Discriminative laws still abound

Discriminative laws still abound

By Ester Jusuf

The following article is adopted from a presentation at the
United Nations High Commission for Human Rights in Geneva on
March 24, 2000.

GENEVA (JP): Indonesia's ethnic minorities have had to face
the stigmatic smudge of racism and discrimination ever since the
New Order came to power 35 years ago.

The new regime immediately churned out a series of regulations
and laws to disseminate racial sentiments within the society.

Some of the laws were specifically targeted at the ethnic
Chinese community. A least 62 of these enactments are in force in
Indonesia today.

These enactments regulate various aspects of life, such as
religion, economy, education, customs and culture, in such a way
as to restrict the rights of the targeted ethnic group in those
fields.

However, President Abdurrahman Wahid, or Gus Dur, recently
eliminated one of these regulations through a presidential
decree. We know that this measure is far from adequate, but we
support Gus Dur's political will to fight racial discrimination
and eliminate political segregation in Indonesia.

If racial violence has become a common phenomenon, it is only
the result of these numerous discriminative laws. In 1998 women
of Chinese descent were the main target for mass rape; the rest
of the ethnic Chinese community was assaulted, murdered and had
their properties looted.

Such atrocities occurred in major cities such as Medan,
Makassar, Jakarta and Surakarta. Ethnic riots also broke out
between the Dayaks, Malays and Madura in Kalimantan in 1997. More
recently in Maluku, Christians and Muslims were engaged in mass
killings. On a smaller scale, religion persecution also occurred
in Mataram, near Bali, and anti-Chinese riots took place in
Pekalongan, Central Java.

The military's involvement in all these racial crimes was a
passive one, mainly due to its failure to protect Indonesian
citizens of a particular ethnic group, and the racial riots serve
as blatant examples of such neglect by the military.

So far there has never been serious prosecution for racial
crimes, nor has there been any sort of protection scheme for
victims and witnesses. The few remedies, which were only rarely
offered, were in the form of show arrests and superficial
symbolic reconciliations.

These racial divisions and violence in Indonesian society are
based on a well-supported and well-nurtured sense of hatred and
stigmatization of the ethnic Chinese.

The Indonesian word cina, literally meaning Chinese, has a
very strong negative racial connotation. The use of officially
approved words and terms with very strong negative racial
connotations to describe Indonesians of Chinese descent, has the
effect of building a thick dividing wall between ethnic Chinese
citizens and all other ethnic groups.

This stigmatization of the Chinese ethnic group is also
further supported by the assimilation policy adopted by the
government, which implies that being Chinese is something which
should be hidden, condemned and as much as possible minimized in
order to blend in with the rest of society.

This in turn detrimentally affects ethnic Chinese Indonesians
both psychologically and physically.

Religious affairs have been a highly regulated aspect of
Indonesian society. Government intervention in this sector is
most significant in the limitation of only five officially
recognized religions: Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism
and Buddhism.

Segregation based on religion is obvious from the restraint
placed on interreligious marriages. Further, many religions are
seen as undeserving of official recognition. The Chinese belief
of Confucianism, for instance, is one such religion. Again here
discrimination targeted at the ethnic Chinese comes into play.

Not surprisingly, this is also a basis on which many riots and
atrocities have occurred in Indonesia, most markedly during 1999
when racial and ethnic issues triggered much mass violence.

Discrimination at its most extreme manifestation took the form
of warfare between religious groups, mass killings of civilians
of a certain religion, destruction and burning of places of
worship. These riots seemed to be well organized, but have also
occurred spontaneously. In a number of cases, the active role of
the military and provocateurs has not been insignificant, for
instance in the riots in Maluku all through 1999, in Mataram in
the latter part of 1999 and previously in Ketapang, in downtown
Jakarta, in November 1998.

We urgently call on the international community to pressure
the Indonesian government, having ratified the Convention on the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination, to fulfill its obligations
and enact legislation against racial discrimination to protect
all Indonesian citizens from all forms of discrimination.

We also call on all right-thinking people to campaign for the
elimination of all racially and religiously discriminative
regulations.

Specific attention should be given to the resolution and
prevention of racial conflict, as well as to the prosecution of
those who have initiated and incited racial conflict.

Furthermore, the Indonesian government should refrain from
interfering in religious affairs. Only after these issues have
been resolved can reconciliation and the establishment of a
peaceful society free of terror, violence and human rights abuses
take place in Indonesia.

The writer is chairwoman of Solidaritas Nusa Bangsa, a
Jakarta-based non-governmental organization for the abolition of
racial and ethnic discrimination.