Demokrasi

by Hamish McDonald

  With pathways into political change blocked, the newly devout channeled their energies into dakwah, the proselytizing of the faith. Funds poured into the building of mosques and madrassas and pesantren (Islamic schools), with some of the money coming from the oil-rich Arabian countries. More Javanese women and girls started wearing versions of the jilbab (headscarf). Charter flights made it cheaper and easier to make the hajj. Hundreds of students went off each year to study in the Islamic centers of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. A few joined the mujahideen fighting the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Five times daily, in villages and urban neighborhoods alike, came the amplified call to prayer, often overlaid from several mosques. Like the calls of a watchman, this became a comforting soundtrack to daily life.

  As we saw in chapter 4, all this did not go unnoticed by Suharto, who steadily adopted more of an Islamic identity himself. Through the Muslim intellectuals’ association, the ICMI, he cultivated a range of young academics and professionals. The army, too, felt uncomfortable at the perception of it as the enforcer of Westernized ways, especially after armed clashes with Muslim communities in incidents at Tanjung Priok in 1984 and Lampung in 1989, and many of its senior officers took on a “green” identity as devout Muslims.

  On Suharto’s resignation in 1998, the patron of the ICMI, B. J. Habibie, stepped up to the presidency and brought several of the group’s leading figures into his government as ministers or advisers. As we saw in chapter 4, it was a short-lived presidency, as was that of his successor, Abdurrahman Wahid. Neither the NU nor the Muhammadiyah camp gained enough traction through their respective political parties to capitalize on the religious identity of 87 percent of Indonesians. Wahid, as the head of the PKB, finessed a relatively minor 12.6 percent vote in the 1999 election result to emerge as a consensus president, based on his personality as much as or more than on his religious standing. The PAN, led by Amien Rais, the Yogyakarta political science professor and former Muhammadiyah head (and ICMI member), gained a disappointing 7.1 percent, less than the PPP’s 10.7 percent.

  With the impeachment of Wahid, the presidency returned to the secular nationalist figures Megawati and Yudhoyono. In the following elections, in 2004, the main Islamic parties all slipped backward: the PKB to 10.6 percent, the PAN to 6.4 percent, and the PPP to 8.2 percent. Incumbency—with Wahid as president and Amien Rais as chairman of the MPR—had not helped at all (not that it had helped Megawati either—her PDI-P’s vote dropped drastically from 33.7 to 18.5 percent). Muslim leaders, once they entered the snake pit of Jakarta political power, turned out to be politicians just like all the others.

  Yet the combined vote of all Muslim-identity parties held up at around 33 percent, just as the secular nationalist total stayed about the same, and Golkar, increasingly the party of business and the outer islands, held at about 21 percent. In the nationalist camp, the newcomer was Yudhoyono and his Partai Demokrat: he went on to defeat his old boss Megawati in the first direct presidential election held that year. In the Muslim camp, the new force was the PKS, which was formed out of an earlier group that had won only 1.7 percent of the vote in 1999: it gained 7.3 percent of the vote, and its leader, Nur Hidayat Wahid, became chairman of the MPR, replacing Amien Rais (who was to trail behind Yudhoyono and Megawati in the presidential election). Significantly, the new PKS and PD emerged as the first and second parties in Jakarta, the urban melting pot that pointed to future trends. In 2008 the PKS went on to displace Golkar from the governorship of West Java, the most populous province in Indonesia, which partly rings the national capital.

  For the following five years, the PKS seemed to be the party that would ride the wave of Islamic piety into power. It explained itself as a party that had grown out of the dakwah (outreach) and tarbiyah (education) movements during the Suharto era, making its biggest impact among both local students and those returning from overseas. Several of its leaders had been to Egypt and become familiar with the (then underground) Muslim Brotherhood, but the party has long been ambivalent about whether this organization is its model. Taking “Bersih dan Perduli” (“Clean and Caring”) as their slogan, the party’s elected representatives made a point of ostentatiously refusing “envelopes” when money was being offered around.

