Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto [1 ed.] 9781782387459, 9781845454050

Citation preview

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Identifying with Freedom

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis General Editor: Bruce Kapferer Volume 1 THE WORLD TRADE CENTER AND GLOBAL CRISIS Critical Perspectives Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 2 GLOBALIZATION Critical Issues Edited by Allen Chun Volume 3 CORPORATE SCANDAL Global Corporatism against Society Edited by John Gledhill Volume 4 EXPERT KNOWLEDGE First World Peoples, Consultancy, and Anthropology Edited by Barry Morris and Rohan Bastin

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Volume 5 STATE, SOVEREIGNTY, WAR Civil Violence in Emerging Global Realities Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 6 THE RETREAT OF THE SOCIAL The Rise and Rise of Reductionism Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 7 OLIGARCHS AND OLIGOPOLIES New Formations of Global Power Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 8 NATIONALISM’S BLOODY TERRAIN Racism, Class Inequality, and the Politics of Recognition Edited by George Baca Volume 9 IDENTIFYING WITH FREEDOM Indonesia after Suharto Edited by Tony Day Volume 10 THE GLOBAL IDEA OF “THE COMMONS” Edited by Donald M. Nonini

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Identifying with Freedom Indonesia after Suharto

f Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Edited by Tony Day

Berghahn Books NEW YORK • OXFORD

www.berghahnbooks.com

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Paperback edition published in 2007 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2007 Berghahn Books All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10-ISBN 1-84545-405-7 (pbk.) 13-ISBN 978-1-84545-405-0 (pbk.) Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

CONTENTS

f Introduction: Identifying with Freedom Tony Day 1

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Gay and Lesbian Indonesians and the Idea of the Nation Tom Boellstorff 19

Democracy, Polygamy, and Women in Post-Reformasi Indonesia Suzanne Brenner 28

Islamic Influences on Indonesian Feminism Kathryn Robinson 39

Going ‘Un-Native’ in Indonesia(n) Joseph Errington 49

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

vi

Contents

Indonesian Publishing: New Freedoms, Old Worries, and Unfinished Democratic Reform Michael Nieto Garcia 58

‘New Barbarism’ or Old Agency among the Dayak? Reflections on Post-Suharto Ethnic Violence in Kalimantan Michael R. Dove 70

Vigilantes and the State Joshua Barker 87

The Ironies of Instability in Indonesia Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Dan Slater 95

Indonesia Seen by Outside Insiders: Its Chinese Alters in Transnational Space Donald M. Nonini 105

Indonesians in Asylum Loren Ryter 125

Notes on Contributors 135

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

500

m

ca

u

ac

250

Map of Indonesia

100°

250

f to

0

0

S

al

SINGAPORE

I

J A V A

ant

an

S E A

Kalim

Borneo

MAL AYS IA

BRUNE

500 mi

750 km

110°

I N D I A N

Makassar

120°

Poso si we S u l aNo r th Massamba Luwu

Ambon

SE

A

ew

Gu

10°

ea

140°

in

PAPUA

PA PUA 0° NEW GUINEA

O C E A N

AR AFU R A SE A

AU ST R A L I A 130°

TIM OR LESTE

SEA

CERAM

P A C I F I C

BANDA

S

EA

PHI L I PPI N E S

TIMOR SEA

Dili

Manado

C E L E B ES S EA

SULU SEA

O C E A N

Jakarta ura Cirebon ad Bogor Surabaya M li Puncak Ba Bandung Yogyakarta J a v a Denpasar

r a

10°

M

t

N

0°

Medan

M AL AYS IA

SOUTH CHINA SEA

s

ka

Banda Aceh

a Ma

10°

it ra St

sa r

A

CC

ai LU

Str MO

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

N

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

INTRODUCTION Identifying with Freedom

f

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Tony Day

By now, Is knew the society she was entering. She had found a circle of acquaintances far wider than the circle of her brothers, sisters and parents. She now occupied a defined position in that society: as a woman, as a typist in a government office, as a free individual. She had become a new human being, with new understanding, new tales to tell, new perspectives, new attitudes, new interests—newnesses that she had managed to pluck and assemble from her acquaintance[s]. And all of this proceeded, untouched, amid the suffering of day-to-day existence.1

The essays in this forum offer sharply focused and critical perspectives on the consequences, both intended and unforeseen, of reform in Indonesia since the resignation of President Suharto on 21 May 1998. Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, a huge archipelago of fascinating diversity and complexity, is now poised to assume a leadership role in Southeast Asia, with China on the rise and the moribund Association of Southeast Asian

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

2

Tony Day

Nations (ASEAN) coming back to life (Sheridan 2005). Until recently, little about Indonesia has been coming to the attention of North America and Europe, the heartland of colonial empires new and old, except when terrorists or natural disasters, such as the tsunami of 26 December 2004, strike with deadly and newsworthy effect. Now, as former President Jimmy Carter told the assembled mourners at the funeral of Coretta Scott King on 7 February 2006, an event watched by millions on television around the world, Indonesia is a democracy. It is on the front line of George W. Bush’s ‘war on terror’. Not coincidentally, the United States has resumed arming Indonesia’s military, still fresh from its brutal war against an independence movement in the province of Aceh and its genocidal repression of freedom in East Timor. The overriding issue in Indonesia today, therefore, as a new age of democracy, American militaristic intervention, and Chinese economic dominance begins to dawn in Southeast Asia, is ‘freedom’—what it means, who defines it, how it is exercised, where it will lead. In 1945, young revolutionaries, like the character Is in the passage from a short story by Indonesia’s most famous writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer ([1952] 1989: 182), quoted above, were “gilapolitik” (politics-crazy), as they struggled for both personal and national “independence” (kemerdekaan).2 More than half a century later, after 32 years of authoritarian rule under Suharto and his New Order (1966–1998), Indonesians are crazy about many kinds of freedom (kebebasan)—freedoms that are subjective and sexual as well as public and political.3 The essays in this collection examine some of the manifestations and paradoxes of kemerdekaan/kebebasan in Indonesia today. They suggest that Indonesians are endeavoring to show the world what democracy will look like in a uniquely plural, Asian nation, one in which Islam is dominant but not hegemonic, in which support is

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction

3

strong for both a secular state and a society that is multicultural and free. The forum opens with five essays that examine the cultural dimensions of freedom in Indonesia. The essays by Boellstorff, Brenner, and Robinson engage with the question of freedom in an area that is foundational to the construction of both individual and national identity in the globalized era generally: gendered subjectivity. Boellstorff argues that since the 1970s, gay and lesbi men and women have constructed Indonesian identities for themselves, with the help of the mass media, especially television and films.4 This process, he claims, might appear to work in opposition to the heterosexual norms propagated by the New Order state but is in fact deeply intertwined with these norms and their assumptions regarding identity, community, and national belonging. Boellstorff (2005: 87) calls this a process of “dubbing culture.” Although identifying with foreign examples of gay culture, gay and lesbi people “are completely Indonesian, but to be ‘completely Indonesian’ requires thinking of one’s position in a transnational world” (ibid.: 81–88). Indonesian gays, Boellstorff suggests, are not so much Southeast Asian participants in a global, middle-class gay movement fostered by the Western media as they are committed, cosmopolitan Indonesian nationalists who insist that gender freedom is fundamental to what being Indonesian actually means. The question of Indonesian gay identity is linked to the struggle for gender equality in marriage. Under the New Order, heterosexual, monogamous marriage became the only form of marital union to receive the full blessing of the state, a strategy that facilitated the containment of an Islamic movement on the rise as well as the revolutionary potential of women’s emancipation. “[I]deological control over women and the family was vital to maintaining control over the nation,” writes Suzanne Brenner (2005: 96). Since the late 1800s, in fact, the marriage question

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

4

Tony Day

has been one of the most important and disputed areas of debate over how to construct a modern Indonesia. For the early nationalists, the struggle against arranged marriage and the social stigma attached to inter-racial unions was integral to the striving for emancipation from colonial rule (Foulcher and Day 2002: 49–60, 85–143; Siegel 1997: 54– 114). Some also argued that a strong, independent Indonesian nation should be built on the foundation of secure, monogamous marriages and that the practice of polygamy would hinder its development into a modern society.5 For the majority Muslims of Indonesia, marriage has long been an issue where a battle line between religious law (shari’a) and the secular Indonesian state has been drawn. In the midst of this struggle, Indonesian women have become emblematic, not just of national and Islamic identity, but of what it means to be a modern individual of any gender (Brenner 2005: 116). With deft irony, Brenner’s essay shows how democratization since 1998 has also stirred up new waves of patriarchy in Indonesia, as evidenced by resurgent support for polygamy. There is now also a strong possibility that conservative shari’a restrictions on women may be introduced at the local level in the newly decentralized archipelago. Brenner’s most important point, however, is that, viewed comparatively against the histories of regime change elsewhere in the world, the resurgence of patriarchy in Indonesia has less to do with Islam than with the unintended social consequences of the destruction of authoritarian regimes. Islamic conservatism in Indonesia, like Christian fundamentalism in the United States, is in part a class-based reaction to new (im)moralities and social dislocations brought about by mediatized, global capitalism. Once again, as in the days of the New Order, the family has become a critical battleground in the fight for freedom. Indonesian women appear to be in no need of paternalistic intervention, however. Robinson records and celebrates

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction

5

the activism of Indonesian middle-class Muslim women who are themselves making use of the rich resources of the Islamic tradition, in all of its local and global expressions, to argue their own case for equality and freedom in the sight of men and God. Robinson’s argument goes to the heart of what is wrong with ‘the war on terror’: its violent, radically freedom-destroying, neo-colonial reductionism. As many have argued, a healthy pluralism of Islamic views is alive and well in contemporary Indonesia, even in regions such as Sulawesi in eastern Indonesia, where long-simmering violence has been given reductive religious labeling linking it to ‘terror’.6 Brenner and Robinson also implicitly raise a question. Will middle-class Muslim women continue to lead the way in brokering new freedoms for Indonesian women generally, or will they falter in the face of continuing, if not growing, social inequality in Indonesia, conditions that foster fundamentalist and paternalistic rejection of freedom around the world? The essays by Errington and Garcia shed light on the crucial, ongoing role of language and print capitalism in the making of modern Indonesia, a subject that the writings of Benedict Anderson have made familiar to students of nationalism everywhere. While it is true that from the late nineteenth century onwards, the Malay language and its Indonesian variant, Bahasa Indonesia, have served admirably as a linguistic medium for the formation of a strong national identity, in which secular, Islamic, modern, and cosmopolitan elements have continued to be synthesized in dynamically creative ways (Anderson 1996; Laffan 2003: 142–180), Indonesian, as Errington suggests, is a problematic linguistic tool for the construction and maintenance of an independent identity in the global age. Errington argues forcefully that its very ‘un-nativeness’ is a strength, evidenced by the amazing role of Indonesian as a language of anti-Indonesian resistance and now as a lingua franca in multi-lingual Timor Leste, the former East

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

6

Tony Day

Timor. Yet this very strength may also contain a weakness. Indonesian’s lack of any ‘natural’ connection with a powerful cultural center, either indigenous or foreign, makes it easy to colonize and dominate (Foulcher and Day 2002: 4–9; see Jennifer Lindsay’s comments in note 9). As Garcia shows, the writings of the latest Indonesian literary movement, known as Generation 98, reveal that Indonesian, successively colonized by the Dutch and then the New Order state, is still being liberated for use by private Indonesians. It is hardly surprising that in tandem with their struggle for freedom in other areas of private and public life, women writers are the ones who are taking the lead in the process of literary emancipation (see Ayu 2005; Utami 2005). But how many other Indonesians are in fact participating in this ongoing revolution? How many readers worldwide are even faintly aware that it is taking place? Increasingly more, but overall still very little, fiction or non-fiction moves either in or out of Indonesia via the medium of the national language, which until roughly the eighteenth century served as the major lingua franca for the trading world of all Southeast Asia. Today that lingua franca is English, and Indonesian gives its speakers only limited access to thought worlds beyond its own insular shores. Arguably, given the problems facing readerships and publishers examined by Garcia, radio and television, both now broadcasting programs in regional languages as well as Indonesian, are playing the leading role in stimulating Indonesians to ‘dub culture’, in ways that may also lead to the strengthening of regional as well as national and transnational identities (Jurriens 2002; Sakai 2004; Widodo 2002). Encouraged by political decentralization, the dissemination of rediscovered linguistic differences may encourage the formation of multiple regional nationalisms that will compete with a unitary Indonesia and its national language as primary sources of imagined community. Be that as it may, Garcia suggests that the right to

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction

7

free expression in any medium or language is a fragile one, threatened by shadow economies and oppressive forces that subvert law and order, poorly guaranteed in any case by Indonesian law, in an increasingly politically decentralized and culturally fragmented nation-state. Just what the words ‘nation’, ‘state’, and the hyphen that connects them might now mean is the central theme in the last five essays in our collection. Dove examines a nation that appears to be fragmenting, violently, into warring ethnic communities, a process that is being encouraged by political decentralization, legislated into law in 1999. Ethnicity was all but ignored in analyses of Indonesian politics prior to 1998, even though ethnic categories, ‘reinvented’ and elaborated into ‘customary laws’ (adat), were an important tool of Dutch colonial rule, and the dominance of the ethnic Javanese during Suharto’s regime was widely resented by other ethnic groups (Suharto was himself Javanese, as was most of the military and government elite). But Dove shows how the Dayak of Borneo have turned to ethnicity to account for their violent actions, for many of the same reasons that nationalists everywhere have identified themselves as members of what Anderson has famously termed an “imagined community” (Chabal and Daloz 1999: 57). By forming a community based on ethnicity, Dayak empower themselves to act as free agents rather than remain victims of neo-colonial control and objects of ethnographic (mis)interpretation. In adopting a cultural ‘counter-narrative’ to explain and take responsibility for their own violence, Dayak exercise a freedom of selfdefinition that may ultimately strengthen, even though it appears to threaten, the basis for national community, one that becomes truly plural in its unity, as expressed by the national motto in the Old Javanese language, “Bhinneka Tunggal Ika,” literally, ”Divided into parts, it is united.” From the days of colonialism until the end of the New Order in 1998, cultural pluralism, like the national language

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

8

Tony Day

itself, has been strongly influenced by the state. Now it may be becoming a resource for the creation of a more deeply rooted sense of national belonging.7 On the other hand, what we may instead be witnessing, as Barker and Slater both suggest from different perspectives, is not the democratic reimagining of a more culturally plural Indonesian nation, but the collapse of the unitary Indonesian state. The actual unity of this state may have always been more mythical than real, which is not to say that it was, therefore, any less oppressive. Even during the periods of greatest centralization, from early times the ‘state’ in Indonesia has been a plethora of loosely co-ordinated political networks and micro-states, each claiming sovereignty over its own community of followers (Day 2002). ‘Communists’, ‘organizations without form’, and ‘criminals’, the labels for those groups whose exclusion during the New Order era bestowed sovereignty on Suharto’s state, have been succeeded by ‘Madurese’, ‘Muslims’, ‘Christians’, ‘Chinese’, ‘thieves’, and ‘witches’, outsider ‘others’ whom different groups, for different reasons, have been licensed to kill or rape, even pulverize beyond recognition, in the name of particular notions of sovereign community (Agamben 1998; Colombijn 2002; Siegel 1998, 2006). The ‘informal networks’ that survived the Suharto era to form the collusive, predatory Jakarta elite analyzed by Slater—as well as similar lower-level Suharto-era bureaucratic networks, which are competing for dominance in the regions, cities, and towns (see Hadiz 2004)—are among the thousands of petty state groupings vying for power in Indonesia today. I might have said “vying for Power,” because the situation described by Dove, Barker, and Slater calls to mind the analysis in which Anderson (1990) defines “the idea of Power in Javanese culture.” Power, like Agamben’s notion of sovereignty, is something wild and external to the political order. Bruce Kapferer (2004: 6) calls sovereign power an “unconstrained capacity to act.” It “antecedes questions of

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction

9

good and evil” (Anderson 1990: 23) and is the vital “constitutive force” of all order and morality inside the state (Kapferer 2004: 6). If this theoretical model is at all applicable to the politics of contemporary Indonesia, some of the freest and most powerful people in Indonesia today are the preman, the thugs-for-hire who carry out much of the violence and whose name derives from the Dutch word vrijman (freeman), a term for merchants who were not employed by the seventeenth-century Dutch East India Company but were permitted to continue trading with the company’s blessing as long as they served the company’s financial interests as well as their own (Ryter 2001: 130). As one contemporary preman put it in a magazine interview quoted by Ryter (ibid.): “Preman means a free person, exactly free-man. I am one of these. A preman is a person who is free, not tied by any knot, free to determine his own life and death, so long as he fulfills the requirements and the laws of this country. But I am free to choose, to carry out the permitted or the not permitted, with all of its risks.” The preman is a social outsider who acts like a sovereign, able to obey or flout the law at will, a truly stateless ‘free man’, whose violence against others at the behest of those who are even more powerful and free than himself generates the sovereign power of the state. The preman is a New and post–New Order variant of a kind of powerful, sovereign male individual with a long and violent history in the annals of the archipelago. And so it is perhaps not surprising that large numbers of Indonesians have taken flight from the reign of this kind of free-for-all sovereignty in search of well-being elsewhere. No single ethnic group has contributed more to the economic, intellectual, and cultural development of modern Indonesia than its citizens of Chinese descent, and yet they have been singled out repeatedly, in colonial as well as post-colonial times, for persecution and violent mistreatment, as hap-

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

10

Tony Day

pened during the riots that erupted in May 1998 following the shooting by the army of innocent university students in Jakarta. Since the resignation of Suharto, much has improved for Chinese-Indonesians. Chinese writing can be seen in public, Chinese customary rituals are now publicly observed, Chinese-language books are on sale, and courses in Mandarin are everywhere (Hoon 2004). Indonesians of Chinese descent, now allowed to be ‘different’, are however still treated as non-Indonesian ‘others’, as the individuals interviewed by Nonini in Australia make clear. But like the gays, women, and Dayak who appear elsewhere in this forum, the refugees studied by Nonini are themselves agents who attempt to control their own destinies. They choose to be ‘Chinese’ and ‘Indonesian’ in different ways, depending on their gender and varied subjectivities. Like many Indonesians, they are “flexible” (Ong 1999) in how they construct their citizenship and their cultural identity. But their ‘cosmopolitanism’ does not convey the kind of blithe, protean, transnational yet patriotic individuality celebrated by Kwame Anthony Appiah (1998, 2006). These are people who struggle—linguistically, socially, economically—to survive, belong, and succeed. Their freedom is back-breaking work, filled with the experience and memory of tragedy, just as it is for the characters in the short story by Pramoedya quoted at the beginning of this introduction, whose freedom co-exists with, but does not cancel out, the “suffering of day-to-day existence.” Yet as Ryter points out, not every Indonesian asylumseeker is fleeing persecution by the state. Ryter’s essay reveals how Indonesian gangsterism and entrepreneurial opportunism have taken to the global street. The paradox noted by both Nonini and Ryter is that asylum-seekers, whatever their motives for leaving, remain committed to their national Indonesian identities. Like diasporic communities from China, India, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, and others, they bear witness to the fact that the

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction

11

‘nation’ lives on in the global era as a fundamental form of imagined human community, even when it is lived at long distance. What is the meaning of ‘freedom’ in Indonesia today? The essays in this forum suggest that it lies somewhere between kemerdekaan and kebebasan, between freedom from the oppressions of the past and the freedom to build many new kinds of future, both individual and communal. What these futures will look like is still unclear. How Islam and democracy will co-exist and develop in mutually affirmative ways remains one of the most fascinating developments for outsiders to watch. Given the fact that Indonesia has not only the world’s largest Muslim population but also its most successfully independent, secularized, and pluralistic one, much rests on the success or failure of the Indonesian experiment in building democracy as a model that could be followed elsewhere. Indonesia has a long history of cultural and ethnic tolerance, yet as these essays demonstrate, it is a history punctuated by outbursts of deadly mass violence. Perhaps violence and democracy are not necessarily incompatible.8 The essays in this collection, all written by non-Indonesians, express ambivalence about some of the directions in which Indonesians, with their hard-won freedoms, are now heading. It is possible to draw the conclusion from what is written here that there is more dedication in Indonesia today to securing private and local spheres of freedom by dismantling the oppressive restrictions imposed by the New Order on individuals and regions than with reconstituting a strong, democratic, national community, united in its resolve to chart an independent course in a world threatened by economic inequality and US imperial domination. The rampant materialism of late capitalism and the irresistible allure of extremist ‘individualism’, so appealing to middle classes everywhere in the world today, may produce nasty, unintended results in Indonesia, not least of which

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

12

Tony Day

would be the dominance in national life of a kind of religious fundamentalism that is both anti-Western (the source of all that is ‘immoral’ about ‘freedom’) and anti-Indonesian, opposed to the very foundational principles of secular multi-culturalism upon which the Republic stands. And there is still China to be reckoned with, how its rise may affect Indonesia in social, political, and economic terms. But Indonesians are now free to differ, and therein lies great hope, albeit fraught with danger, as one of the most cosmopolitan of Indonesian nationalists, Goenawan Mohamad (2002: 3–5), has argued in an essay written in Indonesian entitled “Differing.”9 Goenawan is composing his essay in December, at year’s end, when people “slowly turn the key in the door to their rooms and listen to the world asking: are we really all the same?” His starting point is the honor killing of a 16-year-old girl in Palestine. Is this murder the expression of a ‘cultural difference’ or the violation of a person’s right to life under universal human law? The event is both particular and universal. “Everything that exists gets its identity through being different, and every existing being is always within a situation of comparison with the other.” Resorting to words for difference in his native Javanese, Goenawan can think of this process of universal differing as playful but finite, since it is always halted by violence and death. There is always, as in the case of the murdered girl, a need for justice, for the adjudication of others. “Suddenly there is a need, a longing perhaps, for ‘the same’,” and as Goenawan observes, the Malay/Indonesian word for ‘same’ (sama), is the root of the word for ‘fellow beings’ (sesama). “The world is a conversation between these differing sesama or fellows.” And so is a nation, a community of different human beings, united in the desire for freedom and justice. This desire also calls for a state that can guarantee “relative difference” (Goenawan’s phrase, my italics), free of “hate, anger and murder,” for all.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Introduction

13

Acknowledgments My thanks to Tom Boellstorff, Suzanne Brenner, Michael Dove, Joe Errington, Keith Foulcher, Bruce Kapferer, Jennifer Lindsay, and Richard Maxwell for their ‘critical interventions’ in the writing of this introduction.

