Number of sharia-type regulations passed in Indonesia by province, 2001-2012
Indonesia turns 71 today. Like many septuagenarians, the country appears to be growing more grumpy and intolerant as it ages. This week, the Economist picks up on an apparently rising tide of homophobia in Indonesia. Importantly, the paper also picked up on the fact that the grumpiness is partly motivated by politics: “Politics, as much as religious conviction, plays its part,” The Economist reports. “Many politicians sense they may win more votes by presenting themselves as pious Muslims than by defending sexual minorities from persecution.”
In fact, I’d say it is a lot MORE about politics than about religious conviction. I’ve written about this before, referring to an analysis of local laws I was working on together with political scientist Michael Buehler. The first part of that work is now finally published, in a paper that looks at the cynical ways in which Indonesian politicians use religious regulations to appeal to different key groups at different points in the electoral cycle. (Link is to pdf)
The paper is a bit pompous — academia, eh? — but it shows that at least until 2012, sharia-type laws mapped onto both political history and on to the electoral cycle in very predictable ways. From the map above, you can see that the passage of laws with an Islamic inspiration are concentrated in areas where political Islam has been embedded for over a century. And from the paper you’ll see that “pious Moslem” laws are mostly passed in campaigning periods, unpopular zakat laws imposing taxes are mostly passed during a second term when a bupati/walikota can’t run again, and laws which confer extraordinary patronage opportunities on influential groups are passed more or less across the board.
On the day I write this, Indonesia turns 71 and my family celebrates the 80th birthday of both of my parents. The good news is that my parents are both getting much more liberal politically as they age. I hope Indonesia will, like them, grow wiser rather than grumpier as she matures.
Nearly half of the cases of sexual violence that get reported to Indonesia’s police are dropped or “resolved”, according to the National Commission on Violence Against Women: the victim’s family is paid off, or the victim is forced to marry her abuser, thus restoring family honour. The reaction to this scandalous situation from Joko Widodo’s government has been, well, pretty much nothing.
Then the gang rape of a 14 year-old girls hit the headlines, and Jokowi did what he does best. Without citing any data at all, he declared that Indonesia was suffering a moral meltdown that required extraordinary measures, and he spat out a headline-grabbing regulation that makes him look tough. This modus operandum, which he first used to deal with an alleged epidemic of drug abuse, appeals to those he has whipped into a moral panic, but that does almost nothing to address the root of the problem. The headline-grabber in this regulation is castration (of the chemical variety, the type that, in my own parents’ lifetime, the UK used to inflict on brilliant men who happened to be gay). But it includes the possibility of the death sentence, if the victim is killed, mentally damaged or contracts a disease. It’s up to the judge. That would be the same type of judge who jailed a number of almost certainly innocent men for alleged sexual abuse with the word of a five year-old boy as principle evidence. The evidence was pretty extraordinary, certainly — the kid and two others maintained that perpetrators had conjured a magic stone out of thin air to heal and induce amnesia — the stone may also have been responsible for conjuring away the [incurable] HSV-2 virus which the court decided the boy was infected with, though the laboratory could find no trace of the virus. The details of that case would fit well in one of those Indonesian novels that fills gaping holes in plot by turning people into pigs and tigers. But under the new legislation, the judge who chose to jail the men could have put them to death, and no novelist could have revived them.
Oddly, when I was looking for coverage of the castration story in Kompas, Indonesia’s most respected daily newspaper, my search threw up an unexpected parallel. A the screenshot above shows, a search on “pengebirian” yields a story about the new regulation, then one accusing Jokowi of trying to pass legislation that would castrate Indonesia’s anti-corrpution commission the KPK.
Most Indonesians are impressed by how much the KPK has done to combat corruption in the country — the institution has gone after governors and district heads, ministers and MPs, judges and cops, and it has a very high conviction rate. Certainly, one wouldn’t want to see it emasculated. But having said that, the KPK’s approach is not so different from Jokowi’s: go for the headline grabbing easy-ish fixes — the one or two big fish that will make it look like action is being taken — while leaving the underlying cultural and institutional factors that drive corruption virtually untouched. It’s that “oknum” thing again, the idea that a more or less perfectly moral system is disrupted by one or two wicked individuals who need only to be castrated, shot or jailed to restore perfect harmony. Luckily, many Indonesians don’t buy it; they know that what the country needs in order to protect both children and adults from the worst outcomes of sexual abuse is a functional, victim-friendly police; an independent, fair and accessible judicial system; and educational and cultural systems that give children and women the confidence to speak out. Let’s hope that the Members of Parliament who will debate Jokowi’s knee-jerk legislation are more thoughtful than the President.
