Indonesia and Malaysia face racism allegations

Is racism alive in Indonesia? According to Bill Hayden it is. The former governor general of Australia said recently that Malaysia and Indonesia are racist countries. Arief Budiman takes a look at this issue.

SALATIGA, Central Java (JP): In Indonesia and Malaysia, racism is associated primarily with the state policies against people of Chinese descent albeit they are citizens of these two countries.

Before we talk about racism, first we have to differentiate between racism at the individual level and that at the state level.

Everybody has his or her likes and dislikes as an individual. When somebody dislikes a race, then it is racism. This attitude is unacceptable because it is very certain that one's dislike of a certain race is based on limited or unpleasant experiences with some members of this race.

To impose this attitude on the whole race is, of course, not reasonable because even those members of the race with whom one has had bad experiences are capable of change as individuals.

Unfortunately, an individual's bias against a given race is difficult to change. The question remains as to whether anyone has the right to change someone else's individual preferences.

Things are different when we talk about racism at the state level, as the public policy of a country. A public policy based on racial prejudice is difficult to accept. The former state policy of South Africa that barred Blacks from being with the Whites in public places is an example of this outright racism. But what about a public policy that discriminates against the Chinese in order to alleviate the poverty of the indigenous people?

Here, we come to the task of differentiating between a racist public policy and affirmative action.

Racist policy and affirmative action are both discriminating policies based on racist criteria. Racist policy is based on strong dislike of a certain race, thus it is heavily colored by human emotion.

In affirmative action, the purpose is to assist the weak or the marginalized and to elevate them to a higher social or economic level. Affirmative action is based on the assumption that the liberal principle of the free market will not be able to help the weak. It is believed that the free market will always benefit the strong, and that the state must intervene to correct the unjust imbalance. This intervention is affirmative action. For instance, in the United States, affirmative action involves hiring more African-Americans and placing more women in public offices.

After discussing this, we come to Bill Hayden's statement about Indonesia and Malaysia being racist states.

On the individual level, I am sure that many, if not all, Indonesians and Malaysians have their likes and dislikes about many things, including certain races. However, this is also true of citizens of other countries. If many individual Indonesians and Malaysians dislike the Chinese and look up to Europeans and Americans we cannot do much about this. We can only make a strong effort to correct this attitude on the individual level, because this attitude is not right and just.

What about public policies in these two countries?

Both in Indonesia and Malaysia, there is legislation, mostly in the economic field, discriminating between the pribumi (indigenous people) and the Chinese.

In Indonesia, the Politik Benteng (Fortress Politics) of the early 1950s, and some other state policies that favor indigenous people over people of Chinese decent, are good examples of this kind of legislation.

In Malaysia, Mahathir's New Economic Policy also favors the indigenous people over the Chinese.

The above public policies are defended by putting them into the category of affirmative action. They are said to be meant to help the economically weak indigenous people so that they can compete with people of Chinese descent. However, it is difficult to defend this kind of argument.

Everybody will argue that this specific type of affirmative action would better serve the purpose if they were based on helping the poor of all races and communities compete against the rich, rather than the indigenous people against the Chinese.

Although many people of Chinese descent in these two countries are rich, there are also a substantial number of Chinese who are poor. Also, although there are many poor indigenous people, there are also quite a number of rich ones. Therefore, affirmative action based on race to fight poverty may hit the wrong target and end up justifying racial stances.

Moreover, unfortunately, in the case of Indonesia there are still public policies that cannot be defended as affirmative action. For instance, the governor of Jakarta released a decree on Feb. 14, 1996, prohibiting public celebration of Chinese New Year. This decree is based on Presidential Instruction No. 14, 1967, that regulates the religions, beliefs and cultural traditions of the Chinese.

There is other legislation that limits the spread of Chinese traditions in Indonesia. The most notorious ruling is the prohibition against the use of Chinese characters, including bringing any documents written in Chinese into the country. (Unfortunately, in recent years the Chinese culture has found its way through the back door, in the dubious form of the Kung Fu films aired on the many private television stations. These films have become popular among the middle and upper classes).

The reason given for the prohibition against Chinese culture is to make the Indonesian Chinese more loyal to Indonesia. The argument goes that tolerating the spread of their culture of origin will erode the nationalist feeling of people of Chinese descent in Indonesia. It will create dual loyalty, to Indonesia and to China.

This argument is difficult to accommodate when we observe that in the United States where Chinese culture is not only tolerated, but also cultivated, the phenomenon of dual loyalty among the American Chinese does not occur. This culture, together with others such as the Irish, Italian, Indian and African-American cultures are considered national assets that contribute positively to the creation of the present American modern culture.

And we can see that America's ethnic groups are very nationalistic.

The same thing has happened in neighboring Malaysia. It is officially a Moslem country, but it lets the Chinese and Indian cultures flourish. And people of Chinese and Indian descent in Malaysia are proud to be Malaysians.

Experiences from the history of many countries tell us that nationalist feeling has more to do with the performance of the state in distributing economic wealth and political justice, rather than cultural factors.

Indonesia will be better able to defend itself against the allegation of being a racist country if it eliminates its racist public policies and corrects its race-based affirmative action in the economic fields. Otherwise, what Bill Hayden said will be difficult to deny, more difficult than in the case of Malaysia.

The writer is a sociologist and researcher living in Salatiga.