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. Quoted and translated from Pramoedya Ananta Toer ([1952] 1989) by Benedict Anderson (1998: 41). 2. See Reid (1998) and Taylor (2003: 304–305) for discussions of the word merdeka (free, independent). In the course of its long history, merdeka has come to mean “freedom for personal development realized through duty to society” (Taylor 2003: 305). 3. A good example of the meaning of the word bebas (free, unimpeded) in the sense I am using it here can be found in the following excerpt from an advertisement for Ayu Utami’s 1989 novel Saman (see Utami 2005), a ‘classic’ from the Generation 98 group of post-Suharto authors: “Discusses sex, love, politics, and religion and feelings that fuse together between characters, who are portrayed as being without rigidity, without guilt, as totally free (bebas sebebas-bebasnya) as an Ursula Brangwen, the principal heroine [in The Rainbow] of the writer D. H. Lawrence, who dances naked on a mountain top without inhibition.” Accessed online at http://www.kompas.com/tbgramedia/product _detail.cfm?bid=47851. 4. For more on the role of the media and the Internet in contemporary Indonesia, see Sen and Hill (2000) and Hill and Sen (2005). 5. Susan Blackburn (2004: 123) writes: “Some women leaders—and a few men—argued that the state must ban polygamy for nationalist reasons. At the 1928 women’s congress, a strong opponent of polygamy, Siti Sundari, made a connection between moral outrage and nationalism. ‘If the Indonesian nation wants to become a nation that has a place of dignity in the world,’ she argued, ‘it must be built on households based on mutual love.’ Polygamy was indefensible: ‘The stronger our households, the stronger the

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

14

Tony Day

Indonesian nation; the happier and more secure the marriages of Indonesians, the happier and safer the Indonesian nation.’” 6. On Islamic debate in Sulawesi, see Donohoe (2004). The position papers on terrorism in Indonesia prepared by Sidney Jones for Crisis Watch consistently argue for greater understanding of the diversity of Islam in Indonesia. Jones’s reports and other informative materials on Islam and terrorism worldwide can be found at http://www.crisigroup.org/home/index.cfm?. 7. Perhaps the reimagining of a more deeply Indonesian national community after Suharto, by means of a new exploration and appreciation of ethnic identity, is what Ayu Utami is attempting in the following passage from her novel Saman, in which the narrator, using free indirect discourse (a rhetorical device that is itself an act of social inclusion) and eroticized references to ethnicity, describes the growing attraction of the protagonist Laila to a Sumatran Batak, who becomes her lover: “He spoke the flat Jakarta vernacular. But his hard Batak accent was evident from time to time, especially when he was arguing. She loved to listen to it. Possibly because she was already attracted to him. Or maybe too because she was born of parents who never really liked the domineering Javanese. Her name was Laila Gagarina, a signal to an Indonesian that she was a post-1960s child of Minangkabau origins. Her father was obviously an admirer of Yuri Gagarin. Her mother was a Sundanese with ambivalent feelings about Java. Laila felt that his strong Batak accent contained a quality of honesty, of forthrightness. Or maybe she was merely projecting her own hopes onto this man to whom she was increasingly attracted” (Utami 2005: 20). 8. In any case, it is important to build a future, democratic or otherwise, based on reality, not myth. Writing in the New York Times (15 February 2006: A23) in response to the furor over the publication of Danish newspaper cartoons defaming the Prophet, Karim Raslan, a Malaysian lawyer, author, and commentator on Indonesian politics, observes from Jakarta: “Yes, we [Southeast Asian Muslims] are part of the extended family of believers, the ummah. We cannot help but feel some sense of solidarity with our co-religionists in Damascus, Tehran or Cairo. But the explosiveness of the Arab street doesn’t translate, somehow, to the tropics. Many of us have a growing suspicion that we are culturally different from our Arabic- and Urdu-speaking brethren, perhaps more tolerant and less emotional.” Karim has

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction

15

possibly forgotten about the “explosiveness” of the slaughter of up to a million so-called Communist Indonesians by their fellow citizens in 1965–1966, the genocide carried out by Indonesians in East Timor between 1975 and 1999, and the rape and murder of what some estimates put at more than 1,000 Chinese Indonesians in May 1998. 9. The Indonesian version was published on 24 December 2000. In her introduction to the essay collection, Goenawan Mohamad’s translator, Jennifer Lindsay, comments on the creative word-play in “Differing,” and so illustrates Errington’s contention that the peculiarly “un-native” Indonesian language is capable of expressing a “decentered, flexible” subjectivity in a globalized world (Mohamad 2002: xiv). She also offers another observation, suggesting that the process of turning ‘official’ Indonesian into a deeply expressive wellspring of national identity and subjective freedom is far from over: “All this [i.e., Goenawan’s] experimentation with the Indonesian language comes at a time when Indonesian—particularly in the media—is being increasingly impoverished by the lazy use of English, or Indonesianised English. This is considered trendy. Indonesian, and Malay and regional language root words are not smart. And Goenawan’s enriching of the written language comes at a time when the miracle of Indonesian’s transformation into truly a first language … is so strikingly evident for most of the population. This means above all the transformation of Indonesian into a real oral rather than written language, and this has been happening over the past thirty years, particularly over the past twenty with the invasion of television bringing Indonesian speech, and predominantly Jakarta colloquial speech, into farflung homes” (ibid.: xv). See also Lindsay’s examination of the question of what to call Indonesia’s national language, another aspect of its ‘un-native’ status, in her “The Malaise of ‘Bahasa Indonesia’” in the 15 February 2006 edition of Jakarta Post.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

16

Tony Day

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1990. Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ______. 1996. “Language, Fantasy, Revolution: Java 1900–1950.” Pp. 26–40 in Making Indonesia, ed. Daniel S. Lev and Ruth McVey. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ______. 1998. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World. London: Verso. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1998. “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” Pp. 91–114 in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ______. 2006. “The Case for Contamination.” The New York Times Magazine, 6 January, 30–37, 52. Ayu, Djenar Maesa. 2005. They Say I’m a Monkey. Trans. Michael Nieto Garcia. Jakarta: Metafor Publishing. Blackburn, Susan. 2004. Women and State in Modern Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boellstorff, Tom. 2005. The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brenner, Suzanne. 2005. “Islam and Gender Politics in Late New Order Indonesia.” Pp. 93–118 in Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia, ed. Andrew C. Wilford and Kenneth M. George. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University SEAP Publications. Chabal, Patrick, and Jean-Pascal Daloz. 1999. Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument. Oxford: James Currey. Colombijn, Freek. 2002. “Maling, Maling! The Lynching of Petty Criminals.” Pp. 299–329 in Roots of Violence in Indonesia: Contemporary Violence in Historical Perspective, ed. Freek Colombijn and J. Thomas Lindblad. Leiden: KITLV Press. Day, Tony. 2002. Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Donohoe, Jennifer. 2004. “Opponents of Islamic Law: Diverse Responses to Proponents of Islamic Law Indicate Democracy Is Healthy in South Sulawesi.” Inside Indonesia 79 (July–September). http://www.insideindonesia.org/.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction

17

Foulcher, Keith, and Tony Day, eds. 2002. Clearing a Space: Postcolonial Readings of Modern Indonesian Literature. Leiden: KITLV Press. Hadiz, Vedi R. 2004. “Indonesian Local Party Politics: A Site of Resistance to Neoliberal Reform.” Critical Asian Studies 36, no. 4: 615–636. Hill, David T., and Krishna Sen. 2005. The Internet in Indonesia’s New Democracy. London: Routledge. Hoon, Chang-Yau. 2004. “How to Be Chinese: Ethnic Chinese Experience a ‘Reawakening’ of their Chinese Identity.” Inside Indonesia 78 (April–June). http://www.insideindonesia.org/. Jurriens, Edwin. 2002. “Radioactive: Radio Has Undergone a Revolution Since Suharto Resigned.” Inside Indonesia 72 (October– December). http://www.insideindonesia.org/. Kapferer, Bruce. 2004. “Introduction: Old Permutations, New Formations? War, State, and Global Transgression.” Pp. 1–15 in State, Sovereignty, War: Civil Violence in Emerging Global Realities, ed. Bruce Kapferer. New York: Berghahn Books. Laffan, Michael Francis. 2003. Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma Below the Winds. London: Routledge Curzon. Mohamad, Goenawan. 2002. Conversations with Difference: Essays from TEMPO Magazine. Trans. Jennifer Lindsay. Jakarta: PT Tempo Inti Media Tbk. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Reid, Anthony. 1998. “Merdeka: The Concept of Freedom in Indonesia.” Pp. 141–160 in Asian Freedoms: The Idea of Freedom in East and Southeast Asia, ed. David Kelly and Anthony Reid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryter, Loren. 2001. “Pemuda Pancasila: The Last Loyalist Free Men of Suharto’s Order?” Pp. 124–155 in Violence and the State in Suharto’s Indonesia, ed. Benedict R. O’G. Anderson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University SEAP Publications. Sakai, Minako. 2004. “Reviving ‘Malayness’: Searching for a New Dominant Ethnic Identity.” Inside Indonesia 78 (April–June). http://www.insideindonesia.org/. Sen, Krishna, and David T. Hill. 2000. Media, Culture and Politics in Indonesia. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Sheridan, Greg. 2005. “The Lure of Asia.” The Weekend Australian, 10–11 December, 17, 20. Siegel, James T. 1997. Fetish, Recognition, Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

18

Tony Day

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

______. 1998. A New Criminal Type in Jakarta: Counter-Revolution Today. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ______. 2006. Naming the Witch. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Taylor, Jean Gelman. 2003. Indonesia: Peoples and Histories. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Toer, Pramoedya Ananta. [1952] 1989. “Dia yang Menyerah” [She who gave up]. Pp. 171–228 in Cerita dari Blora [Tales from Blora]. Kuala Lumpur: Wira Karya. Utami, Ayu. 2005. Saman: A Novel. Trans. Pamela Allen. Jakarta: Equinox Publishing. Widodo, Amrih. 2002. “Consuming Passions: Millions of Indonesians Must Watch Soap Operas.” Inside Indonesia 72 (October–December). http://www.insideindonesia.org/.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

GAY AND LESBIAN INDONESIANS AND THE IDEA OF THE NATION

f Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Tom Boellstorff

It is remarkable how few Westerners know that Indonesia is the fourth most populous nation (after China, India, and the United States), or that Indonesia is home to more Muslims than any other country. These basic facts should be enough to establish Indonesia’s importance for current world affairs. In this essay, however, I argue for paying attention to the life-worlds of gay and lesbian Indonesians. While this might seem an unconventional topic, these Indonesians’ lives provide valuable clues to how being ‘Indonesian’ gets defined and to the workings of nationstates more generally. They teach us how heteronormativity—the assumption that heterosexuality is the only normal or proper sexuality—plays a fundamental role in forming nation-states as “imagined communities.”1 In Indonesia

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

20

Tom Boellstorff

and elsewhere, nation-states are modeled on a particular archetype of the nuclear family (husband, wife, and children, with the nation’s president as parent). In line with this model, nation-states often portray themselves as made up not just of individual citizens but of families, which almost always are assumed to be nuclear families despite the staggering range of family forms found in the world’s cultures. Restricting the family model to the heterosexual couple has been a key means by which the idea of the Indonesian nation (and other nations) has been promulgated and sustained. Thus, rather than see the exclusion of homosexuality as a latter-day response to an encroaching global gay and lesbian movement, this exclusion is most accurately understood as a point of departure by which the idea of ‘Indonesia’ comes to exist in the first place. Many ideas are packed into that opening paragraph, and I will spend the rest of this essay fleshing them out. If Westerners have heard of Indonesia, it is most likely Bali. Images of timeless tradition—batik cloth, exotic dances, sandy beaches—remain common. These stereotypes often spill over into the domains of sexuality and gender, so that Indonesia is assumed to be a ‘tolerant culture’, where gay, lesbian, and transgendered persons are valued as shamans or performers. The truth is more complex. Contemporary Indonesia is a vast, multi-cultural nation containing an estimated 670 ethnic and linguistic groups, some numbering in the millions, others with only a few thousand or even a few hundred members. Historically, some (but far from all) of these groups contained experts in ritual or performance who were men but who dressed as women while at work.2 A few of these ritual or performance professions persist, but they have little to do with gay or lesbian Indonesians. They are, after all, professions not sexualities: they require some kind of training and are performed in circumscribed contexts. That these professions are associated with men who dress like women

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Gay and Lesbian Indonesians

21

does not make them ‘third genders’ any more than the association of ‘nurse’ with women makes ‘nurse’ a gender. Distinguishing these professions from gay and lesbian Indonesians is a crucial first step toward understanding the significance of gay and lesbian Indonesians’ lives. A second confounding issue is that since approximately the late nineteenth century, there have been men in the Indonesian archipelago who dress as women some of the time (since about the late 1970s, often all day long), but do not engage in ritual performance. These men often see themselves as having women’s souls and are called by a variety of names, including banci and béncong (which are derogatory), as well as waria, the preferred contemporary term. As is the case for Thai kathoeys and other similar persons elsewhere in Southeast Asia and beyond, warias are much more visible in public life than gay or lesbian Indonesians. People often make fun of warias, but they are usually recognized as existing elements of Indonesian society.3

The Indonesian Situation While the general Indonesian public still confuses warias with gay men, they are distinct, and it is with gay men (and lesbian women) that this essay is primarily concerned.4 It appears that some Indonesians started calling themselves gay or lesbi in the late 1970s to early 1980s (I’ll use these terms for the remainder of this essay). They tend not to learn about these terms from their parents, neighbors, or Islamic teachers. Instead, most Indonesians learn of the idea that one could be gay or lesbi through mass media, including gossip columns in magazines, newspaper reports (often sensationalistic stories of suicide, theft, or murder), and above all imported television shows and films. This recalls the crucial role of mass media in fostering a sense of shared nationalism

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

22

Tom Boellstorff

in the modern era (see Anderson 1983). Because most gay and lesbi Indonesians do not speak English (Indonesia was a Dutch colony) and do not travel to the West, the idea that one could be gay or lesbi has been formed in surprising isolation from Western gay and lesbian subjectivities, despite the links forged by mass media. From the predominance of Islam to expectations about marriage and ‘coming out’, the terms gay and lesbi have taken on a uniquely Indonesian cast. I say “Indonesian cast” here because one of the most striking aspects of gay and lesbi subjectivities (senses of selfhood) is that they are overwhelmingly understood as national. Inhabitants of this nation often identify in ‘ethnolocal’ terms—Achenese, Javanese, Madurese, Balinese, and so on.5 In some ways, such forms of identification have increased under the regime of local autonomy that has followed the forced resignation of the country’s authoritarian president, Suharto, in 1998. Yet while on the face of things there is no reason why there could not be people in the archipelago who identify as lesbian Javanese, or gay Balinese, or so on—building ethnic-specific gay and lesbi networks, publishing local-language newsletters, and the like—gay and lesbi Indonesians see gay and lesbi as nationwide subjectivities, not limited to any one island, ethnic group, or language. This might seem almost inevitable, since the idea of being gay or lesbi clearly does not originate in one’s ethnic or local traditions. Yet there is a long history of all kinds of ideas becoming ‘localized’ in Indonesia over time. Additionally, it is striking that the concepts gay and lesbi are not seen as global subjectivities. Gay and lesbi Indonesians know that there are people describing themselves as gay or lesbian in some sense around the world, and they often feel connected to an intangible community or shared experience with them. But gay and lesbi Indonesians have surprisingly little contact with gay or lesbian Westerners,

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Gay and Lesbian Indonesians

23

given the usual assumption that persons outside the West using transformed versions of ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ must be jet-setting elites riding the crest of globalization. Instead, gay and lesbi Indonesians tend to see themselves as part of a national archipelago. This linkage between sexuality and nation is fascinating but not surprising, given that heterosexuality is so strongly promoted by the nationstate as the foundation of proper citizenship. The use of the nation-state as a kind of lens by which to understand sexuality did not originate with gay and lesbi Indonesians, but it has been redeployed by them in ways that the nation-state never anticipated. With regard to many issues I have raised—including the key role of mass media and the relationship between the nation-state and sexuality—the parallels between gay and lesbi subjectivities are conspicuous. There are, of course, differences as well. One of the most significant is that since the time when the concepts of gay and lesbi began forming in Indonesia to the present, there have been no publicly visible female counterparts to warias. Thus, from the outset warias and gay men have seen themselves as distinct—as persons marked primarily by transvestism on the one hand and homosexuality on the other. In contrast, a named subjectivity for female-to-male transgenders (known most often as tomboi) is as recent as the lesbi subject position. Some tombois consider themselves as a sub-type of lesbi women, but others see themselves as distinct (often emphasizing that tombois “have a man’s soul” just as many warias say they “have a woman’s soul”). In any case, they do not have anything remotely like the social recognition of warias (even though the ‘recognition’ of warias often takes the form of disapproval and rejection). At the level of day-to-day socialization, important differences between being gay and being lesbi emerge due to gender discrimination. There remains great pressure for gay men and lesbi women to marry heterosexually (and

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

24

Tom Boellstorff

oftentimes they wish to do so, a topic to which I return below), but being a wife and mother typically involves duties very different from being a husband and father. As the persons holding primary responsibility for the domestic sphere, wives find themselves with significant restrictions on their movement. To protect their ‘virtue’, women tend to be placed under greater scrutiny by their families even before they marry, and their mobility is thus limited. As a result, lesbi women for the most part cannot go out alone (particularly at night), whereas hanging out in parks, shopping malls, or each others’ apartments is a major means by which gay men meet each other and build community, aided by the advent of the Internet and particularly by cellphone use among rich and poor Indonesians alike. Despite these restrictions, many lesbi women manage to build rich and flourishing lives, ranging from open activism to the less visible but no less significant daily acts of friendship and love in the interstices of Indonesian society.

Sexuality and Nation My discussion of gay and lesbi lives has repeatedly returned to the question of heteronormativity, and specifically to the linkages between heterosexuality, kinship, and the nation. These links run deep: ‘nation’, after all, shares the same Latin root as ‘natal’. It is hardly a coincidence that the two ways to become part of a modern nation— being born a citizen or becoming ‘naturalized’—are the same two ways to become part of a modern family—via birth or adoption. The nation-state is now the dominant means of organizing societies worldwide, and the heteronormativity of this form has proven a common element of many nation-states despite differences of religion, ethnicity, geography, and wealth. This binding together of heteronormativity and nationalism finds its ultimate

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Gay and Lesbian Indonesians

25

expression in marriage. For instance, while Indonesians have married since long before the concept of ‘heterosexuality’ was named as such, the meanings of marriage have shifted greatly. The greatest shift has been the sea change from most marriages being arranged by one’s elders to most marriages being based on love. This shift, which in Indonesia dates only to the last 75 years or so, means that marriage is seen less as a contract between two families than as a chosen bond. Through love, you choose your husband or wife, just as in modern society you choose your leader (through democracy) and your possessions (through consumerism). All of these acts of choice define you as a modern person and as a member of Indonesian society, so the failure to choose correctly carries steep consequences. When marriages are mostly arranged, sexual orientation is not a significant category (and historically there was no term in any of the languages of Indonesia for it), but when marriages are mostly chosen, then that ‘choice’ fails if it is not a heterosexual choice. Sexual orientation has come into being as a recognized aspect of one’s personality, and since the 1920s there has existed a conceptual linkage between choosing one’s husband or wife and being a modern Indonesian (rather than one shackled to local tradition). Small wonder that most gay and lesbi Indonesians desire to marry, and small wonder that they often feel a sense of rejection by Indonesian society. We live in an era when the topic of sexuality is discussed as never before yet at the same time silenced as never before. A handful of nations now recognize gay and lesbian marriage, but many others banish the thought of such marriages and articulate a vision of the nation that excludes non-heterosexual persons of any kind. These recognitions and exclusions take culturally and historically specific forms. We need to pay attention to them not

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

26

Tom Boellstorff

just for what they teach us about sexuality per se but for what they teach us about transformations in conceptions of nationalism, society, and belonging. It is no longer acceptable to write about Indonesia or any other place and speak only of men. One should either make a concerted effort to include men and women, or acknowledge that one’s analysis is based upon men and consider the consequences of this fact. A similar shift is taking place with regard to sexuality. One should include heterosexual and homosexual (as well as bisexual) persons, or acknowledge that one’s analysis is based upon heterosexuality and consider the consequences of this fact. At stake is much more than a simple question of inclusion, of listening to silenced voices. It is not an issue of adding more sexual subjectivity categories to one’s data set; rather, it is an issue of addressing the significance of sexuality for a wide range of domains. This includes domains such as the nation-state—domains at the center of contemporary debates over our collective future in a world where globalization’s strange and developing legacies include new forms of exclusion, ossified tradition, and far-from-splendid isolation.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Gay and Lesbian Indonesians

27

Notes

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

1. The key text with regard to this issue is Anderson (1983). 2. More rarely, there could be found women dressing as men or acknowledged homosexuality. Sex with women was viewed by some men as a drain on their spiritual power, whereas sex with another man was not considered to be so damaging—or was not even seen as ‘sex’ at all. For a more detailed discussion of all of the topics raised in this essay, see my books The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Boellstorff 2005) and Coincidence: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Critique (Boellstorff 2007), and the references therein. 3. Historically, warias worked in lowbrow entertainment, as market traders or as sex workers, and now are strongly associated with hair salons and bridal make-up (see Boellstorff 2004). 4. The distinctiveness of these subjectivities does not mean that there are not various blurrings; for instance, there are some persons who move between being gay and waria (see Boellstorff 2005). 5. I discuss the term ‘ethnolocal’ in Boellstorff (2002).

References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Boellstorff, Tom. 2002. “Ethnolocality.” Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 3, no. 1: 24–48. ______. 2004. “Playing Back the Nation: Waria, Indonesian Transvestites.” Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 2: 159–195. ______. 2005. The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ______. 2007. Coincidence: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Critique. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

DEMOCRACY, POLYGAMY, AND WOMEN IN POST-REFORMASI INDONESIA

f Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Suzanne Brenner

In July 2003, a lavish award ceremony was held at a fivestar hotel in Jakarta. At the Polygamy Awards, as it was called, the financial sponsor and master of ceremonies, a wealthy entrepreneur named Puspo Wardoyo, handed out awards to several dozen Indonesian men who, in the view of the selection committee, had upheld the high moral and religious standards needed to be a successful polygamist. The idea of the ceremony was to bring polygamy and its practitioners out of the closet, so to speak, and to celebrate polygamy’s virtue as a respected Islamic tradition that should be a source of pride rather than shame for both men and women.1 Puspo Wardoyo, the jovial president of the Indonesian Polygamy Society (Masyarakat Poligami Indonesia), had embarked upon a highly publicized crusade to popularize polygamy. Although legal with some

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Democracy, Polygamy, and Women

29

restrictions for Muslim men in Indonesia, polygamy had a social taint to it that Puspo and others like him wanted to see erased. “A man who can afford it financially and who is of good character has the duty to have more than one wife. Polygamy is the most praiseworthy of actions … I want to spread the polygamy virus,” he commented in a magazine interview.2 Polygamy, Puspo argued, was a means of combating such evils as prostitution and adultery, and was an excellent way for financially secure men like himself to spread their wealth around so that more women could enjoy comfortable lives (Suryono 2003). God had endowed men with greater sexual desires than women, he asserted (as did many others who supported polygamy), and multiple marriages were the only legitimate way to channel those desires. He attributed part of his success in building up a large chain of barbecued-chicken restaurants to the fact that he had four wives and had been scrupulous in following Islamic dictates concerning polygamy, as well as other religious obligations. His campaign also brought a great deal of publicity to his restaurants, which included such items on the menu as “Polygamy Juice” (a blend of several fruits) and “Polygamy Stir-Fry.” The Polygamy Awards did not take place without controversy. Members of Indonesian women’s rights organizations, including some with an Islamic orientation, were outraged by the event. A large number of protestors (850, according to one source) showed up at the hotel where the award ceremony was held—many more, it seems, than the actual invited guests—to show their displeasure (Nurmila 2005). The protestors marched through the streets of Jakarta to the front of the Aryaduta Hotel, where they staged a demonstration. A few activists slipped into the room where the ceremony was being held by posing as invited guests, then read aloud a statement condemning the Polygamy Awards just as the ceremony was getting

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

30

Suzanne Brenner

underway.3 Both the ceremony and the protests received extensive media coverage. Before and after the event, numerous television talk shows, newspaper and magazine columns, and seminars were devoted to the subject of polygamy and to Puspo Wardoyo himself. Heated debates over the acceptability of polygamy were waged on both religious and secular grounds. One might well consider the following questions: What was it that brought about this rather sudden commotion over polygamy when the practice had always been legal in Indonesia? Why did Puspo Wardoyo take it upon himself to revive polygamy’s public image at this particular time? Why did one man’s campaign create such an uproar?

