'Bhineka Tunggal Ika' can help Indonesia survive
Ahmad Junaidi, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Can Indonesia survive as a nation-state?
This is the question Indonesians have repeatedly asked since the fall of Soeharto and the dawn of a new era that has led to signs of the country disintegrating.
Indonesia is not alone in facing this challenge faced by nation-states of the 21st century. Indeed, in the past several decades, nation-states the world over have been facing a similar question, with more and more nation-states breaking up.
As the world began to globalize, the state was increasingly perceived more as a constraint on freedoms than a guarantor of rights, a source of vulnerability rather than protection, the creator of a new elite instead of an equalizer.
The result has been a series of revolts with a common message: Survival of the state at the expense of its nations is no longer acceptable, wrote Robin Wright and Doyle McManus in Flashpoints: Promise and Peril in A New World.
Indonesia is experiencing exactly the same threat described by Wright and McManus. It lost East Timor in a 1999 UN-sponsored ballot. Today it is facing increased secessionist movements in Aceh, Papua and Maluku, at a time when it is also coping with demands for greater autonomy from the regions. Ethnic riots and tension have not subsided and every effort to curtail them seems to have failed.
Can Indonesia survive as a nation-state?
It can if it puts into practice its motto Bhineka Tunggal Ika (Unity in Diversity), says noted social and cultural anthropologist Yunita T. Winarto.
"During the 30 years of Soeharto's New Order regime, Bhineka Tunggal Ika was just a slogan," Yunita of the University of Indonesia told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.
She said that during the Soeharto era Bhineka (diversity) was suppressed by unity, uniformity and state hegemony through authoritarianism and militarism. The elimination of the country's diversity began when the government applied Law No. 5/1974 on regional administrations which adopted the Javanese administration structure.
"It hurt people outside Java," said the chief editor of Indonesian Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology.
"Local cultures, which have their own ways to solve conflict, were destroyed by uniformity through state hegemony," Yunita, who received her PhD from the Australian National University, said.
She said government intervention in the kinds of plants that should be grown during the "green revolution" in the late 1970s also suppressed local cultures that already had their own farming systems.
She acknowledged that nation-building efforts, which were started under President Sukarno, had not been completed when the country under Soeharto turned its focus on economic development, destroying earlier efforts in nation-building.
However, Yunita believed that the marginalization of local cultures during the Soeharto era would not lead to the breakup of Indonesia as a nation-state.
"Yes, they hate the government or dislike Javanese culture, but it will not make them secede from Indonesia," said Yunita.
"Historical and political ties and economic interests among the people cannot easily break the national bond," she added.
Yunita saw Bhineka as still relevant if it is respected and truly applied, such as through education that uses a "multicultural approach".
She said children should be taught to respect other, different cultures from as young as kindergarten age.
"Our children should appreciate that Indonesia has so many different cultures. They should learn to respect others from different cultures," she said.