The visit of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, capped with a standing ovation in parliament here on Wednesday, highlights the mutual willingness to push harder for better ties between the people of Australia and Indonesia. While both governments have stepped up cooperation in many fields, the President himself said that among today’s challenges was how to ditch the “preposterous caricatures and persisting age-old stereotypes” of the image of “White Australia” on the part of Indonesians, and the image of Indonesia as a military-ruled regime and “hotbed of Islamic extremism” on the part of Australians.
The picture has been rosier than the results of a recent poll here by the Lowy Institute, though researchers said the results were consistent in five years of similar polling of perceptions of Indonesians and Australians toward each other. A positive indicator in the people-to-people relationship is the high number of Indonesian students studying in Australia over the past few decades, as Yudhoyono also pointed out, citing his own ministers and his son Ibas.
But the stereotypes are part of that reality, Lowy fellow Stephen Grenville said. Among others, he pointed out that Australians found it hard to understand that drug offenses could lead one to imprisonment, or even the death sentence, as in Australia, similar offenses get a slap on the wrist.
A journalist also said that while Australians here loved going to Bali and enjoy the handicraft and batik, “it is confusing” to understand what is going on in Indonesia given the terrorist attacks — 88 Australians were killed in Bali in 2002 — the adoption of sharia law in Aceh and other trends not expected of a “moderate” country. Not to mention the unanswered case of the journalists killed in 1975 in the East Timor town of Balibo.
Researchers say that with the little available news on Indonesia devoted mainly to people smuggling and other “incidental” issues, most Australians failed to notice, for instance, that in the recent global economic crisis many affluent people headed north, such as to Singapore, to save their fortunes. Australia did not get the massive influx of Asians many feared.
Here’s a look at a few of those puzzling issues for Australians — clearly because the government sent out mixed messages. While the police were adamant in naming Jemaah Islamiyah as the group it suspected was responsible for the 2002 Bali bombings, national leaders and politicians were more sensitive to the strong denials by Muslims themselves that we had home-grown terrorists fighting for an Islamic cause. Doubters pointed a finger at the US or a Zionist plot or any conceivable conspiracy.
Of course families of the victims and the Australian public were hurt and astounded at the media attention on the “smiling bomber”, the shouts of “Allah Akbar” at the trials and the funerals of the executed criminals.
Few perhaps stop to think of the crass need by the media, given our press freedom and tight competition, to jump on every sensational scene.
The consistent source of firm signs that Indonesia is against violent extremism has been the police, tirelessly reiterating that they don’t target Muslims, but criminals, with Yudhoyono eventually following suit, gaining confidence with every arrest and successful raid against suspected terrorists. He showed off another bagged terror suspect, Dulmatin, who was shot by police, to an applauding Australian audience at last week’s state visit.
What is confusing is the non-violent sign of Islamic expressions. Even Indonesians ask why a country bound by a Constitution clearly stating non-discrimination, has allowed the passage, so far, of more than 150 bylaws across the country that discriminate against minorities and women. The bylaws include mandatory dress codes in public offices forcing non-Muslims forced to comply as well. And why does a post-Soeharto “moderate” Indonesia have a bylaw allowing adulterers to be stoned to death in Aceh?
The National Commission for Violence against Women filed for a review of the discriminatory bylaws at the Supreme Court but they lost; the Court ruled the bylaws refer to public order, not religion. So it remains unclear whether such bylaws, many inspired by what is claimed to be an understanding of Islamic law, are indeed allowed in a democratic country. The Commission is also filing for a review of Aceh’s autonomy law, which is much trickier. An internationally facilitated agreement between the Indonesian government and Aceh’s separatists resulted in the autonomy law, the basis of Aceh’s sharia bylaws.
Not surprisingly, all this has been confusing to the outside world hoping to see in Indonesia a moderate force in Islam to withstand extremism. Australian leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott described to visiting Indonesian journalists how late president Abdurrahman Wahid, in a visit to Australia, astonished his audience with his wit and laidback religious attitude, portraying “a great antidote to radical Islam”, dispelling part of Australians’ image of Indonesia.
Clear signs of “what is happening in Indonesia” are the polls.
Australians only need to look at the last election figures: The poor showing for Islam-based parties indicates that while no Muslim would say he was against sharia, which only means Islamic law, choosing Islamic law over state law is not a preference. So while today’s Indonesian Muslims like to more clearly profess their religious devotion, it does not mean they would abandon in droves the current secular state. We will be able to see from upcoming local elections whether such bylaws claiming to protect morality will still be a vote-getter, or whether voters will look more to the deliverance of public services this time round.
Another glaring puzzle is human rights and justice. Few Indonesians can relate to Balibo: It is just one among many skeletons in the closet.
We have had, for instance, trials for the 1984 killings in Tanjung Priok, and the conviction of low-ranking soldiers for the shooting of students in 1998, both in Jakarta spanning different generations. But the people most accountable for the atrocities remain untouchable; let alone those responsible for the mass murders of the communist purge in 1965, the rape and killing of women, mostly Indonesian Chinese, in the 1998 riots, and — the litmus test of Yudhoyono’s administration on human rights — the 2004 murder of rights activist Munir.
The violence in East Timor in 1999 has seen the historic recognition of wrongdoing on the part of the Indonesian government following the report of the Reconciliation and Friendship Commission – though follow up to the Commission’s work is another question.
Indonesians like to remind critical friends and neighbors that everyone has dark pages in their history, and that outsiders, including Australians, fail to recognize our dramatic post reformasi achievements.
Yet our younger generation would walk with their heads high, if we could convincingly tell ourselves and the world that we no longer have the dark legacy of impunity. It is precisely our own achievements that lead to higher expectations. We can’t exactly boast about free elections while we hope those who committed crimes against our own people, let alone foreigners, will just fade away and die.
The writer was one of the Indonesian journalists involved in a senior editors’ meeting in Sydney during a visit hosted by the Australian Embassy and the Australia-Indonesia Institute from March 6 to 12. The visit coincided with the Yudhoyono’s state visit to Canberra and Sydney.
