affirmed, "Indonesia is an
electoral democracy. In 2004, for the first time, Indonesians directly
elected their president and all members of the House of Representatives
(DPR), as well as members of a new legislative body, the House of Regional
Representatives (DPD)."
These elections -- as well as direct
elections for regional leaders that began in 2005 -- have generally been
judged free and fair. In addition, Freedom House declared that
"Indonesia is home to a vibrant and diverse media environment."
However, these points do not make Indonesia a
model of democracy and civil rights for the Muslim world.
To begin with, consider the case of Aceh, an
autonomous region of Indonesia in the far north of Sumatra. Aceh rigorously
enforces aspects of Islamic law that curtail civil liberties. For example,
the sale of alcohol is banned and those caught gambling are subjected to
caning. Further, there is a special Islamic police force in the province
known as "Wilayatul Hisbah" that oversees observance of a
dress code, targeting women wearing shorts or seemingly tight trousers.
Debate also continues over whether adulterers should be
beaten publicly -- as is the current practice -- or subject to the punishment
of stoning. In fact, the question of whether Islamic law is enforced strictly
enough was a talking point behind the election of the provincial governor
back in April. The incumbent Irwandi Yusuf, who opposes stoning for adultery,
lost out to Zaini Abdullah, who promises to introduce a
"purer" form of Shari'a to the province.
It should be noted that Abdullah was a former
rebel leader in the Free Aceh Movement, which waged a 30-year insurgency
campaign against the central government. Autonomy and local elections came as
part of a peace agreement in 2005.
Yusuf, who was elected governor for a
five-year term in December 2006, has always been seen as a maverick among the
rebel movement that has since morphed into the Aceh Party, which is described
by the International Crisis Group as an "autocratic, almost
feudal party that brooks no dissent." With the rise of Abdullah, who is
strongly backed by the Aceh Party, the latter can consolidate its power in
the province.
Aceh was probably the first area in what is
now Indonesia to adopt Islam. The Sultanate of Aceh that emerged in 1496
always had a reputation for religious observance and fierce independence. In
the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was renowned for its pirates who
regularly conducted raids against Thailand, besides attacking European and
American trade convoys in the straits of Malacca. This was one of the motives
behind the eventual Dutch conquest of Aceh in 1913.
As scholar and adviser on colonial affairs
Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje noted in his work The Acehnese:
From Mohammedanism (which for centuries she
[i.e., Aceh] is reputed to have accepted) she really only learnt a large
number of dogmas relating to hatred of the infidel without any of their
mitigating concomitants; so the Acehnese made a regular business of piracy
and man-hunting at the expense of the neighboring non-Mohammedan countries
and islands, and considered that they were justified in any act of treachery
or violence to European (and latterly to American) traders who came in search
of pepper, the staple product of the country. Complaints of robbery and
murder on board ships trading in Acehnese parts thus grew to be
chronic."
Now, it could be argued that Aceh is only an
anomaly in Indonesia. To be sure, the sale of alcohol is allowed elsewhere in
Indonesia. In addition, it would be wrong to generalize and claim that Islam
as practiced in Aceh is the same across the entire country.
For instance, on the island of Java, which is
home to the country's capital of Jakarta and has a population of 138 million,
the conversion from Islam to Hinduism was for many only a nominal process,
unlike Aceh. Consequently, they practiced a rather syncretic form of the
religion, and in recent years there has been to a certain extent a Hindu revival in Java.
Nonetheless, the overall trend is
pointing in a negative direction with respect to treatment of religious
minorities. In February of last year, a Christian man was convicted of
"blasphemy" against Islam and sentenced to five years in prison.
For Islamists in Java, this punishment was not enough, and in a subsequent
rampage they attacked members of the Ahmadiyya sect that affirms its Muslim
identity but is deemed heretical by most orthodox Muslims. At the same time, two churches were burned and a third razed to the ground.
To take another example, in May of this year, on the outskirts of Jakarta, a
Muslim mob threw stones and bags of urine at a church on Ascension Day: the
culmination of an intimidation campaign that had begun in January.
One could go on (a Christian center burned by a mob
believing that a new church was being built in violation of traditional
Islamic law), and the problem is that the government has failed to protect
religious minorities, with violence against them on the rise.
For concrete statistics, one need only look
at a Guardian report from last month, which points out
that "last year, the local Setara Institute for Democracy and Peace
recorded 244 acts of violence against religious minorities -- nearly double
the 2007 figure."
The Guardian article, which focuses on
the case of a civil servant facing a prison sentence for posting "God
doesn't exist" on Facebook, also points to the Indonesian Communion of
Churches, which says that around "80 churches have been closed each year
since President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono took power in 2004, and an additional
1,000 congregations have faced harassment."
In the case of West Papua, which has like
Aceh been the center of a separatist movement, it is reported that the Indonesian
security forces are actively persecuting Christians (see
here as well).
This is exactly reminiscent of the security
forces' behavior not only in what is now East Timor but also in the Maluku
Islands in 2000-2002, where many Indonesian soldiers cooperated with the
Islamist militant group Laskar Jihad's campaign against Christian Melanesians
that killed up to 10,000 Christians.
The trend towards increasing intolerance was
also noted by the liberal Muslim writer Irshad Manji, who
faced harassment multiple times during her recent book tour in Indonesia to
promote her book Allah, Liberty, and Love, which has now been banned in neighboring Malaysia.
Compared with much of the Middle East and
North Africa, as well as countries like Pakistan, Indonesia is distant from
Islamist theocracy. It should be noted that many of the reports linked to
above come from Indonesian outlets like the Jakarta Post. This
indicates a commendable degree of press freedom that is by contrast being
increasingly eroded in Turkey, which is also upheld as a model for the Muslim
world but leads the globe in the number of imprisoned journalists.
Nevertheless, the recent trends in Indonesia
point to an environment increasingly intolerant of religious minorities and
civil liberties: not only in Aceh, but also the nation in general.
Observers often point to an influx of Wahhabi
clerics from the Middle East as the cause, but in my view one should also
bear in mind that what Daniel Pipes terms the "Islamic
revival," which began in the 1970s on a global scale, is deeply
rooted in issues of identity and cannot simply be put down to oil revenues
flowing into Saudi Arabia, has not quite run out of steam.
In sum, one cannot put it any better than the
headline of an op-ed by Andreas Harsono in the New York Times:
Indonesia today is "no model for Muslim democracy."
Update from June 6, 2012: Today comes
a report
in the Jakarta Post, in which an Indonesian think-tank called Charta
Politika discusses encroachment of Shari'a into local politics, mentioning
the specific case of the city of Taskimalaya in West Java that will soon
require all Muslim women - visitors or residents - to wear veils. Again, it
should be emphasised that the secular trend that was certainly apparent in
the early 1970s is being reversed.
Aymenn
Jawad Al-Tamimi is a student at Brasenose College, Oxford
University, and an adjunct fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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