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Polygamy and Democracy: A Marriage Made in Heaven? Ironically, it was Indonesia’s transition toward democracy after the fall of the Suharto regime that made it possible for the ever-smiling restaurateur to take his campaign to the Indonesian public. Although the first president of the Republic of Indonesia, Sukarno, was an unapologetic polygamist, the authoritarian Suharto regime, which wrested power from Sukarno and his supporters in the mid-1960s, took a dimmer view of polygamy. Women’s rights activists had called for its end in Indonesia since the colonial era; as Susan Blackburn (2004: 111) finds, no issue over the past century has continuously provoked such strongly negative reactions among Indonesian women. The fact that polygamy’s incidence in Indonesia has always been relatively low has not stopped women from despising it; the threat of it alone is enough to make many women feel anxious or resentful. It was only during President Suharto’s 32 years of iron-fisted rule, however, that progress was made toward limiting, although not entirely eliminating, multiple marriages.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Democracy, Polygamy, and Women

31

In 1974, after decades of lobbying from Indonesian women’s groups, the government finally passed a law that was intended to improve women’s rights in marriage and divorce. That law, which was strongly opposed by some Islamic factions, imposed restrictions on polygamy (including a requirement that a would-be polygamist obtain the permission of the first wife before marrying again) and declared that monogamy should be the foundation of Indonesian marriages. In 1983, the government went even further and required that all employees of the huge Indonesian civil service, including high-ranking officials, obtain the permission of their superiors as well as their wives if they wanted to enter into a polygamous union (Blackburn 2004: 133).4 Polygamy was strongly discouraged among bureaucrats and other civil servants, thanks, some said, to pressure brought by Suharto’s wife and the wives of other high-ranked officials out of fear that their own husbands might choose to take additional wives (Suryakusuma 1996: 103–104). Under the 1983 regulations, polygamy was to be permitted only under limited circumstances, such as the inability of the first wife to bear children. The Suharto government, in short, made it increasingly difficult to engage in polygamy (even though many men managed to skirt around the regulations without too much trouble), and the social stigma that was attached to the practice was now underscored by official disapproval and, for civil servants, the threat of punishment. Under Suharto’s totalitarian regime, to campaign openly for polygamy would have been seen as a blatant challenge to the will of the state. It is also unlikely that the media, which were heavily censored (and self-censoring) during the Suharto era, would have been willing to publicize such a challenge. After Suharto’s resignation in 1998 and the ensuing transition toward democracy, known as reformasi, however, a new freedom of expression made

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

32

Suzanne Brenner

it possible for those who wished to see changes in Indonesian society or polity to state their views openly. No longer was the public discussion of polygamy risky or taboo; in fact, it took on an aura of respectability, even trendiness, as Puspo and others took their campaign to the airwaves and other media. Furthermore, although the 1974 marriage law remained in effect, polygamy seemed to be officially approved, or at least tolerated, when Vice-President Hamzah Haz, who served under President Megawati Sukarnoputri (2001–2004), took his third wife while still in office. It is significant that those on both sides of the divide have strategically linked their arguments for and against polygamy to the propagation of democracy and the empowerment of women in Indonesia—democracy (demokrasi) and empowerment (pemberdayaan) both being key terms of the transitional period. In an all-too-flattering book about Puspo Wardoyo’s campaign to promote polygamy, commissioned by Puspo himself for the occasion of the Polygamy Awards, the editor writes in the preface: “[I]n the euphoric atmosphere of democracy, the existence of this book can become a catalyst for democratic life … Democracy teaches us to be honest and transparent, in addition to honoring and respecting people’s beliefs and world-views even when we hold different opinions. This book can serve as the impetus for us to learn how to be more democratic in our attitudes” (Suryono 2003: 6). Anti-polygamy activists, in contrast, see polygamy as a fundamentally undemocratic institution that perpetuates the subordination of women to men and violates women’s basic human rights. This is made clear in a written statement prepared for a press conference held right before the Polygamy Awards by a large coalition of women’s organizations and individuals who were opposed to polygamy: “In a family that is egalitarian and democratic … the practice of polygamy could

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Democracy, Polygamy, and Women

33

not possibly take place. The practice of multiple marriages occurs only in families where the husband holds tremendous power while the wife and children are in a powerless position.”5 The statement went further in insisting that polygamy is a form of violence against women and children, and that Indonesian law continues to discriminate against women in allowing polygamy to exist in any form. Puspo and his allies, however, maintained that far from being oppressive to women, polygamy, when practiced properly according to Islamic law, was highly beneficial to them: “[I]t can be empowering to women and can solve social problems” (Suryono 2003: 25). At the same time, Puspo was adamant that according to Islamic doctrine, a husband need not obtain his wife’s permission in order to marry an additional wife (or wives)—an implicit challenge to the legitimacy of the 1974 marriage law (ibid.: 27).

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Democracy’s Gains, Women’s Losses It is often assumed that the shift from authoritarianism to democratic governance is as beneficial to women as it is to men, if not more so, and that democracy has the potential to liberate women from the worst forms of patriarchal oppression associated with tyrannical regimes. In Indonesia, women have broadly supported the shift toward democracy with real enthusiasm. Yet the picture of postreformasi Indonesia has not been an entirely glowing one for women. The newfound support for polygamy in recent years is just one example of how women seem, on some fronts at least, to be losing rather than gaining ground. Other examples can be found. In the movement toward decentralization of government and regional autonomy that has featured prominently in the post-Suharto political landscape, a number of regional governments have been working to introduce elements of shari’a (Islamic law) into their legal codes and regulations—something that

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

34

Suzanne Brenner

would not have been possible under the Suharto regime. These regulations often disproportionately target women by imposing restrictions on them that are not imposed on men, for instance, by requiring them to observe night-time curfews unless they are accompanied by a husband or close male relative, or by compelling them to wear Islamic dress whether or not they choose to do so (see, e.g., Viviani 2001). Although many women (and men) have objected to these laws and, in certain cases, the laws have been changed to make them more acceptable to women as a result, some of the laws have already gone into effect or are on track to do so in the near future. Those people who oppose them, many of whom are themselves practicing Muslims, are often branded as ‘anti-Islam’ or ‘Islamophobic’ (see, e.g., Adhes 2004), labels that are most unwelcome in a nation that is nearly 90 percent Muslim. The point is not, I should emphasize, that Islam is invariably bad for women while secular democracy is always good. Liberal Islamic organizations, including those focused on women’s rights such as Rahima, a Jakarta-based NGO, have been tireless advocates of women’s political participation and equality with men. Another case in point involves the first democratically elected president after the fall of Suharto, Abdurrahman Wahid, who came from a prominent family of Islamic scholars and clerics. During his years as the leader of the largest Islamic organization in Indonesia, Nahdlatul Ulama, Wahid was known internationally for his efforts to promote democracy, human rights (including women’s rights), and female-friendly interpretations of the Qur’an. On the other hand, Megawati Sukarnoputri, Wahid’s vice-president and successor, who came from a secular nationalist rather than religious background, made little effort to advance the cause of women’s rights during her three years as president despite the fact that she was the first female president of Indonesia. Indeed, it was quite apparent that she did not see

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Democracy, Polygamy, and Women

35

women’s issues as a priority for her administration. Only when looking toward re-election—a bid that ultimately failed—did she attempt to win over women voters by supporting a bill against domestic violence, which, to the frustration of women’s rights groups, she had failed to endorse for nearly three years. Despite the new challenges that Indonesian women face, probably very few of them would wish to return to the days of authoritarian rule. Although women did make significant progress during the Suharto era in such areas as education, access to birth control, and improved life expectancies, countless women were also victims, directly or indirectly, of the regime’s harsh suppression of human rights. The gender ideologies that the regime fostered, moreover, which stressed that women’s primary duties were to be self-sacrificing wives, mothers, and citizens, were hardly egalitarian. With all of its problems, postreformasi Indonesia has nevertheless opened up many avenues of political participation to women (as it has to men) that were not available to them before. Women have been actively engaged in the effort to reshape Indonesian society and politics through involvement in NGOs, political parties, public demonstrations, and other channels (see esp. Blackburn 2004: 227). Whatever benefits democratization may have for women in Indonesia or elsewhere, though, we need to recognize that the transition from authoritarianism to democracy does not always have democratizing effects when it comes to the relationship between women and men. This has been amply documented in many countries besides Indonesia, most glaringly, perhaps, in the post-socialist nations of Eastern Europe. In a widespread phenomenon that Peggy Watson (1993) has characterized as “the rise of masculinism in Eastern Europe,” women have been pushed out of the public sphere, particularly out of the political realm, toward the ‘feminine’ roles of homemak-

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

36

Suzanne Brenner

ers, consumers, and sex symbols (see also Gal and Kligman 2000). Watson (1993: 72) observes, for example, that after the collapse of socialism, democratic elections “had the immediate effect of making all of the East European parliaments far more exclusively male institutions than had been the case previously. As the parliaments acquired a measure of real social power, so women were excluded.” Just as state socialism failed to be the utopia for women that was originally promised, so the transition to liberal capitalism did not guarantee that women would enjoy equal rights with men. While the balance of gender roles and women’s political representation (which has always been limited in Indonesia) do not seem to have shifted as dramatically in Indonesia as they have in the countries of Eastern Europe, it would be a mistake to ignore the parallels in the women’s experiences or to attribute the rise of conservative attitudes toward gender relations solely to cultural particulars, such as the dominance of Islam in Indonesia or the revival of traditional patriarchal cultures in Eastern Europe. The political and social changes that occur when authoritarian regimes give way to more democratic ones may themselves bring about the rise of conservative forces that can work to the detriment of women. In looking at democratic transitions, it is important to try to understand the different effects that they inevitably seem to have on men and women (see Gal and Kligman 2000: 4). And as we have seen time and again, transformations in public life almost always have consequences in the private domain, yet those effects are frequently neglected in political analyses. Finally, one need only look at the gross under-representation of women in the political systems of the United States and other Western nations to see that where women are concerned, the actual practice of democracy rarely delivers what its ideology has promised. To acknowledge this is not to give up on the idea of democracy altogether,

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Democracy, Polygamy, and Women

37

but to think about how it might be improved upon, as many Indonesians are doing while taking stock of the developments of recent years. They see the transition to democracy as a work in progress that is still far from complete. In Indonesia, the initial exhilaration over the end of decades of authoritarian rule has given way to more sober, yet still hopeful, assessments of the road ahead. That road may turn out to be a particularly difficult one for women.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Farha Ciciek and the staff at Rahima, an Indonesian women’s rights organization, for facilitating the research on which this essay is based. I am also grateful to Tony Day for his comments on an earlier version of this essay.

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. By ‘polygamy’ I am referring specifically to ‘polygyny’, that is, the marriage of one man to more than one wife at the same time. In accordance with Islamic law, Indonesian Muslim men are permitted to have up to four wives simultaneously. 2. Male Emporium Magazine, May 2003. Reprinted online at http:// cyberman.cbn.net.id/face2.asp?postid=2. Puspo was similarly quoted in other Indonesian publications. 3. Personal recollections of staff members at Rahima, a Jakarta-based NGO, November 2005. 4. Civil servants were also required to obtain the permission of their superiors if they wanted to divorce. 5. Statement issued under the title “Poligami Bersumber Dari Tradisi Masyarakat Bukan Dari Islam” (Polygamy originates from society’s traditions, not from Islam) by the coalition Kaulan Perempuan and Suara Nurani Untuk Perempuan at the “Menolak Poligami” (Reject Polygamy) press conference, Jakarta, 25 July 2003, page 3.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

38

Suzanne Brenner

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

References Adhes S. S. 2004. “Islamophobia LSM Perempuan terhadap Formalitas Syariat Islam” [Islamophobia of women’s NGOs toward the formalization of Islamic law]. Amanah 17, no. 51. http://www. amanah.or.id/detail.php?id=278. Blackburn, Susan. 2004. Women and the State in Modern Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gal, Susan, and Gail Kligman. 2000. “Introduction.” Pp. 3–19 in Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism, ed. Susan Gal and Gail Kligman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nurmila, Nina. 2005. “Polygamy and Chickens.” Inside Indonesia 83: 19–20. Suryakusuma, Julia I. 1996. “The State and Sexuality in New Order Indonesia.” Pp. 92–119 in Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia, ed. Laurie J. Sears. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Suryono, Eko, ed. 2003. Poligami—Kiat Sukses Beristri Banyak: Pengalaman Puspo Wardoyo Bersama Empat Istri [Polygamy—The secrets to success in having many wives: The experiences of Puspo Wardoyo and his four wives]. Solo, Indonesia: C.V. Bumi Wacana. Viviani, Nevisra. 2001. “Legislasi Syari’at Islam dan Aspirasi Perempuan (1)” [Legislation of Islamic law and women’s aspirations (1)]. Swara Rahima 1, no. 2: 7–8. Watson, Peggy. 1993. “The Rise of Masculinism in Eastern Europe.” New Left Review 198: 71–81.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

ISLAMIC INFLUENCES ON INDONESIAN FEMINISM

f

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Kathryn Robinson

In imagining Indonesia’s future, its character as a country with the world’s largest Islamic population emerges as a critical issue. In the post-Suharto period, some commentators have seen the emergence of Islamist politics as a threat to newly attained freedoms. No sooner had women been freed from the constraints of ‘state ibuism’, i.e., the official policy promoting the role of wife and mother (ibu) of the New Order (see Suryakusuma 1996), which endorsed patriarchal familism as a cornerstone of authoritarian politics, than they faced a new kind of patriarchal authority in the demands for the enactment of shari’a as state law. For example, during her 2005 visit to Australia, Indonesian feminist commentator Julia Suryakusuma raised the specter of Islam as the greatest current threat to gender equity and to women as social actors in civic life, whose rights in the domestic sphere are now protected by the state. The growing influence of Middle Eastern Islam in Indonesia, evidenced by funding for organizations,

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

40

Kathryn Robinson

translations of publications, and the increase in Islamist rhetoric, has caused alarm among many observers. This apprehension draws on the stereotype of the Middle East as the source of all that is ‘bad’ about Islam, taken as an undifferentiated whole. But this view of Islam fails to acknowledge debates within Islam and diversity in Islamic practice, not the least of which are the varieties of Islam that can be found throughout the Indonesian archipelago. These diverse practices have emerged as local communities and indigenous polities responded in distinctive and often unique ways during the long period of Islamic conversion, beginning from the thirteenth century. The influence of reform traditions that arise in the Middle East is not something new in Indonesia. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Islamic modernism developed as a response to Wahabism, the conservative Islamic movement that became dominant in Arabia in the eighteenth century. These influences, too, emerged in a variety of forms in the archipelago, and were expressed in local debates and contestations. What threat does Islamism pose to gender equity in Indonesia? The current efflorescence of the jilbab (tight veil), as a marker of Islamic identity and piety, and even as a fashion statement, with proliferating styles, is seized on by many observers as a symbol of the current drive to regulate women’s access to the public sphere and to roll back gains that women have made, including, for example, the bureaucratic restriction on the male prerogative of polygamy (from the 1975 Marriage Law) (Robinson 2006). Gender analysis gained wide currency among social activists in Indonesia in the 1980s and became a factor in contemporary Islamic thought in the 1990s, with Indonesian Islamic intellectuals drawing on the analyses of critical women Islamic writers, such as Amina Wadud Muhsin, Fatima Mernissi from Morocco, Pakistani scholar Riffat Hassan, and the Indian proponent of gender equity

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Islamic Influences on Indonesian Feminism

41

in Islam, Ali Asghar Engineer. Indonesian authors were citing English versions of their works in the early and mid1990s. The organization LSPPA translated and published a compilation of works, Setara di Hadapan Allah (Equal before Allah), by Riffat Hassan and Fatima Mernissi (1991), and a translation of Mernissi’s (1994) Women in Islam (Wanita dalam Islam) was published by Pustaka. Engineer’s (1994) translated work, Hak-Hak Perempuan dalam Islam (Women’s rights under Islam), was published by Yayasan Bentang Budaya. A visit by Riffat Hassan sparked further interest in interpretive stances to argue for Islam as a source of gender equity. These Islamic writers were taken up in discussion groups among students and activists in Jakarta, Bandung, and Yogyakarta (Viviani 2001: 4). A number of Indonesian feminist Islamic thinkers came to the fore, notably, Lies Marcoes-Natsir and Wardah Hafidz. Marcoes-Natsir and Meuleman’s (1993) co-edited book, Wanita Islam dalam Kajian Tekstual dan Kontekstual (Muslim women in textual and contextual study), emerged in this climate (with contributing authors citing Mernissi and Hassan). The compilation by Fakih et al. (1996), Membincang Feminisme (Debating feminism), engaged the debates on Islamic textualism and gender relations, with authors citing Engineer and Mernissi. Interestingly, in light of the assumption that the Middle East, and in particular Saudi Arabia, is the source of new Islamic ideas, this surge of Islamic feminist writing in Indonesian translation exemplifies how Indonesia draws on international intellectual currents. Most of the works supporting feminist contextual analysis were not translated from Arabic but from English, French, or German. Women’s advocacy groups such as Rahima established links with Sisters in Islam in Malaysia. Two major books that emerged at the end of the decade were Nasaruddin Umar’s (1999) Argumen Kesetaraan Jender:

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

42

Kathryn Robinson

Perspectif Al-Qur’an and Syafiq Hasyim’s (2002) Hal-Hal yang Tidak Dipikirkan: Tentang Isu-isu Keperempuanan dalam Islam, both of which cite Mernissi and Hassan. A unique feature of this Islamic movement for women’s rights in Indonesia is the significant influence of male scholars, who have been subjected to criticism and even threats for their supportive stance. This body of Islamic feminist writing argues against gender-biased interpretations of Islamic texts.1 It proposes a reconstruction of Islamic values, weeding out the patriarchal traditions that have taken root in Islamic thought and practice, which are in contradiction with the true egalitarian spirit of Islamic values (Viviani 2001). Women are using Islam and interpretive strategies to challenge men’s prerogative. Authors like Mernissi and Hassan contend that there is no verse in the Qur’an which argues that men and women were created differently. Mernissi uses semantics and weighs up the historical context (asbab al-nuzul) in an analysis of the verses of the Qur’an and Hadith (the reports and the words and actions of the Prophet).2 Discriminatory practices arise from gender-biased interpretations of the Qur’an and Hadith. Proponents of gender equity argue for a contextual rather than a textual (literalist) approach to interpretation, because almost all of the verses that refer to gender in the Qur’an and Hadith can be understood in light of the historical context at the time of revelation (asbab al-nuzul). Local differences are inherent in the transmission of Islam, and these local particularities can assume the basis of doctrine. For example, the story in the Hadith by Bukhari concerning the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib shows the influence of Judeo-Christian ideas. It is necessary to understand the metaphorical dimensions of meaning and to test the Hadith for reliability and credibility (sanad shahih, the rules by which scholars judge the verity of the chain of

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Islamic Influences on Indonesian Feminism

43

transmission). Other considerations in interpretation are the chain of transmission (jalur periwayat), the substance of the report (matan), and its history (asab al wurud). These interpretive traditions are used by advocates of gender equity to challenge what are regarded as misogynist interpretations, and to argue for the Qur’an as a basis for gender equity. Proponents of this view maintain that one objective of the Qur’an is to transform social reality gradually and in stages (bi al-tadri), including the area of gender relations. They assert that the idea of gradual social change is fundamental to the Qur’an. The textual battle about appropriate social roles for women emerged in the public debate over the question, can a woman be president of a majority Muslim nation? In 1999, the negative opinion emerged as a fairly transparent attack on the candidacy of Megawati Sukarnoputri. Male and female Islamic scholars defended her right to run for office, arguing their case on the basis of textual interpretation (Robinson 2004). The flood of new Islamic feminist literature illustrates the cosmopolitan character of Islamic social and political thought as a counterpoint and complement to Western thinking (in a manner similar to the development of nationalist politics). There is a significant group of prominent women activists (many of whom benefited from the flowering of Islamic education in the New Order period) who argue that feminism is not exclusive to Western cosmopolitanism. They view Islam as the basis of a distinctive feminist movement and of a unique form of gender equity. In the Monday section of the major Jakarta daily, Kompas (Swara), edited by Lies Marcoes-Natsir, Indonesian Islamic intellectuals, both male and female, engage in these debates, as they do on the Web sites of organizations such as Jaringan Islam Liberal and Rahima. Many of these intellectuals are active within the major Islamic organizations, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhamadiyah.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

44

Kathryn Robinson

When reformasi reopened discussion on some old arguments that women thought had been settled, the women were ready. The public debate in favor of polygamy that Puspo Wardoyo began with his Polygamy Awards in 2003 increased the stakes for women in terms of the demands for revision of the 1975 Marriage Law (see Brenner this volume and Robinson 2006). While groups like LBH-APIK (Legal Aid Institute for Women’s Human Rights) had been critical of the law’s formal designation of men as household heads and women as household managers, and also critical of the discriminatory nature of the continued legality of polygamy, the debate has ‘heated up’. In particular, female Muslim intellectuals are challenging the polygamy and divorce provisions of the 1975 Marriage Law and its further iteration through the 1989 Kompilasi Hukum Islam (Compilation of Islamic law). The Kompilasi has been praised for its incorporation of the rights women have (e.g., common property rights) under adat (custom) (see, e.g., Lev 1996) and the rights afforded Indonesian women by the provisional divorce or Ta’lik.3 In late 2004, the government signaled its intention to upgrade the status of the Kompilasi Hukum from Presidential Instruction to law. This gave rise to a new wave of public debate, much of it initiated by the gender-mainstreaming team in the Department of Religious Affairs, led by Siti Musdah Mulia, and supported by the Commission on Women’s Human Rights (KOMNAS Perempuan). These groups argue that the sections of the Kompilasi dealing with family law should be further revised to reflect principles of democracy and gender equity and contemporary Indonesian social practice. In particular, women’s rights advocates criticize discriminatory clauses of the marriage law relating to age at marriage, the stipulation of male household heads, the requirement for a wali to be male, differential divorce rights, and the continued legal support for polygamy (also argued to be in breach of Indonesia’s obligations as a sig-

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Islamic Influences on Indonesian Feminism

45

natory to CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women). The women critics also want to revisit unequal inheritance. In all these ways, women are continuing to press for state intervention to protect women’s rights.4 Demands for democratization in the post-Suharto period have led to a scaling back of the highly centralized executive concentration of state power through regional autonomy. The emphasis on a return to adat as a basis of local governance has, in many places, created opportunities for powerful groups to advance their interests in the name of a revival of distinctive traditions. In this process, and under the rubric of adat and regional autonomy, gender relations are also being renegotiated (Budianta 2002; Noerdin 2002). Some Islamist groups have seized on the new climate of post-Suharto political freedom to press their case for Islam as the foundation of government, incorporating shari’a as the basis of local directives. Perda (local regulations) enacted or proposed under this rubric have up until this time focused principally on the restriction of women’s autonomy through dress codes and curfews. However, the move toward regional autonomy has also been associated with the rise of rhetoric invoking kearifan lokal (often glossed as ‘local genius’) and a resurgence of customary practices that had disappeared or diminished as part of legitimate public discourse under the New Order. These local customs often incorporate distinctive forms of gender practice. In Sulawesi, the opportunity for local content in the education curriculum has led to an escalation of cultural events aiming to revitalize traditions that had been eclipsed. In South Sulawesi, large areas of the countryside had been under the control of Darul Islam rebels from 1950 to 1964, and the rebels had banned cultural practices deemed un-Islamic, including circle dances known as Dero, which had involved men

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

46

Kathryn Robinson

and women holding hands and dancing together. I had assumed the Dero dance to have disappeared from Islamic areas of North Luwu, but at a cultural festival held in the new district capital, Massamba, in 2003, the Dero dance was back with a vengeance, catching up young and old, male and female, Muslim and Christian. The valuing of kearifin lokal is a challenge to any attempt to recast gender relations in a unitary model. In West Sumatra, shari’abased perda endeavored to limit the mobility of women through curfews, a move that was vehemently opposed by women traders, but opposition was even more strident to an attempt to stifle matrilineally inherited land rights and the authority of the Bundo Kanduang (senior women of the matrilineage). The calls for gender-discriminatory forms of shari’a are being challenged by both Islamic and secular feminists, with the former group contesting the notion that the interpretive basis of the regulations represents shari’a. In addition, groups operating under the umbrella of Islam, such as Rahima and its offshoot, Fahima, in Cirebon, are consciously adapting local cultural practices such as the salawatan (joyous songs in praise of the Prophet) to promote gender equity. In the current political climate in Indonesia, Islam is taking a progressive role in developing new forms of political discourse and political action, as well as being used by some groups to further political self-interest. For Indonesian women who identify with demands for greater gender equity, Islamic cosmopolitanism is providing an alternative source of feminist ideals to those that arise in the West. The dialogue on gender rights is an example of the social and political complexities of Islamic debates in Indonesia, voices that are not heard in the West due to the clamor of anxiety discourses that equate Islam with terrorism.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Islamic Influences on Indonesian Feminism

47

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Kamini Junankar for research concerning the history of translations of Muslim feminist works into Indonesian. Ciciek Farha provided invaluable comments as a protagonist in these debates.

