Religion and contemporary politics in Indonesia

Indonesia Religion

Indonesian Politics and the Influence of Islam

Indonesia's importance in the world and its considerable wealth as a producer of natural resources are geographical advantages which its native populations have rarely enjoyed. A dense fabric of regional and ethnic conflicts have long been the determinant factors in the success with which Indonesians have been able to cultivate the bounties at their disposal and to bring order to the extensive territory which it has been their fortune and challenge to possess for fifty years. Indeed, progress has been made in the nation which in 1999 held its first democratic elections for the presidency. However, the land and range of ethnic predispositions which are contained by its sovereignty are vast and its histories, distant and recent, are marked by turmoil. Both the victim of grave intercontinental discrimination and the perpetrator of terrible crimes against humanity, Indonesia is today a product of the long-term cultural, political and religious paradoxes created by the unnatural relationship between its colonized history and its struggle to find its own identity.

In the midst of this struggle, we consider that Indonesia is a highly spiritual nation, particularly in terms of its commitment to the Islamic faith and identity. However, we also note that this was not always so. Today, MacDonald et al. (2005) report, "Indonesia is a very religious society. Belief in 'One God' is compulsory by law, and religious observances and ceremonies play an important part in almost all Indonesian people's lives. Around 88% of Indonesian people are Muslims, making Indonesia the largest Muslim nation in the world. Nearly all Indonesians belong to the Sunni branch of Islam. They pray five times daily; in cities and towns there are prayer rooms attached to many public buildings, such as railroad stations." (p. 246)

This denotes that the government maintains some level of Islamic identification, but as we will explore, the better part of the last half-century has seen some degree of conflict between the goals of public governance and private spirituality.

Body:

Background:

It is appropriate before proceeding to a consideration of Indonesia's current political and religious dynamic to reflect briefly on the country's modern history. This would be marked largely by occupation, a condition which carries significant implications for the nation's modern political identity.

The Japanese invasion of 1942 and the subsequent three years of occupation are the historical inflection point for Indonesia. The irony of an imperialist invasion disrupting a pattern of colonial rule has had a real impact on Indonesia's ongoing difficulty in reconciling contradictions within its own jurisdiction such as those which have relegated the nation's people to violence, poverty and ethnic unrest even as the nation moves closer to international standards of human rights recognition and economic interdependency. As we consider the implications of Indonesia's embattled but evolving political system, it is in light of these struggles and their connection to a defiant but permeating Islamic influence over the nation.

Accordingly, at the start of the 20th century, the mores of colonialism were ever more being subjected to the scrutiny of nationalist independence movements such as those which had begun to emerge in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Such an organization began to make headway amongst the oppressed natives of Indonesia, who collectively harbored a deep resentment for the foreign authority which had been present and dominant for centuries, with the Portuguese preceding the Dutch and even the British claiming a brief stake in its natural affluence. (Wilds, p. 66) After 200 years of unchallenged foreign rule, the populace began to show organized evidence of a coming resistance. At this time, a collective "of Indonesian intellectuals was initially set up for educational purposes but later turned into politics. It was inspired by Japan's victory over Russia in 1901, which also gave impetus to nationalist movements in many parts of Indonesia." (Embassy of Indonesia, 1)

Even as Indonesians challenged foreign occupation, they found themselves quickly transferred from the hands of one occupier to the while the tensions of WWII mounted around them. In many ways, the Indonesian population welcomed the Japanese. There were certainly established groups in pursuit of independence, whose leaders in nationalist activist figures such as Sukarno and Hatta openly contested Japanese occupation. (Cassanos, p. 42) However, the sharp distinctions between this occupation and that which it had just expelled endowed these new conquerors with a considerable advantage in terms of public image. Aside from obvious ethnic similarities that freed Indonesians from the undeniable assumptions of white superiority and manifest destiny which had entitled Dutch rule, the Japanese distinguished themselves by enabling the emergence of a uniquely Indonesian identity. The very existence of an independent Indonesian culture today, from the proliferation of its religious predisposition toward Islam to the elimination of reverential symbols erected to honor foreign invaders, can be attributed to the 1942 changeover. It was at this juncture that the independence movement gained its greatest momentum, as tangible symbols such as the Indonesian (rather than Dutch or Japanese) flag was now allowed to fly over the colony.

