Bersih Lingkungan - cleaning up and the new religion of the New Order

MUCHA Q ARQUIZA
19 April 2010

‘Outward appearance’, Henk Schulte Nordholt [1997] commented is derived from and at best merely the visible face of the ‘real thing’. Most academic accounts of social history often downplay the relevance of outward appearance, he observes, emphasizing that thinking is the ‘inner substance’ and “theory does not need to wear fancy shoes”.’ Yet when social history has rendered into complex narratives of contradiction, ambivalence and false-claims where much of the ‘real thing’ is dressed-over and concealed under heavy cosmetics, the only truthful and reliable best narrative could very well be the visible faces of ‘outward appearances’.

If there were monuments or physical landmarks to capture the outward appearance of the New Order, it would have to be at least two: the Monumen Pancasila Sakti in Lubang Buaya and the Taman Mini. Both New Order monuments capture the current ideology, and religion, in both its physical [i.e.literal] appearance and its symbolisms summarized as Bersih Lingkungan, a clean environment and a clean politics, that emphasizes the purificatory ritualized processes and the new dispensation’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies for keamanan [i.e.order&safety], and kebersihan [i.e.clean]. Order and cleanliness is also exponentially projected and idealized as silent, uncritical and depoliticized society. The outward appearance of New Order religion is, for instance, the halus or finesse of a cultured slematan as opposed to the krasek or chaos of the 'wildness' rebutan as suggested in the study of rituals by Pemberton . It is the reverence and commemoration of military exploits who have ‘brought order’ back as opposed to the memorialization of anti-colonial revolution and independence and the Sukarnoist legacy. The Pancasila Sakti monument’s theme and its meaning vividly captures the new religion of New order as KA LEMBIMENTRA AD [Kepala Lembaga Pembinaan Mental dan Tradisi Angkatan Darat] or ‘Chief of the Institute for Spritual edification and Army Tradition’, a military instrument for ideological control that summarizes the new historical perspective in the following description:

"The theme reflects treachery, terror tactics and the PKI revolt against Pancasila and the government. The bas-relief depicts the struggle by the Indonesia people to crush the PKI-Muso insurrection at Madiun. Next, the people opposed the effort of PKI to influence their fight through the NASAKOM idea. This movement led to the revolt and the betrayal of the G30SPKI and concluded with the liquidation of the PKI and the establishment of the government of the New Order…[The monument] is representative of the historical veracity of the fight and the heroic exploits, as well as of historical objectivity." [Monumen Pancasila Sakti 1975:365]

Indeed the New Order has been a massive clean-up drive, the same ideology that would later pervade civic action projects such as the kerja bakti and Green Revolution, that not only aimed to rid Indonesian society of communists but also to wipe out from collective memory of the heroism of Sukarno and the Guided democracy [i.e. as the old order]. Psyhically, New Order was all about sanitation and sterilization of social ideology and religion itself. Hefner [2000] described the political strategy of Soharto regime where “the government adopted a mixed regimen that combined severe controls on political Islam with guarder support for Islamic spirituality…[organizing] religion as a ground for public morality, as shield against Western liberalism and an antidote to communism…the New order not only tolerated depoliticized forms of religion but encouraged their penetration into all corners of society” [Hefner 2000:59] such that ambivalent alliances have to forged and traditional political concepts and organizations have been rendered anew, often, on contradictory terms and meanings.

Soharto’s policies were thoroughly of ‘non-religious’ sort, according to Hefner, shaped only by self-serving interests and political considerations that were ‘[precoccupied] to hold power, stabilize the economy and reap the benefits of development for himself and his family’. It was only in the late 1980s where Soharto found it to the advantage of its political survival to court the conservative segments of Muslims. Yet while intending to maintain a hold on politicization of Islam and cultivating pliant conservatism, instead, the regime “stimulated the growth of prodemocracy Islam”. [ibid. 2000:72] “ [By] way of liberal democrats, then, notions of freedom, universal citizenship, human rights, and enlightenment made their way into Indonesian political thought in association with democratic socialism.”

And to this latter trend, the resurgence of the new intellectuals, that Hefner calls the ‘junior modernists’ as modeled by Nurcholis Madjid, the secular humanists, the socialist democrats and most young breed of activists represented by the Mahasiswa Islam [MI] and the ‘angkatan 66’ [i.e. generation of ’66, very much comparable with our Philippines’ Martial Law babies] brought in fresh breeze that would prelude the era of reformation, whose politics were favorably coincidental with and catalyzed by the massive boom in information technology, media and literacy, and that, altogether, deserve another write-up and a critical response. ###

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[1] Nordholt, H.S. [1997] Outward appearances dressing state and society in Indonesia.The Netherlands: KITLV Press, intro. Pp.1-38.
[2] Pemberton, J. [1994] On the subject of ‘java’. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.
[3] Hefner [2000] “Ambivalent Alliance: Religion and Politics in the New Order” in Civil Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 58-93.