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. For example, the issue of the place of women in heaven. 2. An explication of their interpretive strategies can found in Subhan (2002). 3. Under Indonesian law, the man pronounces the conditions of provisional divorce at the time of the marriage (nikah). If he fails to fulfill these conditions, the woman has grounds for divorce. 4. Kompas, 11 October 2004, “Menyosialisasikan ‘Counter Legal Draft’ Kompilasi Hukum Islam” (Publicizing the “counter legal draft” of Islamic legal compilations), http://www.kompas. com/kompas-cetak/0410/11/swara/1316378.htm (accessed 8 September 2005); Jaringan Islam Liberal, 8 September 2005, “Wawancara Dr Siti Musdah Mulia, M.A.: Kompilasi Hukum Sangat Konservatif!” (Interview with Dr. Siti Musdah Mulia, M.A.: Legal compilations are extremely conservative!), http:// islamlib.com/id/index.php?page+article&id+408 (accessed 8 September 2005).

References Budianta, Melani. 2002. “Plural Identities: Indonesian Women’s Redefinition of Democracy in the Post-Reformasi Era.” Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs 36, no. 1: 35–50. Engineer, Ali Asghar. 1994. Hak-hak Perempuan dalam Islam [Women’s rights under Islam]. Yogyakarta: Yayasan Bentang Budaya. Fakih, Mansour, et al. 1996. Membincang Feminisme: Diskursus Gender Perspektif Islam [Debating feminism: Gender discourse in Islamic perspective]. Surabaya: Risalah Gusti.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

48

Kathryn Robinson

Hassan, Riffat, and Fatima Mernissi. 1991. Setara di Hadapan Allah [Equal before Allah]. Yogyakarta: LSPPA Yayasan Prakarsa. Hasyim, Syafiq. 2002. Hal-Hal yang Tidak Dipikirkan: Tentang Isuisu Keperempuanan dalam Islam [Matters not considered: On women’s issues in Islam]. Bandung: Mizan. Lev, Daniel S. 1996. “On the Other Hand?” Pp. 191–203 in Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia, ed. Laurie J. Sears. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Marcoes-Natsir, Lies, and Johan Hendrik Meuleman. 1993. Wanita Islam dalam Kajian Tekstual dan Kontekstual [Muslim women in textual and contextual study]. Jakarta: INIS. Mernissi, Fatima. 1994. Wanita dalam Islam [Women in Islam]. Bandung: Pustaka. Noerdin, Edriana. 2002. “Women and Regional Autonomy.” Pp. 179–186 in Women in Indonesia: Gender Equity and Development, ed. Kathryn Robinson and Sharon Bessell. Singapore: ISEAS. Robinson, Kathryn. 2004. “Islam, Gender and Politics in Indonesia.” Pp. 183–198 in Islamic Perspectives on the New Millennium, ed. Virginia Hooker and Amin Saikal. Singapore: ISEAS. ______. 2006. “Muslim Women’s Political Struggle for Marriage Law Reform in Contemporary Indonesia.” Pp. 183–210 in Mixed Blessings: Laws, Religions, and Women’s Rights in the AsiaPacific Region, ed. Amanda Whiting and Carolyn Evans. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff. Subhan, Zaitunah. 2002. Rekonstruksi Pemahaman Jender dalam Islam: Agenda Sosio-kultural dan Politik Peran Perempuan [Reconstructing the understanding of gender in Islam: The sociocultural and political role of women]. Jakarta: el-Kahfi. Suryakusuma, Julia I. 1996. “The State and Sexuality in New Order Indonesia.” Pp. 92–119 in Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia, ed. Laurie J. Sears. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Umar, Nasaruddin. 1999. Argumen Kesetaraan Jender: Perspectif Al-Qur’an [Arguments about gender equality: The perspective of Al-Qur’an]. Jakarta: Paramadina. Viviani, Nefisra. 2001. “Sketsa gerakan perempuan Islam Indonesia: Mengukir Sejarah baru” [A sketch of the Islam women’s movement in Indonesia: Carving out a new history]. Swara Rahima Edisi 1. http://www.rahima.or.id/SR/01-01/Fokus.htm (accessed 15 November 2005).

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

GOING ‘UN-NATIVE’ IN INDONESIA(N)

f

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Joseph Errington

Wipe your glosses with what you know. — James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Indonesian is the national language of the world’s fourth most populous country. Although it has 200 million speakers, it is little known beyond its borders and a narrow circle of area specialists. To reduce its obscurity in the global scheme of things, I will show here how it has developed into an unusually national but ‘un-native’ language. A brief sketch of the language’s history highlights commonsense ideas about language, identity, and nationalism that the Indonesian case does not fit, further reinforcing its uncommon aspects.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

50

Joseph Errington

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

From Pidgin to Language Long before it was renamed Indonesian and proclaimed the language of an Indonesia-to-be, Malay (Bahasa Melayu in that language) had been spoken for centuries in different forms and communities around the region. By the turn of the twentieth century, most of its native speakers were colonial subjects of Great Britain’s Federated Malay States, with only a fraction residing in the Netherlands East Indies. Today, Malaysian (Bahasa Malaysia) refers to Malaysia’s national language and related regional dialects, while Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) is a ‘second language’, spoken in essentially the same way by perhaps 80 percent of Indonesian citizens, in addition to 1 of about 500 ‘first’, ‘native’, or ‘ethnic’ languages. European explorers who first entered this area in the sixteenth century encountered other kinds of ‘trade’, market’, or ‘pidgin’ Malay that had long been in use in ports from the coast of India to as far north, by some accounts, as Japan. No one’s first language, pidgin offered a simple tool for dealing with a restricted set of topics. Another native Malay, spoken by people living on the Straits of Malacca, was the literate language of a courtly elite. Written in an Arabic-based script, it was likened by the early explorer Tavernier to other “cultured languages” of the world, much like Latin in Europe. After the Portuguese were ousted from the region in the seventeenth century, Dutch missionaries, traders, and military men found themselves at odds as to which language best suited the overlapping but different purposes of all involved: their own, some kind of Malay, or the languages they came across in the locales and communities where they pursued their various interests. This controversy went unresolved into the eighteenth century, when the Dutch began their sustained engagement with the agrarian societies of Java’s fertile rice plain. Their intensive

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Going ‘Un-Native’ in Indonesia(n)

51

contact with a small ruling class of Javanese nobles made for a problematic politics of interaction. Failure by the Dutch to use elaborate forms of Javanese politesse with sufficient care and skill could result in offending just those powerful people they sought to co-opt. To navigate between the threat posed by the constant risk of faux pas in Javanese and (as they imagined it) the danger of natives mastering Dutch, the colonialists improvised another language. Dienst Maleisch (Service Malay) became the ad hoc language bridge across the colonial divide, yet another simple communicative mode that Dutch colonialists nonetheless came to prefer in “inverse … proportion … to their knowledge of the language” (Heinrich Kern, quoted in Groeneboer 1998: 142). This semi-official Malay was to develop rapidly over the nineteenth century, in and with a plural colonial society, particularly in expanding urban settlements such as Batavia (now Jakarta). Outside the small circle of Dutch rulers hailing from the homeland, below and away from the apex of their power, Malay served communication needs in a proliferating range of contexts, not all under colonial surveillance or control. By the 1880s, unruly but useful ‘low’ Malay had become the language of an urban vernacular press and was a public, though unofficial, form of discourse. By this time also the colonial state recognized an overriding need to assert its proprietorial relation to Malay and began to take steps to establish an official version of what had long been its de facto language of administration. This required in the first place that Malay be reduced to uniform alphabetic writing, a task that fell to a Dutch philologist born in the East Indies whose research led him to conclude that “the best Malay,” the most fitting object of description and instrument of power, was spoken natively in the Johor region of the Malay peninsula, the Riau islands, and the eastern coast of Sumatra. This, he explained in his gram-

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

52

Joseph Errington

mar (Ophuijsen 1910: 2), was the region that had been home to the greater part of an older Malay literature. With a spelling system and description in place, institutional forces were set in motion to create the political symbology of language that would render other varieties marginal or worthless. This involved a series of part-forwhole substitutions: of silent but unitary letters for pluralities of voicings; of a distant literary past for blooming, buzzing confusions of everyday talk; of writable norms and official use for contextually embedded interactional practices. In the absence of a focal, normative reference point, though, this could be accomplished in the Netherlands East Indies only by means of an “extraordinary symbiosis of scholarship with the metropolitan politics of a colonizing state” (Hoffman 1973: 22), whose new state-backed Malay some preferred to call Bahasa Belanda (literally, Dutch language) rather than Bahasa Melayu (Maier 1993: 57). What the Dutch called “general, cultured Malay” (algemeen beschaafd Maleis) spread in use among their native subaltern elite, members of a “new class of potential readers, with different living and reading habits, with different expectations with regard to books, based on their school experiences” (Teeuw 1973: 112). But once possessed by others, knowledge of a language, a bit like money or information, falls beyond the control of the giver. The Dutch could not prevent ‘their’ Malay from being pirated as a vehicle of nationalist thought and communication across lines of ethno-linguistic difference among these native elites. So Malay came to embody a common irony of colonial history: what had been devised as a language of colonial power became an instrument and symbol of anticolonial, nationalist sentiment. Young proto-nationalists, who baptized it Indonesian proleptically in 1928, used it as a second or third language, as have most of its speakers ever since.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Going ‘Un-Native’ in Indonesia(n)

53

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Departure of ‘the Native’ Indonesian gained official status as a national language in 1945, but it achieved practical success—entering the mouths and minds of significant numbers of Indonesians—only beginning in the late 1960s. Suharto’s authoritarian New Order, adopting a frankly proprietorial stance toward the national language, set in motion a statedominated educational campaign that ‘spread’ knowledge of oral and literate Indonesian down the social hierarchies and away from urban centers into rural communities. Languages, Johannes Fabian (1986) observes, never spread like a liquid, a rumor, or a disease. In many regions of the country, the dissemination of Indonesian required zones of contact, created by and for the New Order, in which people learned how to be subjects of an authoritarian state and citizens of a nation. This makes it hard to avoid state-centered accounts of the transition from Malay to Indonesian as part of a larger project of national development (in Indonesian, pembangunan). But it was relatively easy for Suharto’s New Order regime to avoid imposing social and linguistic hierarchies like those so commonly found in other ‘developing’ nations, where knowledge of a European language of state, inherited from a colonial regime (usually English or French), separates some citizens from others who speak only one or more of a plurality of local ‘ethnic’ or ‘native’ languages. To call Indonesian a second language, like English or French, is misleading, then, because it obscures its place in the nation and society, even if it is learned outside domestic and communal spheres of life, usually in association with literacy. In this respect, it resembles more closely Latin in Medieval Europe or English in much of the globalizing world, although these parallels obscure the interplay between ‘linguistic sameness’ among speakers of any language, on the one hand, and senses of ‘social

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

54

Joseph Errington

sharedness’ among members of community, on the other. The creation of linguistic sameness through Indonesian was very much a top-down, state-dominated project, but it has also given rise to ideas of cultural sharedness (Heryanto 1995), which Anderson (1991) links to nationally “imagined communities.” But nationalist projects have been theorized, from Johann Gottfried von Herder to Samuel Huntington (2004), in ways that key strongly to a monoglot ideal, and given Indonesia’s enormous linguistic diversity, Indonesian’s ‘un-nativeness’ might be taken as evidence of what Partha Chatterjee (1986) calls a “derivative discourse” of nationalism. While Chatterjee (ibid.: 7) is able to develop an alternate account of Bengali nationalism in which Bengali is a resource in an “inner domain of cultural identity,” it is unclear how such a ‘domain’ could be created in and for a language not ‘native’ to those who occupy it. It might be better to describe Indonesian as ‘nonnative’ rather than a second language, but this label is misleading as a negative designation, which presupposes a normative sense of what it lacks: the authenticity of a ‘mother tongue’, whose native speakers both ‘own’ it and count as reference points for an understanding of its qualities. To say that someone speaks a language ‘non-natively’ implies that they are at best emulating native speakers, whose usage is the self-evident metric for evaluating their success. Without such a reference point, Indonesian in the colonial past or nationalist present stands over and against ‘native’, ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ languages as something else. It lacks the diffuse but self-evident qualities that are bound up in the ‘native’, whether it is applied to an individual or a collectivity (community, tribe, ethnic group, etc.), and does not possess a sameness of ways of speaking grounded in the transcendent sharedness of identity. These connotations can be read from resonances,

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Going ‘Un-Native’ in Indonesia(n)

55

for instance, with phrases such as ‘Native American’, the more old-fashioned ‘aboriginal’ (i.e., ‘from the beginning’), and the newer increasingly salient ‘First Nations’. All invoke a sense of the past’s claims on the present, which, as Anderson (1991) argues, ground nationalist projects and ideologies. I call Indonesian ‘un-native’ to foreground its qualitatively different place in Indonesian political culture and as a marker of identity. As an ‘un-native’ language, it is unusual but not unique in a globalizing world. On the one hand, its history and use parallel that of the Tok Pisin language of the neighboring nation of Papua New Guinea; on the other hand, less obvious comparisons can be made with ‘New World’ forms of English (Manglish, Hinglish, Taglish, Singlish) that are emerging in dynamic urban communities around the globe. To be sure, these hybrids count as ‘non-native’ in that they are normatively inferior to native English, but this should not obscure their value as means of communication and embodiments of shared experiences among members of linguistically diverse urban communities. These urban fusions are emerging in and helping to define flexible social spaces between ‘native’ vernaculars and ‘standard’ English. They may never achieve the official status of Indonesian but nonetheless are emergent linguistic reflections of ‘un-native’, interstitial communities. ‘Un-native’ languages such as Indonesian seem peculiar when viewed through the lens of the commonsense ideas I have sketched above. They can easily be construed as socially marginal, unstable, and susceptible to rapid change. It seems plausible that such languages are fated to ‘die’ in the face of pressure from ‘stronger’ languages unless they can acquire enough native speakers to achieve the status of ‘real’ languages. I can briefly rebut this argument here, using the ironies of Indonesian’s post-colonial afterlife in East Timor to demonstrate the durability and

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

56

Joseph Errington

power that seem to derive precisely from its ‘un-native’ qualities there, as in Indonesia. In 1975, this former Portuguese colony, now the nation of Timor Leste, was invaded, annexed, and brutally occupied by Indonesia. There and then, the New Order set into motion its own colonial project, carried out in the image of its successful project of national development elsewhere on Indonesian territory. On the face of things, the New Order’s educational program was similarly successful: young Timorese, who were native speakers of a dozen or so local languages, learned to be fluent but ‘unnative’ speakers of Indonesian—like their teachers, their occupiers, and the citizens of Indonesia. But the Timorese had other uses for that language. It offered a bridge for communication and collaboration across lines of ethnic and linguistic difference that Portuguese colonialists had never tried to eradicate over the course of four centuries of colonial rule. Young Timorese made it their language of resistance to the Indonesian occupation, and while history did not exactly repeat itself, the ‘un-nativeness’ that allowed a subaltern to use colonial Malay as a weapon against the Dutch likewise helped younger Timorese to pirate Indonesian as a means to resist the New Order. Since 2002, when their struggle succeeded against all odds, Indonesian has begun to take on new political and cultural valences in a complex, unstable situation. A repatriated Lusophone elite finds itself engaged with Timorese freedom fighters whose language of collective action they regard with distrust and disdain as the language of their former occupiers. Portuguese was never spoken widely beyond colonial elite circles, but these elites have moved to (re)establish that language’s official dominance, now as a national language, and, in doing so, to marginalize Indonesian, along with the ‘lost generation’ of freedom fighters who speak it.

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Going ‘Un-Native’ in Indonesia(n)

57

The post-colonial afterlife of Indonesian in Timor is less clear than its future in Indonesia, but nonetheless helps to corroborate the argument that ‘un-nativeness’ needs to be recognized as an endowment of languages that gives them values and uses different from, but no less real than, those of their more typical native counterparts.

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

References Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso. Chatterjee, Partha. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? London: Zed Books for the United Nations University. Fabian, Johannes. 1986. Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880–1938. Berkeley: University of California Press. Groeneboer, Kees. 1998. Gateway to the West: The Dutch Language in Colonial Indonesia 1600–1950. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Heryanto, Ariel. 1995. Language of Development and Development of Language: The Case of Indonesia. Pacific Linguistics series D, no. 86. Canberra: Australian National University. Hoffman, John. 1973. “The Malay Language as a Force for Unity in the Indonesian Archipelago 1815–1900.” Nusantara 4: 19–35. Huntington, Samuel. 2004. Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Maier, Hendrik M. J. 1993. “From Heteroglossia to Polyglossia: The Creation of Malay and Dutch in the Indies.” Indonesia 56: 37–65. Ophuijsen, C. A. van. 1910. Maleische Spraakkunst. Leiden: S.C. van Doesburgh. Teeuw, A. 1973. Pegawai Bahasa dan Ilmu Bahasa [Language officers and Indonesian linguistics]. Trans. J. Mayor Polak. Jakarta: Bhratara Publishers.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

INDONESIAN PUBLISHING New Freedoms, Old Worries, and Unfinished Democratic Reform

f Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Michael Nieto Garcia

Indonesia is in the midst of a publishing renaissance. The number of published titles doubled in 2003 to a sum greater than any year under Suharto. Titles unimaginable 10 years ago now line bookstore shelves: books about Marx, books by and about ethnic Chinese, and books with the words ‘sex’ or ‘homosexual’ and ‘Islam’ in the same title. In 2000, the publisher of Nobel Prize–nominated author Pramoedya Ananta Toer released a special Emancipation Edition of the previously banned Buru Quartet, named after the island on which the Suharto regime had imprisoned the writer for almost 14 years. Oblivious to the efflorescence of publishing in the world’s fourth most populous nation, few outside the country have read a single Indonesian book. Unlike well-known works by Indian, Colombian, Russian, and Chinese authors, most people in the world are not likely to come across a book by an Indonesian writer in their

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Indonesian Publishing

59

own language at the local bookstore, in the library, or even online. Better known for its volcanoes, island paradises, shadow puppets, and world’s largest population of Muslims, Indonesia’s books remain largely untranslated, a secret library ringed by fire and water. Sadly, Indonesians are not reading Indonesian books either. Reading culture is low. Libraries are few, their books dusty and mildewed. The 98 percent literacy rate1 among younger Indonesians does not tell the whole story. The overall literacy rate is much lower, 84 percent.2 And half the population drops out of school between the ages of 15 and 19 (BPS 2002: 103). Forty-five percent of the titles published in 2004 came from a single publishing conglomerate, Gramedia. Another 55 percent were translations (Suwarni 2004; Y09 2005). Nevertheless, reading culture is on the rise, in large part because Indonesian publishing is freer than it was under Suharto’s New Order. But freedom of the press is still under threat. Current publishing freedoms are largely an outgrowth of the more passive role taken by a recently decentralized government, a political restructuring that also diminishes the capacity of government to actively protect free speech. In the absence of constitutional, institutional, and other indispensable safeguards of civil liberties, the active protection of free speech in the near future seems unlikely, something that is certain to prove an obstacle to the realization of other unfinished democratic reforms.

Contemporary Literature: Generation 98 Radical changes of themes, style, and substance since the end of literary suppression in 1998 raise questions about the role of literature in society. Before 1998, Seno Gumira Ajidarma had to use fiction to expose government propaganda about the 1991 massacre in East Timor known as the Dili incident. Fired from his job as a magazine editor

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

60

Michael Nieto Garcia

for over-reporting the event, Seno was able to skirt censorship through poetry, short stories published in newspapers, and his 1996 novel Jazz, Perfume and the Incident. But with the end of government repression and censorship, the most visible literature turned from wide-ranging social critique—sometimes obliquely political—to escapism. While some new fiction is both entertaining and socially relevant, many popular new writers come from privilege, their fiction depicting high-society metropolitan values3 and glamorous sex- and money-drenched lifestyles that bear little resemblance to those of most Indonesians. But the population is young, and sex sells. Dominated by long-excluded women writers, Generation 984 literature frequently foregrounds sexuality (Garcia 2005: x). But there are serious downsides to the high commercial value of sex in fiction, such as the frequent charge that authors who use sexual themes to great literary effect or to make a larger point are merely exploiting sex. Equally problematic are the conflation of sexual transgressiveness with critical feminism and the confusion of sexually gratuitous schlock fiction with works of greater literary merit. As a result, even ‘teen lit’ seems to get more recognition from mass readership and the press than important male writers such as Seno. Fortunately, due literary respect comes from other sources. After recognizing older, established writers from previous generations in its first three years, the prestigious Khatulistiwa Literary Award was given to an author who stands apart from women writers most known for the sexual content of their work. For her collection of short stories, Kuda Terbang Maria Pinto (Maria Pinto’s flying horse), Linda Christanty shared the 2004 prize with Seno—who by mingling a surrealist aesthetic with realism reflects the absurdist feel that can accompany the stark realities of Indonesian life.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Indonesian Publishing

61

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Freedom of Speech and Liberal Democracy Certainly, Indonesia’s many contradictions can give the impression of Kafkaesque absurdity. Examples include the burning of Pramoedya’s library (Samuels 1999: xix) by the same regime that would also dramatically raise education and literacy levels. An even more obvious contradiction is a democracy without a bill of rights. Eliminating contradictory statutory and ministerial provisions to ensure unambiguous protection of free speech under the Constitution (Razak 2000a: 133)5 is particularly important in Indonesia, which has had a long history of state censorship. Feudal courts, the colonial Dutch, national founding father Sukarno, and the military-backed New Order all vigorously persecuted freedom of expression in the name of development as well as maintaining social harmony and stability—and their own power. So far, the role of government in the publishing miracle of the last few years can be summed up in one word: freedom (Garcia 2004b). Dismantling key repressive governmental regulations and policies offered sudden escape from decades of book banning, ‘telephone censorship’, and the politically motivated revocation of publishing licenses. But freedom of the press and publishing in Indonesia is incomplete. Since 1998, book burnings and ‘sweepings’ by anti-communist and fundamentalist mobs have taken place, journalists have been murdered while covering embezzlement cases and the military’s domestic activities, and libel cases against journalistic publishers have been tried controversially under pre-reform articles of the Criminal Code instead of the reform-era 1999 Press Law (Garcia 2004b: 124–128; Tesoro 2004: 321). Those who would exercise the right to free expression in writing

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

62

Michael Nieto Garcia

enjoy new ‘freedom of’ but not ‘freedom from’: they are not protected by the government from other groups and forces, or even fully from government itself.6 The state of insecurity that Indonesians must live under despite the freest and fairest elections in decades suggests that democracy is rooted as much in protecting everyone’s rights as in protecting everyone’s right to vote. Also needed is the social and political culture to keep such rights. The heightened consciousness and attitudes of the reformasi (reform) era have brought about changes that will make it harder for future tyrants to roll back present gains—as long as these liberal reforms remain part of the national culture. Yet despite decentralization, freer elections, and other reforms, there have been no constitutional amendments to unequivocally protect fundamental rights such as freedom of expression.7 Under the current administration, greater constitutional protections are far less likely to be achieved than greater restrictions on free speech through new legislation, a proposed anti-pornography bill, which in a 2003 draft used the phrase “exploiting sex” in such a way that a wide swath of contemporary fiction could be banned as ‘pornographic’.8 The question, is democracy fundamentally incompatible with Islam? is often asked today. With its respect for the individual, liberal Islam is certainly capable of myriad manifestations of liberal democracy, but Asian collectivism, with its inability to recognize individual rights over the tyranny of the group, might not be. In addition to ‘collectivist clauses’ in the Indonesian Constitution,9 legal code, and ministerial decrees, the manipulation of collectivist culture by ruling elites into a carefully cultivated ideology of anti-individualism endangers citizens in the name of social values deemed incompatible with fundamental human rights.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Indonesian Publishing