Lesbis and Gays: No entry to our neighbourhood! (Photo: Prima Mulia/Tempo)
Just hours after an incompetent attempt at terrorism shut central Jakarta down for about 20 minutes earlier this month, I wrote a commentary in the Financial Times saying that “Islamic State” (which, let’s remember, is neither) and similar rabid, back-to-the-7th-century fanatics had no traction in Indonesia because “Indonesia is a vibrant democracy and its citizens are proud of their diversity and tolerance”. (If the link to the FT doesn’t work for you, you can read the text in Word here).
The commentary refers to some work I’ve been doing with a colleague, Michael Buehler, analysing the spread of sharia-inspired local laws (peraturan daerah, or perda) across Indonesia. We find solid evidence that these perda are passed mostly for reasons of political self-interest. Either they bring in cash, or they create patronage opportunities, or politicians think that they are popular, and that they will help in re-election campaigns.
Interestingly, though, our analysis suggests that — SURPRISE — Indonesia’s political elite is out of touch with what most voters think and want. Local leaders who pass “morality” laws in their first term may make themselves popular with groups such as FPI, which then have a legal basis to go around smashing up those bars that don’t pay them protection money, but that does NOT translate into popularity with voters — they are much less likely to get re-elected compared with those who didn’t pass such laws in their first term. (Notes for nerds below.**) Interestingly, those who passed laws that effectively encourage Sunni (Wahabi?)-branded thugs to beat up on other sects did especially poorly in the provinces that have the strongest traditions of political Islam and the largest Moslem majorities.
And still, we get quite senior politicians thinking that appealing to intolerance is a populist move. The punch-bag of the week are gay men and women (and perhaps also transgenders, now inexorably grouped with the others under the daft acronym LGBT, though waria are socially, culturally and politically very differently positioned in Indonesian society compared with gays). First, the minister for research, technology, and higher education, Mohammad Nasir, said gays were not welcome on campus. Then the popular mayor of Bandung, Ridwan Kamil, got in on the act, in a very Indonesian way — support gay rights if you want, just don’t do it in public. (Here’s a useful summary of recent homophobic pronouncements by Indonesian officials from Human Rights Watch.) The Sunni-themed thugs in the FPI appear to have taken Ridwan’s comments as license to put up idiotic banners such as that pictured above and go house to house looking for same-sex-love. The FPI, Front Pembela Islam or Islamic Defenders’ Front, is one of several groups of Islamic-themed gangsters (pdf) who cloak their extortion rackets in the language of The Book. Guess what they found in the cheap boarding houses used by students in the university town of Bandung? Lots of young women sharing rooms!
FPI members are generally not very clever, and it may be that few of them have been to college far from home. But they are, after all, Indonesian. So they should know that in Indonesia, people of the same gender regularly bed down together — in some islands I’ve shared mattresses with three generations of women at once. And I can assure those shouty young men who wish to defend Indonesia’s morals that that does NOT make me a “lesbi”.
Stupidity on the part of gangsters is understandable. On the part of senior politicians it is less forgivable. There has been a bit of backtracking from several of the mouthiest politicians, including Nasir and Ridwan. But they, and all of their colleagues, appear to be very slow on the uptake. When will they learn that most Indonesian voters are way ahead of them in the desire to live and let live, otherwise known as tolerance?
**The data set was limited to the 254 local government heads who passed any sharia-inspired perda between 2001 and 2012 — 442 regulations altogether. These results compare the electoral fate of those who passed certain types of bylaws in their first term with those that did not. For those who care about these things, the results were statistically significant at the p<0.05 level.
