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Asia Times (atimes.com), September 19, 2001
Indonesia needs to come off the fence
By Bill Guerin
JAKARTA - When Afghanistan starts appearing on CNN's daily weather forecasts, one knows that something is afoot in the still smoking war rooms of the Pentagon. Despite American protestations to the contrary, most Muslim countries are assuming that innocent Muslims are going to suffer in the hunt for retribution and are warning off the Americans from any action that would help fuel an Islam v The West clash.
Indonesia is no exception. Amien Rais, himself once accused by American senators of inciting a jihad (holy war) in the Moluccan Islands where inter-religious fighting between Christians and Muslims has claimed over 5,000 lives in just two years, has assumed the role of spokesman for 180 million Muslims. He said more than once last week that the US should not "hastily blame certain parties", reminding them that they had made a mistake in suspecting Muslim militants of being involved in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
The events on US soil last week have given the administration of President Megawati Soekarnoputri an as yet unrecognized global responsibility that should receive the highest priority. The US saw the previous president, Abdurrahman Wahid, as a moderate Muslim with democratic aspirations but in power in an era when radical Islam is fast becoming a real and potent political force. How will they see Megawati and her team in the aftermath of the events of last Tuesday?
The signs are not good. Aside from Rais's shallow one-upmanship, Vice President Hamza Haz sang the same song, saying that the US could be making a mistake if it blames the attacks on Muslims. At least he had the grace to add, "The attacks were inconsistent with Islamic teachings. Islam is not like that." Haz may have been trying to stamp his authority on Muslim Indonesians, but while condemning the events in New York and Washington DC, saying that they were a crime against humanity, he still felt the compelling need to warn that US relations with Islamic nations could be jeopardized if Washington decides to blame Muslims for the attacks without sufficient evidence.
The Israel-Palestinian conflict is never far away when Islamic voices sound off in Indonesia. Habsyi, from the Ikhwanul Muslimin Indonesia organization, a group said to have links to widespread criminal activity at street level in Indonesia, said, "That event must be used as a lesson, especially for President Bush and America. America has played its role and used its veto [in the UN security council] to support Israel although Israelis do whatever they want in Palestine," Habsyi thundered.
Megawati should realize the significance of this high profile anti-American stance on her territory. The same people are on record as saying in April this year that they would work with anyone to bring Wahid down. As yet unconfirmed reports also link the group to the infamous Front for the Defense of Islam (FPI). These are the white robed, turbaned storm troopers who recruited an army of jihad warriors to send to the Moluccu islands.
In the US and in some capitals of Europe, Muslims are already being intimidated, abused and threatened, although on a very small scale. This is a natural gut reaction from the simple minded, or those who see matters in a more simplistic fashion than diplomatic governments. Nonetheless, it hardly compares with the intimidation often thrust upon US citizens in Indonesia.
In November last year, for example, dozens of youths from a Muslim militia, wearing military-style uniforms, conducted one of their notorious "sweeps" against unfortunate Americans enjoying the delights of Solo, in Central Java. They warned hotels to expel American guests and spread leaflets demanding that all Americans in the country, including US ambassador Robert Gelbard, get out or "face the consequences".
At the time many Indonesian Muslims were incensed over Israel's crackdown on Palestinians in Jerusalem, which they blamed on the US. Preceding this sentiment was the view that Gelbard and Washington were prone to interfere in Indonesia's internal affairs.
Blunt speaking Brooklyn born Gelbard, a 56-year-old Harvard graduate, has consistently maintained his style of telling the truth. Unfortunately, this is not well received in a culture that often does not want to hear the truth, and certainly not from a foreigner.
Wahid and his foreign minister Alwi Shihab publicly repudiated the inflammatory calls to kick out Gelbard, and Rais was seen then to be exploiting the anti-American feeling to embarrass the president.
The US may come to the conclusion that this type of virulent nationalism, if unchecked by a state's leadership, is different only in scale from the goals of the perpetrators of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. There was no intent to discriminate between Christians, Muslims and Jews, nor whether their intended victims were of Irish, Asian or Arab background. The goal was to inflict damage and to terrorize all Americans
Indonesia's constitution is not based on Islam, but on Pancasila (five principles; the first of which is the belief in God Almighty). Nonetheless, religious sensitivities, more often than not, have created havoc in the community. Religious and sectarian killings in Ambon and the rest of the Spice Islands have claimed many hundreds of lives.
Controversies, which lead to such religious conflicts, endanger every Indonesian and put them at the mercy of those who will stop at nothing, including religious provocation, to cause disorder and unrest. This is unfair to the vast numbers of law abiding Indonesian Muslims.
Mahathir Mohamad, the Malaysian Prime Minister, and often seen as a loose cannon, spoke for Muslims the world over when he said in Kuala Lumpur in June 1999, "Muslims are not inherently against the West, the Christians or the Jews. The Muslims want peace as much as anybody else. We want a share of the bounties of this earth. We are not violent people given to terror and anarchic behavior. Some of us may misbehave, but no more than others do. We should not be tarred with the same brush. The majority of us are God, peace-loving rational people."
Back in Indonesia, Wahid was showing the way of life of the true Muslim by his openness to people of other religions, and consistently warning his nation of provocation by certain people who abuse Islamic symbols and spirit for their own interests.
"Now there are people, who, just because they wear robes, use swords and wear turbans, claim themselves as religion (Islam) defenders. In fact, they are not defenders at all," said Wahid. "Those who claim to defend the religion by carrying swords actually do not know much about religious teachings."