63

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Message in a Bottle Even when free speech is protected, obstacles of geography and economics remain. Too often books are either local and cheap or widely distributed and expensive. Vertical integration is common in the book industry (Surianto 1999: 225); otherwise, half the cover price of books found in bookstores is taken by the distributor (Wangsitalaja 2003: 18).10 Many important books are available only in Jakarta—the center of book production and distribution, where less than 10 percent of the population lives—and half of the bookstores are on the single island of Java (Winarno 2002: 67; see also Sukur 2003). Publishing is at heart a cottage industry (Epstein 2001: 1, 33). But without wide distribution, reading culture in remote areas is at risk, and inter-cultural communication and understanding are seriously undermined, since books from one region are rarely available in another. Books written and published in the province of North Sulawesi cannot be found in East Java, while books written and produced in Aceh cannot be obtained in North Sulawesi. Alternative presses, such as those in the small press mecca of Yogyakarta, aim for wide distribution while balancing commercial interests with high publishing standards (Garcia 2004b: 131), but their books are not much cheaper than those published by big conglomerates. Maintaining a healthy publishing industry depends on the vitality of the small presses to offer the greatest diversity of quality titles, topics, and publishing philosophies. But wedding wide distribution to low cost relative to average incomes remains a big obstacle for small and regional presses trying to break through with national reach. Even with the continued expansion of digital publishing—which, using the Internet for distribution, is more a supplement to than a replacement for books—the distribution bottleneck remains a major problem.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

64

Michael Nieto Garcia

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Status, Thrift Editions, and Non-Governmental Forces Another problem is status. The most important books are targeted at top-end buyers, where status plays an exaggerated role in marketing, collapsing quality-content books with quality packaging and status consumption. Since the wealthiest are disproportionately the best educated, even the alternative presses can get caught up in the demographic marketing trap. And when they focus more on sexy marketing and packaging than accurate, relevant, and informative content, a kind of Gresham’s Law for books seems to hold sway: bad content drives out good, which is more expensive to produce. Under existing business models and economic conditions, few authors can dedicate themselves to full-time researching and writing, and few publishing houses offer the kind of professional and economic incentives needed to raise the caliber of non-fiction books. Though lagging behind an increasingly sophisticated readership, Indonesian non-fiction is poised to play an important socio-political role: books are freer than newspapers to offer critical content, do investigative journalism, and otherwise push the limits of free speech. Even when publishers shy away from taboo, controversial, or politically intimidating material in manuscripts, the plethora of small printers and informal distribution networks in Indonesia democratizes book publication to offer authors fairly unrestricted access to large blocks of readers. But there are drawbacks to information that is acquired through informal networks. Marketing to top-end buyers exclusively—rather than offering more expensive first editions followed by later thrift editions—restricts access and drives consumers into the informal sector of the economy, which democratizes access but impoverishes authors while augmenting the finances and control of power brokers and local thugs

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Indonesian Publishing

65

who benefit from ‘booklegging’ and other extra-legal activities. Where there are large flows of unregulated capital, underground organizations, always hungry for financing, will attempt to control it. Overlapping with the formal sector, these shadow economies can exacerbate existing corruption such as ‘envelope journalism’, the taking of bribes in exchange for writing favorable stories or killing critical ones (Basorie 2001: 74). And shadow economies can generate what in some spheres amounts to the power of a shadow government. Corrupt courts can be bought off.11 Unofficial local and regional power players can menace constitutional rights, prompting self-censorship out of fear for one’s personal safety. Being far from free and independent, Indonesian journalism is unable to carry out the important economic and political role of a free press toward the development and practice of democracy by making business and political matters more transparent (Coronel 2001a: 4). This perpetuates a corrupt atmosphere that depresses trade and foreign investment, which, though benefiting some more than others, are badly needed to raise socio-economic levels for the majority of Indonesians. Without democratic access to widely distributed books that are affordable enough to make pirated editions less appealing, problems multiply: reading culture remains low, the flow of information is constricted, fewer people understand the value of free speech, and extra-state power goes unchecked—even to the point of infringing on civil liberties. The sum of which is that without thrift editions, basic human rights are undermined.

Under the Volcano Indonesian publishing is both a barometer and a catalyst of the vitality of democratic principles and human rights in the archipelago of fire mountains that composes the

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

66

Michael Nieto Garcia

world’s third-largest democracy. Whether publishing and fundamental rights continue to smolder without exploding and collapsing inward will depend in large part on their protection through a combination of economic, cultural, and governmental actions. Beyond its shores, global demand for Indonesia’s books will in part depend on whether the burning of books can be supplanted by a steady flow of informative and engaging books, the kind that burn themselves into the minds of readers.

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. The literacy rate between the ages of 15 and 24 by UNESCO’s estimates (see http://unstats.un.org/unsd/mi/mi_series_results. asp?rowID=656 [accessed 17 October 2005]), which together with a youth bulge practically guaranteed that many of the new books would be about sex or sexuality. 2. This overall literacy rate figure is based on older but more comprehensive data reported by the Indonesian government to UNESCO. See http://literacy.org/explorer/country_results. iphtml?ID=105 (accessed 17 October 2005). 3. I am indebted to Ben Abel for stimulating discussions about the contemporary Indonesian book scene. In addition to freely sharing his own views, Ben first suggested to me the importance of the role of metropolitanism in literary culture, of status in book sales, and of distinguishing different varieties of feminism in Indonesian literature. 4. A rudimentary sketch of Generation 98 and a literary analysis of one of its writers can be found in Garcia (2005). For a brief introduction to three popular literary women writers, see Garcia (2004a). 5. Rather than providing broad protections, Article 28 of the 1945 Constitution relegates the freedoms of association, assembly, and expression to future statutes. Such statutes in the form of provisions in the Criminal Code (KUHP) have been among the most repressive of free speech: “incitement of hatred towards authority,” “sedition through printed materials and photo-

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Indonesian Publishing

6.

7.

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

8.

9.

67

graphs,” “inciting hostility, hatred, or insult,” and “disparaging the President or Vice President” (translation of statutory clauses from Loqman 2000: 176–177). See Tiarma Siboro, “NGOs Slam Susilo for Weak Rights Policies,” Jakarta Post, 14 October 2005, http://www.thejakartapost.com (accessed 23 September), for criticism of the failings of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s administration to prevent several cases of human rights abuses during his first year in office, and for government policies that threaten freedom of expression. Vice-President Jusuf Kalla ran on a freedom-of-the-press ticket, but constitutional wording continues to undermine freedom of expression. See SIE, “Hasyim Muzadi dan Jusuf Kalla Sama-sama Janjikan Kebebasan Pers” (Hasyim Muzadi and Jusuf Kalla both promise freedom of the press), Kompas, 6 August 2004, http:// www.kompas.com (accessed 20 September 2005), for some of Kalla’s comments while on the campaign trail. Cultural fundamentalists, rather than feminists and other such groups, are the primary supporters of comprehensive anti-pornography legislation. With the help of political provocateurs generating mass appeal for what on the surface might seem like a good idea, the fundamentalists have been trying for the last few years to play a role in the drafting and passage of such a bill. But pornography is already illegal in Indonesia, while ambiguous legal wording in drafts of the bill threaten to turn the proposed legislation into a blunt instrument for censorship. A 2003 draft, particularly, raised alarms about opening the door to the persecution of literature and other arts. See, for example, BUR and MBA,“RUU Antipornografi Jangan Jadi Alat Represi Baru Media Massa” (Don’t let anti-pornography laws become new instruments for repressing the mass media), Kompas, 1 October 2003, http://www.kompas.com (accessed 18 September 2005). Without first protecting the fundamental rights of individuals, clauses intended to ensure social justice can instead be abused by authoritarian or factionalist rulers: the “deliberation” clause in the Preamble subjects individuals to the vagaries and tyranny of group consensus; the express representation of “groups” rather than individuals in Article 2 tilts self-rule toward factionalism; the “rights of origin” clause in Article 18 allows individual rights to be trampled by provincial law or traditional customs; and despite being intended to do just the opposite, the “cooperative endeavor” clause in Article 33 has long been used as a concept

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

68

Michael Nieto Garcia

to justify forcing the poor to sacrifice in the name of development that unequally benefits the wealthiest citizens. See Razak (2000b: 183–190). 10. Distribution prices can be expected to rise even more since the doubling overnight of fuel prices on 1 October 2005, a measure implemented by the Yudhoyono government in order to cut budget-busting fuel subsidies in the face of precipitously rising crude oil prices. See Alan Sipress, “Indonesia Nearly Doubles Price of Gasoline,” Washington Post, 1 October 2005, A12, http://www. washingtonpost.com (accessed 5 October), and Jusuf Wanandi, “Higher Oil Prices and Indonesia’s Political Stability,” Jakarta Post, 5 October 2005, http://www.thejakartapost.com (accessed 5 October). 11. Monetary corruption of the courts leads to plutocratic justice, which favors commercial firms and the wealthy, engendering a judicial form of censorship that leaves journalistic publishers and writers afraid to write critically beyond the spin of public relations or to expose the fraudulent or suspicious transactions of corporations and business tycoons. Many aspects of contemporary Indonesian book publishing discussed in an earlier article are omitted or only briefly alluded to in this short essay. See Garcia (2004b) for an expanded discussion of dimensions such as ephemera, knowledge transfer, pirated and counterfeit books, the high cost and low numbers of used books, the perception of Indonesian journalism as irresponsible, disincentives to raising book culture and book production, demand for books by those who can afford only thrift editions, and economic incentives and information imbalances that complicate copyright issues.

References Basorie, Warief Djajanto. 2001. “Indonesia: Free But Still in the Dark.” Pp. 64–95 in Coronel 2001b. BPS (Badan Pusat Statistik). 2002. Statistik Indonesia 2002. Jakarta: BPS. Coronel, Sheila S. 2001a. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–20 in Coronel 2001b. ______, ed. 2001b. The Right to Know. Quezon City: Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. Epstein, Jason. 2001. Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future. New York: W.W. Norton.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Indonesian Publishing

69

Garcia, Michael Nieto. 2004a. “More than just Sex.” Inside Indonesia 80: 26–27. http://www.insideindonesia.org. ______. 2004b. “The Indonesian Free Book Press.” Indonesia 78: 121–145. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program. ______. 2005. “Introduction.” Pp. ix–xvii in Djenar Maesa Ayu, They Say I’m a Monkey, trans. Michael Nieto Garcia. Jakarta: Metafor Publishing. Loqman, Loebby. 2000. “Social, Political, and Economic Aspects of Mass Media Laws.” Pp. 168–179 in Razak 2000b. Razak, Abdul. 2000a. “Press Law Amendments under Reform.” Pp. 116–136 in Razak 2000b. ______, ed. 2000b. Mass Media Laws and Regulations in Indonesia. Singapore: Asian Media Information and Communication Centre. Samuels, Willem. 1999. “Introduction.” Pp. xiii–xxii in Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Mute’s Soliloquy, trans. Willem Samuels. New York: Hyperion, with Hasta Mitra and Lontar. Sukur, Silvester G. 2003. “Toko Buku Luar Jawa: Hidup Enggan Mati Tak Mau” [Bookstores outside Java: Reluctant to live, unwilling to die]. Matabaca 1, no. 12: 43–44. Surianto, Teddy. 1999. “Potret Distribusi Buku di Indonesia” [Portrait of book distribution in Indonesia]. Pp. 220–237 in Buku Dalam Indonesia Baru [Books in the new Indonesia], ed. Alfons Taryadi. Jakarta: Obor. Suwarni, Yuli Tri. 2004. “Publishers Booking Solid Gains.” The Jakarta Post, 17 May. http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu (accessed 27 September 2005). Tesoro, José Manuel. 2004. The Invisible Palace: The True Story of a Journalist’s Murder in Java. Jakarta: Equinox. Wangsitalaja, Amien. 2003. “Lembaga Kajian Islam dan Sosial (LKIS): Dari Penerbit Gerakan ke Penerbit Profesional” [Institute for the Study of Islam and Society (LKIS): From press for a movement to professional publisher]. Matabaca 2, no. 3: 16–19. Winarno, P. M. 2002. “Mendambakan Distributor Buku Nasional” [Longing for a national book distributor]. Pp. 63–75 in Pemasaran Buku di Indonesia, ed. J. B. Soedarmanto and P. D. Subagya. Jakarta: Ikapi. Y09. 2005. “Buku Terjemahan Mendominasi Produksi Buku di Indonesia” [Translations dominate book production in Indonesia]. Kompas, 24 February. http://www.kompas.com (accessed 19 September 2005).

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

‘NEW BARBARISM’ OR OLD AGENCY AMONG THE DAYAK? Reflections on Post-Suharto Ethnic Violence in Kalimantan

f Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Michael R. Dove

The collapse of the 33-year-long military dictatorship of President Suharto in 1998 was closely preceded and followed by outbreaks of ethnic conflict and violence across the country. This violence quickly attracted the attention of scholars, far more so, ironically, than did the mostly ‘quiet’ but equally destructive violence of Suharto’s long and oppressive rule. Anthropologists and other social scientists have since produced an extensive literature on the outbreaks of ethnic violence in Indonesia (Anderson 2001; Hüsken and de Jonge 2002; Wessel and Wimhöfer 2001), especially Sulawesi and eastern Indonesia (Acciaioli 2001; Aragon 2001; Klinken 2001; Spyer 2002; Vel 2001), and its historic antecedents (Colombijn and Lindblad 2002; Nord-

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

‘New Barbarism’ or Old Agency?

71

holt 2002; Wadley 2004). The following analysis will focus on the violent conflict between Dayak and Madurese that broke out in Kalimantan in 1997 and flared up sporadically during the years that followed. Whereas outside observers, including this writer, reacting against ‘new barbarism’ media accounts, tended to attribute this conflict to the political-economic legacy of Suharto’s New Order regime, the Dayak themselves attributed it to cultural differences with and offenses by the Madurese. This indigenous explanation, claiming ‘agency’ at the expense of political inexpediency, poses a challenge to scholarly conventions of representation.

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Dayak-Madurese Conflict ‘Dayak’ is a loose, colonial-era term for the indigenous, tribal, non-Muslim, pagan/Christian peoples of Borneo, comprising Brunei, the Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah, and the Indonesian provinces of Kalimantan. The term ‘Madurese’ refers to Muslims from the island of Madura, who have migrated in search of farmland to Kalimantan. At the end of 1996 and the beginning of 1997, in the Sanggau, Sambas, and Pontianak districts of the province of West Kalimantan (figure 1), minor altercations between Dayak and Madurese youths escalated into a fullscale ethnic conflict (which was subsequently suppressed but flared up again during both 1999 and 2001), leading to widespread arson, the displacement of tens of thousands from their homes, and perhaps 1,000 deaths, some involving beheadings and cannibalism. Whereas both groups participated in the violence, the outnumbered Madurese bore the brunt of the losses. These events horrified both national and international publics, including most ethnographers of the Dayak, few if any of whom had ever witnessed this sort of behavior. Shocking as these events were, however, most foreign

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

72

Michael R. Dove

scholars were equally disturbed by the lurid nature of the media coverage. Representative headlines during this period included “Murder and Mayhem: Ethnic Animosity Explodes in Bloodshed,” “Descent into Darkest Borneo,” and “Bloody Borneo: A Massacre and Cannibalism Strike at the Heart of Indonesia.”1 This sort of coverage seemed to play into what Richards (1996: xiii) has called the “new barbarism” or a “Malthus-with-guns” interpretation of contemporary violence in less-developed countries (cf. Peluso and Harwell 2001), as developed by Homer-Dixon FIGURE 1 Map of West Kalimantan

M

Sambas

AY AL

SIA

2°

Sambas

Sanggau

K

Pontianak

Mempawah

District District Sanggau

u ap

as

1°

Putussibau

River

Kapuas Hulu District

Sintang

Pontianak

IN

Sintang District

DO

N

ES

IA 0°

N 1°

Ketapang

So

Ch

Ketapang

in

a

BR

h ut

a

U

NE

I

IA

District

Se

MAL

S AY

East Kalimantan IA

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

District

Singkawang

0

100 km

0

109°

2°

S West E N Kalimantan O IND Central Central Kalimantan South Kalimantan

110°

111°

112°

500 km

113°

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

3° 114°

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

‘New Barbarism’ or Old Agency?

73

(1991, 1999) and popularized by the journalist Kaplan (1994, 1996).2 Accordingly, when the Australia-based journal Inside Indonesia asked me to comment on the Dayak-Madurese conflict, I was happy to oblige. I wrote a short article emphasizing the long history of disenfranchisement of the Dayak by former President Suharto’s New Order regime, especially at the hands of the para-statal logging concessions and rubber and oil palm plantations that had appropriated large amounts of tribal land in the area of the conflict (Dove 1997).3 I interpreted the Dayak-Madurese violence in light of this disenfranchisement and in light of the many anti-state sentiments I had heard from Dayak and the relative paucity of statements I had ever heard directed against non-Dayak. I was not necessarily surprised that in this case the Dayak had targeted another ethnic group as opposed to the state, since Suharto’s totalitarian New Order regime had made open resistance to the state nearly impossible. I was convinced, nonetheless, that the true blame for Dayak marginality and anger lay with the state. I called their violence with the Madurese “a classic example of economic tensions manifested as ethnic tensions” (ibid.: 13). In short, I explicitly blamed the Suharto regime for the conflict and exonerated the Dayak and Madurese themselves. The same conclusion was reached by an international NGO, Human Rights Watch Asia (HRWA), which also contributed an article to the same issue of the journal (HRWA 1997a).4 Shortly after publication of this issue of Inside Indonesia, I received a paper circulated by one of the most prominent Dayak NGOs in West Kalimantan, the Institute for Dayakologi Research and Development (IDRD), stating that the articles by both HRWA and myself were incorrect and inappropriate (IDRD 1998).5 In particular, IDRD wrote that we had overlooked the true cultural explanations of the conflict.6

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

74

Michael R. Dove

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Cultural versus Political Explanation Whereas my article as well as that of HRWA in Inside Indonesia argued for a political-economic explanation of the Dayak-Madurese violence, IDRD took pains in its response to argue that the conflict was not the result of political-economic oppression and thus some form of false consciousness: “While the marginalisation of the Dayak through the development and political process is a factor that cannot be overlooked, it is interesting to note that you never hear a Dayak talk about the conflict in such terms” (IDRD 1998: 1). The HRWA report, along with the reports of other observers (e.g., Harwell 2000), argued that the violence had been inflamed by the involvement of thirdparty provocateurs. It was argued that military supporters of deposed President Suharto were trying to retrieve their political position by fostering regional destabilization in the hope that this would lead to a call for the return of a military government.7 IDRD bristled at this charge, which it sought to rebut at length in its report, if not always very credibly. For example, IDRD writers claimed that the semi-automatic weapons that had been found in the possession of some Dayak fighters were not given to them by government agents but were their own (which was highly unlikely); and IDRD insisted that the Dayak had been tipped off to covert movements of Madurese fighters and refugees not by police or military sources but as a result of consulting spirits. IDRD maintained that the problem with the political explanation of the conflict was that it privileged the state, whereas IDRD’s own cultural explanation privileged itself. Its explanations might have provided self-empowerment in its own eyes, but it made the IDRD more culpable in the eyes of others. The political explanation removed much of the blame for the conflict from the Dayak’s shoulders by portraying them as victims too. At the cost of losing this

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

‘New Barbarism’ or Old Agency?

75

sympathetic portrait, IDRD nonetheless argued for its full agency in the conflict, rejecting the role of innocent pawn for that of culpable actor. IDRD itself attributed the conflict not to matters involving politics, economics, or natural resources, but solely to cultural issues.8 IDRD writers asserted that they took up arms because the Madurese had offended their adat, their culture. And culture also infused the Dayak response. As Harwell (2000) observes, the Dayak seemed to be fighting with culture over culture. IDRD also took pains to argue that the issue in the conflict was contemporary Dayak culture, not some hoary relic from the past. They disputed at length the widespread characterization in the media of the conflict as a ‘regression’, for example.9 Most notably, the IDRD writers insisted that the violence was not ‘headhunting’, with its historical connotations. In fact, IDRD was quite right about the modern versus historic character of the violence. This involved not simply the dispatch of life but a wide variety of cultural elements, most or all of which were modern inventions. To begin with, the representation of the Dayak actors as a unified, self-conscious collective was something new,10 albeit with sporadic historic precedent. Further, most if not all of the participants in the conflict came from groups with no headhunting tradition (those with such a tradition, e.g., the Ibanic peoples of the Upper Kapuas or the Kenyah of East Kalimantan, did not participate in the conflict). And much of the Dayak ideology attending the conflict (e.g., the assertion that the warriors who ate the flesh of their enemies were possessed by spirits) seems to have been invented for the occasion, perhaps drawing and building on external, essentialized images of the Dayak.11 Scholars differ on how to interpret such practices, which feature so prominently in the ‘new barbarism’ media coverage of violence in less-developed countries. Fairhead (2001) argues that violence is violence, and that

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

76

Michael R. Dove

the only distinction is between the expensive violence of the laser-guided bombs of the industrialized countries and the inexpensive violence of the knife or cutlass of non-industrialized countries. But Richards (1996: xx) notes that tactical issues can be involved in the way that violence is carried out: “Once a decision to resort to violence had been taken, hand cutting, throat slitting and other acts of terror become rational ways of achieving intended strategic outcomes.” In West Kalimantan, similar acts of terror arguably served the Dayak campaign by demonstrating to their perceived enemies that they faced an unfathomable and formidable warrior culture.

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

‘Ethnographic Refusal’ Anthropologists, who have more of a right to claim culture as their field than any other discipline, have often exhibited reluctance to talk about culture in the context of violent conflict. Ortner (1995) calls this the problem of “ethnographic refusal,” by which she means the refusal on the part of ethnographers to write ‘thickly’ about their subjects’ own views in such cases. Ortner (ibid.: 187–188) contends that “[r]unning through all these works, despite in some cases deep theoretical differences between them, is a kind of bizarre refusal to know and speak and write of the lived worlds inhabited by those who resist (or do not, as the case may be).” Li (2002: 362, 368) similarly notes that whereas studies of indigenous knowledge have delved heavily into such things as botanical knowledge, “[t]here has been much less interest in exploring indigenous peoples’ political-economic knowledge, the understanding that they have about the power relations that surround them … Confronted with popular violence, we pay superficial attention to the ethnic or religious idioms through which people explain their own actions, preferring to treat violence as a manifestation of underlying, political-economic

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

‘New Barbarism’ or Old Agency?