  By 2008 PKS claimed to have half a million cadres active in its branches, all chosen and trained to be walking examples of principled and pragmatic politics, ready to pitch in and help when natural disasters or other problems arrived. It made good use of the Internet and other modern technologies, yet preached a conservative social agenda. While espousing the equality of women at one level, its religious council was talking of the “natural division of labor,” in which women were suited to supporting and domestic roles; the council also enjoined women to follow demure ways of dressing and behaving.

  Those suspicious of a hidden agenda noted the inclusion of several descendants of Darul Islam figures. Over 2006 and 2007, the central board of Muhammadiyah was concerned enough to issue a warning about PKS infiltration and moved to expel members who had dual loyalty. It saw a sharp division between itself and the rising party. Muhammadiyah accepted the Indonesian state as it was, governed by the multifaith Pancasila. The PKS, on the other hand, had as its goal the steady Islamization of the nation, so that an Islamic state would eventuate by universal consent. Around the same time, the NU became more vigilant against PKS cadres entering its pesantren and warned against the influence of “transnational” Islamic movements, such as Wahhabism, Hizb ut-Tahrir (the Party of Liberation, a transnational movement working for a borderless Islamic caliphate), and Ikhwanul Muslimin (the Muslim Brotherhood, meaning the PKS). Women activists, meanwhile, claimed to have traced a movement in Yogyakarta to separate boys and girls at schools to a PKS initiative.

  For its part, the PKS denied having any strategy to infiltrate other organizations. As for its long-term goal, it was not interested in the Jakarta Charter of legally obliged Islamic behavior, but what it called the “Medina Charter,” which it said was based on Muhammad’s rule in the Arabian city, and under which all religious minorities had freedom of worship.

  Yet the PKS was soon to hit a ceiling. In the 2009 election, its vote rose only slightly, to 7.8 percent, compared to the widely mooted goal of 20 percent, which would have put Nur Hidayat Wahid in a good position to contest the presidency. It did much better than the other Muslim parties. The PKB’s vote dropped to 5 percent amid squabbling over the succession to Wahid, who died at the end of that year; the PPP’s vote dropped to 6 percent, as did that of Amien Rais’s PAN, while some smaller Islamic parties dropped out of parliament altogether. Still, the PKS’s small share was a sign of lost momentum, despite its vastly increased national profile and flow of funding.

  One reason was the old phenomenon of political contamination. As a minority group, the PKS politicians could not change anything, and not all the party’s cadres could maintain their “Clean and Caring” stance. With the party deciding to join Yudhoyono’s grand coalition for his second term, the contamination became more pronounced. The PKS gained three cabinet positions: Agriculture, Social Services, and Communication. In 2013, as we shall see, a massive scandal enveloped the party over manipulation of beef import quotas in the Ministry of Agriculture.

  Another factor may have been a backlash among women voters. The PKS had been one of the strongest supporters of a new antipornography law, passed in 2008. In its application at the local level, it soon became an excuse for vigilantism against women seen as dressing immodestly or moving about on their own. A woman coming home in the early evening in one West Java town, for example, was stopped and searched: the lipstick in her handbag was seized upon as evidence of “prostitution.” Several of the top PKS leaders practiced polygamy; one middle-aged man took a teenage bride. The example of the wildly popular Muslim televangelist Abdullah Gymnastiar, known as Aa (“Big Brother”) Gym, showed the force of a female backlash: in 2006 he took a second, much younger wife, and hi
s ratings plummeted.

