Ethnicity explosive issue, rights campaigner warns
JAKARTA (JP): Ethnicity, religion and ideology remain explosive issues that Indonesia should seek to diffuse, a prominent human rights campaigner warns.
Such issues have the potential to trigger conflicts that may undermine the nation's integrity, Adnan Buyung Nasution told a seminar here on Sunday.
Indonesia is home to about 185 million people, comprising more than 300 ethnic groups who speak some 200 languages. The government recognizes five religions: Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and mysticism.
Citing an example of ethnic tension, Buyung pointed to the recent labor demonstrations in the North Sumatra capital of Medan, which escalated into an anti-Chinese riot in which a businessman of Chinese descent was killed.
The seminar organized by the Association of Indonesian Catholic Students (PMKRI) was in commemoration of the historical 1959 Presidential Decree.
With the decree, the late President Sukarno dissolved the Constituent Assembly, whose 500 members had been elected by the people in the 1955 general election. The decree also ordered a return to the 1945 Constitution from the federal constitution which had been in use for several years.
Buyung warned that Indonesia will face a national disintegration problem like the former Yugoslavia if the potential conflicts were not handled properly.
"What we have to do now is exchange views among Moslems and non-Moslems, Chinese and non-Chinese and discuss what we should do about this nation-state," said Buyung, who is also the chairman of the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation (YLBHI).
According to Buyung, Indonesia, as the world's biggest Moslem country, has not yet done enough to solve the national problem after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, an event which many political analysts consider to be the turning point of the young Indonesia's democratic life.
Buyung said that months before the decree was issued, Indonesian politicians had nearly completed a draft of a new constitution which was expected to be more accommodating to the various interests.
"The draft was 90 percent finished at the end of 1958 when the assembly went into a recess," said Buyung, who completed his doctoral thesis about the assembly in 1992 at Rijk University in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
He said that then Premier Djuanda's administration as well as the Army, however, disliked the draft constitution and proposed the assembly abort it and return to the 1945 Constitution.
Another speaker, Hardi, the then vice prime minister, however, said that the assembly had failed to formulate the new constitution because the Moslem-based parties and their opponents were involved in a heated debate about the nature of the Indonesian state.
Islamic basis
The debate centered on "whether or not Indonesia should adopt an Islamic basis," he said, adding that the ruling Indonesian Democratic Party (PNI) later joined the chorus and suggested Sukarno issue the decree to return to the 1945 Constitution.
Buyung rejected the "classic" explanation of Hardi, saying that the assembly was in recess and about to continue the discussion when the presidential decree was being issued.
Buyung quoted Sukarno as saying that Sukarno had hoped the assembly could successfully draft the new constitution because the people of Indonesia had never written a constitution themselves.
"It's not fair. It was the army which felt uneasy about the debate, arresting some members of the assembly to create the image that the assembly was incapable," he said.
In a bid to challenge mainstream historians, Buyung said that the army loves the 1945 Constitution because it gives them more power and tolerates a lower standard of human rights.
He said that dissolving the assembly had even stopped the constitutional dialog among Moslems and non-Moslems as well as other opposition parties about the very nature of the Indonesian nation-state. (09)