For the first time in more than 30 years, Muslim parties are represented in the Indonesian parliament, and are now conscious of their strength. Does this mean that Indonesia could become a Muslim theocratic state in the future, like Iran or Pakistan?
The New Order Government under dictator Suharto always restricted the political rise of Islam for the same reasons as the first president of Indonesia, Sukarno. Realizing the potentially explosive force of a highly politicized Islam, especially at a time when Islamic fundamentalism was radicalizing politics from North Africa to Malaysia, Suharto foresaw a danger that the emergence of a politically dominant Islam would cleave Indonesian political society along religious lines.
Thus the national ideology Pancasila was to be the glue that held this large nation together. But is this glue still sticky enough? Just before he was elected president, Wahid said that the nation's largest Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), had never nurtured any wish or aspirations to form an Islamic state. However, only seven months later the NU at its annual congress decided to again use Islam as its organizational principle, replacing Pancasila.
"Jihad as a holy ibadah for Muslims is the only answer and solution to all this tragedy". These words on the web site of the Indonesian Laskar Jihad prescribe a war not to avenge the tragedy of the Indonesians of all religions who have lost their lives over the past three years, but to settle the score with those who were "tortured and humiliated" and oppressed by a "Christian cleansing". The fact that the site is really an appeal for sponsors for the jihad's "glory of Islam" crusade makes the language of aggression the more difficult to understand. Such language is not found in the Holy Koran. On the contrary, the Koran decrees that murdering another human being is the same as killing all mankind.
To be a Muslim translates simply into submitting oneself to the will of God. Jihad , so often seen by militant Muslims and many non-Muslims as a synonym of "holy war", and a call to fight against non-Muslims in the defense of Islam - is, to most Muslims, the ongoing struggle with one's inner self, for self-purification or to help one achieve some noble goal.
Osama Bin Laden, on the other hand, interviewed by ABC news in December 1998, said, "hostility towards America is a religious duty and we hope to be rewarded for its by God, praise and glory be to him. Praise be to God for guiding us to do jihad in his cause."
Back to Indonesia, and only this week, Ambassador Gelbard. while saying he had been heartened by the outpouring of expressions of condolence from Megawati and other Indonesians of all walks of life and all religious faiths, had a few bones to pick.
He wrote to the Jakarta Post that he was deeply disappointed to read the comments of some senior Indonesian government officials and commentators, as he feared they could create an atmosphere of misunderstanding and hatred, rather than one of compassion and healing.
He cited one article "US warned against blaming Islamic groups for attacks" as being proof that the individuals cited in the article preferred to unjustly criticize the ongoing investigation of the "horrible crime" that US law enforcement officials have already promised will be fair, thorough and unprejudiced, rather than express condolences for the victims of the cruel and cowardly attacks.
The ambassador condemned the "anti-Semitic and misinformed comments" of Dewi Fortuna Anwar, also given space by the Jakarta Post. Gelbard said her comments suggested that the terrible acts against Americans and even acts of terrorism within Indonesia may be justified, whereas terrorism threatens all of humanity and can never, ever be justified.
He said that most of this reporting implied that the United States government is blaming Muslims for the terrorist acts, which is simply not true. In a telling shot across Indonesia's bows, he said the community of nations, including Muslim nations such as Pakistan, had already expressed its strong support for the efforts to bring the criminals to justice. Some of America's strongest allies and closest friends are Islamic nations. Muslims, Christians, Jews and people of other religious faiths are all valuable threads in the American social fabric, and Americans denounce prejudice against any religious group, he concluded.
Indonesia's complaints against the US stem from a perceived American tendency to interfere in their domestic affairs, the extended arms embargo and their sympathy with the Palestine cause against a US-backed Israel. The manipulation of fear, whether as part of a long-term strategy to "convert" long held beliefs, perceptions and orientations, or whether allowed to go on by omission, by those who could, but don't, draw the distinctions, carries a high risk for Indonesia. Confusion becomes the norm, with the only certainty being that however one carries on with ones lives, someone is angry, someone sees one as an enemy.
The US is exactly in that position. The numbing terror of last Tuesday results from a perception over the years that America is responsible for every single conflict involving Arabs or Muslims. A US intelligence official puts it simply, "They see it as a long-term war against that panoply of enemies of theirs, the US and the Zionists and their lackeys among the moderate Muslim governments." He was talking about Al Qaeda, the network of extremists led by bin Laden and suspected of carrying out the "21st Century Pearl Harbor" attack on America, but note the similarities with the reasoning and the perceptions of the Indonesian Laskar Jihad.
In a Muslim world of more than 1 billion believers, and which is geographically within a crescent stretching all the way from North Africa through Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and on to the Indonesian archipelago, the 180 million Indonesian Muslims make the country the biggest voice in the Islamic world.
Preachers at one memorial service in New York referred to the "Bitter weeping of mother America". Will Indonesia come into the fold, the community of nations, and share this weeping on behalf of all mankind? Or is it destined to sit on the fence, continue to be less than steadfast in its efforts to deter terrorism, and thus become an international pariah once again?
Three days after real life disaster movies came to every TV screen in the world, US President George W Bush used the phrase "the nameless, faceless enemy" to describe the perpetrators. He may have been prompted by caution, but is the "enemy" not simply those few fanatics who contrive to twist the words of the Koran to lead, as Mahathir says, good, law-abiding, God-fearing Muslims into the paths of evil?
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