Thank you, Julian Aldrin Pasha, for performing your duties professionally (“The President hears you”, Aug. 11) in a manner that taxpayers can reasonably expect. I wish we could say the same for our so-called “representatives” in parliament!
You quote the President’s words, “as religiosity increases, so will the politics of identity. And aided by globalization and technology, extremism and radicalism can only grow”.
I agree with the first sentence, but not the second. The biggest factor pushing the growth of extremism and radicalism is not technology and globalization, but rather the willingness of mainstream politicians to succumb to, or even exploit, the politics of identity. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono then should avert extremism and radicalism by counteracting the politics of identity, which he has correctly identified as a mortal danger.
This means he must reduce Indonesians’ obsession with religious identity. He could, for example, remove the “religion” label on national identity cards, end the ban on interreligious marriages and promote tolerance for followers of all religions, not just the six currently permitted ones.
But he shows no desire to do any such thing. Far from counteracting the danger from religious politics, he actively promotes it.
He is preoccupied not so much with the threat to Indonesia’s future from growing religious violence, as with the deadly threat from naked ladies in videos.
Incidentally, there is a relevant scene in the movie Dirty Harry. Detective Harry is on a rooftop looking out for a serial killer on an adjacent building. However, he is distracted by an undressed girl he spies through an apartment window and misses the sniper’s movements on the rooftop. Fortunately, being focused, he recovers in time to spot the killer and foil the attempted murder.
But if SBY were on the stakeout, the killer would have time to pick off his victim, shoot up the neighborhood and blow up the building for good measure, while SBY still had his binoculars trained on the window of the naked girl.
His appointment of Tifatul Sembiring, a notorious proponent of censorship and intolerance, as communications and information technology minister, clearly reveals SBY’s priorities.
The police’s antiterror unit, Densus 88, is performing well, but the rest of the police force is a shambles.
(And the Ritz-Carlton bombing should have been prevented, not solved after the fact. And companies’ reduced concern about fallout from terrorism reflects better commercial calculation, not reduced risk of terrorist attacks).
Religious freedom is rapidly declining without any sign of meaningful action by the government. As mentioned above, Indonesia is far from a religiously free society. Without conscious effort by the government to increase, or at least sustain, the current level of freedom, such a society will drift by default into ever-increasing oppression.
The best test case is that of the Ahmadiyah minority, who are not a large voting bloc and have long been marginalized. And on this test Yudhoyono’s score has been diabolical.
He himself oversaw the 2008 joint ministerial decree on Ahmadiyah and now hides behind it as an excuse for not properly defending Ahmadiyah followers. Now, I agree that “upholding the law” and “acting according to regulations” are very important and I recognize that many Indonesians struggle psychologically with the concept of an unjust law.
John Hargreaves
Jakarta