Photo: Jaringan Masyarakat Peduli Pegunungan Kendeng, via Twitter
Some decades ago, the US anthropologist Clifford Geertz coined the phrase “Theatre State” to describe politics in Java and Bali. The Powers That Be in many countries use pomp and pageantry to project power but Geertz’s point was that in Java, the strutting and preening was power, the display had become a substitute for government. In this essay in the Nikkei Asian Review, I suggest that in this democratic age, Indonesian citizens are taking over the stage. A great recent example are the farmers of Kendeng, pictured above, who recently trekked 122 kilometers on foot to attend a court case that they had brought against a polluting cement factory. There’s no doubt that they had costume and set designers to help out with the performance — check out the matching backpacks. But their theatrics worked: the court denied permission to go ahead with the factory.
This week, we’ve seen some more serious theatrics, on centre stage in the House of Representatives in Jakarta. There, obviously against the will of some of its members, the House Ethics Committee was made to sit through an audio recording of parliamentary speaker Setya Novanto trying to shake down the head Freeport McMoRan Inc’s Indonesian operations, to the tune of some four BILLION dollars. Freeport Indonesia runs the world’s largest gold mine, and that’s not even its day job: the Grasberg mine, in the fractious far eastern province of Papua, is principally a copper mine. It makes a lot of US shareholders very rich and is Indonesia’s biggest tax payer. Its contract comes up for renewal in 2021, and the company is trying to get some indication from the changeable Indonesian government whether it is worth investing billions of dollars now in long-term operations, something that it is naturally reluctant to do if there’s a good chance it will be kicked out in just five years time.
Wednesday’s instalment of the morality play, shown live on Indonesian TV starred Indonesia’s Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources Sudirman Saeed. With dignity and some determination, he stood his ground in the case that he himself brought against Novanto, and in the end the court agreed to hear the recording. In the three-way conversation Novanto, who belongs to the Golkar party that dominated Indonesian politics through the Grand Patronage era of the Suharto years, and squillionaire Muhammad Riza Chalid, suggested to Freeport boss Maroef Sjamsoeddin that they could smooth through some assurance of long-term contract renewal. All Freeport had to do was put 20 percent of the Indonesian company’s shares into the pockets of President Joko Widodo and Vice President Jusuf Kalla. (Here’s the transcript of the conversation, which also contains lots of catty remarks about relations at the very top of Indonesia’s government, and some breathtakingly arrogant assertions about Novanto’s own powers.) Sjamsoeddin showed up in the parliamentary theatre on Thursday to confirm that the recording was genuine.
So what’s the next act in what threatens to be Indonesia’s biggest corruption story to date? Well, we’ll have to wait. In the time-honoured fashion of Indonesian politicians, the House of Representatives if going off on a study tour. And really, what better place to learn about ethics in government than Russia?
If you’re interested in the modern expression of the Theatre State in Indonesia, you might enjoy this little video I made in the outer reaches of Halmahera:
On Tuesday night, I went to the opening ceremony of the Frankfurt Book Fair, where Indonesia is the Guest of Honour. True to form, Indonesia worked its last-minute magic and the ceremony was delightful; the highlight for me was the speech by Education Minister Anies Baswedan. I’m not given to enjoying formal speeches by Indonesian Ministers (or by any ministers, for that matter). But Bpk Anies managed to go beyond the platitudes of these occasions, to make a point that was both timely and important. Referring directly to the hundreds of thousands of refugees from different cultural traditions who are besieging the borders of Europe, he spoke of what the world might learn from Indonesia: that diversity is a source of strength, not of weakness. Indonesia, he said, specialises in managing differences. He acknowledged that there had been bad times, including in the 1960s. But overall, the “imagined community” of Indonesia has stood over time as a solid monument to the strength that can be derived from diversity in a tolerant society. His speech made me really proud, and I wasn’t the only one. I even tweeted to that effect once I got connected — for all their expertise in engineering and software manipulation the Germans live in the dark ages when it comes to social media and connectivity.
