The ostensibly pluralist Indonesian government issued a decree last month that instructed the minority Ahmadiyah sect to halt its activities or face legal sanctions, including up to five years in prison for violators. While the vaguely worded decree stopped short of an explicit ban on the heterodox Muslim group, it represented a victory for a small but potent alliance of radical Islamists and their gangs of street-fighting supporters. A new report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) warns that the extremists have used classic interest-group lobbying methods, combined with real and threatened violence, to achieve a level of influence far beyond their miniscule electoral support. If their many political opponents and the state itself fail to stand up to them, their list of demands will only grow, dragging the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country toward its ideological fringe and undermining an otherwise promising Southeast Asian democracy.
Indonesia remains the only country in Southeast Asia to be rated “Free” in Freedom in the World, Freedom House’s annual survey of political rights and civil liberties. Its successes in combating terrorism have been reported in the press, and the ICG has noted a reduction in deadly communal violence between Muslims and Christians on the island of Sulawesi. However, while the government has taken action against openly murderous militancy, the radicals behind the anti-Ahmadiyah order have found a formula for winning state appeasement. They have cloaked their acts of intimidation and violence in street demonstrations, sanctioned them through semiofficial religious institutions, and directed them against targets that are unlikely to garner widespread sympathy among Indonesians, like Ahmadiyah and vices including pornography and alcohol.
Ahmadiyah was founded in British India at the end of the 19th century by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. The largest faction in Indonesia, which claims to have 400,000 members, reportedly considers the founder a prophet, whereas mainstream Islam identifies Muhammad as the final prophet. As a result of this and other differences in belief and practice, Ahmadis are often persecuted in Muslim countries where they form sizable minorities, including Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
While most Indonesian Muslims disagree with Ahmadiyah beliefs, they also recoil from the forces behind the new decree. As detailed in the ICG report, neither the state-affiliated institutions nor the private groups involved in the affair are rooted in Indonesia’s electoral democracy. The Coordinating Agency to Oversee People’s Beliefs (or Bakorpakem), described as an intelligence body, and the state-funded Indonesia Ulama Council (MUI) were established by the authoritarian regime of former president Suharto. Meanwhile, the Forum Umat Islam (FUI), an alliance of Islamic groups set up in part to support a 2005 MUI fatwa against Ahmadiyah, is dominated by Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI). The former is an international group that advocates the restoration of an Islamic caliphate, while the latter is a movement of street toughs known primarily for smashing up (and extorting money from) bars and other purveyors of vice. They have also destroyed Ahmadiyah sites and unregistered Protestant “house churches.” The ICG notes personal connections between the MUI and the FUI.
In April, Bakorpakem recommended a decree against Ahmadiyah, grounded on a 1965 decree barring religious deviancy, but some government advisers said such a move would violate the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom. When the National Alliance for Freedom of Religion and Belief (AKKBB) rallied against the proposed decree on June 1, demonstrators were brutally attacked by FPI thugs. As is usually the case with FPI actions, the police reportedly made no arrests, though public outrage ultimately forced the authorities to act. On June 5, police raided the FPI headquarters and arrested more than 50 members, including the group’s leader, Habib Rizieq Shihab. However, a large anti-Ahmadiyah demonstration outside the presidential palace on June 9 apparently spurred the government to issue the decree the same day. In effect, the state restricted a nonviolent group to satiate their violent persecutors. Ahmadiyah, not the FPI or the anticonstitutional Hizb ut-Tahrir, was viewed as the source of unrest.
The June 9 decree may have been the product of a poor political calculation by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who faces reelection in 2009. He and his small Democratic Party will need support from Islamist parties to win, but the former has been growing while the latter contract, and the country’s two large secular-nationalist parties would easily swamp the Islamists if they left the president’s side. Yudhoyono may have also been loath to oppose what he saw as a populist cause after stoking public anger with a 30 percent fuel-price increase in May. Hizb ut-Tahrir and the FUI have often pointed to fuel and food prices as signs of foreign capitalist domination and the need for Islamic governance.
If the president thought he could quiet Islamist radicals with the anti-Ahmadiyah decree, he clearly thought wrong. Protesters on June 18 demanded a full ban on the sect as well as the release of imprisoned FPI leaders. It remains quite unclear what behavior is forbidden under the decree, but advocates of a total ban will undoubtedly report violations, and the FPI will take the order as a stamp of approval for its campaign of violence. Meanwhile, opponents are planning to seek redress with the Constitutional Court and the UN Human Rights Council.
As noted above, the Ahmadis are not the only victims of the extremist agenda. Blasphemy laws have already been used against other “deviant” sects. A sweeping antipornography bill that would affect the personal dress and behavior of all Indonesians has been held up by opponents thus far, but the parliament in March passed a bill banning internet pornography, along with “false news” and ethnic or religious hate messages. That measure, which includes penalties of up to six years in prison, could seriously restrict media freedom.
Indeed, the government has repeatedly failed to address persistent human rights problems, which range from unresolved Suharto-era abuses to the passage of sometimes-draconian “Sharia” ordinances at the local level in 2006. Given the government’s weakness in the face of lingering authoritarian elements on the one hand and radical agitators on the other, it may be up to civil society—including voters, political parties, human rights groups, and the country’s 70-million-strong mainstream Muslim organizations—to defend the democratic constitutional order against the stentorian few who threaten it.
Photo Credit: Flickr user ivanatm
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