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Runaway radicals in
Indonesia
By Jacob Zenn
Indonesia's Islamic Defenders' Front (FPI)
pressure group has this year in turns assaulted
Ahmadiya and Christian places of worship, attacked
journalists who reported critically on its
activities, forced through intimidation the
cancellation of Lady Gaga's scheduled concert, and
ambushed various government police stations and
courts.
While the radical fundamentalist
group purports to be growing in numbers, up to
30,000 members according to the FPI leader Habib
Rizieq Shihab, it is simultaneously undermining
many of the secular foundations on which Indonesia
was founded and has since thrived in the ongoing
transition from autocracy to democracy.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's
inability or unwillingness to curb the FPI's
intimidation tactics, meanwhile, has dented his
administration's
self-touted reform credentials at a crucial time
for the country's international standing as a
moderate Muslim democracy. How he deals with the
group in the months ahead will largely determine
his legacy as a twice elected democratic reformer.
The FPI was founded in 1998 as
opportunities opened up for Islamists to engage in
political activities banned during former dictator
Suharto's 32 years of iron fist rule. The group's
first priority was to amend the first principle of
Pancasila (Sanskrit for "five principles"), which
forms the official ideological foundation of the
Indonesian state.
The principle of
godliness, including the implementation of sharia
law for Muslims, was included in the original
Pancasila, but independence hero and former
President Sukarno replaced it with the wording
that stands today, "the belief in one God"
(Ketuhanan yang masa eha).
Without
specific recognition of sharia law for Muslims,
the FPI believes that Indonesia's economic and
political system cannot be just for Muslims and
that the secular state's authority is
illegitimate. According to FPI leader Rizieq, the
establishment of his group was an attempt by
devout Muslims to eliminate non-Islamic acts in
society where government authorities failed to
act.
The FPI's original platform,
including raids against perceived dens of immoral
behaviors such as gambling, prostitution and
drinking alcohol, was popular among conservative
Muslims. Rizieq's growth strategy for the FPI has
been to attract more conservative Muslims to the
group and through various street actions gradually
erode secular society. Since its founding,
however, the FPI has demonstrated a propensity for
violence.
In 1998, the FPI participated in
the riots against ethnic Chinese Indonesians and
issued a "call for jihad" against "ninja forces,"
which the FPI believed were government agents who
targeted Islamic scholars throughout the
archipelago's main island of Java. In 1999, it
ordered the capture of university students who
took down an FPI sign that said, "Watch out!
Zionism and Communism are penetrating all aspects
of our lives." In 2001, the FPI held protests
against America's invasion of Afghanistan at the
US embassy in Jakarta and tore down the embassy's
barbed wire fence before being thwarted.
Rizieq promised in 2003 to de-emphasize
mass action and focus on economic development and
education to stamp out "immoral acts," but the
FPI-led violent intolerance persisted. That same
year FPI members invaded a church that had been
meeting in a school's sports hall for 10 years on
the grounds that the church was attempting to
spread Christianity in a public place. In 2005,
the FPI attacked the transgender "Miss Waria"
contest in Jakarta.
In 2007, dozens of FPI
members raided a Yogyakarta discotheque because it
hosted striptease shows. In 2008, the FPI
destroyed cafes and vendors in the Pasar Wetan
area, Tasikmalaya because they were selling food
during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. In
2010, the FPI tried to forcefully tear down the
Tiga Mojang statue in Bekasi, which depicts three
women in traditional Sundanese attire, and a
dragon statue in Singkawang city during a Buddhist
celebration.
In 2011 the FPI threatened to
overthrow Yudhoyono's government if he attempted
to disband the group. This statement was released
shortly after the FPI violently attacked the
Ahmadiya community, which the FPI and some
hard-line Muslims consider an heretical Islamic
sect, based in Cikeusik, Banten. The group has
since continued its violent ways and means.
Degrees of intolerance
To be
sure, FPI-sponsored violence has not approached
the levels orchestrated by Jemaah Islamiyah (JI),
a home-grown terror group held responsible for
various bombing attacks, including the 2002 Bali
bombing that killed 202, mostly Western tourists.
But the two organizations' objectives run in
parallel: to convert Indonesia, home to the
world's largest Muslim population, into an Islamic
state.
While there is scant evidence that
JI and FPI have coordinated operations, the FPI
has benefited from being seen as the lesser of two
evils when compared to JI. Jakarta Police Chief
Nugroho Djayusman reportedly said that the FPI is
a "small, relatively insignificant group" that is
"not ideological, except insofar as it opposed
gambling, prostitution and pornography … By
contrast, [JI leader Abu Bakar] Bashir's foot
soldiers were a much more serious ideological
group".
Indonesia's security forces have
decimated JI's leadership and the group has failed
to carry out any major attacks since 2009. In
contrast, the FPI has been able to operate with
relative impunity and little interference from
Indonesian security forces. (Rizieq was sentenced
to 18 months in prison in October 2008 for
inciting violence at an interfaith rally where
dozens of people were injured by FPI supporters
earlier that year.)
JI's leadership
emerged mostly from the ranks of jihadis who
fought against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in
the 1980s and returned to Indonesia with the
al-Qaeda influenced mindset that big explosions
and high-spectacle attacks would win the support
of the wider Muslim world. While major bomb
attacks, including against Western hotels situated
in the capital Jakarta, made global headlines, the
violence failed to give the group a mass
following.