Then came the news of the burning of a church in Aceh, which must have taken place just a few hours before Bpk Anies made our hearts swell. And the news of the displacement of hundreds of people, seeking refuge from religious-inspired violence, just like the Syrian refugees the minister talked of. It seems from locally-constructed chronologies that the violence was not unpredictable, and indeed the police said it was premeditated. Malay-speaking Aceh Singkil is both the most mixed district of Aceh and the part of Indonesia in which I witnessed most violence myself — including two spectacular catfights between women, complete with jilbabs torn off and handfulls of hair being pulled out. Perhaps we can hope that this is no more than a random incident, that it won’t spark any greater conflict. But having felt so warm and fuzzy about Indonesia’s (generally remarkable) example as a manager of differences, I now feel that Bpk Anies needs to persuade some of his cabinet colleagues to start managing those differences a bit more actively.
Trying to cut words from a headline? Replace “study tour” with “junket”. Most Indonesians think of study tours, or “studi banding” as a politician’s way of going on an overseas holiday at the taxpayers’ expense. There are exceptions, of course. Over a decade ago, I took the then vice-governor of Papua province, Konstan Karma, to Uganda to see what a generalised HIV epidemic looked like. One morning, we visited a clinic at a university hospital in Kampala. It was overflowing with people, waiting patiently to be seen by a doctor. Bpk Karma chatted happily with many of them.
After a while, not wanting to appear impatient, he took me aside and asked quietly: “When are we going to meet the AIDS patients?” Uuuuhhhhh…. “These are the AIDS patients, Bpk,” I replied. He looked at me, eyes wide, then looked around, then looked at me again. There must have been about 300 people crowded in to three small rooms and overflowing into the courtyard. “But it can’t be. All these women, all these children…” He was on the verge of tears. Then he went back to chatting, now with greater concern, asking questions, patting kids on the head. When we left the clinic, he reached in to his pocket, pulled out a hundred dollar bill, and gave it to the doctor on duty. “I’m sorry it’s not more,” he said. After that visit, Bpk Karma tried very hard to convince fellow politicians in Papua to take HIV more seriously. His success was questionable, but it was clear that seeing the future with his own eyes persuaded him to try, at least, to avert that future.
Contrast that experience with this story from the Jakarta Globe, about Jakarta politicians on a three day “study tour” to Bali. Thirty two Jakarta councillors felt the need to learn from Bali, and eight staffers went to dance attendance on them. This one paragraph says it all:
The main program on their itinerary, though, was a meeting with their counterparts at the Bali provincial legislature, which failed to take place. The Jakarta officials showed up at the council building on Thursday, only to be told that the very people they expected to meet had themselves embarked on a study trip to Yogyakarta.
This phenomenal waste of money and opportunity jars especially because I happen to be doing some work on the history of the HIV epidemic in China. Foreign study tours of up to two months, during which technocrats attended classes or went on site visits every day, were the key which unlocked an eventual response. The study tours sparked a lot of home-grown experimentation by a small but dedicated group of Chinese researchers and civil servants. It took a while for China’s leaders to give a damn about HIV, but once they did start to care, those foreign-inspired technocrats had tried out different models at home, knew what was likely to work, and were ready to roll. If Indonesia’s public servants did more studying and less touring, the country might be better off.
Seventy years ago today, Sukarno and Mohmmad Hatta were frog-marched to a radio station by students hungry for independence. There, they declared the formation of the republic of Indonesia. Both the text and its original presentation in Sukarno’s handwriting (pictured above, rescued from the waste-paper basket) tell us much about the country. It translates as:
We the people of Indonesia hereby declare the independence of the Republic of Indonesia. The details of the transfer of power etc. will be worked out carefully and as soon as possible.
Jakarta, 17-8-05
Representatives of the people of Indonesia
The date is taken from the Javanese calendar. The crossings-out reflect the imprecision of the Malay language in which it was written. Though Malay was adopted as the national language, it was not the mother tongue of any of the founding fathers; perhaps they struggled to find just the right word for this momentous declaration. The content — and especially the Etc. of which I’m so fond and which I used as a title for my book — reflects the imprecision of the very nation itself. At the time of the declaration, the nationalists were not even agreed on what territories it covered, and most other nations took four years to agree that it even existed. My personal favourite, however, is the way the last word, Indonesia, gets squished down into a little curly tail: forward planning has never been the nation’s most obvious strength.