Discussion:

In 1945, with the catastrophic end of the worst and largest conflict in world history, Indonesia saw an opportunity that many former colonies did. "Shortly after Japan's defeat in WWII, Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed Indonesia an independent state, and they became the founding fathers of the new country. The largest archipelago in the world, with over 17,000 islands -- only 3,000 of which are inhabited -- has emerged into a new Indonesia." (AP, 1) With Japan devastated by defeat, disarmed and now itself the subject to foreign rule, Indonesia was left in a vacuum. Its armament during the Japanese occupation had been crucial as its declaration for independence was met with immediate Dutch resistance.

The Japanese invasion had paved the way not just for an armed Indonesia but for a post-colonial era in which the world's governing body, the newly formulated United Nations, was keyed toward endorsing nation-state independence whenever warranted. Such being the case, Indonesia's nationalist movement earned the support of the UN, which issued a resolution recognizing its independence that same year. After four years of conflagration, which was often violent, the Dutch eventually withdrew completely from Indonesia at the behest of the international community. Finally, in 1950, Indonesia had achieved a complete and uncontested independence.

That this was a nation forged by a brief but violent wartime occupation would be a significant part of its identity. Though the Japanese had allowed the development of the Indonesian culture that pervades today, it had also inevitably imbued the population with some of its imperialist values, and consequently the militant elements of its appealing samurai culture. The potential benefits to both the occupier and the occupied as seemed to occur, at least briefly between Japan and Indonesia, was a lesson not lost on the fledgling government, which also recognized the values in strong-arm tactics such as those which had been dealt against its people.

Today, the greatest evidence that a Japanese invasion was the cinder which sparked independence is in Indonesia's own adoption of imperialist impulses. The reasons for its constant colonization and occupation had been its diffuseness and the wealth of its resources. Likewise, these considerations would be primary in Sukarno's extremely hardline tactics. The ethnic variety of Indonesia, typically suppressed by a unified front against foreign occupation, had turned inward after independence, rendering a large and inconsistent terrain with a host of internal independence movements bubbling under the mantle of a newly instated government.

As we currently know, Indonesia is a nation that has struggled to find itself amid the lingering violent impulses of its occupied past. Since its inception, it has engaged in violent conflicts for the continuation of its sovereignty in ethnic enclaves such as Papua New Guinea, Malaysia and East Timor. Sadly, one of the most recognizable stamps of Japanese invasion on everyday Indonesian life is the terror which its military has, like its former occupiers, willingly levied over those struggling for independence, as was documented during its twenty-five-year rule in East Timor. Finally given statehood in 1999, the tiny nation acknowledges that between 100,000 and 200,000 of its own had perished due to occupational atrocities committed by Indonesia. (Miller, 1)

This unfortunate record is supplemented by atrocities which Indonesia had also committed against its own people during the first decades of independence. Sukarno's resistance to the Chinese influenced communist swell in the mid-1960s resulted in a sustained period of violence, the motive for which was an intertwined ethnic and political tension, left potentially 1 million Indonesians dead. The Japanese invasion had not only served as precipice for Indonesia's birth but Japan had also helped spawn a nation with militaristic modes which echoed those of which it had recently been stripped. To date, ethnic tensions provoke the hostilities that are omnipresent in Indonesia. Independence movements are a constant threat to its stability with many evermore fueled by radical Islamic orientation. It is this orientation that currently dominates Indonesia's political identity, its relationship with the global community and the hierarchies of power that dominate regional politics throughout Indonesia's rural, mountainous, and coastal regions.