77

inequalities.” Richards (1996: xvi) sees this as one of the weaknesses of the ‘new barbarism’ approach, namely, that it pays “scant attention to the insurgents’ own claims concerning the purpose of their movement.” Ortner attributes ‘ethnographic refusal’ to two things, the first of which is the ‘cultural materialist’ approach of the 1960s, which treated cultural concerns in general as secondary to economic and political processes. This is exemplified by the studies of Rappaport (1968) and Harris (1966), which purported to show how seemingly exotic cultural practices actually served material ends.12 The persisting legacy of this approach makes it difficult for anthropology to engage seriously with certain dimensions of the Dayak’s discourse of violence, some of which are practically unknown in the ethnographic literature. Most notably, the Dayak said that they could identify Madurese by their smell and that this offended them. The senses in general have been ignored by the social sciences. To a remarkable and also remarkably unrecognized degree, our efforts to comprehend and represent the ‘Other’ focus on visual manifestations, not those of sound, touch, smell, etc. This is just beginning to change: an anthropology of the senses is emerging (Howes 1991; Stoller 1989), especially of sound (Feld 1982; Panopoulos 2003; Roseman 1991), and even of smell (Classen, Howes, and Synnott 1994; Drobnick 2006). The second cause of ‘ethnographic refusal’, according to Ortner (1995: 190), is a “failure of nerve surrounding questions of the internal politics of dominated groups.” This occurs, for example, when our subjects engage in violent behavior of which we disapprove.13 As Harwell (2000: 221) has written of the West Kalimantan violence: “How do I write about violence that touches my close friends in a way that … ‘attempts to explain the unexplainable without excusing the inexcusable’?” This question is further complicated when, as in this Dayak

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

78

Michael R. Dove

case, our subjects’ own views on violence strike us as not merely incorrect but as non-liberatory or counter-productive. Li (2002: 364) asks: “What does it mean for scholars to generate knowledge intended to counter understandings framed in ethnic or religious terms, when these understandings are generated not by misguided outsiders (the media, scholars or politicians highlighting primordial identities and exotic tribal rituals) but by everyday ‘indigenous’ experience?”14 The taking of enemy heads—headhunting—was a skittish subject for anthropologists of Indonesia during the decades prior to the 1997 Dayak-Madurese conflict. In response to the fascination with headhunting on the part of foreign ethnographers in the nineteenth century and of domestic and international publics alike in the twentieth century, modern ethnographers have largely ignored the subject, preferring to look at violence in the metropole rather than at the margins. In place of the nineteenth-century accounts of tribal headhunting, thus, we have twentieth-century accounts of ‘state headhunting’, referring to the study of local beliefs about human sacrifice for state construction projects and, more generally, of local perceptions of and adaptations to ubiquitous state oppression and violence (Tsing 1993, 1996; cf. George 1996; Schiller 2001). For all of these reasons, most foreign anthropologists—myself included—were initially unprepared to deal with the Dayak violence against the Madurese.

Counter-Narratives The philosopher Alcoff (1991) writes that all “speaking for” others is essentially political, a function of what she terms the “rituals of speaking”—who is speaking, who is spoken of, and who listens. But she also argues that rituals of not “speaking for” are equally political acts, and often self-serving ones at that, which cannot be justi-

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

‘New Barbarism’ or Old Agency?

79

fied on the grounds of the difficulties of “speaking for.” So scholarly “retreat,” based on the Western, positivist fantasy of autonomy and isolation, may not be a valid solution to this challenge of representation.15 Instead, Alcoff suggests that the solution may be our allowance or creation of possibilities for alternative or counter-narratives by our subjects. What if these counter-narratives seem to us to be ‘non-liberatory’ or counter-productive? Whereas some scholars, such as Spivak (1988), argue that non-liberatory speech is undesirable and should not be supported, Alcoff (1991) suggests that the very act of the counter-narrative is liberating and empowering, regardless of its content. Ortner (1995: 186) similarly suggests that we need to accept “incoherencies” from our subjects, both because they are cultural-historical products and because they offer alternate coherencies to our own. IDRD’s critique of the articles by HRWA and myself and its own proffered view of the conflict clearly represent what Alcoff calls a counter-narrative. By these standards, this is a salutary development. The IDRD narrative has another virtue too. In his classic study of Azande witchcraft, Evans-Pritchard (1937: 67–68, 78) takes pains to distinguish between “mystical” and commonsense explanations of everyday events (e.g., between explaining a cracked pot in terms of witchcraft and explaining it in terms of a potter’s error). Geertz (1983: 79–80) criticizes Evans-Pritchard for failing to see that witchcraft explanations do not violate commonsense but rather support it where it otherwise falls short: they “seal up the common-sense view of the world.” I suggest that IDRD’s cultural interpretations of the DayakMadurese conflict may fill a similar role. The academic political-economic explanation of this conflict portrays the Dayak community as wounded and (therefore) erring, thus leaving vast unresolved issues in Dayak life. In contrast, the IDRD explanation much more simply depicts the

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

80

Michael R. Dove

Madurese as having given offense to Dayak culture, which the Dayak have redressed, albeit through violent means. Whereas the academic explanation does not resolve the situation, the internal one does—it ‘seals up’ the Dayak view of the world.

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgments I have been studying and writing about various Dayak groups since 1974, when I commenced my doctoral research with one group, the Kantu’, in the upper reaches of the Kapuas River in West Kalimantan. I have since made a half-dozen additional return trips to various parts of Kalimantan, with support from the National Science Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the East-West Center, and the United National Development Program, with in-country sponsorship by L.I.P.I., Gadjah Mada University, and BAPPENAS. Earlier versions of this analysis were presented at Yale in F&ES 747a/ANTH 581a “Society and Environment: Introduction to Theory and Method” and F&ES 752b/ANTH 610b “Society and Environment: Advanced Readings.” The author is grateful to the students in both courses, and to his co-instructor in the latter course, Carol Carpenter, for helping him to develop and refine this analysis.

Notes 1. Respectively, the Far Eastern Economic Review, 20 February 1997; The Economist, 27 March 1999; and Time Magazine, 12 March 2001. 2. The thesis of ‘new barbarism’, drawing heavily on the work of Homer-Dixon (1991, 1999), is that population-driven resource scarcity, environmental degradation, and poverty provoke violent conflict, whereas critics like the anthropologists Richards (1996) and Fairhead (2001) argue just the opposite—that it is

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

‘New Barbarism’ or Old Agency?

3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

81

political conflict, often over resources, that degrades resources and impoverishes populations. I carried out fieldwork in the 1980s on para-statal plantations in the part of West Kalimantan where the subsequent DayakMadurese conflict was centered (Dove 1999a). The HRWA article was a précis of a subsequently published lengthy report on the conflict (HRWA 1997b). Subsequent publications on this subject included Bamba (2000) and IDRD (2001). Several years earlier, IDRD had invited me to write a foreword for a volume that they published on Dayak culture and development (Dove 1994; cf. Dove 1999b). There was historical precedent for such political machinations in West Kalimantan. Suharto’s New Order regime had previously used the Dayak to drive Chinese suspected of communist sympathies out of the rural areas (Davidson and Kammen 2002; Heidhues 2001). IDRD (1998: 6) did not completely deny the role of other factors, however, acknowledging “threats to territory and culture from the development of monoculture plantations, logging concessions, and mining.” Cultural regression is a central theme for Kaplan (1994: 73), who talks about “re-primitivized” man. Cf. Schrauwers (1998) on the recent origin of the ethnic term ‘To Pamona’ in Sulawesi. My Kantu’ informants who periodically visited the coast to trade would prominently display on their boats blowpipes—which they neither made nor used—simply to scare away thieves, telling inquisitive passers-by that the poison on their darts would kill in “ten seconds.” Metropolitan fears of dart poison extend back to the early trade wars with the Dutch East India Company (Dove and Carpenter 2005). On the other hand, the ‘cultural materialist’ tradition was itself a response to a then prevailing, reflexive recourse to cultural explanation that was (and sometimes still is) often disempowering for ethnic minorities. I taught at a government university in Java from 1979 to 1985, where I soon found that the dominant epistemological framework for understanding the country’s minority groups was ‘culture’. All of the perceived ‘undesirable’ behavior of these groups was ascribed to their distinctive cultures, an explanation that implicitly deprived their behavior of any eco-

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

82

Michael R. Dove

nomic or ecological logic. As a result, one of my principal tasks as an anthropologist, ironically, was to argue that culture was not necessarily the primary determinant of such behavior. 13. Baviskar’s (1996) analysis of the way that outside scholars emphasize the ‘positive’ aspects of beleaguered tribal groups in the vicinity of the Narmada dam, while de-emphasizing their ‘negative’ aspects (e.g., violence and hierarchical social and gender relations), is exemplary in this regard. 14. Li (2002: 367) attributes the Dayak conflict with the Madurese to a “sedentarist metaphysic” (following Malkki 1992), referring to the invocation of values of locality and indigeneity by the Dayak in resource contests. She argues, based on histories of population mobility and admixture, that these are purely imagined values, and she blames NGOs and foreign scholars for their dissemination. She absolves the New Order regime of responsibility in this matter by arguing that it did not pursue ethnic-based politics. I suggest, however, that the ‘sedentarist metaphysics’ itself is a response to the New Order’s efforts to promote a ‘non-sedentarist state metaphysic’, which appropriated resources from local use and control for the central state to use as it saw fit. As for imagined values, most social scientists today accept that culture is constructed (Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Linnekin 1992), which renders problematic the concept of un-imagined or authentic values (Linnekin 1992; Schrauwers 1998). 15. For example, it was difficult if not impossible during the New Order for foreign scholars to work within the country and be openly critical of the regime’s political stance toward marginal communities. An entire generation of social scientists made its peace with this situation by writing obliquely, or not at all, about issues of power within Indonesia. This was also a ‘retreat’, a tradition of ‘not speaking’.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

‘New Barbarism’ or Old Agency?

83

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

References Acciaioli, Greg. 2001. “Grounds of Conflict, Idioms of Harmony: Custom, Religion, and Nationalism in Violence Avoidance at the Lindu Plain, Central Sulawesi.” Indonesia 72: 81–114. Alcoff, Linda. 1991. “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Cultural Critique 20: 5–32. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. ______, ed. 2001. Violence and the State in Suharto’s Indonesia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications. Aragon, Lorraine V. 2001. “Communal Violence in Poso, Central Sulawesi: Where People Eat Fish and Fish Eat People.” Indonesia 72: 45–79. Bamba, John. 2000. “Shocking Ethnic Violence in West Kalimantan: Have the Headhunters Risen from the Graves?” Paper presented at the International Conference on Conflict Resolution, Peace-Building, Sustainable Development and Indigenous Peoples, Manila, Philippines, 6–8 December. Baviskar, Amita. 1996. “Reverence Is Not Enough: Ecological Marxism and Indian Adivasis.” Pp. 204–222 in Creating the Countryside: The Politics of Rural and Environmental Discourse, ed. E. M. Dupius and Peter Vandergeest. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Classen, Constance, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott. 1994. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London: Routledge. Colombijn, Freek, and J. Thomas Lindblad, eds. 2002. Roots of Violence in Indonesia: Contemporary Violence in Historical Perspective. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Davidson, Jamie S., and Douglas Kammen. 2002. “Indonesia’s Unknown War and the Lineages of Violence in West Kalimantan.” Indonesia 73: 53–87. Dove, Michael R. 1994. “Kata Pengantar: Ketahanan Kebudayaan dan Kebudayaan Ketahanan” [Foreword: The survival of culture and the culture of survival]. Pp. xxiii–xlii in Kebudayaan Dayak: Aktualisasi dan Transformasi [Dayak culture: Actualization and transformation], ed. Paulus Florus, Stepanus Djuweng, John Bamba, and Nico Andasputra. Jakarta: LP3S/IDRD and P.T. Gramedia. ______. 1997. “Dayak Anger Ignored.” Inside Indonesia 51: 13–14. ______. 1999a. “Representations of the ‘Other’ by Others: The Ethnographic Challenge Posed by Planters’ Views of Peasants in

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

84

Michael R. Dove

Indonesia.” Pp. 203–229 in Transforming the Indonesian Uplands: Marginality, Power and Production, ed. Tania Li. Amsterdam: Harwood. ______. 1999b. “Writing for, Versus About, the Ethnographic Other: Issues of Engagement and Reflexivity in Working with a Tribal NGO in Indonesia.” Identities 6, nos. 2–3: 225–253. Dove, Michael R., and Carol Carpenter. 2005. “The ‘Poison Tree’ and the Changing Vision of the Indo-Malay Realm: Seventeenth Century–Twentieth Century.” In Environmental Change in Native and Colonial Histories of Borneo, ed. Reid Wadley. Leiden: KITLV. Drobnick, Jim. 2006. The Smell Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fairhead, J. 2001. “International Dimensions of Conflict over Natural and Environmental Resources.” Pp. 213–236 in Violent Environments, ed. Nancy L. Peluso and Michael Watts. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Feld, Steven. 1982. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kalului Expression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. George, Kenneth M. 1996. Showing Signs of Violence: The Cultural Politics of a Twentieth-Century Headhunting Ritual. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harris, Marvin. 1966. “The Cultural Ecology of India’s Sacred Cattle.” Current Anthropology 7: 51–59. Harwell, Emily. 2000. “The Un-Natural History of Culture, Ethnicity, Tradition and Territorial Conflicts in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, 1800–1997.” PhD diss., Yale University. Heidhues, Mary Somers. 2001. “Kalimantan Barat 1967–1999: Violence on the Periphery.” Pp. 139–151 in Wessel and Wimhöfer 2001. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Homer-Dixon, Thomas F. 1991. “On the Threshold: Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute Conflict.” International Security 16, no. 2: 76–116. ______. 1999. Environment, Scarcity, and Violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

‘New Barbarism’ or Old Agency?

85

Howes, David, ed. 1991. The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses. Toronto: Toronto University Press. HRWA (Human Rights Watch Asia). 1997a. “The Horror in Kalimantan.” Inside Indonesia 51: 9–12. ______. 1997b. “Indonesia: Communal Violence in West Kalimantan.” Human Rights Watch Asia 9, no. 10: 1–40 Hüsken, Frans, and Huub de Jonge, eds. 2002. Violence and Vengeance: Discontent and Conflict in New Order Indonesia. Nijmegen Studies in Development and Cultural Change, no. 37. Saarbrüken: Verlag für Entwicklungspolitik. IDRD (Institute of Dayakologi Research and Development). 1998. “The Role of Adat in the Dayak and Madurese War.” Ms. Pontianak. ______. 2001. Amuk Sampit Palangkaraya [Running amok in SampitPalangkaraya]. Pontianak. Kaplan, Robert D. 1994. “The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, and Disease Are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of our Planet.” Atlantic Monthly (February): 44–76. ______. 1996. The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy. New York: Random House. Klinken, Gerry van. 2001. “The Maluku Wars of 1999: Bringing Society Back In.” Indonesia 71: 1–26. Li, Tania. 2002. “Ethnic Cleansing, Recursive Knowledge, and the Dilemmas of Sedentarism.” International Social Science Journal 173: 361–371. Linnekin, Jocelyn. 1992. “On the Theory and Politics of Cultural Construction in the Pacific.” Oceania 62, no. 4: 249–263. Malkki, Liisa H. 1992. “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialisation of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees.” Cultural Anthropology 7: 24–44. Nordholt, Henk Schulte. 2002. “A Genealogy of Violence.” Pp. 33–61 in Colombijn and Lindblad 2002. Ortner, Sherry. 1995. “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1: 173–193. Panopoulos, Panayotis. 2003. “Animal Bells as Symbolic Sound and Hearing in a Greek Island Village.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 9, no. 4: 639–656.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

86

Michael R. Dove

Peluso, Nancy Lee, and Emily Harwell. 2001. “Territory, Custom, and the Cultural Politics of Ethnic War in West Kalimantan, Indonesia.” Pp. 83–116 In Violent Environments, ed. Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rappaport, Roy A. 1968. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Richards, Paul. 1996. Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone. Oxford: International African Institute. Roseman, Mary. 1991. Healing Sounds from the Malaysian Rainforest: Temiar Music and Medicine. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schiller, Anne. 2001. “Talking Heads: Capturing Dayak Deathways on Film.” American Ethnologist 28, no. 1: 32–55. Schrauwers, Albert. 1998. “Returning to the ‘Origin’: Church and State in the Ethnographies of the ‘To Pamona.’” Pp. 203–226 in Southeast Asian Identities: Culture and the Politics of Representation in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, ed. Joel S. Kahn. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Pp. 271–313 in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Spyer, Patricia. 2002. “Fire without Smoke and Other Phantoms of Ambon’s Violence: Media Effects, Agency, and the Work of Imagination.” Indonesia 74: 21–36. Stoller, Paul. 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tsing, Anna L. 1993. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ______. 1996. “Telling Violence in the Meratus Mountains.” Pp. 184– 251 in Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia, ed. Janet Hoskins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Vel, Jacqueline C. A. 2001. “Tribal Battle in a Remote Island: Crisis and Violence in Sumba (Eastern Indonesia).” Indonesia 72: 141–158. Wadley, Reed L. 2004. “Punitive Expeditions and Divine Revenge: Oral and Colonial Histories of Rebellion and Pacification in Western Borneo, 1886–1902.” Ethnohistory 51, no. 3: 609–636. Wessel, Ingrid, and Georgia Wimhöfer, eds. 2001. Violence in Indonesia. Hamburg: Abera.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

VIGILANTES AND THE STATE

f

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Joshua Barker

Indonesia’s New Order was among the most repressive and violent states of the twentieth century. During Suharto’s period of rule (1966–1998), the state was directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of as many as a million or more of its own citizens and the incarceration of many more. While the worst of this violence occurred during the pogroms against communists in 1965–1966 and during the long occupation of East Timor, the whole New Order system of rule was constructed on what Benedict Anderson (2001a: 13) has described as a “vast machine of state violence.” This machine left behind a dangerous legacy that must be better understood if it is to be overcome in the years ahead (J. Bertrand 2002; Colombijn and Lindblad 2002). Over the past several years it has become increasingly apparent that the legacy of New Order authoritarianism is not what many expected. At the time of Suharto’s ouster, most believed that the New Order would reconstitute itself in all but name or that the country would descend into communitarian violence—perhaps even civil war.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

88

Joshua Barker

A few optimists hoped that democracy would take root and that Indonesians would finally come to terms with their violent past. What has transpired has been far more complicated: a surprising degree of democratization, the containment of civil war, localized eruptions of communitarian violence, and an almost complete failure to come to terms with past violence. One of the more disturbing developments since the fall of Suharto, and one that has not received much international attention, has been the widespread emergence of vigilantism in urban and rural areas.1 It is now common for citizens themselves to mete out punishments to those suspected as having committed a crime or an offense. Thus, for example, thieves who are caught red-handed are often beaten or even burned alive by local residents (Wardoyo 2005). People accused of witchcraft are sometimes taken from their homes and publicly lynched by their neighbors (Siegel 2006). And businesses involved in ‘immoral’ activities, such as gambling or prostitution, frequently find themselves threatened or their businesses ransacked by angry mobs of religious youth. My concern here is to describe the implications of these instances of vigilantism for understandings of the Indonesian state.2 Briefly stated, my contention is that vigilantism puts to rest the long-standing idea that Indonesian state power is characterized by a powerful unity. It shows that state power is routinely constituted and reconstituted in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways through acts of “everyday policing” (Buur and Jensen 2004: 140). Most of us are accustomed to thinking of the state as a powerful unity. The state is that which stands above and rules over society through an appeal to a transcendent law. In order to enforce its law, the state exercises, as Weber (1958: 78) described it, “a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force.” A person who breaks the law is punished for his or her crime. Punishment is not a

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Vigilantes and the State

89

form of vengeance perpetrated by the victim of a crime; it is an act performed for the purposes of upholding the law. Both law enforcement and punishment are the sole prerogatives of the state and take place through its instruments: the police, the courts, the prison system. According to this long-standing conception of state power, when people commit acts in which they ‘take the law into their own hands’ or, as it is called in Bahasa Indonesia, “play judge themselves,” these are understood as criminal acts that challenge the authority of the state. A closer examination of vigilantism in Indonesia, however, reveals that the exercise of and resistance to state power is far more complicated. Take the case of neighborhood watch groups and their punishment of thieves, for example. In Indonesia, most urban neighborhoods and most village hamlets are policed on a daily basis not by uniformed police but by local residents or private security guards. Communities take care of their own policing needs either by doing it themselves or by paying people to do it on their behalf. The Indonesian government claims that this is because Indonesians have a culture of gotong royong, that is, a culture of co-operation, mutual self-help, and mutual support. However, the history of community self-policing demonstrates that since colonial times, the state has not merely celebrated such practices but rather has actively cultivated them. This was especially true of Suharto’s New Order regime, which made neighborhood watches and/or private security guards an obligatory part of community organization. It also increased police oversight of these institutions by making the police responsible for their training and their integration into the broader state apparatus of surveillance and social control (Barker 1999, 2001; R. Bertrand 2004). This arrangement had two notable advantages for the regime: it cost the government very little, and it created a citizenry that thought and acted like police. As one policeman indicated to me at the time,

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

90

Joshua Barker

under this program every head of household would fulfill the function of a policeman. If every head of household is obliged to function as a policeman, does it make sense to distinguish vigilante violence from state violence? By far, the most common form of vigilante violence, the archetypal form of ‘playing judge oneself’, is the punishment of suspected thieves caught ‘wet’ (in the act) by residents or passers-by. From a Weberian standpoint, such acts are clearly vigilante acts that could undermine the authority of the state because they represent the appropriation of violence by elements in society. However, in the Indonesian context, as in so many post-colonial contexts, these hard and fast boundaries simply do not apply. It is not just that the boundaries between state and society, between police and vigilantes, are “blurred” (Gupta 1995); it is that “the vast machine of state violence” (Anderson 2001a: 13) is in fact made up of thousands and thousands of micro-level machines, dispersed throughout all levels of society. The neighborhood watch is but one of the micro-level machines involved in routine violence; others include youth organizations, militias, gangs, and toughs (preman). The myth of state power during the New Order was that all these micro-level machines and their routine forms of violence were part of a giant whole that was pyramidal in shape and unified in structure. In the realm of policing, this myth was enshrined in official and unofficial government policies and practices that sought to co-opt vigilante groups and put them to work for the ruling party, the police, or the army. There is no denying that these policies had real effects. When I conducted research on urban policing during the mid1990s, I found a security ‘system’ in which neighborhood watches, preman, and private security guards worked in close collaboration with the ruling party, the army, and the police. In most cases, these groups offered themselves up to be cultivated and supported by elements within the

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Vigilantes and the State

91

New Order regime. However, even then there were many cases in which such groups acted relatively independently of the regime, occasionally standing in outright defiance of its authority. For example, it was not uncommon in Bandung for the police to fail to arrest a suspect because neighbors of the suspect would threaten to avenge an arrest with a mob attack on the police precinct. This kind of event challenged the myth that the state was unified and all powerful. In the post-Suharto era, as such acts have become more prevalent, it is growing increasingly apparent that the myth of state unity is obscuring the actual mechanisms through which state power is exercised. A sense of the complexities involved in post-Suharto Indonesian state formation is conveyed by a series of local newspaper reports about events that transpired in Puncak shortly after Suharto’s ouster in 1998. Puncak is a tourist region located in the mountains just south of Jakarta. Historically a destination for family vacations, during the 1990s it had started to develop a busy nightlife, with discotheques and nightclubs springing up all along the main highway. Between 1990 and 1998, the number of ‘entertainment places’, including billiard halls, discotheques, massage parlors, and pubs, grew from just 10 to as many as 50. According to one source, only 4 of these businesses operated with official permission from government authorities (Pikiran Rakyat, 11 August 1998). In addition to contributing to the usual problems associated with drunken and drugged patrons, many of these businesses doubled as brothels. On 12 July 1998, a group of 135 ulama (Muslim religious teachers) delivered a letter of complaint to the Bogor District Assembly (DPRD) requesting that such businesses be closed down and that Puncak be restored to its status as a tourist resort for families. In response to this letter, on 18 July, a police operation was launched that netted 110 sex workers in the Puncak area. This did

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

92

Joshua Barker

not satisfy the ulama, however. Ten days later they gathered their supporters from all over Puncak and went to the DPRD demanding that the businesses be shut down permanently. Perhaps because there was no immediate action by the authorities, two days later, a group of about 1,000 people from villages and religious schools around Puncak attacked 17 discotheques and massage parlors with stones and wood. In some cases, mobs entered the buildings and vandalized them. The groups also approached the boarding houses where many of the women who worked in the nightspots lived, shouting epithets and demanding that they leave. Attempts by the police to disperse the crowd were futile, as were warning shots fired into the air. The action stopped only after several ulama intervened to calm the crowd. A week later, ulama wearing headbands with the message “peaceful reform” again demanded that the businesses be shut down; this time, however, they made their demand to the executive branch rather than the legislative one (Pikiran Rakyat, 20 July 1998). In response to these actions, 300 employees of the nightspots staged their own protest at the DPRD. With posters reading, “If discotheques close, wives and children eat what?” and “Government officials don’t be hypocrites, don’t you like to come to entertainment spots?” the employees and representatives of the nightclubs issued a complaint saying that the local government had not protected investors in the local economy and had not adequately enforced the law. The result, they claimed, was that thousands of people had lost their jobs and their ability to feed their families (Pikiran Rakyat, 28 and 31 July 1998). The actions of the ulama and their followers are what Walter Benjamin (1978) would refer to as ‘law-making’ violence. Such violence not only challenges an existing state of affairs; it founds a whole new state. In this case, as in a number of other cases described by Sidel (2001:

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Vigilantes and the State

93

53–59), the state it founds corresponds to an image of an Islamic moral economy, defined against the supposed evils of an unrestrained capitalism. To appreciate the complexity that these forms of violence bring to the conventional understanding of the Indonesian state, one merely has to recognize that this form of ‘law-making’ violence is taking place on a routine basis in communities across the archipelago. The result is a patchwork of de facto jurisdictions, each with its own ‘morality’ and each policed by self-appointed vigilantes, as well as by the police and the army. The state, rather than being a unified whole standing above and ruling over society, is an assemblage of micro-level machines, each with its own particular genealogy, logic, and repertoire of policing practices.