  But the more important factor in the stalling popularity of the Islamic parties was that everyone to some extent started playing “the Islamic card” in politics, not least Yudhoyono. Although he was educated in the United States, his openness to the West was balanced by the careful modesty he showed in his personal life, by his undertaking of the hajj, and by his adherence to foreign policies supporting the Palestinian cause and opposing the Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. At home, he included Muslim parties in his ruling coalition even after the 2009 election gave him and his PD an unprecedentedly strong mandate. Members of Habibie’s Muslim intellectuals’ group moved into his and other secular parties. “We have taken the leadership from the radicals and the simplistic people in Islam who push a black and white solution,” says Adi Sasono, an ICMI member who was a minister in Habibie’s government and who now heads the Indonesian cooperative movement’s main body.

  Beneath the government, there is now a creeping orthodoxy. From the start of his presidency, Yudhoyono gave enhanced space and semigovernment status to the Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI, Indonesian Ulamas’ Council) and its fatwas, or rulings on matters of theology, and appointed a highly conservative figure from the PPP, Suryadharma Ali, as his minister of religious affairs. One result was passage of the antipornography law. Another was increasing pressure on the minority branches of Islam regarded as heretical by the orthodox Sunni.

  The half million members of the Ahmadiyah sect, who recognize a prophet who came after Muhammad (to most Muslims, the last and greatest messenger of God), escaped an outright ban by Yudhoyono’s government. But an edict warned them against making their own interpretations of Islam or trying to spread their beliefs. Across several regions Ahmadiyah mosques were shut down by local authorities. In 2011 a 1,500-people-strong mob attacked an Ahmadiyah group in Cikeusik, Banten province, and killed three, while police stood by. The twelve rioters brought to trial received sentences of three to six months in jail, while an injured Ahmadi was charged with provoking the attack and given seven months.

  Over 2011 and 2012, Sunni groups attacked and evicted communities of Shia on the big island of Madura, adjacent to East Java, and a court gave one of the local Shia clerics four years’ jail for heresy. In both cases the response of Yudhoyono’s religious affairs minister was to advise the minority to convert to mainstream Sunni practices or to agree to be declared non-Muslim. Yet both the religious affairs and home ministries have dug their heels in against any more registration of religions beyond the six allowed on official identity cards—Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism—even though the constitutional court has ruled that the state may not limit the number of religions. Even supporters of Yudhoyono were mystified that the religious affairs minister was not replaced.

  The larger Christian minority also felt nervous under Yudhoyono. They, too, had been swept up in the wave of piety that accompanied fast economic growth and political turmoil. The decadal census shows their place in the Indonesian population remaining much the same, about 7 percent of Indonesians being Protestant and 3 percent Catholic, with the largest concentrations in North Sumatra, West Kalimantan, Manado, Maluku, and Papua.

  Yet many Christian observers feel that the official figures somehow understate the reality, as indicated by a highly visible wave of church building across cities and rural areas. Many new believers flock to evangelical churches in the Java countryside. In the Temanggung regency, Central Java, where about forty churches have sprung up in recent years, angry Muslims ransacked a courthouse after a judge gave a Christian evangelizer a five-year jail term for distributing leaflets critical of Islam, instead of the death sentence they were demanding. The same fervor grips large sections of the ethnic Chinese minority, especially in Jakarta, where there are now “megachurches,” such as preacher Stephen Tong’s $27-million Reformed Millennium Centre, which holds up to 4,500 worshippers. The second-generation scion of the Lippo Group, James Riady, is one such born-again.

  A backlash against this Christian expansion has taken several forms. One is the application of building consent rules that require the agreement of surrounding communities; these are not usually bothered with in the case of mosques. A notorious case is a large church project in the West Java city of Bogor that has stalled for years, despite a court ruling that it must go ahead. A smaller church for people of the Batak ethnic group in Bekasi was demolished by local authorities in early 2013.

  All these minorities feel threatened by Muslim vigilantism, chiefly from the Front Pembela Islam, a preman-style organization of white-clad thugs who take it on themselves to put down Christian churches and Islamic minorities and to disrupt places of entertainment that they see as locations of prostitution and alcohol consumption. Founded in 1998 by military and police officers for use against student protests, the FPI has been tolerated long after another violent, military-sponsored Islamic group, Laskar Jihad, was shut down following the first Bali bombing in 2002.

