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IBRAHIM ISA'S - SELECTED INDONESIAN VIEWS, 25 December 2008 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDONESIANS OBSERVES PEACEFUL CHRISTMAS RECOGNIZING AND RECTIFYING THE ERROS OF THE PAST GENERALS AND THE 'INVENTION OF TRADITION' CHRISTMAS BRINGS INDONESIAN TOGETHER --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDONESIANS OBSERVES PEACEFUL CHRISTMAS *The Jakarta Post* , Jakarta | Mon, 12/26/2005 4:56 PM Indonesians observed Christmas peacefully across the country as tens of thousands of police and troops remained on high alert for possible terrorist attacks. The security forces had earlier warned of possible terrorist attacks during the Christmas and New Year holidays as militants might seek revenge for the killing last month of Malaysian bomb-expert Azahari bin Husin, a senior member of the regional terror network Jamaah Islamiyah (JI), during a police raid in East Java. JI has been blamed for a series of bomb attacks in the country, including the deadly and near simultaneous Christmas Eve church bombings in 2000. But as of late Sunday the world's most populous Muslim nation remained peaceful, police said. ""Up until now, the security situation across the country remains safe and under control. We will continue to stay fully alert for future threats to security,"" national deputy police spokesman Anton Bahrul Alam told /AFP/. Some 47,000 police and soldiers have been deployed to guard churches and Christian houses of worship, hotels, and shopping malls. Even security guards dressed as Santa Claus were seen checking vehicles for explosives at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Jakarta, /AP/ reported. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono attended a Christmas celebration in Nias, North Sumatra, on Sunday. Also present at the event was Timor Leste President Xanana Gusmao, who on Saturday evening attended a Christmas Eve mass at Jakarta's cathedral. Susilo and Gusmao are slated to attend an event to mark the first anniversary of the Dec. 26 tsunami in neighboring Aceh province. Nias Island, which was also affected by last year's tsunami, was shaken by a 4.6-magnitude earthquake on Sunday morning just before the arrival of the President and other distinguished guests for the Christmas celebration. During the celebration, which was held in a soccer field and drew a crowd of more than 6,000, Susilo said that his visit to the mainly Christian island was a display of his ""empathy for the people of Nias and southern Nias who suffered so much because of the earthquake and the tsunami."" ""With the spirit of Christmas, it is my hope that the people of Nias can bounce back and further rebuild Nias,"" he was quoted as saying by /AFP/. Presidential spokesman Andi Mallarangeng told reporters earlier in the day that the presidential guard had increased security for the country's leading family following intelligence reports of ""serious threats against the safety of the President and his family"". Meanwhile, Indonesian Christians living in a number of cities considered susceptible to terror attacks, such as *Jakarta*, *Poso* and *Palu*, marked Christmas Eve without any signs of fear despite the presence of security officers in their churches. Bomb squad personnel and security officers scoured churches on Saturday before Christmas Eve services, and searched for suspicious items around foreign embassies and shopping malls. In the Central Java capital of *Semarang*, thousands of Christians flocked to churches from Saturday morning to midnight amid good weather. In a show of religious harmony, members of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) civilian guards, known as Banser, helped police officers to guard the houses of worship. The NU is the country's largest Muslim organization. Ali Maffudz, who leads the province's NU civilian guards, said that as many as 3,500 Banser members had been deployed to support the security forces guard churches across Central Java. In neighboring *Yogyakarta*, Christians celebrated their Javanese-style Christmas in peace. *Kendari*, the capital of Southeast Sulawesi, continued its tradition of celebrating peaceful Christmases. There was no sign of security disturbances during the annual celebrations. Police officers maintained low profile security measures to guard some 30 churches in the predominantly Muslim city. