Cap-cay Thoughts on Religion, Nationalism and Colonialism in Indonesia

By Mucha Q. Arquiza

INDONESIAN RELIGION-BASED NATIONALISM AND CIVIL SOCIETY

Although a little dated, Delia Noer’s (1973) account of the modernist Muslim movement in Indonesia especially in Minangkabau and Java provides important details useful in understanding the present Indonesian religion and politics. Noer stressed the role of education and information access as primary vehicles of Indonesia’s religion-based political movement. By the late 18th century, Indonesian society was already highly literate and its permuda (i.e. young generation) had high level of awareness not only on matters of religion but more so on politics. This was aided in no small measure by the availability and popularity of systems of mass education in both formal and informal setting. With the community-based school system in place, the mass media culture (i.e. journalism and literature in both oral and written forms) subsequently established a popular culture that values religious morality and literacy, dialectically reinforcing and sustaining the peoples’ religious and political education. Education and mass media were beyond the control of colonial hands (i.e. the Dutch) and were allowed to flourish as local initiatives, therefore, its contents freely resonated the Indonesians’ sentiments and aspirations, namely, the majority’s religious ideals and anti-colonial sentiments.
This feature of Indonesia’s modernist movement could be comparable to the Philippines’ Propaganda Movement of the late 19th century. What might have defined the shaping of Indonesian and Philippine nationalisms, and hence contrasting them, were the fact that where the Arab world (particularly Makkah) and western Asia were the intellectual haven for young Indonesian kiyai and ulama, Mother Spain and Europe were the cradle of knowledge for the Philippine illustrados (i.e. elite).
These traditions of cultural and socio-political (i.e. grassroot politics) autonomy have proven to be important resources and social capital not only as foundation of present-day Indonesian civil society, but as impetus and precursor in creating an enabling environment for Indonesian society and peoples’ directly governing their lives sans the state . It is clear even today that Indonesian civil society is imbued with high morale, extreme degree of freedom and political will and enjoys popular patronage. Consequently, the civil society by itself have become an expression of people’s governance, constituted as a synergy of elite moral leadership and politicized grassroot that is readily mobilized and willing to effect change outside of state influence, or even DESPITE the state. This is manifested in organizations such as Muhammadiyah, Nahdatul Ulama, the various Jaringans, pesantrens, and tarekats that have proven to be the sustaining energies behind Indonesia’s community development and progress, especially at grassroot levels, in the midst of perennial bureaucratic anomalies and unhampered corruptions by state leadership. By all indications, Indonesian civil society have become the ‘alternative government’, or else a ‘state-less’ government of and by the people, seeming to affirm the idea that governance can be self-governance of purely popular initiative. It is amusing how an ordinary Javanese have been routinely ignoring the fatwa issued by the government institution, the Majlis Ulama Indonesia (MUI), and instead heed the counsel of her/his kiyai or kaum toa on matters of religious ethics and even politics.
With the blessings of its archipelagic nature (i.e.dispersed population centers; many still remaining as isolated island-territories) and long tradition of highly decentralized autonomous polity at various levels, it is not far-fetched to infer that it is perhaps this dynamism and flux, blended with contemporary realities of an extremely willful and independent-minded people, that have fortunately prevented the full materialization of RI’s so-called ‘democratization’ based purely on Western concepts of centralized bureaucracy, unitary state and government.

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PANCA SILA: TAKE TWO

In my previous posting on ‘Revolution and the Panca Sila’, I argued that while it was theoretically the best formula, Panca Sila came at a wrong time. Specifically, I wanted to note how the PKI would have read the signs of the time: the national consciousness of Indonesian masses was not yet ripe and the political moment required to achieve strategic victory for a socialist revolution was not yet at its peak as the bourgeoisie and elite (i.e. feudal lords and economic oligarchs) still controlled the rein of economic power-base. The main strategists in this project, the Marxist-Leninists in the PKI (i.e. Communist Party of Indonesia) leadership couldn’t have been myopic and missed out this particular detail that without the unjust structures of a class-divided society dismantled, and without the backbone of society (i.e. peasantry) sufficiently awakened and the vanguard working class sufficiently organized - not only to carry out a peoples’ revolution - but more importantly to pick-up the shards in the event of post-conflict reconstruction, it was a political strategy that was deemed to fail from the very onset because it would be reduced to mere exercise of political adventurism (i.e. putzism) on the part of elite central leadership, and true enough, the nationalist revolution went crumbling down headed for a political catastrophe as it was when the communists attempted a coup in the mid 1960s that resulted to the tragic G30S massacre. Indeed, it takes a colossal blunder in history, and unfortunate loss of many lives and dreams, to provide present-day revolutions with important lessons on strategizing poly-contextual and multi-national neocolonial liberation struggles.
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THE DARKER SIDE OF MULTICULTURALISM AND PLURALITY DISCOURSE