The last six decades have seen many Etc.s: riotous multi-party democracy (centralised), “guided democracy” aka dictatorship under Sukarno, a “New Order” aka dictatorship under Suharto, and many stripes of “reformasi” aka riotous multi-party democracy (decentralised). There will doubtless be many more to come. Indonesia is a nation that will live always in interesting times.
I wish the nation and its people very many happy returns. A propos of nothing, so does Google, which for some reason pleases me.
Earlier this year, Indonesia’s national parliament passed a law that tried to curb dynastic succession in politics. This was frankly a little surprising. The chairwoman of the largest party in parliament, Megawati Sukarnoputri, is the daughter of Indonesia’s first president. Though she never did manage to get elected herself, Megawati did spend some time in the top job after her boss President ‘Gus Dur’ was impeached. After a bit of political arm-twisting, her own daughter now sits in the cabinet. It’s hard to imagine either of these woman getting their jobs on their own intellectual merits, which are generally agreed to be slender. The same is true of a number of the wives, sons, nephews, sisters-in-law and other sundry relatives of former provincial governors and district heads who have been elected to replace their loved-ones in important executive posts around Indonesia — over 50 of them in all.
In some areas of Indonesia, prominent families are entrenching themselves in power so effectively that the archipelago is looking a lot like it did before the Europeans arrived five centuries ago — a necklace of quasi-independent but interlocking Sultanates in which power and bloodlines were synonymous. Lawmakers at the national level are worried enough about this that in March they made it illegal for anyone to step straight into a district head, mayor or governor’s seat if they are directly related to them by blood or marriage. Parents, children, siblings, spouses and in-laws would have to wait until at least one (five year) term had passed before they could be elected to replace their relative. That was before the constitutional court had its way. Ruling earlier this month on a case brought by the munchkin son of the head of Gowa district in South Sulawesi, the court said the restriction violated every Indonesian’s right to run for office. The munchkin’s uncle, “Komandan” Syahrul Yasin Limpo, looked on with satisfaction from his post as Governor of South Sulawesi.
In this essay in The New Yorker, I muse on why political dynasties are more dangerous in Indonesia than they are in the United States. It boils down, I think, to the lack of an independent judiciary that might provide an effective constraint on the octopus reach of family connections into all of the institutions which are supposed to provide checks on the local executive. There’s something else at play too, though — the networks of patronage which both produce and benefit from dynasty politics are simply more deeply embedded in many of Indonesia’s cultures than they are in the United States. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the weeks that I’ve been happily ensconced as a visiting fellow at KITLV, or the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Carribean Studies in Leiden. I’m especially fascinated by the work of Ward Berenschot, who is actually trying to quantify different levels and patterns of patronage politics across Indonesia. He’s found, not all that surprisingly, that what he calls clientilism runs thicker in clannish areas of Eastern Indonesia than it does in Java (with the exception of Banten, where Ratu Atut Chosiyah has established herself as Grand Misstress of patronage politics). I look forward to seeing more of the results of his work as they emerge.
When comparing notes with male foreigners who have travelled to remote parts of Indonesia, I often find that we have quite different perceptions of village life. That’s in part because I have the extraordinary privilege of being able to spend time in the kitchen with the women as well as in the coffee shop with the men (this strange, white beast being allowed to tread where local women wouldn’t). This means I hear different stories about all sorts of things: politics and history, culture and family life. While men clearly dominate the public sphere throughout Indonesia, I’ve become increasingly convinced that at the level at which the business of society really happens, about which decisions are made about family and social investments, about who goes to which school and whether to buy a TV or a sewing machine, it’s Indonesia’s women who are in charge.
As the boxing match between the KPK and the police rumbles on, Jokowi seems to have thought, too, about the potential for Indonesia’s women to quietly get on with the hard work of putting a stop to the fisticuffs. He’s appointed an all female panel to choose the next anti-corruption commissioners. It’s dispiriting that this is such a hard task. The Jakarta Post reported former KPK commissioner Busyro Muqoddas saying that members of the selection team should be mentally prepared to deal with people offering them bribes to select one anti-corruption commissioner over another.