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- RECOGNIZING AND RECTIFYING THE ERROS OF THE PAST *The Jakarta Post* , Jakarta | Sat, 09/30/2006 9:38 AM | Opinion *Aboeprijadi Santoso*, Amsterdam As Justice and Human Rights Minister Hamid Awaluddin is about to embark on a new mission to offer citizenship to former students of the sixties abroad -- the so called ex-/mahids/ (students who studied abroad on government sponsorship) -- it's important to notice that the issue is not simply about offering Indonesian citizenship. It's about the need to recognize and rectify the state's past wrongdoings. Moreover, it should be part of a bigger framework within the truth and reconciliation process. Ultimately it's a test of the government's political will to build a truly new Indonesia. When the news spread last August that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had instructed Minister Hamid Awaluddin to offer former students of the sixties, who have been living as exiles abroad, Indonesian citizenship, the issue led to a heated debate among the exiles in Europe. Basically, there is nothing new about the offer. Many highly placed officials, including former President Soeharto, have asked them to return home, but hardly got a serious response. One important exception was when President Abdurrachman 'Gus Dur' Wahid sent then Justice and Human Rights Minister, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, to meet them in The Hague, in January 2000. In the 1960s President Sukarno sent thousands of students to the Soviet Union, China and Eastern Europe to study on state-fellowships. Most have returned home, but a few hundred, mostly of the political left, remained abroad for fear of reprisals at home. Whether they were students or not, the distinction became irrelevant as they all -- former ambassadors, officials and cadres of the former communist party PKI and the Partindo -- suffered a common fate. The specter of 1965 persecutions at home and the intimidating Cold War climate abroad finally brought them from China and the Soviet Union to West Europe, where most now reside in the Netherlands, Germany and France. They became exiles, work and die here -- it's a life ""born out of blood, pain, sadness, anger and spirit"", the exiled poet Sobron Aidit once put it. Gus Dur called them ""the wandering freedom fighters"" since many of them had taken part in Indonesia's independence struggle. On the other hand the fact that they lost their citizenship and civil rights abruptly in the mid-1960s, with its far reaching consequences, is still a painful memory. This predictably will be a crucial issue when Hamid meets them next week in The Hague and Paris. For, what happened in many embassies as Gen. Soeharto took power in 1966 was in fact a coup d'etat. Ambassadors loyal to Sukarno resigned and instead of the charge d'affaires, the military attaches took over and issued a statement demanding political loyalty to the new government of Soeharto. Those who refused to sign were at one stroke condemned to exile. That's a human rights violation, they now claim. Hence, they demand rehabilitation with an admission of wrongdoing on the part of the government. ""It's a matter of honor,"" Ibrahim Isa, an exiled journalist says, summing up the argument. ""It's illegal,"" exiled lawyer Wijanto pointed out. According to Indonesian law, only the Justice Ministry is entitled to decide on citizenship. However, it would appear, Minister Hamid doesn't intend to do anything more than offer them the opportunity to regain an Indonesian passport in connection with the new Citizenship Law. Indeed, he categorically rejected the idea of discussing the human rights issues involved when he met one ex-/mahid/, Tom Iljas, in Helsinki on Sept. 11. ""Do you want a passport, or not!"" Hamid was quoted as saying angrily as he read Iljas's open letter to President Susilo. The truth is regaining citizenship may not even be the issue. Hamid's plan is a case of too little, too late. Most exiles are now too old to pursue a career at home and have given up hope of returning home. ""Moreover, since 1998, we could go home freely, some have even died there, so the problem is not about passports,"" Ibrahim Isa insisted. Many exiles, therefore, hope Minister Hamid will be open and ready to engage in a dialog and discuss the human rights and political issues involved. The minister should understand that despite their foreign passports, ""these exiles truly love Indonesia and feel Indonesian,"" said Ibrahim. Few, perhaps, are ready to welcome Hamid's offer just as several would like to see the decree on banning Marxism and communism removed before accepting the offer, but most exiles want at least a dialog on their civil and human rights. The humiliation, in any case, of having to live abroad and being denied citizenship for decades by an illegitimate act of the state they had helped found, is intensely felt. ""I do not demand anything (even if I were entitled to). The government has to understand us and offer an apology,"" said Francisca Fangidey, a former legislator and freedom fighter who lost her husband during the independence struggle. The pain is even greater as Jakarta has offered amnesty and considerable compensation to former Free Aceh Movement (GAM) separatists, but not to the left-wing exiles. ""We never rebelled against the unitary state. So, I feel that President Yudhoyono will have some sensitivity toward us,"" said Ibrahim. In a reconciliatory spirit similar to Gus Dur's in 2000, Information and Communications Minister Sofyan Djalil had publicly offered an apology to the exiles at a meeting with the Indonesian community in Stockholm recently. Like Sofyan, Hamid was part of Jusuf Kalla's team, who pursued a dialog with GAM, and led the Indonesian delegation to a successful peace