Sectarian mapping of cities to prevent conflict, as another church, in Bekasi, is closed.
Having lived in Bekasi, West Java some years ago, the Jakarta Post article about ‘religious mapping‘ holds interest. The very idea that you need to map an area to provide for peaceful sectarian co-existence, never mind integration, sums up what is wrong with Indonesia. It can be better summarised in two words: Muslim clerics, as in this story of protests against the construction of a Protestant church in Bekasi recently:
Rusli, 38, a moderate Muslim, was in a quandary when local clerics recently asked him and other residents to sign a petition against the building of the Batak Christian Protestant Church (Filadelfia Huria Kristen Batak Protestan (HKBP)) church in their neighborhood in Jejalen Jaya.
The clerics said that if we didn’t sign, they wouldn’t recite prayers at our funerals. I insisted on not signing it, but most of my neighbors were cowed by the threat.
With local clerics still playing a pivotal leadership role in rural parts of Bekasi, people in the Muslim-majority region are easily dragged into conflicts sparked by religious tensions. The spat between the HKBP and the Jejalen Jaya residents only escalated once Muslim clerics in the subdistrict began inciting opposition to the construction of the church.
All Muslim clerics in this subdistrict have agreed the construction of the church must desist immediately
says protest leader Nesan.
So what’s their problem? Murhali, Bekasi FPI leader said on TVone on Sunday that there were 6 churches in the area.
At night, their singing disturbs the locals’ sleep
They can hardly be serious in saying that church-bells and hymn-singing ‘disturb’ Muslim residents, since their own mosques emit cacaphonous ululations again and again every day, not least when normal folk are abed and asleep.
Bekasi ’45 Islamic University sociologist Andi Sopandi points out such faith-fomented conflicts are to be expected. Such disputes, he says, occur frequently in developing rural or suburban areas across the country, where the influx of newcomers with a more diverse background has grated on traditionally more homogeneous communities.
Locals and newcomers get along well only if they share similar basic values, and for most Indonesians, that would be religion
says Andi, who advised former vice president Jusuf Kalla during the latter’s mediation to end the deadly inter-religious clashes in Poso, Central Sulawesi. Given the situation, he goes on, the establishment of an interfaith communication forum alone is never enough.
True enough, Andi, but what is to be done?
Andi believes it is paramount for all regional administrations in the country, including in Bekasi, to produce a map, updated each year, that shows the spread of religious clusters in the area.
The map shouldn’t just list the populations of each religion, but should also point out their homes and nearest houses of worship. Using such a map, the local administration can work with its Interfaith Communication Forum to allow for houses of worship to be established where the population of any particular religious group is high.
It might, one would think, be easier just to let people build a church, or temple, or mosque, subject to parking needs etc., and allow for freedom of religion to proceed, but not here. The ignorant savages who hold court in the mosques direct their flock to hound anybody who doesn’t share their beliefs.
Why, we have to ask again? And it does seem to come back to the paranoid fear among these clerics that their flock will jump ship. Repeatedly, we hear the horrified fanatics speaking of ‘conversion’. Sometimes they use the term ‘Christianisation‘ of areas, as if there’s some Rome-directed plot to flood Bekasi with Catholics or perhaps American evangelists are master-minding wholesale Protestant indoctrination of the Bekasi masses. No wonder Islamic spokesmen often prescribe the death penalty for anyone who converts out.
Are rank-and-file Muslims truly so weak in their faith that only such barbaric threats keep them bending the knee to bearded ignoramuses? I doubt it. Most people need a pretty heavy reason to change the religion they were born into.
The menace of proselytisation was also the excuse in last week’s report from Taman Galaxy, which is a nice little housing estate there where I occasionally did some work about seven years back. Everybody seemed civil enough, no signs of irrationality, at least no more than usual. But this year, we have 16 Islamist outfits up in arms because Galilea Church has a little Sunday fair.
One Murhali said that there were allegations that the church was carrying out a mission to convert residents.
We received reports that church officials often held a charity bazaar for locals but they were asked to say that Jesus is their God. I think it’s a violation.
Sounds unlikely, but what the heck, even if they were asked, they can ‘just say no’, nobody forced them to go there, and given Islam’s record of forcible conversion, a charity bazaar is pea-nuts.
I’m sure Andi Sopandi is a well-meaning man, but maps will only show that non-Muslims are in a minority just about everywhere in Bekasi and in Jakarta. The kind of bigoted clerics we’re talking about here don’t care at all if it’s 2% or 20% – backed up by the kind of Islamist zealots who run the political show in Bekasi, they want to stamp out any alternative source of spiritual guidance that might seem preferable to their own unpleasant brand.
wahaha found your wodka didn’t you?
Ross, I know you are very proud of your Northern Irish Protestant roots, and rightly so, indeed you remarked once that their only crime was loyalty. How then do you square that with their, let’s say, rather ambivalent attitude to the rights of non-protestants in their community?
I recall off-hand several incidents, very nasty incidents indeed, regarding the blockading of Catholic schools and places of worship where the stout solid yeomen of Ulster used precisely the same language and tactics as the yahoos of Bekasi.
I’m usually pretty much in agreement with your viewpoints but we should always recognise that we’re in Indonesia, not the pleasant leafy suburbs of the English Home Counties. Furthermore we should always remember that western society for all its undoubted advantages doesn’t need any lessons in savagery from the rest of the world.
