Indonesia is in need of vilification law

By Johannes Nugroho

SURABAYA (JP): "Those who surrender leadership to womankind shall not be condoned (by God). Ye shall not profane the Koran and the Prophet's Hadis merely in order to elect a woman as president of RI," thundered a 100-meter banner spread out in front of the Islamic University of Indonesia's Ujungpandang campus.

As with most thunder, it gave birth to lightning when outraged, ardent sympathizers of Megawati's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan) stormed the campus to burn the offending article.

Meanwhile, westward across the Java Sea in Surabaya, a number of campaigners of a certain political party called for the annihilation of Indonesians of Chinese extraction, placing the yoke of blame upon their shoulders for the nation's present calamities.

It is difficult to determine whether the authors of such prejudiced public statements were voicing their true sentiments or were merely paying lip-service to gain mass support. At any rate, such political tricks evidently boomeranged, at least in the issue of a female president. The overwhelming number of votes for Megawati's PDI Perjuangan in the June 7 general election was the nation's ultimate verdict on the polemic.

More importantly, such public outbursts of discriminative and vengeful epithets, in most democratic countries, would fall under the category of the outlawed "vilification". Vilification is defined as "a public rather than private expression or act which may incite hatred or discrimination toward any group in society".

Yet in Indonesia, outrageously racist, sexist or any discriminative public remarks are continually overlooked as incidental gaffes of which the culprits are likely to go unpunished. The State Minister of Food and Horticulture A.M. Saefuddin, in the not so distant past, made his infamous comment about Megawati's unsuitability for the presidency because she was a "non-Muslim", which was factually fallacious by any account.

The infinitely discriminative public comment gave rise to a short-lived public furor, assuaged by the minister's half-hearted public apology. He claimed his statement had been taken out of context.

Predictably, there was no official rebuke by the President. In the end, as public interest abated, Saefuddin practically sailed triumphantly out of the troubled waters, only to be followed by a period of arguably self-inflicted public silence and a low- profile public existence.

Presumably, the incessant condonation of public forms of discrimination is detrimental to the process of democratization in the country. Conjointly, it helps to perpetuate the notion that one is able to publicly vilify a particular group in society and, what's more, get away with it.

In doing so, it is not improbable that the nation might gradually turn into a land of bickerings, intolerance and divisiveness.

On a more futuristic front, the nation's negligence to act upon the issue of vilification might jeopardize the quality of posterity. The leniency with which public perpetrators of vilification are treated only serves to convey a message to the young that it is permissible to discriminate against someone based on his or her sex, race, religion and so forth.

To employ a circuitous route, the acuteness of the problem can be likened to the second-rate-citizen status of women in today's Indonesian society. Prior to the elections, it was necessary for certain non-governmental organizations to televise announcements of women's intrinsic rights to political liberty. Why use such public methodology to educate both men and women? The answer is that the television announcements were a counterbalancing form of social conditioning which is, after all, answerable for any kind of prejudice in society, including sexism against women.

Thus, it is irrefutable that the need to outlaw discriminative rhetorical vagaries, for the benefit of the future, is indeed great. The state, in this instance, through its judiciary pillars, must not condone such pernicious sociopolitical phenomenon. One of the first steps of the incoming government would crucially be to introduce legislation making vilification a legal offense.

Most Western democracies have legally equipped themselves with antidiscrimination legislation to combat sexism, racism and discrimination based on religion, handicaps and sexual preference.

In Australia, for instance, different forms of antidiscrimination bills have been legislated since the 1970s, such as the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, Affirmative (Equal Opportunity for Women) Act 1986, Racial Hatred Act 1995, Human Rights (Sexual Conduct) Act 1994 which effectively safeguards the interests of minority groups as well as all groups in society.

As a direct consequence of such antidiscrimination legislation, most Australians have been conditioned to regard discrimination, at least public forms of it, as undesirable. The benevolent social conditioning has been met with success as the government and all public elements have given the task of eliminating discrimination their unequivocal support.

The condition is favorably fortified by a vocal press that acts as a democracy watchdog and vibrant pressure groups extant in the country. The most faithful witness to the success of Australians' rejection of public discrimination was the failure of the Pauline Hanson's anti-Asian One Nation Party to win a Federal parliamentary seat in the last general election which returned the Liberal-National government to power.

It was only last April that an Australian football player from Victoria's St Kilda, Peter Everitt, was brought before a tribunal for allegedly having "racially abused" an Aboriginal player from Melbourne, Scott Chisholm. The fact that a public discriminative slur from a sportsperson caused such an uproar further accentuates the stringency with which antidiscrimination has been upheld.

Moreover, in 1997 the New South Wales Equal Opportunity Tribunal made a landmark ruling against the New South Wales Police Services for vilification against Wesley Patten, an Aboriginal member of the community. Correlatively, it is regrettable that in Indonesia a government minister could get escape scot-free after making a discriminative comment on a religious basis.

The Indonesian Vilification Act could well emulate the Australian format as well as formula. The act should ideally cover different types of discrimination such as those of racial, gender-based, religion and sexual preference. The government could instigate an independent institution like the Equal Opportunity Board in Australia, the role of which would be to make impartial assessment as well as rulings on breaches of the act. Alternatively, the government could incorporate the function into the Commission on Human Rights which so far has only had a consultative role.

Having accomplished the first vital step to democracy in the general election, Indonesia is in dire need to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of the process of democratization. A sound way to go about it would be the establishment of a formidable foundation of law through progressive legislation.

Legislation is symbolic of the nation's determination to eradicate the society's wrongs as well as being a mirror of what kind of society the nation elects to become. What is more germane is the role of legislation as a social conditioner to educate the populace toward a more tolerant and democratic society.

Most paramount of all is the variable of law application and the institutions involved. To borrow one of Nahdlatul Ulama Islamic organization leader Abdurrahman Wahid's dictums, "No matter how flawless the rules are, they won't work if the doers are dishonest or corrupt."

The writer works at the International Language Program, Surabaya.