deal in Helsinki. Hamid's predecessor, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, has been criticized for allegedly lacking the will to implement Gus Dur's instruction. But, in a way that Hamid never did, Yusril had publicly admitted that the exiles had actually lost their citizenship illegally, thus recognizing the political and human rights issues involved. It would be deeply ironic, not to mention dishonest, for a human rights minister if Hamid Awaluddin, in the tradition of New Order bureaucrats, denies the issue and resolves the problem of the exiles as if it were a mere technical-administrative issue, rather than a political one. /The writer is a journalist with /Radio Netherlands. GENERALS AND THE ´INVENTION OF TRADITION´ Aboeprijadi Santoso, Jakarta The Jakarta Post Tuesday, May 6, 2008 Retired General Wiranto, backed by hundreds of his colleagues, has in effect begged for impunity for human rights violations by claiming that their mission was to maintain the unitary state of Indonesia. Retired or not, the generals basically perceive their job as a sacred mission bestowed upon those ready to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the nation. Hence, it is being used to relieve them from any charge of abuse. It is a key legacy of a politicized Army nurtured during the New Order, still vividly alive today. Wiranto, deeply worried about state human rights commission Komnas HAM's investigation of past atrocities, has persuaded Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono to resist Komnas and ask the generals not to respond to Komnas' calls. But the military chief said it is no longer the Army's business, leaving them to respond as individual citizens. Now, some 600 generals have urged Komnas to stop its investigation while arguing, like Juwono, that Komnas' calls are unconstitutional. One wonders why the retired officers should behave as a quasi-political party: mobilizing friends and comrades, seeking ministerial support and exercising pressure. A generation of officers, whose careers grew during the New Order era, is united to defend younger colleagues on issues -- human rights cases -- they themselves never had to deal with. They may have some knowledge about the cases, but are totally unfamiliar with the concept of human rights since their views are inevitably biased by the New Order political culture. Wiranto, for example, turned the tables when he denied rights violations and asked "what about my human rights?" -- thus, misinterpreting the universal principle at issue, which is about the state's actions against unarmed populations, not individual citizens vis a vis fellow citizens. The case also illustrates how the legacy of past abuses has seriously affected them -- hence, some are aspiring to be president. For, it is not the first time they sought political intervention. In late 1999, as East Timor moved toward independence, Wiranto reportedly approached Xanana Gusmao and urged him to help prevent an international tribunal from coming into being. They succeeded and most of those indicted for the 1999 violence were since promoted and all were acquitted. Meanwhile, it is important to note that the meeting of hundreds of retired generals, the first of its kind in years, which included many allegedly involved in various past abuses, claimed that they could not be blamed since they were carrying out the state's mission to maintain the integrity of the unitary state (NKRI). This pretext has too often been used; it's a motto, if you like, to justify violent incidents involving civilians. It means that the mission should be accomplished at all costs. As the nature of the mission was made sacrosanct, it became politically acceptable and practically convenient for the soldiers to ignore the rights of locals caught in conflict situations. Any close observer of the wars in East Timor and Aceh could testify that clashes resulting in Army casualties were usually followed by heavy-handed retaliation as collective punishment for villages allegedly supporting rebels. It is a common trap in guerrilla warfare. Army units could also arbitrarily attack a community of militants, badly armed believers, as seemed to have happened in the 1989 Talangsari case. But, seen from the center, the operation must be effective and the risk taken since the rebellion must be crushed. The nature of the doctrine was such that the mission's very acronym -- "NKRI" (the unitary state) -- became a legitimizing mantra. Indonesian politicians are fond of mantras. We used to have a never-ending "revolution" to justify mass mobilizations for state purposes. Later, we saw the New Order imposing its own version of state philosophy of Pancasila in order to strengthenstate hegemony. Both claimed these symbols and values to be part of continuity with the past, and used them as mantras. Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid is doing the same these days. Facing internal conflict in his PKB political party, he said he left "Kyai Langitan", a group of elderly men he claimed to have instructed him to run for president in 2004, and turned to five grand Kyais. Traditional symbols are used, revived, even recreated to face new challenges. The historian Erich Hobsbawm considers such things crucial and coined the term "the invention of tradition". Soeharto and his generals, too, sought continuity by inventing their style of "tradition". The "NKRI" mantra, however, is a concept corrupted from the idea of unity as conceptualized when the nation fought for independence. We seem to forget that our Founding Fathers Sukarno and Muhammad Hatta, and the generations of the 1930s to 1960s, consistently spoke of "persatoean" (unity) rather than "kesatuan" (indivisible unity). The latter, the "K" of NKRI, seems a militarized version that refers to the meaning of "unit" in the Army's term. Let's recall: even in the aftermath of the devastating tsunami and civil war in Aceh, the key slogan in Meulaboh read: "We love peace, but above all, we love unity". The New Order's semantic transformation has been taken for granted for too long, and in doing so, we tend to forget that it emphasizes the militarized and centralized unity at the expense of diversity and regional interests. To exploit the unitary concept as a political mantra regardless of the local situation not only risks greater resentment and greater human costs when it comes to retaliation, but could in the long run threaten the very integrity of the state the military wants to maintain. Here the Aceh rebellion (1976-2005) is a case in point. Muhammad Hatta, pointing to such potential, warned us that "persatoean" must not turn into "persatean" (bloodbath). The author is a journalist. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- CHRISTMAS BRINGS INDONESIAN TOGETHER *The Jakarta Post* , Jakarta | Sun, 12/26/2004 8:43 AM | Jakarta *The Jakarta Post*, Jakarta Indonesia celebrated Christmas amid heightened security late on Friday and Saturday due to reports of possible bomb attacks in the capital and vandalism in the conflict-torn regions. In *Jakarta*, a heavy downpour highlighted the serene and peaceful atmosphere of the celebrations at over 120 churches across the city, including the two largest the Jakarta Cathedral and Immanuel Church in Central Jakarta. Police worked together with community organizations -- including the Youth of Tanah Abang Mosque and the Red and White Brigade (BMP) to guard the area outside the churches and direct traffic, for which the chairman of the Indonesian Council of Bishops (KWI), Cardinal Julius Darmaatmadja, expressed his gratitude. ""I credit all Christians for their courage to still attend mass amid the bomb threats ... I also thank all parties that took part in protecting the churches,"" he said at the beginning of his sermon at the cathedral. Warnings from Western governments of possible Christmas bombings had reportedly not only stopped people from attending church services but also forced some churches to hold Christmas Eve services at hotels, malls and office buildings. Darmaatmadja encouraged the congregation to work together with the new government to revive a sense of peace and security. ""We have seen people humiliated by several acts of violence and discrimination ... natural resources have also been drained, while corruption continues. All of these have created hatred ... Many people have lost their places of worship, people feel insecure."" Poverty, he added, should be considered ""a disaster for us all; as Christians we should eradicate poverty in solidarity."" In *Serang*, Banten, Protestant minister Benny Halim also called on people to end violence and hostility toward one another. In *Palu*, Central Sulawesi, where attacks against churches have been a regular feature in the city in the past years, the calm was marred by machete-wielding assailants on motorcycles who attacked a Protestant minister, identified as Jhoni Tegel and his friend Jemry Tembalino, in Masani village of the strife-torn Poso regency. The minister was seriously injured in the attack. Central Sulawesi Police chief Brig. Gen. Aryanto Sutadi said that police had embarked on a manhunt for five suspects ""who were clad in T-shirts of the police mobile brigade,"" he said, adding that the five were also carrying firearms. In *Ambon*, a festive mood prevailed during Christmas's Eve when thousands of the city residents took to the streets to witness a fireworks display. Christians and Muslims, who in the past years engaged in bitter clashes, mingled in the streets rejoicing the return of peace. Ambon Police were out in force with over 500 personnel to guard the celebrations. This was augmented by the deployment of one company from the mobile brigade and two platoons of army soldiers. In *Surabaya*, no disturbances were reported during Christmas celebrations apart from traffic congestion caused by over 40,000 people trying to gain access to Bethani Church, the largest church in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, in *Denpasar*, Bali, a bomb scare overshadowed celebrations as word circulated that explosives were planted at an intersection in the city. The police declared the bomb threat a hoax after a one-hour search.