There has been much ghastliness committed by human beings down through the generations but you will always find that members of our much vaunted western civilisation weren’t behind the door when it came to dolling out the historical horrors.
Give Indonesia a break, it’s a very young society, it’s in the middle of a vast transformation. If, and I admit it’s a bloody big “if”, Indonesia survives the next decade or so then we can look back on incidents like that in Bekasi as not even worth a footnote in the history books.
I couldn’t agree more about the need to look beneath the surface of these unpleasant incidents but that applies as much to Bekasi as it does to Belfast.
In 2002 children on their way to Holy Family Primary school in Ardoyne, north Belfast found themselves subject to a dreadful series of blockades which saw appalling sectarian abuse and utterly reprehensible thuggish behaviour against little children walking to school.
If one was to simply accept this incident at its face value one would assume that it was a classic example of the brutish bigotry inherent in Northern Irish protestants however digging a little deeper one found out there was somewhat more to the story. In a nutshell a once majority protestant/Loyalist area was being subsumed by the surrounding Catholic/Republican districts. Local Unionists felt they were being elbowed out of their own district, they complained of frequent harassment and intimidation carried out by senior Republican figures, the same men who could be seen walking their children to school the next morning. The residents then decided that if they couldn’t feel safe in their own homes then their rivals would not be allowed to enjoy the same benefits. Now I am making no determination as to the truth or otherwise of these claims but I want to illustrate how often there is more than meets the eye to the front page headlines.
So what’s the connection with Indonesia? Well I recently read “Riots, Pogroms, Jihad” by John T. Sidel who has examined several inter-ethnic/religious riots in Indonesia and he shows that as often as not such incidents arise from purely local issues more often connected to economic or social concerns than any great conspiracy by the vast global Jihad. He shows that they usually occur in “up and coming” areas (my terminology not his) where traditional societies are being transformed by the arrival of affluent outsiders (no, I’m not going to define that, work it out for yourself) building shopping malls and suchlike and overturning the prior existing social order. One of the concomitant effects of the shiny new malls and businesses is a sudden upsurge in church building and the arrival of ostentatious Christian worship where none, or relatively little, existed previously. You can, I think, see where I coming from and where I’m going; unable to protest against the shopping mall or new business outlets the uneducated lumpenproletariat go for the obvious target.
In no way whatsoever am I condoning such appalling behaviour, but the fact remains that the church blockades are more often the symptom, not the cause, of the underlying unease and merely to throw it all in as an example of Muslim intolerance and bigotry is not going to resolve the problem. I live in a quiet suburb in central Jakarta, the church bells ring out alongside the adzhan from the mosques, no one is attacking those churches. Up in Pasar Baru the Cathedral sits perfectly comfortably alongside Istiqlal Mosque without the least bit of trouble, if one wants to get to the bottom of what’s going on out in the suburbs then one needs to scratch a bit deeper than the kneejerk assumption of latent Islamo-fascism.
(I’ll pass discreetly over your idea that Irishmen born, bred and buttered in a part of Ireland that they and countless generations of their Irish ancestors before them have lived should be deported for not wishing to owe allegiance to the Queen of England as we might fall out over exactly where you expect my many law abiding Irish nationalist relatives should go.)
“It seems to me that the correlation is rather gratuitous unless there is demographic evidence that the christian population of Indonesia generally enjoys a higher living standard.”
I would dare say that in Jakarta (I don’t know about the outer islands) a correlation between wealth and Christianity almost certainly exists. If I am wrong I stand to be corrected but I certainly haven’t met too many poor Christians in this town and the rich people I’ve met do seem to have a significantly high Christian proportion, good luck to ’em I say.
Just for the record I have no personal antipathy towards either Christians or rich people, I’m merely stating the facts as I see them.
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ET said:
The problem is that safeguards cannot be selectively applied. After all, the perceived “danger” in one corner is the paranoid one in another. Christianity, to certain types of committed Muslims, is “a cult that strives for world dominance.” Thus, for them, it is right to restrict its expansion. That is, without any doubt, the thinking behind the Bekasi bigotry. It is exactly the same logic behind attempts to inhibit the free practice of Islam in parts of Europe.
If one thinks that restricting the rights of Muslims (and only Muslims) is okay in Europe, then he or she must either: A) accept that this principle implies it’s also okay in places like Indonesia, and shut his or her mouth when Indonesian Muslims act in blatantly bigoted ways; or B) be selective in his or her outrage and, thus, be a hypocrite.
Or, even better, he or she could grapple with the idea that freedom of religion on the individual level, in compliance with civil and criminal law–and not special rights for specific religious groups, whether minority or majority–ensures the rights and obligations of all individuals, while keeping any religion from gaining too powerful a position in state or society.
What’s more, whenever state or mob acts to restrict the rights of individuals to equal treatment in the eyes of the law, based upon some group affiliation, it’s a dangerous, slippery slope to majoritarianism and tyranny.
Indonesia is facing a concerted attempt to realize that nightmare through incremental steps. Though there are also very positive signs of the state maintaining its pluralist foundation, it goes without saying that it is finding it difficult to chart a steady course. But it is hardly alone in this struggle. Other plural societies are also facing pressures towards ethno- and religio-centrism. The names of the players may change, but the crass bigotry and danger of groupism remain the same…