Letter: Religion and the street violence

This is a comment to the opinion piece titled “Religion, juggernauts and the street violence” written by Moh. Yasir Alimi (The Jakarta Post, Jan. 27).

Another dangerous juggernaut is a public propelled by self-righteous outrage. Grief relates closely to anger, intolerance and the desire for vengeance.

In 1997, many British people were so moved by the death of Princess Diana that they began to hate Queen Elizabeth, who was deemed not to be grieving appropriately.

Grieving Americans after the 9/11 attacks discouraged rational scrutiny of the reasons for invading Iraq.

We see s similar process in the response to last Sunday’s crash. Media outlets asserted that the car was traveling at 100 kilometers per hour based on uncorroborated evidence.

Articles (including Yasir Alimi’s) reported that the driver and her passengers had consumed crystal meth. Yet urine tests only showed the presence of MDMA and methamphetamine, both of which might have been contained in an ecstasy tablet. One article reported that the car’s occupants had consumed “bottles of whisky” without saying how big these bottles were or how many bottles they had consumed.

Meanwhile, the police were considering charging the driver with premeditated murder, seemingly based on no evidence whatsoever. Of course many people probably feel that accurate reporting is unnecessary as long as the driver is severely punished.

That is a dangerous attitude. In many accidents it is hard to apportion responsibility correctly, leading to lies, bullying and even violence. The idea that strong emotion is good reason to distort facts can only worsen this problem.

Justice in Indonesia is already a transactional process in which police and the courts fix cases according to extraneous factors such as money or, in some cases, public outrage. Encouraging this tendency further undermines the judicial system and spurs on mobs who rightly believe that threats and violence carry more weight than legal consistency.

A further outcome is a neglect of policies promoting safety. Measures that effectively reduce transportation accidents are tried and tested in developed countries, which consequently have much lower fatality rates than Indonesia, despite having far higher rates of vehicle ownership. But Indonesian administrators have no incentive to implement such policies; the only perceived virtue is to match and meet the public’s emotional demands at the appropriate time.

John Hargreaves
Jakarta