  In 2006 a US embassy cable said an official of the BIN, or State Intelligence Agency, had mentioned that the then national police chief, General Sutanto (who would later head the BIN), had been funding the FPI right up to the time it attacked the embassy that year. Sutanto had described it as a useful “attack dog” that could spare the security forces from accusations of human rights violations. Another cable reported that former Jakarta police chief Nugroho Djayusman admitted contact with the FPI, though he claimed it was to monitor its activities.

  In mid-2008 a mass of FPI members attacked a multifaith crowd that had gathered at the foot of the National Monument in Jakarta to protest against the then imminent antipornography law. The police stood by as dozens of demonstrators were injured by the FPI. Following a public outcry, police reviewed video recordings and arrested several FPI members, including the group’s head, Habib Rizieq, who received an eighteen-month jail sentence some months later. The group continues its violent attacks across Java and, in 2013, celebrated its fifteenth anniversary with a large-scale motorcycle parade through Jakarta.

  When pressed, government officials claim the FPI is now “out of control” and functioning as muscle for hire. Yet the wilting of Laskar Jihad, once the support of the security apparatus was removed, suggests that Yudhoyono’s government has not really tried to keep the FPI’s activities within the law. On the other hand, the army’s continually professed willingness to help out the police against terrorism and interreligious violence offers a cure that would be worse than the disease.

  An example of what could be done came in February 2012, when masses of the local Dayak people in Palangkaraya, Central Kalimantan, occupied their airport to prevent the disembarkation of four FPI leaders who had arrived to set up a provincial branch. The FPI delegation was kept on the aircraft and sent back to Java by security officials. When Yudhoyono went to New York to collect an award for religious tolerance from an American private foundation, media coverage had an almost derisive tone and highlighted protests by members of the demolished church in Bekasi and by Shia and Ahmadiyah representatives outside the presidential palace.

  Below the surface, a much more sinister form of Islamist violence has stirred, and the government and the police deserve much more credit for their response to it. The jihad in Afghanistan during the 1980s attracted a small number of volunteers from Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. On their return in the 1990s, these people were drawn to the purist teachings of figures like Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, an ulema of Yemeni descent who founded the Al-Mukmin pesantren at the village of Ngruki near Solo, Central Java.

  Ba’asyir had fled to Malaysia for seventeen years during the New Order, after frequent arrests for advocating the adoption of Syari’ah law and ultimately for his involvement in a bombing at the Borobudur monument. By the time he returned to Indonesia in 1999, the country was awash with jihadist literature and teaching. The new Internet and video technologies
brought texts into immediate, vivid life, promoting the school of thought known as Salafism (similar to Wahhabism and also originating from Saudi Arabia), which envisions a transnational caliphate of Muslims who follow a social and religious life modeled on the era of the Prophet.

  When the first bombing of tourist targets in Bali in October 2002 shattered some of the general complacency about Indonesia’s “moderate” Islam, the manhunt for the plotters led Indonesian police and their foreign advisers to a circle of younger jihadists linked to Ba’asyir and the Ngruki pesantren. They operated under the name Jemaah Islamiyah (Islamic Congregation), the police believed, with Ba’asyir as their spiritual leader. For his part, Ba’asyir denied any connection with terrorism or that Jemaah Islamiyah even existed outside the constructions of the police and Western intelligence agencies.

  Already suspecting Ba’asyir over church bombings in Java, the authorities looked for evidence that linked him with the Bali bombing. They obtained convictions for conspiracy and immigration offenses, but on his release after twenty-five months in jail, the Supreme Court overturned his conspiracy conviction. He returned to making ambivalent messages about martyrdom in the cause of jihad and in at least one sermon called foreign tourists “worms, snakes and maggots.” In 2011 a court sentenced him to fifteen years in jail for organizing a secret terrorism training camp.