The rhetoric of plurality, multiculturalism and tolerance is such a double-edged issue especially when deployed as political tool that many Asian governments, not least of all Indonesia and the Philippines, have exploited and unscrupulously used to ‘anaesthesize’ and render the masses passive and indifferent to social change. To many political activists participating in neocolonialism (anti-imperialism) struggles in SEA, plurality, multiculturalism, and the rhetoric of minority politics often send chills in the back reminiscent of the Cold War era back to the time when Western political strategists (particularly America) hatched and exported by Asian dictators a war virus called ‘Low Intensity Conflict’ (LIC), in Muslim parlance, a fitnah, that pitted sibling against each other, and sent comrades on a frenzy of mass purgation of fellow comrades, bringing out the worst case of distrust and treachery among humankind. In the Philippines, most infamously applied during the height of cold war in the ‘80s against communist-led or -influenced insurgencies especially at a time when revolutionaries have declared that the political playing field had now reached a supposed ‘advanced substage of strategic defensive’ characterized by a substantive degree of consolidated organizing of critical mass-base and having achieved an optimal level of conscientization enabling them, at their own accord and initiative, to launch massive political action in the open that is capable of toppling a reactionary State (e.g. such was perceived to be the stage in 1986 during the People Power revolution in the Philippines that toppled the Marcos regime). Militarily, it was portended to signal the next sub-stage of the revolution where the protracted war of defense was now to be taken into the streets, transforming legal mass actions into urban mass uprising, and complimenting it in the countrysides with bold moves of counter-offensives aimed at ‘liberating frontiers’ or sustaining small pockets of populations and villages where revolutionary governance could then be established and implemented to supplant status quo. As history would show, in the Philippine experience, such were however better said in theory, precisely because LIC had worked out its poison before the political basketball white-board was even ready for execution in practice!

The counter-response from the State was purported to have been a military strategy of at least two components: 1. massive infiltration into the ranks of the insurgents and creating schisms within (as what happened in the Mindanao Left in the early 1990s), and 2. waging battles for the minds and hearts of the mass-base or ‘winning the hearts and mind of the people’. In principle, these basically employed the classic divide-and-rule tactics of colonial wars, whereby the reactionary State might even tactically support identity-based political struggles such as in launching peace-talks (e.g. Peace Processes with MNLF Muslims in southern Philippines, or with Acheh’s GAM, in Indonesia) in the pretexts of accommodating the demands of minority nationalities, these pacification projects or programs of political clemency to insurgents, were in fact disguised strategic move of containment and weakening of a potentially fatal unified country-wide resistance. The ‘peace strategy’ have been coupled with massive efforts of education and information, mobilizing the academia and media as producers and purveyors of knowledge, popularizing a discourse that the political struggle had all along been just a mere cultural or religious war (i.e. a subtler version not different from the Huntington nightmare), befitting no more than ‘cultural’ solutions, hence, ‘eutopian hopes’ (see in Adeney-Risacotta) are peddled in promises that assure social equity is actually possible in non-armed struggle, through ‘negotiations’ for a multicultural and pluralist setting and by inculturating tolerance (as do patience, passivity, suffering and submissiveness) as ‘resurrected’ religious and cultural virtues. Meanwhile historical injustices could actually be redressed and healed, if we are to believe this myth, through inter-cultural as well as interfaith dialogue and other rituals of pacifism. We are so familiar with the stuff: peaceful rally, prayer vigils denouncing war and violence and lots of unpeaceful photo-ops and media coverage of government officials and surrendered insurgents, sometimes graced with holy presences of bishops or ulama, grinning while happily dove-freeing/flying, hand-shaking, candle-lighting, gunungan-cutting-and-sampling, signing peace covenants and singing of peace-hymns, etc. while the guns and bombs in the countrysides continue every ticking second snuffing off lives and obliterating ecology into smithereens, again, alluding to some religious acts or practices captioned as ‘staying tranquil in the midst of chaos’ (i.e. with no intention of poking pun at the Buddhist belief). If these rituals appear to be mostly of catholic or christian ones, it is by no means coincidental, as the LIC strategists are mostly of catholic/christian/jewish neo-conservatives. Yet ironically, disarming the State militia, controlling proliferation of small arms and curbing international arms deals are not to be part of the peaceful strategies. This, an economic side, an unwarranted encroachment into the domains of World Bank-IMF, WTO and the war-tech makers and traders, US and Israel, are, of course, beside the point that are better off conveniently side-lined by locally-spun ‘softer’ human rights issues (i.e. economic, social and cultural rights - ESCR) in half-hearted complaints about government’s violations by ‘commission and omission’ in the increasing burden of a domestic war and vicious counter-insurgency campaigns heaving seriously at the expense of social and economic development , sacrificing the Millenium Development Goals, whileas, in conflict-affected areas, in a split-second, militarization and human insecurity have been the major causes of infant and adult mortality than are low reproductive rights awareness, illiteracy, hunger and disease combined.

Amnesty International recently noted that Philippine Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita reported to the UN Commission that Philippines has been channeling much of the UNDP funds and official development assistance for development to counter-insurgency in the south. But then that would have to be another story.

22 February 2010