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A chance to alter course of religious dynamics in Indonesia

Last month, when Indonesian Home Affairs Minister Tjahjo Kumolo announced only days after the new Cabinet was sworn in that people would have the option of leaving the religion column blank in their state-issued identity (ID) cards, the knee-jerk reactions against it forced him to clarify or, rather, soften his remark.

President Joko Widodo’s decision to retain Religious Affairs Minister Lukman Hakim Saifuddin (picture) was hailed as a step towards improving the government’s treatment of followers of minority religions in the country. Photo: @khoirondurori, Twitter

President Joko Widodo’s decision to retain Religious Affairs Minister Lukman Hakim Saifuddin (picture) was hailed as a step towards improving the government’s treatment of followers of minority religions in the country. Photo: @khoirondurori, Twitter

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Last month, when Indonesian Home Affairs Minister Tjahjo Kumolo announced only days after the new Cabinet was sworn in that people would have the option of leaving the religion column blank in their state-issued identity (ID) cards, the knee-jerk reactions against it forced him to clarify or, rather, soften his remark.

Having said that stating one’s religion is a matter of privacy, he later qualified his statement by saying that the option applied only to followers of religions that are not formally recognised by the state. Followers of the six formally recognised religions — Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism — must continue to state their religions in the cards, he said.

Granted, he was avoiding controversies so early in his term, but this would have been a great opportunity to delete the religion column altogether from the state ID card, thus addressing a host of issues that has led to decades of discriminations and violence.

Mr Tjahjo’s initial statement is still the most politically progressive of any Indonesian government official in terms of religious relations, since the late President Abdurrahman Wahid moved to recognise Confucianism about 13 years ago. In the same year he made Chinese New Year a holiday, effectively lifting an over-three-decade-long ban on its celebration in Indonesia.

On paper, recent laws and regulations allow followers of minority and indigenous religions such as Sunda Wiwitan, the native faith of the Sundanese, and Kejawen, the native faith of the Javanese, to leave the religion column blank in their ID cards.

However, in practice, members of religious minority groups have to identify themselves as observers of state-recognised religions, or they would not be issued the cards, effectively denying them public and social services.

Prominent civil society figures and human rights activists agree that deleting the religion column altogether is a step forward to preventing religious violence in the country, including those perpetrated against minority communities such as the Ahmadis and the Shias.

In sectarian conflicts such as in Poso, Central Sulawesi, and in Ambon, Maluku, in 2000-05, being caught with the wrong ID Card in the wrong place means losing one’s life, a fact I personally experienced. As a journalist travelling through the sectarian conflicts in Poso many years ago, I did not take my ID card with me for safety reasons, as I passed both the warring Muslim and Christian areas.

DISCRIMINATION OF RELIGIOUS MINORITIES

Amnesty International said that despite some positive human rights development in Indonesia since the democratic and political reforms in 1998, freedom of religion remains severely restricted, owing to the 1965 Blasphemy Law and the 2008 Law on Electronic Information and Transactions.

Both of these laws are often used to target individuals who belong to minority religions, faiths and opinions, and particularly those who adhere to interpretations of Islam that deviate from the mainstream form of Islam in Indonesia, said Amnesty International’s recently launched report Prosecuting Beliefs: Indonesia’s Blasphemy Laws.

Most widely persecuted are the Ahmadi followers, who despite identifying themselves as Muslims, are declared as deviant, even non-Muslims, by other Muslim groups.

In the 10 years of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s administration, criminalisation of individuals for blasphemy was done to curb freedom of thought, conscience and religion, said the Amnesty International report. The organisation documented at least 106 people imprisoned under the law since 2004, some for up to five years and most of whom are of minority religious beliefs.

One of the recent high-profile individual cases involved a former civil servant in Sumatra who was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment after posting “God does not exist” on his Facebook page. His formal charge was giving false information by claiming he was a Muslim in his ID card.

In the same period, Amnesty International has also recorded increasing levels of harassment, intimidation and attacks against religious minorities, fuelled by discriminatory laws and regulations at the national and local levels. They include attacks on places of worship and homes by mobs, in some cases resulting in the forced eviction of communities from their homes into temporary shelters and accommodation. The police often turned a blind eye.

Mr Tjahjo’s seeming backtrack from the original plan to reduce the government’s involvement in individual religious observance followed some protests by politicians from Muslim-based parties and conservative Islamic groups that accused the plan as being against Indonesia’s ideology and feared it would lead to secularisation of the country. Pancasila, the five principles adopted as the national ideology, stipulates that every citizen believes in the existence of one God.

But religion was actually made compulsory in the state ID cards sometime in the mid-1960s, in the aftermath of the 1965 aborted communist coup in Indonesia that brought the late President Suharto to power. Fears over the rise of communism led to a ban on atheism and the eventual state recognition of only five religions. In addition, ethnic Chinese Indonesians were not allowed to practise their own faith, particularly Confucianism, and had to change their Chinese names, a move that would be reversed only more than 30 years later.

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s decision to retain Religious Affairs Minister Lukman Hakim Saifuddin, who was installed by Dr Yudhoyono in June to replace Suryadharma Ali after the latter was named a graft suspect, was hailed as a step towards improving the government’s treatment of followers of minority religions in the country.

In his short tenure, Mr Lukman has expressed his intention to reach out to the minority religious groups most vulnerable to discrimination and shown his firm stance on religious militancy.

The Jokowi administration now has a chance to alter the course of religious dynamics in Indonesia by cutting back the government’s involvement in individual religious affairs. Many are counting on him to make sure he does not back down on his own commitment. THE MALAY MAIL

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Devi Asmarani is a freelance journalist based in Jakarta.

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