The FPI's methods, on the other
hand, have steered clear of terrorist violence and
have pursued their fundamentalist aims through
mass protests, intimidation and acts of thuggery.
Having avoided the terrorist label, the FPI has
been able to promote itself more effectively as a
morality police force. At times it has linked up
with other conservative Islamic institutions, such
as the Islamic Defenders Legion (LPI), the
Indonesian Mujahideen Council (MMI), and Kokam,
the youth wing of the Muhammadiyah mass Muslim
group.
FPI claims to receive funding only
from member donations. However, it has also
reportedly received from funds from wealthy
Indonesians and even the state intelligence agency
to carry out ideologically-motivated attacks,
including the attempted attack on the US embassy
during the protests against the publication of
cartoons viewed as insulting to the Prophet
Mohammed in 2006.
According to Indonesian
police records, the FPI engaged in violence and
destructive behavior in 34 cases in 2010 and 2011
in West and Central Java and North and South
Sumatra, statistics that do not include Aceh,
Sulawesi, and Kalimantan where the FPI has clashed
respectively with Christian, Ahmadiya and
indigenous Dayak communities. In February this
year, the Dayak community organized thousands of
its members to protest at the airport when four
FPI members were scheduled to arrive to build a
regional office in Palangkaraya, Kalimantan.
Outnumbered, the FPI members never disembarked the
plane.
This year the FPI's targets have
fallen into three main categories: Ahmadiya, Shia,
Buddhist, Christian and other non-Sunni Muslim
places of worship; public places deemed as
non-Islamic, such as alcohol shops and stalls that
serve food during the Ramadan fasting period; and
displays of Indonesia's pre-Islamic heritage, such
as dangdut music and waying puppetry.
FPI
violence and intimidation has now successfully
shuttered dozens of churches across the country.
After hundreds of FPI members protested in front
of a Ahmadiya worship sites in Aceh on April 30
this year, local authorities sealed off the
buildings to Ahmadi worshippers. Three days later,
16 other undung-undungs, or small
unofficial houses of worship, in the area were
also sealed off by district officials on the
pretext that they had been built without proper
permits and that locals had "complained" about
them.
This action had wider implications
for the estimated 120,000 Christians in Aceh who
have been unable to obtain government permission
to build new churches and are now barred from
worshipping in "unofficial" churches. In yet
another example of the FPI's rising religious
intolerance, dozens of FPI members armed with
sticks and stones attacked an Ahmadiya mosque in
Singaparna, West Java during preparations for
prayers in April. The FPI justified its actions on
the grounds that the Ahmadiyas had refused to stop
praying from the Koran after being warned doing so
was heretical. One witness said the police and
other state officials had been notified about the
FPI's plan to attack but because of the fear of
confronting the FPI did nothing to stop them.
Flawed role model
The FPI's
rising intolerance and challenge to secular
society comes at a time when many Western leaders
had hoped to hold Indonesia out as a glowing
example for the Arab Spring-inspired democratic
transitions underway in the Middle East and North
Africa.
In July 2011, US Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton got the ball rolling on the
Indonesia-Arab Spring connection when she stated
that, "In the year of the Arab Spring, there has
never been a better moment for Indonesians to
share what they learned from their own transition
to democracy with the people of Egypt, Tunisia,
and other nations that are now on that same
difficult journey."
More recently, in
April 2012, British Prime Minister David Cameron
said at Al Azhar Islamic University in Jakarta
that, "If Indonesia can succeed, it can lead the
world in showing how democracy can offer an
alternative to the dead-end choice of dictatorship
or extremism."
Indeed, the uprisings seen
recently in the Arab World resemble the mass
pro-democracy street demonstrations in 1998 that
led to the overthrow of Indonesia's
military-backed, authoritarian Suharto regime.
Indonesia's democratic progress since has often
been held up as a shining example not only for
transitional Arab states, but for the entire
Muslim world.
Freedom House, a
non-governmental organization which conducts
research and advocacy on democracy, political
freedom and human rights, rates only Indonesia and
Senegal as having "fully free" political systems
among 47 Muslim-majority countries worldwide.
FPI's attacks on religious minorities,
which constitute more than 12% of Indonesia's
estimated 242 million population, and assaults on
traditional Indonesian culture, however, is more
reminiscent of the Salafist-Jihadist strands of
intolerant Islam seen in many Arab countries in
the Middle East and North Africa.
If
Indonesia is to truly serve as a democratic model
for these countries, Yudhoyono's government needs
to enforce the law and bring a halt to the FPI's
rising intimidation and violence. Yudhoyono
promised on July 1, without naming the FPI, to
"take firm action against groups that force their
own will and violate the constitutional rights of
others."
Two factors may motivate
Yudhoyono to finally make good on that promise. As
a lame duck president, Yudhoyono may have begun to
think about his legacy and whether he will be
remembered as the president who failed to rein in
the FPI. He may also be reassured by groups in
Indonesia, such as the Indonesia Without FPI
Movement, which are threatening legal action
against FPI if the government does not take
action. Between the violence-prone FPI and newly
established pressure groups pushing for rule by
law and secularism, his choice as a self-professed
democratic reformer should be clear.
Jacob Zenn is an international
affairs analyst and legal adviser based in
Washington D.C. He specializes in comparative
analysis of insurgencies in Southeast Asia,
Central Asia, Nigeria, and South America. He can
be reached at zopensource123@gmail.com.
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online
(Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and
republishing.)
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