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. Although vigilantism is not entirely new, in the post-Suharto era it has taken on new forms (e.g., to my knowledge, the burning of suspected thieves is only a recent occurrence), and some scholars have argued that it has also become more frequent. The police do not keep statistics on vigilante violence; statistics are compiled only on the specific crimes that have been committed. For an attempt at a statistical analysis, see Wardoyo (2005). 2. For a summary and critique of the argument that Indonesia has a violent culture, see Collins (2002). 3. For a comprehensive overview of theories of the Indonesian state, see Day (2002).

References Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. 2001a. “Introduction.” Pp. 9–19 in Anderson 2001b. ______, ed. 2001b. Violence and the State in Suharto’s Indonesia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications. Barker, Joshua. 1999. “Surveillance and Territoriality in Bandung.”

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

94

Joshua Barker

Pp. 95–127 in Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Colonial Vietnam, ed. Vicente Rafael. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications. ______. 2001. “State of Fear: Controlling the Criminal Contagion in Suharto’s New Order.” Pp. 20–53 in Anderson 2001b. Benjamin, Walter. 1978. “Critique of Violence.” Pp. 277–300 in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken. Bertrand, Jacques. 2002. “Legacies of the Authoritarian Past: Religious Violence in Indonesia’s Moluccan Islands.” Pacific Affairs 75, no. 1: 57–87. Bertrand, Romain. 2004. “Les virtuoses de la violence: Remarques sur la privatisation du maintien de l’ordre en Indonésie contemporaine.” CERI-FNSP (January). http:// www.ceri-sciences-po.org/archive/jan04/artrb.pdf. Buur, L., and S. Jensen. 2004. “Introduction: Vigilantism and the Policing of Everyday Life in South Africa.” African Studies 63, no. 2: 139–152. Collins, Elizabeth Fuller. 2002. “Indonesia: A Violent Culture?” Asian Survey 42, no. 4: 582–604. Colombijn, Freek, and J. Thomas Lindblad, eds. 2002. Roots of Violence in Indonesia: Contemporary Violence in Historical Perspective. Leiden: KITLV Press. Day, Tony. 2002. Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Gupta, Akil. 1995. “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.” American Ethnologist 22, no. 2: 375–402. Sidel, John T. 2001. “Riots, Church Burnings, Conspiracies: The Moral Economy of the Indonesian Crowd in the Late Twentieth Century.” Pp. 47–63 in Violence in Indonesia, ed. Ingrid Wessel and Georgia Wimhöfer. Hamburg: Abera. Siegel, James T. 2006. Naming the Witch. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wardoyo, Danang Kukuh. 2005. “Trial by Fire: Taking the Law into Your Own Hands Is Now Commonplace in Indonesia.” Inside Indonesia 79. http://www.insideindonesia.org/edit79/p2930_wardoyo.html. Weber, Max. 1958. “Politics as a Vocation.” Pp. 77–128 in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

THE IRONIES OF INSTABILITY IN INDONESIA

f

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Dan Slater

Hope Is When Army Officers Are Democrats. — Louis de Bernières, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord

Indonesia seems perpetually condemned to “live in interesting times,” as the famous Chinese curse goes. The past decade has seen the country attract global notoriety as a land of recurrent economic shocks, ethnic conflicts, terrorist bombings, separatist rebellions, and natural catastrophes. Political authorities have appeared too corrupt and inept to respond effectively. Thus, when Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), a retired general, scored a landslide victory in Indonesia’s first-ever direct presidential election in September 2004, the political rise of a military man was widely portrayed as a small blow for stability in a highly unstable nation. This essay ventures the argument that—at least at the level of elite politics—precisely the opposite is true. The

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

96

Dan Slater

recent behavior of Indonesia’s parties, parliaments, and presidents reveals that elite politics has been characterized by too much stability rather than too little. This is because the elite figures who belatedly connived in the toppling of former presidents Suharto in 1998 and Habibie in 1999 managed thereafter to construct something of a political cartel (Slater 2004). Like a cartel of private companies, this cartel of political elites has served to protect its leading members from outside competition. Indonesia’s pre-eminent political figures have remained practically irremovable through the electoral process, even though elections themselves have been commendably free and fair. Unafraid of being removed from power, political leaders have faced little impetus to govern. From this perspective, the government has failed to deal with Indonesia’s ongoing social and economic crises not because political elites could not get their act together, but because they could. That elite stability has fostered Indonesia’s festering socio-economic instability is the first irony I explore here. The second is that the election of a much stronger individual figure as president has ironically destabilized, not stabilized, elite politics. As we will see, the electoral campaign and victory of SBY significantly disrupted the cozy workings of the political cartel. The big question is what kind of political arrangement is arising in the cartel’s stead. Is SBY trying to reconstruct the cartel under his own leadership? Or is he trying to free himself from coalitional constraints, aiming to rule by fiat and ignore his fellow political elites entirely? Either of these outcomes would be deeply troubling for democratic accountability in Indonesia. A third, more hopeful possibility is that political groups shunned by SBY will provide the basis for a loyal opposition that can hold the new president and his closest allies accountable for their

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Ironies of Instability in Indonesia

97

performance. Unfortunately, this currently seems to be the least likely of these three scenarios. The next section explores how the rise of competitive elections failed to produce competitive elites upon the collapse of Suharto’s New Order. I then examine how the 2004 presidential elections threw a wrench in the collusive works. I conclude with a preliminary assessment of the SBY presidency’s implications for democratic accountability in Indonesia.

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Competitive Elections, but Not Competitive Elites Democratic elections are supposed to afford citizens the opportunity to replace underperforming politicians with alternatives of their choice. But leaders of major parties can shield themselves from electoral accountability by colluding to share power among all political groups (Katz and Mair 1995). Even when such leaders lose elections, they do not lose power. Contrary to the view that Indonesian politicians cannot manage the country’s multiple crises because they are too busy fighting among themselves, I suggest that they have lacked the will to perform because they have not feared their own removal from power if they fail to do so. How did Indonesia’s democratic transition in 1998–1999 give rise to such an unaccountable cartel? The major point is that informal networks from the New Order era survived the changes in formal rules that accompanied the demise of authoritarianism. The so-called opposition parties of the Suharto era were in fact deeply infiltrated by regime supporters and apologists. Even the three elite figures most famously critical of Suharto’s dictatorial rule—Abdurrahman Wahid, Amien Rais, and Megawati Sukarnoputri— were occasional rather than constant thorns in Suharto’s side. As such, they developed working relationships with many elite figures in the military and the ruling party, Golkar. Their political rise in the reformasi era would find them

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

98

Dan Slater

working in tandem with those regime insiders who turned against Suharto as his collapse began to appear inevitable. Student-led urban protests toppled Suharto and his narrow clique in May 1998, setting the stage for competitive national elections in June 1999. These would prove to be the two truly inspiring moments of mass public participation during Indonesia’s democratic transition. Faceto-face elite interactions during this period lacked such drama but proved equally consequential. One could sense the beginnings of a wide-ranging political cartel as early as January 1999, when military commander Wiranto summoned Wahid, Amien, and Megawati, among others, to his Jakarta home to discuss the upcoming parliamentary elections. By making it clear that the military would not actively support new president B. J. Habibie in particular, or Golkar in general, Wiranto helped set the stage for a free and fair vote. That was the good news for democratic accountability. The bad news was that Indonesia’s party and military leaders were cementing relations of backroom co-operation before being forced to engage in public competition. This was especially important because Indonesia’s next president would be selected by parliament rather than the populace. While each party’s share of parliament would be determined by popular will, the composition of the political executive would be a matter of elite compromise. A special parliamentary session in October 1999 delivered the presidency to Wahid and the vice-presidency to Megawati, even though Megawati’s PDI-P dramatically outperformed Wahid’s PKB in the June balloting.1 Wahid then offered cabinet seats to all major and minor political parties alike, while Wiranto maintained his grip on the Indonesian military. Amien Rais and new Golkar leader Akbar Tandjung were appeased with the top positions in the Indonesian parliament. The upshot was that Habibie had been removed, but that was basically it. No parties

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ironies of Instability in Indonesia

99

emerged from the 1999 elections as losers, and there was no viable political opposition in place to check the government’s malfeasance and unresponsiveness. The key to this power-sharing arrangement was the cabinet. Wahid managed to secure the presidency only by promising to share the cabinet among all political factions. When he reneged on that quid pro quo, reshuffling the cabinet to the benefit of his loyalists and at the expense of the party cartel between April and August 2000, the cartel responded with parliamentary impeachment proceedings. His removal in July 2001 delivered the presidency to Megawati, who rewarded Wahid’s vanquishers by replacing the former leader’s ‘all-the-president’s-men’ cabinet with a ‘rainbow’ cabinet that included all significant political parties. From August 2001 to March 2004, this collusive arrangement produced impressive stability—dare I say sclerosis—at the elite level. Golkar’s Akbar proudly called this a “political moratorium.” The passivity of Megawati’s government is typically ascribed to her lack of individual vigor and leadership. But the broader point is that no one in her administration was under pressure to perform because no one perceived a viable opposition that might replace him or her in the 2004 elections. When considering whether SBY’s victory will reinvigorate public governance in Indonesia, we need to consider not just whether he is a more vigorous individual than his predecessor, but whether and how his political rise has reshaped the ruling coalition.

Disrupting the Political Moratorium: The Campaign and Victory of SBY The Megawati moratorium was an extremely sleepy political time, but it did produce one major shift that helped set the stage for the story to follow. Under pressure from civil society organizations condemning the government’s

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

100

Dan Slater

unresponsiveness, the ruling parliamentary cartel agreed to hold direct presidential elections in 2004. The next president would be chosen by ordinary people, not by party elites. This did not necessarily mean that elite politics would become more competitive and less collusive, however. The two largest parties, Golkar and PDI-P, had become increasingly chummy during the moratorium years. It was highly probable that candidates representing those two increasingly indistinguishable parties would face off in the presidential election. If so, it would not much matter who won. Golkar and PDI-P would continue to rule cooperatively, sharing scraps of power with smaller parties to prevent them from assuming an oppositional stance. This was no doubt the outcome that Megawati and Akbar most fondly desired. However, their hopes for a continued moratorium were dashed when the ruling cartel suddenly snapped. Less than a month before the April 2004 parliamentary elections, SBY resigned from his cabinet post as co-ordinating minister for security affairs, bitterly condemning Megawati’s inactivity in the face of ongoing political and economic crises. The charismatic former general announced that he would pursue the presidency under the banner of the little-known Partai Demokrat (PD). Whereas a Golkar victory in the presidential election would have meant merely a political demotion for Megawati and her PDI-P, an SBY victory seemed to threaten outright defeat. A Golkar president would not have excluded the PDI-P from prestigious and lucrative cabinet posts, but SBY very well might. The April parliamentary vote gave Megawati’s party more reason for concern, as the PDI-P’s vote share plummeted from around 34 percent to around 19 percent. More importantly for the discussion here, Indonesian voters punished all five major parties in the ruling cartel with lower

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ironies of Instability in Indonesia

101

vote totals than they received in 1999. The two major gainers were the PD and the PKS,2 an Islamist upstart that attracted voters with its calls for cleaner and more responsive governance. Yet the cartel had suffered only a flesh wound, not a death blow. Golkar and PDI-P remained the top two parties. As presidential elections approached, elite collusion rather than competition remained the order of the day. Virtually every party leader pondered teaming up with virtually every other political grouping, including the military, in presidential–vice-presidential ‘duets’. When the dust settled, all five presidential candidates were familiar faces from the political cartel. If any of the four candidates besides SBY had prevailed, the cartel almost certainly would have survived unmolested. But it was SBY who carried the day, trouncing Megawati with over 60 percent of the vote.3 The president-elect proclaimed his desire to rule through a ‘limited’ coalition rather than Megawati’s ‘rainbow’ variety. Speculation erupted over which parties would be invited to share executive power in the cabinet, and which, if any, would be left out. Party leaders were suddenly forced to contemplate the possibility of political defeat. Elite politics was thus destabilized, not stabilized, by SBY’s win.

What Kind of Democracy? Political Accountability under SBY During the month-long intermission between SBY’s victory and inauguration, there was reason for optimism that the cartel was indeed dead and that political opposition was at last emerging. None of the four largest parties had backed SBY in his race for the Istana (the presidential palace). Hence, none of them felt confident that SBY would try to coax them into the ruling coalition with cabinet seats. Smarting from their failure to keep Megawati in

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

102

Dan Slater

power, PDI-P and Golkar leaders announced the formation of a self-styled ‘Nationhood Coalition’ to serve as a formidable opposition bloc in parliament. Constructing an opposition coalition would quickly prove to be the political equivalent of herding cats. Cooperation was not only elusive between parties, but within them. Indonesia’s third-largest party, the PKB, quickly shifted into the pro-SBY camp despite the objections of its founder, former President Wahid. Nor could PPP4 leader Hamzah Haz make good on his threat to deny his party’s support to SBY, given the considerable leadership challenges he faced within his own ranks. Anti-Wahid and anti-Hamzah figures in the PKB and PPP were subsequently rewarded with cabinet posts. The limits of SBY’s ‘limited’ coalition expanded accordingly. Even Golkar was too debilitated by internal dissent to present a united opposition force. SBY encouraged such dissension even before the presidential election, choosing Golkar bigwig Jusuf Kalla as his running mate. This naturally elevated Kalla vis-à-vis Akbar as an object of Golkar members’ affections. SBY favored Kalla further by giving him unusual leeway as vice-president in shaping the cabinet to his own liking. Two anti-Akbar figures in Golkar received plum cabinet slots, and SBY chose a judge who had once argued for Akbar’s conviction on corruption charges as attorney-general. Golkar members evidently got the message. They ousted Akbar at the party’s annual congress in December 2004, choosing Jusuf Kalla as their new champion. Anyone with a keen memory of the New Order might detect a familiar pattern here. Suharto used the powers of an authoritarian presidency to intervene in the affairs of ‘opposition’ parties, ensuring their control by political allies and amateurs. Although it is too early to say so definitively, SBY already seems to be using the power of

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ironies of Instability in Indonesia

103

his popular mandate to undermine Indonesia’s party system before it has a chance to congeal. Weakened parties would mean a weakened parliament and an empowered presidency. Thus, the clearest danger of the SBY presidency to Indonesian democracy is not an outright return to a military dictatorship. Rather, it is the kind of executive domineering that is currently destabilizing democracies in Thailand, the Philippines, and Venezuela—and that did so for a time in Indonesia under Wahid in 2000–2001. Nevertheless, this discussion has hopefully convinced the reader that there are also dangers in continuity. When parties share power too widely, they choke off political opposition, denying voters the chance to replace their most unrepresentative representatives. This malady defined Indonesian democracy from 2001 to 2004, and might yet come to characterize the SBY years as well. PDIP is the only opposition party left, and it has been cast into that role more by default than by design. The party might be lured into a newly encompassing party cartel if SBY can engineer a leadership change in the PDI-P as he has in Golkar. Such a full-blown restoration of the political cartel would certainly enhance stability at the elite level. But by choking off political opposition, it would also protect elites from popular pressures to address far more important forms of instability: those that continue to afflict public life beyond the halls of power in Jakarta.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

104

Dan Slater

Acknowledgments The author gratefully acknowledges the research assistance of Sevag Kechichian in the preparation of this essay.

Notes 1. PDI-P stands for Partai Demokrasi Indonesia-Perjuangan (Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle), PKB for Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa (National Awakening Party). 2. Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (Prosperous Justice Party). 3. The other three candidates (Amien Rais, Wiranto, and VicePresident Hamzah Haz) were eliminated in the first round of voting in July. 4. Partai Persatuan Pembangunan (United Development Party).

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

References Katz, Richard S., and Peter Mair. 1995. “Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy.” Party Politics 1, no. 1: 5–28. Slater, Dan. 2004. “Indonesia’s Accountability Trap: Party Cartels and Presidential Power after Democratic Transition.” Indonesia 78: 61–92.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

INDONESIA SEEN BY OUTSIDE INSIDERS Its Chinese Alters in Transnational Space

f Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Donald M. Nonini

Chinese businessmen in Indonesia still want to come [to Australia] for safety for their families, especially their children. Right now many Chinese in Jakarta fear violence, because commercial grudges are actually being settled by attacks on them. Recently, a famous Chinese businessman in Indonesia was shot dead even though he was guarded by men from KOPPASUS [an elite counter-terrorist army unit]. He was killed by men due to some business grudge … I do not want my son to do business in Indonesia because of the violence. He could make a competitive tender for a government or other contract, but then find that someone bears a grudge against him for being underbid and decides to hurt or kill him. One never knows. — Wilyanto, 22 August 2003

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

106

Don Nonini

So spoke Wilyanto, a prosperous housing developer from Indonesia living in Australia, whom I met over lunch at a restaurant in an upscale shopping mall in the fashionable Box Hill suburb of Melbourne in August 2003.1 Wilyanto, by then in his early fifties, had come to Australia in 1979 and had worked as a Protestant minister until 1991, when he founded his housing development firm in Melbourne, which now operated in Indonesia, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, and China. He referred to an Indonesia that since 2000 has become a reorganized oligarchic state— one in which ‘money politics’ and ‘political thuggery’ at the local and provincial level pose new risks to the bodies and capital of Chinese Indonesians like Wilyanto and his son (Hadiz 2004; Hadiz and Robison 2005; Robison and Hadiz 2004).2 In what follows, I assume a broader theoretical argument made elsewhere (Nonini 2004)—that the flight from 1998 to the present of tens of thousands of Chinese from Indonesia, as a result of the traumatic event they refer to as ‘May’, can be understood only as one long moment within a longer process. The responses by Chinese Indonesians to this violence cannot be extricated from their strategies of mobility in the face of the operations of state power and contemporary capitalism in the Asia Pacific, that is, of the more encompassing processes of globalization, including the rise of Southeast Asian capitalisms and predatory developmental states, whose trajectories have pre-dated the violence of 1997–1998 (Nonini 2003; Nonini and Ong 1997; Ong 1999). This essay provides several perspectives on reformasi Indonesia by Chinese Indonesians who have repositioned themselves in transnational space. Although they were interviewed in 2000 and in 2003 in Australia, they are ‘of’ Indonesia: they were born there and grew up there, and are, now and then, ‘in’ Indonesia, because they live divided lives moving between Indonesia and other nation-states in the Asia-Pacific region.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Indonesia Seen by Outside Insiders

107

Ethnographic research on a group such as ethnic Chinese Indonesians poses epistemological and moral risks. On one hand, the Weberian assumption of a relation of verstehen to anthropological subjects has long been associated with ethnographic research among those least privileged by class, ethnic, national, and gender inequalities. Indeed, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1991) pointed out, anthropologists have long identified themselves with the ‘savage slot’ and its more recent incarnations. Empathy with subjects and their sympathetic depiction (often associated with a colonial-liberal sentimentality) are core concepts in this assumption. On the other hand, what are the implications of this assumption in the case of a population such as ethnic Chinese Indonesians who, at multiple levels, manifest class privilege—who are relatively wealthy and highly mobile transnationally relative to most Indonesians? Do not their tales of victimization serve the ends of a rhetoric of domination in which they themselves are often deeply implicated? Does not Fabian’s (1983) critique of anthropology’s denial of coevalness to its colonial subjects, with whom the ‘knowing’ anthropologist shares a common history of modernity, apply also in the realm of rationality as well as that of space? That is, has verstehen not in fact been combined in anthropology with a denial of the coeval rationality and moral judgment of the contemporary subject, so that the ethnographer is expected to suspend political judgment of her subjects in favor of a good, sympathetic story? But what of dominant subjects undergoing difficult circumstances? Is it sufficient for the ethnographer to do no more than recount sympathetically their tales of victimization when they are also implicated, to various degrees, as agents in their own victimization? There is no easy resolution of this conundrum. A tension between the personal sympathies that an ethnographer has with his subjects and the moral and political

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

108

Don Nonini

judgments he at times finds imperative to make of their behavior must be frankly acknowledged. These tensions are certainly a dimension of the ethnographic terrain in what follows. Since space precludes a detailed history, this essay’s attempt to read sympathetically what my subjects spoke to me about should be seen in terms of the diverse moral judgments that Chinese Indonesians make about one another as expressed here, as well as against the broader critical views on domination in Indonesian society evident in the essays elsewhere in this volume.

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

‘May’ in the Register of Post-Colonial Chinese Indonesian History Although beginning with the presidency of Gus Dur (Abdhuraman Wahid) ethnic Chinese have been accorded new civil rights, legal impediments to their full citizenship remain. Examples include the odious SBKRI (Republic of Indonesia Citizenship Certificate) that each Indonesian adult of Chinese descent must file and, by some reports, the coding of race on the national ID cards that citizens must carry (INS Resource Information Center 2002). De facto discrimination against ethnic Chinese by state officials, police, the military, and others occupying key institutional positions continues, exacerbated by the new powers of local, regency, and provincial governments to levy taxes and fees (which all too often fall on Chinese businesses) granted under the decentralization policies of the Indonesian state since 2001 (Hadiz 2004; Hadiz and Robison 2005). In many respects, ethnic Chinese residing in Indonesia continue to be treated as its internal ‘other’ to its majority pribumi population—not truly ‘of’ but indeed ‘in’ the country. In dialectical reaction, many Chinese who are able to have become mobile transnationals, so as now to be truly ‘of’ but no longer, except episodically, ‘in’ Indonesia.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Indonesia Seen by Outside Insiders

109

The acts of violence against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia during several months of 1997–1998, culminating in looting, arson, and gang rapes during 13–14 May 1998 in Jakarta, have now come to define not only an originary moment in contemporary Indonesian history but also a trauma referred to as ‘May’ within the collective memories of Chinese Indonesians. A sense of risk and danger for Chinese in Indonesia has arisen from historical memory. Since 1949 (and indeed earlier), Chinese in Indonesia have experienced the episodic violence of assaults and killings directed at them, arson and looting of their properties, petty on-the-street insults (orang cina, orang cina), shakedowns by petty bureaucrats and army officers, quotas that keep them out of Indonesian universities, a law passed in the 1960s that prohibited Chinese businesses from operating in the desa or villages, prohibitions against Confucianism and public ancestor worship that lasted until 2001, the banning of Chinese-language newspapers and schools, and much more (Coppel 2002). The incidents of riots, arson, rape, and murder before, during, and after ‘May’ throughout urban Indonesia were but one peak in a sorry stream of recurrent violence against Chinese, another being the deaths of 50,000 in 1965–1966 during the rise of Suharto’s New Order. Chinese Indonesians whom I interviewed in Australia in 2000 and 2003 vividly remembered the violence they experienced personally, either directly or indirectly: their neighbor who was beaten by a mob, the night their parents felt forced to burn all their Chinese-language books secretly, the arson of their own shop or family home. Many of these experiences took place in the 1970s or 1980s and led them or their parents to emigrate to Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, the United States, or elsewhere in the Asia Pacific. At the same time, these recollections of terror and fear feed into positive strategies of mobility and self-fashioning—ways

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

110

Don Nonini

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

of ‘getting ahead’ that also, potentially, have been ways of ‘getting out’ of Indonesia. In this essay, I offer the reflections of Indonesians of Chinese descent on what it means to be identified and thus to act as ‘Chinese’ in Indonesia, in particular, by way of contrast to the experiences of what it is to be mobile Indonesians, having lived and continuing to live both in Indonesia and outside of it—for them, in Australia. At the same time, the essay seeks to destabilize the category of ‘Chinese’ Indonesian by showing the ways in which the contrapuntal themes of gender and class divisions complicate unitary and racialist representations of ‘the ethnic Chinese of Indonesia’. The purpose is therefore not to represent a statistically ‘typical’ population of Chinese Indonesians overseas, but instead to echo, to the extent that brevity allows, the encounters and debates that they have with one another about social difference.

