The organizers of the 2020 International Women’s Day (IWD) rally ought to be featured as among the most resilient movers and shakers of Indonesian modern political history. Very few rally organizers in Jakarta ever managed to demonstrate a concerted peaceful action of a diverse group of people on the street and responsiveness to participants’ post-rally complaints. GERAK Perempuan (Women’s Movement against Violence Alliance) is not the average rally organizer and continues the energy of large protests by women in earlier years.

However, reports of harassment during the IWD rally circulated on print and social media platforms right after the rally. One of The Jakarta Post’s reports on the rally focused on the harassments during the rally and the fallout from these circulating complaints.

Some women were indeed verbally and sexually harassed during the March 8 rally. These incidences amplify a core problem — the truth and significance reflected in the campaigns and banners about how and why Indonesian women today still have to fight hard against systematic harassment, degradation and rape.

Unfortunately, the report’s overemphasis on the cases of harassment which women participants experienced in a single rally on a day of commemorating women’s achievements is a narrative that typically perpetuates the systemic challenges which women and other minority groups in Indonesia are facing. Despite the surfacing issue of the rally’s failure to be a safe space for women, the public deserves to be informed that the rally organizers or GERAK Perempuan members are still dedicating priceless labor to be taken seriously.

They have done so through marking IWD in meaningful, inclusive, and responsible ways. Many of the organizers are working tirelessly to respond to survivors’ reports via online platforms. The above report’s mention of Dhyta Caturani’s post on Instagram is one example.

GERAK Perempuan comprises over 60 women’s organizations and their allies. As a close observer of the coalition and active participant of the rally, I contend that GERAK Perempuan has influenced the course of the Indonesian social movements’ history in at least three important ways.

First, GERAK Perempuan has managed to include and consolidate highly diverse political aspirations into one coherent movement. The task of uniting differences is not an easy one. Members’ political aspirations vary by the ideological and programmatic concerns of their affiliated organization because the coalition includes students, workers, academics and community organizers.

They include a few men. Some of the women have part-time or full-time jobs. Many of the women work in the formal economy, and several are migrant and domestic workers.

Nevertheless, GERAK Perempuan has navigated members’ differences well. The most obvious indicator is their consistent set of actions, position papers and press releases that address the forms of systematic violence against women — including the omnibus bill’s potential threats to the livelihood of factory workers who are predominantly women; the family resilience bill’s bias against minority women and groups.

Second, GERAK Perempuan has made key contributions to the overall Indonesian women’s struggle within 1.5 months, since its consolidation on Jan. 24. The coalition has raised the public’s and multiple governmental bodies’ awareness of our society’s most pressing issues.

On Feb. 10, GERAK Perempuan marched on the Education and Culture Ministry to seek Minister Nadiem Makarim’s decisive action on sexual offenders in Indonesian universities. The coalition’s march then garnered public support through a petition on change.org and inspired the minister to pledge to tackle the issue through his following interviews as stated on Feb. 21.

Then on Feb. 24, the coalition marched on the House of Representatives to protest the lack of transparency in the drafting of the family resilience bill. The online platform of the Kompas daily recorded minor hostility from the House’s security apparatus on its Youtube channel, but the march, fortunately, went peacefully.

Third, GERAK Perempuan has set a high bar for rally organizers in Indonesia. What distinguishes it from other rally organizers is that the coalition takes harassment reports seriously. GERAK Perempuan has responsively coordinated with all members to collect reports. More importantly, it has spent hours of internal evaluation and deliberations about the best way to formulate two essential things.

The first is GERAK Perempuan’s collective recognition of the unanticipated number of harassments which women participants had to endure. The second is its follow-up actions to care for survivors of the harassments during the rally. These two essentials, unlike most rally organizers today, are fundamentally responsible, empowering, inspiring and reflective — not victim-blaming nor defensive.

In short, the rally organized by GERAK Perempuan in Jakarta is a rare and, I contend, a historic scene of workers, students and minority groups — cross-cutting class with ethnicity, religion and gender identity — marching together peacefully. Their united action on the streets in the heart of the capital along Jl. MH Thamrin and Jl. Medan Merdeka has shaken Indonesia’s less progressive and intolerant groups’ views, to the extent that speculations have circulated about whether workers’ unions or gender minority groups had taken over the IWD rally.

The harassment experienced even during a massive protest against the belittlement and crimes against women precisely demonstrates the urgency of GERAK Perempuan’s overarching movement agenda to the Indonesian and global public: “Resist systematic violence against women!”

IWD organizers such as GERAK Perempuan have further energized and inspired the fight for less hostile spaces for women and minorities to express their freedom and political aspirations in Indonesia amid today’s signs of diminishing tolerance to differences.

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Doctoral student of political science at Northwestern University, United States, under the Arryman Scholarship

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