Family name important to ethnic groups

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Government regulations banning the public from using their family names on their birth certificates must be suspended immediately as it could affect a community's cultural system, public figures from the Batak and Manadonese communities say.

Leo Panggabean, a Batak public figure from Bekasi, West Java, and Victor Rompas, a public figure from the Manado community from North Sulawesi, said in Jakarta last Friday that surnames played an important role in their cultures.

"A marga (family name) is very important for Batak as it used to reveal relationships between individual members of the community. Therefore, I object to the regulations banning people from using their surnames on their birth certificates," Panggabean told The Jakarta Post.

A Batak marga, usually, has a record of its ancestry from generation to generation by tracing the offspring through their surnames.

He said that the Batak cultural system banned people from marrying if they had the same surname. "A man with the surname of Panggabean is not allowed to marry a woman with the family name of Panggabean. Should the couple insist on getting married they would be expelled from the community," he said.

He said that the Batak cultural system could only function if the Batak people could maintain the use of their family names. "I cannot imagine what will happen if the Batak people have no surnames. If that happens then, I believe, our cultural system will perish," he said.

Victor said that although the use of the family name for the Manado people was not as strict as for the Batak community, the marga still influenced the everyday practices of Manado culture.

He said for example that Manado banned a marriage of a couple who had the same surname.

He said, however, that the main issue here was that people should be free to use their surnames as it was their right. The government should not interfere with a person's choice as to whether to write their children's surnames on their birth certificate or not, he said.

"It should be the right of the families to decide whether they use their family names or not. And it's certainly not for the government to decide," said the 83-year-old native of Manado.