As the text by Cessanos (2005) notes, this would be among the longest-standing and most determinant internal conflicts confounding the stability and political unity of Indonesia as a whole. Cessanos reports that even at the outset of its independence under new President Sukarno, any unified vision of how to balance political modernization with deference to its Islamic cultures was met with splintering, factionalism and conflict. Accordingly, the source indicates that "Dutch-educated nationalists and Islamic parties agreed to create a unified, Western-style parliamentary state. But across the archipelago differenced in thinking produced more than 30 parties, of which the four largest were variously based on the principles of Islam, nationalism, or communism. Separatist movements and uprisings divided the new Indonesia republic. Darul Islam (Islamic Domain) a militant group in West Java, believed in an Islamic state and fought the government from 1948 to 1962." (Cessanos, p. 44)

Such conflicts would stand in the way of a democratic Indonesia for decades. Indeed, in the face of tremendous pressure of armed Islamic militants, the Sukarno administration would be inclined to impose martial law upon the nation and its people. Humanitarian interests and political representation would suffer immensely during this time, as would a public increasingly subjected to the collateral violence of domestic infighting. Ironically, the eventual political modernization of the presidency in Indonesia would lead only to greater conflict. This is because the presidency of Suharto, which began in 1967 and ran all the way until the first democratic national elections in 1999, was highly sympathetic to Western interests and economic partnerships. (Cessanos, p. 48) Such sympathies would only further incite the sense of alienation and disenfranchisement felt by Islamic nationalist groups from the modern state of Indonesia.

The identity of Indonesia remained highly undermined by the interests of a highly centralized state authority. This, research would denote, is counterintuitive to the development of a newly independent state. The cultural impetus couched in the nation's Islamic identity would be largely relegated to military authoritarianism. Vu (2010) would regard this as inherently contradictory, arguing that "besides centralized governments and cohesive coercive institutions, effective official ideologies and legitimizing discourses must be part of a developmental state structure." (Vu, p. 5)

Thus, for decades, Suharto maintained his authority on the flimsy premise of cultural whitewashing, working aggressively to prevent the accumulation of power sought by the nation's increasingly militant Islamic population. Then, with the explosion of the Asian Financial Crisis in the late 1990s, the disenfranchised were provided with all the evidence they required to view the government's Western sympathies as a threat to the Islamic way of life. As Cessanos reports, Indonesia's currency inflated to worthlessness, its banking system collapsed, its stark market bottomed out and more than 14 million citizens lost their jobs. This was a tangible lode of ammunition for Islamic recruiters, who blamed the imperialist vulnerability of non-theocratic government for the nation's suffering. As Cessanos tells, the "Suharto was up for reelection in February 1998, but he faced massive dissent from students, Muslim parties, and others opposed to his policies and the corruption of his regime. There were demonstrations on university campuses. In April, rioting erupted in Medan, Sumatra, and spread to other cities, in part because fuel prices had increased over 70%." (p. 49)

Government efforts to quell the unrest resulting the shooting of four students as the Trisakti University in Jakarta, at which point the city erupted into four days of rioting and violence in which more than 1200 people were killed. (Cessanos, p. 49) These events would denote the correlation experienced for many private citizens between the government's secular orientation and the public's overwhelmingly Islamic predisposition. In many ways, the mounting evidence of our research suggests that the aggressive Islamic orientation of private citizens in Indonesia is less a matter of history and heritage than it is a matter of political alignment. The text by Jones (2010) finds that the rapid rise and proliferation of the Muslim identity in Indonesia over the course of the 20th century has occurred in response to the objectionable political realities that have persisted there, whether through foreign occupation, subsequent internal dictatorship and eventual Western economic exploitation. As Jones indicates, "these conditions have also been linked to the rise in expressions of Islamic piety in Indonesia in the last decade. . . The appeal of a universal, time-tested, alternative framework through which to improve oneself and the nation allowed religion to circulate as an antidote to state developmentalism -- and was made all the more appealing given the regime's repression of political resistance and the uncertainty following its demise." (p. 278)

As the Jones text argues, efforts to stamp the Islamic influence out of the public discourse would only lead to a greater intensification of practice and demonstration of faith amongst private citizens. This, of course, would become highly visible in public spaces both as a matter of protest and as a matter of lifestyle orientation. As Jones posits, "perhaps the most visible sign has been the increased popularity of women's Islamic dress, a relatively new phenomenon in Indonesian sartorial and religious history. Initially positioned in the 1990s as a medium and symbol of self-discipline free from consumerism, corruption, and politics, Islamic dress has since been intensively commodified, with fashion cycles that almost outpace the nonreligious clothing market." (p. 278)