The Female Alter to the (Modal) Chinese Alter Within state-oriented policy discourses, the modal Chinese alter is the wealth-owning male, the paterfamilias, called metonymically ‘Chinese capital’. Rather than start with this figure, I want to begin ‘his’ deconstruction with the reflections of two women whom I interviewed. Julianni, in her late twenties, came to Melbourne to study for a master’s degree in 1998. Prior to that she had worked as a journalist in Indonesia for a magazine produced by the Tempo publications and had participated in a multi-ethnic women’s NGO. Julianni reflects on her own encounter with Kwik Tiok-Djan, the leader of Persatuan Alaman Indonesia (PAI), an NGO working on behalf of Chinese Indonesians in Australia, and more broadly on the ways in which the unreflective sexist character of ‘the Chinese community’ of Indonesians—both in Indonesia

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Indonesia Seen by Outside Insiders

111

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

and Australia—plays into the non-Chinese stereotype of the ‘rude’ (kasar), greedy, and anti-social Chinese capitalist in Indonesia. So, in terms of, you know, how the complex of my own personality, I feel like I don’t know who, which one is my identity. Maybe number one is because I study, and I’m a Chinese woman, Protestant, minority, and also, I’m taking political science which is very rarely taken by women, Chinese women. So I feel like a lot of challenges, you know, in my life, that Kwik Tiok-Djan for instance assume me and expect me for instance to help, you know, doing the consumption jobs in the kitchen for PAI meeting, or if I talk a lot, see, he doesn’t like that. In fact, he is a leader of PAI he doesn’t really expect, you know, to listen to my opinion. He doesn’t know how sensitive this issue is to me, you know. So, it seems to me like the leadership among the Chinese in the Chinese community do not acknowledge women’s rights, it really seems to me it’s the same as the old generation of my uncles, of my grandfather. What is the difference? What is the, you know, what is actually the meaning of being Chinese if our community itself do not provide, you know guarantee, the acknowledgment of women’s rights in the community, in the ethnic community? … For me, I am, number one because I am Christian, and because I am educated, so different from other Chinese women who just gossiping, and laughing, and looking for men, good men or rich men to marry. Not me, this is not my agenda, at all.

Julianni goes on to speak of the ‘community’ in Melbourne and the ways in which those who have long resided in Australia have sought out more recent migrants, with whom they share ties as members of the same Protestant churches.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

112

Don Nonini

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

But I think they do not really change their minds. And then they do not work out what kind of culture that Chinese Indonesian have to look for, do they find a breakthrough to answer the challenges, whether this is right the Chinese always business-minded, whether the Chinese very rude in terms of, you know, having relationship with one another … Rude here means Chinese you know, because they oriented to money—like my father, rude, very antsy [impatient], very laughing, very loud, and when they interact with one another, they can, they just talking about food, they do not really sharing values.

When I interviewed Lien, a woman in her mid-thirties, in 2003, she was a PhD candidate in linguistics at a university in Australia, where she had come in 1996. I asked Lien to describe the impact on her of anti-Chinese treatment and violence in Indonesia, and how it affected her and her ideas about Indonesia—its government, but also the country itself. She spoke of her own experience at a government-operated university in Indonesia where she studied for a master’s degree before coming to Australia for PhD research: The prejudice I faced everyday was very great. People said that “All you Chinese are rich,” but I know that many Chinese in Indonesia are poor. Then there was the prejudiced lecturer at my university who told me about one day his being at a restaurant when a beautiful woman, very well dressed and made up, came in accompanied by a man in shorts. He pointed to me and said, “You would know who these people are,” as if I myself was on trial as a special representative of Chinese. Or my friend, in one school classroom, sitting next to me, and asking me “Are you Chinese?” and I said, “Why do you care, what difference does it make?” but then she repeatedly asked me “Are you Chinese?” and badgered me in this way. And then there were my feelings of embarrassment and anger with my

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Indonesia Seen by Outside Insiders

113

mother for speaking “that language”—Peranakan—when she visited my school, and I said, “Mummy, don’t speak that language, it can get me into trouble.” Or another university lecturer, when I spoke Peranakan dialect, said, “Don’t speak like that” and instead wanted me to speak Bahasa Indonesia.3

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

It was such treatment at the hands of non-Chinese, as well as the opportunity for advanced study, that led Lien to emigrate to Australia in 1996. Nonetheless, she was called to return to her parents’ home in Surabaya to care for her mother, and arrived in Jakarta on 13 May 1998, just as the anti-Chinese violence there reached its climax. Of her decision that day to continue flying directly on to Surabaya, without staying in Jakarta, where the extent of the violence was as yet unknown, she said: “I really thank God, for I was very lucky.” It was on May 13, 1998, that I arrived in Surabaya. After I arrived, my mother fell ill, and I remained there until late 1999, until after my mother died. One brother and my sisters are still living in Surabaya, and I am in contact with him via e-mail almost every day, along with my cousins and my mother’s cousins who live in Sydney [Australia]. During the months in Surabaya, I stayed behind my family compound’s fence, and I lived in fear, since there had been word of rapes taking place not far from there. In order to go places, I walked, even if it took 20 minutes, because of my fears about taking taxis in the streets of Surabaya, since taxis were one of the places the rapes took place, you know. Once you got in a taxi, you had no control over where they might take you. During this whole period, I suffered from recurring bad dreams, because of the fear … Now, with my brothers or sisters in Indonesia I refuse to talk about Indonesia and its politics or treatment of Chinese because then I start suffering

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

114

Don Nonini

again from the bad dreams, like those of the time I was staying with my mother in Surabaya.

When I asked her about her future educational plans, Lien said: “I always had to feel ashamed of being Chinese, but one day, now, I feel, why should I be ashamed of being Chinese—I’m proud of being Chinese. Now I want to do my dissertation on the Peranakan language, my language.”

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Variants of the Modal Figure: Chinese Businessmen in Transit The “momentary glow of fraternity” among Chinese transnationals, a self-conscious self-orientalizing diaspora grounded in an essential, glorious Chinese essence, about which Aihwa Ong (1999: 55) has critically written, joins in collusion with World Bank and IMF policy statements anxious about the mobility of ‘Chinese capital’, and with business school and journalism pundits prognosticating on the familistic basis of Chinese ‘business success’. The common quotient in this calculus of collusion is the modal male figure: the rational, market-oriented, hard-working, industrious, and stingy but very wealthy Chinese businessman, who is patriarchal and devoted to the accumulation of family capital. Behind and below this veritable Colossus, subject to fading into the background, stands everyone else: wives, sons, mistresses, daughters, employees, and non-Chinese (unless, of course, they are as wealthy as he is). Let us see what the representation of this legendary modal figure looks like when contrasted to the actual Chinese Indonesian businessmen who have relocated family and fortune off-shore to Australia. What we discover are non-heroic but nonetheless suffering, if self-preoccupied, men.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Indonesia Seen by Outside Insiders

115

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

First comes a critical pribumi (non-Chinese) Indonesian’s perspective. I interviewed Pak Harsono, a retired lecturer in Indonesian language, at a university in Perth in Western Australia. Appearing to be in his late fifties, he was Javanese and a Christian, and had come to Perth in 1963 from Indonesia. He spoke to me of the businessmen whom he had met who had relocated—in part—from Indonesia to the Perth region. They live in houses worth at least [Australian] $700,000, with at least four cars, if they have three university-age children. Their cars are late model, and very expensive, with lots of Mercedes, BMWs, and similar expensive cars … The children live in Perth, where they go to the universities, where they study hard, having learned habits of hard work from their parents. The mother lives in Perth, but the father of the family comes and goes between Perth and Indonesia, where he continues to carry on his business. Their business is in trade and in manufacturing there [Indonesia]. However, they have a very difficult time getting employment in Australia … Also, most of them have very high positions in companies in Indonesia, and they are “very Javanese.” They accept the Javanese status hierarchy in which those who reach very high positions do not dirty their hands. They instead expect to be served and deferred to by those lower down in the hierarchy. So it is a real shock for these businessmen to try to start their own businesses in Australia under its business skills provisions. For instance, if they open a small restaurant, this will be a real come-down in status for them—to have to serve customers personally, to be deferential when now, in Indonesia, they receive such deference from those lower down. So it is for this reason that many Chinese businessmen here in Perth cannot completely relocate here. In addition they have valuable property still in Jakarta and elsewhere in Indonesia. As a result, they find that they have to go back and forth between Perth and Indonesia.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

116

Don Nonini

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

As Pak Harsono makes clear, concern for upper-class Chinese male status and prestige, within the broader Javanese status hierarchy, co-exists with and indeed is inextricable from the impetus to accumulate capital under predatory conditions in Indonesia, in forming the subjectivities of these men. Let us look more closely at the phenomenon by returning to Wilyanto, the successful housing developer residing in Melbourne. When I interviewed him in 2000, he spoke about businessmen who were recent arrivals. Many of them are businessmen who move here because have money, to migrate to Australia, but the problem … many of them couldn’t find a job here. So many of them become unemployed, and many of them have a very stressful life, family, and then themselves … Here in Melbourne, especially the Chinese, are maybe middle-class upward, maybe they up but not really rich. Many of them are professional or businessmen, but most of them always got the problem with the, one with the language, it’s a hidden problem because [being] fluent in language and understand[ing] the language are different, actually … It’s hard for them to adjust to the Australian conscious[ness], it’s hard for them to get a job, it’s hard for them to start the business because the business here is different from the business in Indonesia. Totally different. The business here, we call it clean, clean business … In Asia, usually we speak rather saving face, we speak try to get contact, etc. In here it’s less likely like that. In here, in Melbourne, they need our performance, and I believe the younger generation, they can adopt it, but the older generation, it’s very difficult to adopt it.

For men accustomed to “saving face, [and] we speak try to get contact,” engaging in “clean, clean business” where “they need our performance” is fraught with difficulty. Wilyanto continued:

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Indonesia Seen by Outside Insiders

117

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Most of them are unsuccessful, because like I say the experience in Indonesia they can’t be like that, because you see kakaan—collusion, nepotism and whatever4—so the way to do business in Indonesia is like that … In Indonesia it’s who you know is important, and here is what you know is important, that’s the difference. It’s really skill, in Indonesia, it’s whom you know, and then you can buy skill, you can buy everything. The opportunity first, and then after that they buying everything—they become just like that.

This incapacity of most Chinese Indonesian businessmen to adapt to Australia’s specific nexus between state and capital diagnoses a radical disjuncture between two national ways of doing business and engaging in capital accumulation, and two distinctive governing logics by which the states in, respectively, Indonesia and Australia, are oriented toward their private enterprise systems (see Nonini 2004 for the argument). If we leave out the unusual exceptions such as Wilyanto, male subjectivities are not ones, on the whole, formed out of the celebration of heroic accomplishments of successful wealth attainment in Australia, but out of disappointments; fears of loss of wealth, status, and social position; and disorientation in seeking to understand Australian ways of doing business. What we see instead is a reorientation and strong attraction toward the dangerous strategies of private accumulation under the conditions of the predatory arrangements between business and state prevailing in reformasi Indonesia, especially in Jakarta, where so much of the action still takes place. Such imaginative as well as physical ‘returns’ to Indonesia, driven by the allure and rewards of domination as well as marked by its dangers under reformasi, should be frankly acknowledged. How do commuting businessmen see the care of their wives and family? While I did not conduct a large number

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

118

Don Nonini

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

of interviews in which this came up, I was forcibly struck by one conversation I had with three wealthy businessmen in an affluent suburb of Perth one evening. Amri, an importer/exporter and an educational consultant, spoke as follows, while the two other men, also engaged in business in Indonesia, indicated their approval: Why is Australia so different from Hong Kong or Singapore, where you can bring in the servants from Indonesia to help the wives? Why not in Australia? If the wives and children are taken care of in this way, the husbands will feel much better. So the wife won’t have to suffer so much. It’s just an idea that the Australia government should try. Of course, like Hong Kong and Singapore, the Indonesian family should pay the government a deposit before bringing in servants. The Immigration Department should ask: What do you need for a better life? A permit allowing for servants to come here with the family from Indonesia … In Indonesia, servants live with the family and are available 24 hours a day … There’s much agreement among us about this. In Indonesia if you call the servant, then everything will be all right.

A generalized deficit in care for family members is being diagnosed here, although the cure for the disease—allowing servants to enter Australia with their masters—is one that a neo-liberal Australian immigration policy will probably not soon endorse.

Poorer Immigrants: “They Live as It Is Like a Robot” Not only is the modal figure challenged by its female alter, but also by its class shadow—the many thousands of poorer Chinese who have emigrated to Australia in search not only of political safety but also of better employment

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Indonesia Seen by Outside Insiders

119

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

and a secure education for their children. Their lives, unlike the celebrated modal figure of the wealthy and successful businessman, go largely untold in the media. Consider Michael, who owns a small sundry goods store in a seaside suburb of southeastern Sydney, and his brother’s wife Nina, who works for a government media organization in Sydney. Michael spoke about how he came to Australia, and the many travails he endured: Michael: In 1973, my elder brother sponsored me to come over to Australia. I was 14 years old at the time. When I arrived I had absolutely no money. Nina: Tell him how you worked three jobs. Michael: I worked long hours for five years to save money for a house, and within five years I had the money saved, and bought a house. Within another five years, I had paid for the house. Nina: We realize that we can only count on ourselves, on our money. We can’t count on the government or anyone else. So we work hard, and we can survive this way.

Michael then spoke of the traumatic events that drove him to leave Indonesia in 1973. As he told this story, he spoke very softly, at times laughing but in an almost breathless way. Perhaps there simply is no adequate, preagreed-upon way to talk about such things—no etiquette, but only some devices of speaking that reinforce, even as perhaps they are used to soften, the effects of what is being conveyed: Michael: I would never go back to Indonesia because I fear going back, and because life is so much better for me here in Australia. I grew up in Bali. Nina: His backyard was on the ocean, and in 1965 he saw bodies and body parts float past [from people killed].

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

120

Don Nonini

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Michael: There was a doctor who was accused of being a communist. One day some people came to his house, summoned him to come, even though he was still in his at-home clothes, and put him in back of a truck. I found out that his hands had been bound, and he had been dragged repeatedly through cactus with spines, and died.

Michael recounted a narrative not only of early suffering and horror in Indonesia, but also of an arduous struggle to overcome the economic and social constraints of an alien Australian culture—one that lasted for more than 25 years in order to attain modest success operating the sundry store he owned in Sydney. Other, more recent immigrants have been less fortunate in a period when conditions in Australia have grown considerably more difficult for poorer Chinese. Since the 1980s, less well-off East and Southeast Asian immigrants have come to occupy nationally specific niches within the secondary labor markets of the new Sydney metropolitan service economy. Unlike Michael, who in the conditions of post–“Whites Only” Australia in the 1970s was able to successfully appeal his arrival status as a ‘stateless person’ and gain permanent residency and eventually Australian citizenship, more recent immigrants have faced the stringent immigration policies of Australian neoliberal governments committed to a calculus of allowing in only those with a demonstrable economic value to the country—precisely because they are the owners of capital or the bearers of professional degrees. As a result, many less well-off immigrants from Indonesia have since the early 1990s entered Australia as ‘visitors’ (tourists), then overstayed their temporary visas and found off-record employment in the informal labor markets of the service economy. Life is difficult and employment insecure. As one informant put it, overstayers “live as it is like a robot.”

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Indonesia Seen by Outside Insiders

121

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Concluding Thoughts The experiences of Chinese Indonesians within Indonesia that I have recorded reflect a variety of responses to the persecution and violence directed against Chinese Indonesians. Although I heard stories that expressed the feelings of the speakers about their passivity and victimization, I was impressed also by the irritation that many voiced when they heard others elaborate on their victimhood as if it were directly translatable into experiences of heroic achievement through suffering. Indeed, many persons had much to be sad about; a kind of collective grieving was palpable at times. Still, I was more forcibly struck by the sense that so many people have—in a variety of ways, as suggested in this essay—moved on. What do the stories of Chinese Indonesians recounted here tell us about life in contemporary Indonesia? On one hand, they tell us the obvious: the Indonesian political and legal system has much still left to reckon with before accounts can be said to be squared with its Chinese citizens. While ethnically specific suffering since the founding of the Indonesian Republic is of course by no means limited to the Chinese, their singular fate has been to be assailed repeatedly since 1949 as the national alien within—the national alter that is viewed as the potential enemy within the body of the nation. Within the economic arrangements of contemporary regional and Indonesian capitalisms, this rendering of accounts takes the distorted and tragic form of the Indonesian nation-state’s attempt to manage the ‘flight of Chinese capital’. It is distorted because, as this essay demonstrates, transnational Chinese Indonesians show enormous diversity in terms of the class and gender identifications and constraints they face, and in no way can this rich variety in the lifechances of such a heterogeneous population be reduced

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

122

Don Nonini

down to the dreadful and crass accounting of capital influx or outflow. It is tragic because the essentializations of Chinese by pribumi chauvinists, World Bank/IMF policy wonks, and Asian Wall Street Journal pundits that make possible the hegemony of the modal figure of the ‘successful’ male Chinese capitalist are a form of symbolic violence that paves the way for the hands-on physical and sexual violence that has marked the history of the Chinese in modern Indonesia. The tragedy is no less because the Chinese Indonesians I interviewed in Australia represent a relatively privileged group who have benefited from contemporary class and state structures of domination. On the other hand, what I am most left with are the tales, sentiments, and attitudes of affirmative attachment by Chinese overseas toward Indonesia—its people and its land. The stories of the people I interviewed, whether of women or men, of wealthy executives or restaurant service workers, and whether in Sydney, Perth, or Melbourne—show passionate attachments to Indonesia. Claims are made simultaneously of fear and hatred but also—if not always of deep affection—of driven commitments to habits and practices viewed by the immigrants as distinctively ‘Indonesian’. What the diversity of Chinese voices I recorded say is that what being ‘Indonesian’ means for them is ultimately open-ended, as yet undetermined, and subject to proof in that future reckoning I referred to above.

Notes 1. The research findings reported here are based on fieldwork conducted in the metropolitan areas of Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, and Canberra in 2000, 2001, and 2003. Most of the interviews were conducted in 2000 among Chinese Indonesian leaders, business people, clergy, and students. I am grateful to the University of

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Indonesia Seen by Outside Insiders

123

North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the National Endowment for the Humanities for funding that made this research possible. 2. On the recent rise of oligarchic-corporate states in Asia and elsewhere, see Kapferer (2005). 3. Bahasa Indonesia is the national, standardized language of Indonesia. Peranakan is a dialect of Indonesian used by Chinese-Indonesians. 4. Kakaan—korupsi, kolusi, nepotisme (corruption, collusion, nepotism)—the three scourges of political life in Indonesia.

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

References Coppel, Charles A. 2002. Studying Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia. Singapore: Singapore Society of Asian Studies. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Hadiz, Vedi R. 2004. “Indonesian Local Party Politics: A Site of Resistance to Neoliberal Reform.” Critical Asian Studies 36, no. 4: 615–636. Hadiz, Vedi R., and Richard Robison. 2005. “Neo-liberal Reforms and Illiberal Consolidations: The Indonesian Paradox.” Journal of Development Studies 41, no. 2: 220–241. INS Resource Information Center. 2002. “Indonesia: Information on Treatment of Ethnic Chinese.” US Department of State. http://uscis.gov/graphics/services/asylum/ric/documentation/ IDN02001.htm. Kapferer, Bruce. 2005. “Introduction: Oligarchic Corporations and New State Formations.” Social Analysis 49, no. 1: 163–176. Nonini, Donald M. 2003. “American Neoliberalism, ‘Globalization,’ and Violence: Reflections from the United States and Southeast Asia.” Pp. 163–202 in Globalization, the State, and Violence, ed. J. Friedman. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. ______. 2004. “Spheres of Speculation and Middling Transnational Migrants: Chinese Indonesians in the Asia Pacific.” Pp. 37–66 in State/Nation/Transnation: Perspectives on Transnationalism in the Asia-Pacific, ed. B. S. A. Y. Yeoh and K. Willis. London: Routledge. Nonini, Donald M., and Aihwa Ong. 1997. “Introduction: Chinese Transnationalism as an Alternative Modernity.” Pp. 3–33 in

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

124

Don Nonini

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, ed. A. Ong and D. M. Nonini. New York: Routledge. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Robison, Richard, and Vedi R. Hadiz. 2004. Reorganising Power in Indonesia: The Politics of Oligarchy in an Age of Markets. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics of Otherness.” Pp. 17–44 in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. R. Fox. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

INDONESIANS IN ASYLUM

f

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Loren Ryter

To speak of ‘asylum’ is to speak of an intense fear released upon arrival in a sheltered place of calm. With political asylum, both the fear and the subsequent calm are politicized, because the origins of fear are typically understood to be identified with a state apparatus, and the umbrella of shelter is defined by the territorial boundaries of another nation-state. Seeking asylum involves more than escaping trouble in one’s homeland. It links that trouble to government and severs a connection between homeland and nationality. Defection, an extreme variant of asylum, is a politicized trade of nationality. However, in any asylum request, one’s prior nationality, if not repudiated altogether, must be placed in abeyance until such a time that the state apparatus of one’s homeland no longer persecutes dissent. Even so, rarely do those granted political asylum reclaim their prior nationality and return to their homeland once the conditions of persecution have vanished. Given the repression of the Suharto period, we might have expected large numbers of Indonesians to have

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

Copyright © 2007. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

126

Loren Ryter

sought political asylum, yet this does not seem to have been the case. In fact, the number of Indonesians who sought political asylum in the United States was no more than a handful annually during the last years of the New Order.1 Few Indonesians sought political asylum in the Netherlands, where Indonesian nationals have not been a significant component of those who have applied for asylum there during the past decade.2 Of course, we cannot ignore the dramatic attempts (both before and after 1998) of Acehnese to plea for asylum in Kuala Lumpur, of West Papuans to flee to Australia, and of East Timorese to scale embassy gates in Jakarta. However, by in large these attempts have been rebuked by their would-be hosts, who have for the most part tried to avoid damaging their relations with Jakarta. But if we exclude these three groups, each with their own strong sense of nationalism, we are left with the fact that during most of the New Order, few Indonesians fled abroad to escape detention, assassination, or other forms of repression.3 By contrast, requests from Indonesians seeking asylum in the United States since 1998 have ballooned (see table 1). The number of asylum seekers was significant between 1988 and 2004, the last year data were available, and peaked at nearly 3,000 in 2003. If few fled Indonesia’s dictatorship, droves have been fleeing its ‘democratic reform’. How can we account for this and what does it mean? It is tempting to see this dramatic shift as a validation of the views of New Order statesmen and apologists, who claimed that Indonesians liked the New Order, which, despite its sometimes harsh approach to dissent, provided security to its citizens and contained sectarian strife among them. The chaos in its wake and the ethnic and religious conflicts that ensued, on the other hand, were a consequence of bad government, which Indonesians will understandably flee as long as their needs for security are not met. Such views, of course, discount the fact that New

Identifying with Freedom : Indonesia after Suharto, edited by Tony Day, Berghahn

127

Indonesians in Asylum

TABLE 1 Asylum Cases Filed by Indonesian Nationals in the US (1992–2004) Indonesian Cases Year

Cases Filed

Cases Granted

% Granted†

Cases Denied

% Denied†

Individuals Granted

2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992

487 2,808 1,604 1,684 883 2,330 168