Indonesia is in need of vilification law

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.