Graft eroding Indonesians' religiosity: Intellectual

SEMARANG (JP): Indonesians should hold to their religious traditions more firmly so that foreign values, flowing into Indonesia via television, will not destroy the local culture, according to a respected intellectual.

Emha Ainun Nadjib said on Saturday that Indonesians were concerned about the negative impact of foreign values being conveyed by the electronic mass media.

"This worry is in fact unnecessary, if Indonesians' religious beliefs are strong enough to repel values incompatible with their own," he said in a workshop on culture organized by the Suara Merdeka newspaper.

Emha said, however, that Indonesia's image as one of the world's most religious nations had been declining. He singled out corruption as a the most worrying sign of an erosion of religiosity among Indonesians.

In democracies like the United States and Japan, he said, a government official will resign if he is involved in a corruption or other scandal because those countries had a functioning check- and-balance mechanism that controlled officials' behavior.

"By contrast, if I'm an Indonesian cabinet minister and I rape someone while I'm abroad, no one is sure whether or not I will be dismissed," said the outspoken intellectual, who has frequently been prohibited from addressing seminars and whose plays have often been banned.

Emha, a dropout of the Gontor Islamic boarding school in East Java, also expressed concern over what he described as the "sectarian" attitudes of Indonesian politicians.

Activists of the three sanctioned parties, Golkar, the Indonesian Democratic Party and United Development Party were concerned only with the interests of their respective organizations, he said.

"Indonesian leaders, especially the politicians, should think big and beyond their own organizations...that is the nation's civilization," he said.

Meanwhile, intellectual Darmanto Jatman said that Indonesia was beginning to feel the power of mass media in shaping public opinion.

"The domination of the mass media in shaping public opinion is beginning to create its own values," said the lecturer from Semarang's Diponegoro University. (har/pan)