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congratulate the writer on a carefully presented yet plain analysis that resonated with me. The analogy of the canary dying is sound (“The dying canary and Indonesia’s religious freedom” by Tobias Basuki, The Jakarta Post, Oct. 3).

You have cited several different canaries. I believe there are a good many more canaries that all have the same disease. In a nation state, one expects a democratically elected government to uphold the law, protect all citizens — including from each other — and provide vision and leadership for the nation. That is patently no longer evident in Indonesia. The two dying canaries cited in the article both illustrate the point with failures on each count.

But there are also much larger canaries that are dying, including within Indonesian Islam where new fundamentalist doctrines are suffocating the canary that is Indonesia’s moderate and tolerant Islam. The techniques of inculcation typically stifle any questioning or debate; a case of people being shamed into accepting that they have “had it wrong” for so long.

So this canary is dying of suffocation. Ahmadiyah is just one of the first canaries to be killed off on the road toward fundamentalism and, further down the same road, extremism.
As all these canaries die, so too will the canary of democracy.

Because the government is failing to “uphold the law, protect all citizens — including from each other — and provide vision and leadership for the nation”, we must assume that the government is already intimidated and afraid to take its responsibilities seriously. So, who is left to take the warning from all these dying canaries? Are the people also resigned to “going with the flow” without so much as questioning or debating where the flow is taking them and the Republic of Indonesia?

When there is no vision or leadership evident in a government at nation-state level, then the way is open for unelected and unrepresentative authoritarian forces to take control of the agenda. I see that as a process already well under way.
The alternative is for the people, the ordinary people, but especially the educated, who may still have some sense of objectivity and reasoning, to start taking an active interest in the future of their families, their children and indeed their country. Silence means consent.

Do Indonesians not see the tell-tale dying canaries? Indeed, do they even care? Or will they only awake to what is happening to them and their country when it is too late, when all the canaries are dead, including democracy, and an authoritarian regime is once more back in control? The risk next time is an agenda of further religious cleansing; perhaps our own Spanish Inquisition or Edict of Fontainebleau: An Indonesia for the majority, not an Indonesia that religious and ethnic minorities would want to contemplate.

The maintenance and strengthening of democracy, complete with that most fundamental principle of democracy — the protection of all minorities, is the best hope for Indonesia, which continues to have a diverse, multicultural and tolerant society.

If we all behave like ostriches with our heads buried in the sand then we will not even notice the canaries, let alone recognize that they are dying.

Nairdah
Sydney