Graft eroding Indonesians' religiosity: Intellectual

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)