Ethnicity explosive issue, rights campaigner warns
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)