An armed police officer is
silhouetted against against a church decoration in Depok, south of Jakarta, on
Christmas eve. (Antara Photo/Indrianto Eko Suwarso)
As Christians across Indonesia
streamed into churches to attend Christmas masses and services this year, they
couldn’t possibly miss the heavy security presence. The sight may be
surprising if not disconcerting for Christians elsewhere but heavy
security at festivals held by religious minority groups has become the
norm in Indonesia.
The
question remains why it is necessary at all.
There’s no denying that the initiative to
“secure” religious minority events is laudable. The media was filled with
reports about how police officers conducted bomb sweeps in churches and how
moderate Muslim youth groups such as Nahdlatul Ulama's Banser activists
volunteered to stand guard to help ensure that Christians were able to
celebrate the birth of Jesus.
Indeed tales of heroism aren’t in short
supply, especially with regard to the voluntary brigade. In 2000, for example,
a NU Banser member by the name of Riyanto perished while on duty at the Eben
Haezer Church in Mojokerto, East Java. His bravery in volunteering to help guard
a church was in no question as the year was precarious, witnessing multiple
bomb attacks on churches in the country. It was doubly affirmed in his decision
to dash out of the church carrying a bomb he had spotted inside. The bomb
detonated outside, killing Riyanto in the process.
Fifteen years have passed since Riyanto’s
sacrifice and yet Christians still can’t feel wholly safe when publicly
celebrating their most important festivals such as Christmas and Easter without
the “protection” of security personnel. While most Indonesian Christians who
grew up in the Reformasi era may consider Christmas with guards as a
run-of-the-mill thing, the older generations may still remember it wasn’t
always like that.
The 1998 Reformasi may have given birth to
democracy for Indonesia but it also spawned an increased level of lawlessness
that religious minorities have to face. The Jakarta-based Setara Institute
chronicled a consistently worrying state of religious freedom in the country.
In 2012 there were 145 cases of government abuse of religious freedom, with a
total of 264 cases of attacks against religious minorities. The figures for
2013 didn’t show much improvement.
In the run-up to Christmas this year,
supporters of the hard-line vigilante group Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) paid
visits to several shopping malls in Surabaya to warn businesses against
“forcing” their Muslim employees to don Christmas paraphernalia in the line of
duty. Interestingly, however, the malls under the FPI watch are traditionally
viewed as those most frequented by middle-class non-Muslim Surabaya residents.
Even more noteworthy was the support given
to the FPI by the Surabaya Police for these vigilante actions. The media
liaison officer of the Surabaya Police, Adj. Sr. Comr. Lily Djafar, confirmed
that all the district police headquarters in Surabaya had sent letters to
businesses under their jurisdiction with advice to refrain from overt Christmas
displays for their shops. She reasoned that it was important so as not to give
reason for FPI to raid these businesses.
Prior to the FPI round-the-town patrol,
the government-funded Indonesian Council of Ulema (MUI) issued a fatwa
forbidding Muslims from participating in Christmas celebrations, though it
later denied the fatwa meant that Muslims weren’t allowed to convey Christmas
good wishes to Christians. However, it certainly emboldened one Facebook
commentator to warn Bandung Mayor Ridwan Kamil against entering any church
during the Christmas season, which the latter rejected completely, in the name
of pluralism.
Admittedly, not all Muslims were to be
cowed by MUI’s nannyish injunction. Twelve students from the Islamic State
University (UIN) Walisongo in Semarang turned up at a Roman Catholic church to
wish everyone a merry Christmas and even stayed to listen to mass.
The courage of these Muslim students was
no doubt extraordinary. Their action would have elicited criticism from among
the more orthodox sections of their own faith. These students were evidently
more courageous than the police officers who, rather than standing firm in
defense of pluralism, chose to counsel individual citizens to sacrifice their
constitutionally guaranteed freedom in the face of bullies.
Given the information imparted Wikileaks
cables that a number of former police generals were linked to the
FPI, the blatant refusal by the police to defend minority rights is sinister.
But after so many surreal breaches of trust, it becomes harder and harder
to believe that police neglect of duty is not the norm in this country.
In a metaphor more suited to Easter, like
Pontius Pilate, the police washed their hands of responsibility for
allowing the FPI to conduct raids on businesses that overtly acknowledged the
Christmas season. Like in all the cases of church closures in the last decade,
the police never worked up the courage or perhaps the will to protect
minorities from unlawful acts.
Christians sometimes refer to Jesus Christ
as the Prince of Peace. So it seems highly ironic that the celebration of his
birth in Indonesia has been tainted with specters of unease, evident in the
presence of armed guards. Noble volunteers from non-government bodies such as
Banser aside, the permanent presence of police officers at Christmas becomes a
hollow form of compensation by the state for allowing religious extremism to
fester, even 15 years after the bold sacrifice of Riyanto, a private citizen
who wanted to do something for his fellow human beings.
Johannes Nugroho is a writer from
Surabaya.
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