The reactions to the all-female panel have been mixed, though perhaps none more extreme in it’s misogyny than this extraordinary rant from a university lecturer in law. (And we wonder why Indonesia’s legal system is so roundly despised by most citizens…).
Other commentators have said that Jokowi is reaffirming women’s place in Indonesian politics: he has eight female cabinet ministers. In this commentary in the Nikkei Asian Review, I argue that the female panel will probably do a good job of selecting commissioners because they are less tied in to patronage networks than men are. That’s a good thing for the nation, obviously. But it’s the result of women being denied access to the public sphere, and thus having to survive on their wits and their talents rather than their connections.
I’d be curious to know what readers think about this. But before you point out the exceptions to the rule that women in Indonesia tend to be carried forward by talent rather than connections, let me do it for you. It’s certainly something Jokowi is aware of.
Several times over the last months, I’ve been asked to comment on the impending execution of convicted drug dealers. I’ve always refused, largely because I thought I’d just be fuelling hysteria about something that wasn’t actually going to happen. Then, just a few minutes before I was about to speak on a panel called “Death Sentences” at the University of California Irvine, I heard that Indonesian police had indeed pulled the trigger on eight people, one of them mentally ill. On the panel with me were two extraordinarily talented journalists, Amy Wilentz and Erika Hayasaki, both of whom have written movingly about death in different contexts. The topic was a grim pun signalling the challenges of writing compellingly about disease and death; the events in Indonesia made it a lot more topical than I had hoped.
The following day I was scheduled to give a talk at UCLA about Indonesia. It’s not an easy sell; even in a university with a strong Southeast Asian studies department there are only a handful of people working on Indonesia. So it was with mixed feelings that I noted at breakfast that Indonesia had made it to page 3 of the Los Angeles Times. Then I looked at the dateline:
The story was written by an LA Times reporter in Johannesburg. That’s how much attention the world’s fourth most populous nation merits even in one of the more Asia-facing cities of the world’s third most populous nation. As I said in this piece I dashed out for The New Yorker, it seems to be only the sound of tsunamis, bombs and firing squads that brings Indonesia to the attention of the world. What’s puzzling to me is that seems at the moment to be a source of pride to many Indonesians.
We know that Indonesia advertises the death penalty for drug dealing, and we know too that as a nation, it feels very strongly about its sovereignty. We know it hates being preached to by holier-than-thou neighbours, especially when, as with Australia in this case, they are themselves guilty of (lesser but more frequent) abuse of the rights of marginalised individuals in pursuit of political goals. Australia’s hysteria about uncontrolled immigration is just as irrational as Indonesia’s hysteria over drugs. We know that Jokowi is deliberately overstating the drug catastrophe that threatens to engulf the nation. Indonesian readers can find the executive summary of BNN’s survey of drug user among young Indonesians here; loosely comparative data from Europe and the US are here. To summarise, drug use among young people in Indonesia does not reach a tenth of the levels that it does in many richer countries. It’s hardly going to wipe out a generation.
What I didn’t know was that Jokowi would not take the high road. I expected him, at the last minute, to make a big public showing of how magnanimous he (and by extension the civilised and ultimately humane nation of Indonesia) really is. Apparently, his own position is now so weak that he felt the need to grasp for the support of Indonesians through fair means or foul. I do not question Indonesia’s RIGHT to carry out the death sentence in accordance with the law, except in cases where the defendant is clearly mentally ill, or where the law may have been mis-applied by judges of dubious probity. In several of the cases which ended with bullets on Thursday, in other words. What I do question is Indonesia’s DESIRE to kill low-level drug mules. Some 86% of Indonesians approved of the killing in one poll. (Over 50% also wanted to see people put to death for corruption, which would certainly hollow out the government and the political parties; Indonesians are more indulgeant towards terrorists, however, with only 2% supporting their execution.)
To me, the most depressing thing about Jokowi’s desperate grasp for popularity at home is that it may just work.
For the record: Following edits, The New Yorker piece suggests that the US is doing better than Indonesia at harm reduction. Actually, it’s a toss-up. Indonesia has better laws but arguably worse practice. In the US, federal law remains antediluvian, but some cities and states do quite well in practice at helping injectors stay safe.
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