Moral crisis as serious as economic turmoil

By Harkiman Racheman

MEDAN (JP): In a country where absolute power revolves around a single hand, the ruling regime tends to be corrupt and unaccommodating (let alone representative!) toward the aspirations as well as interests of its various social components.

The now-defunct New Order government was likely to rotate around the vested interests of a dynasty that prioritized none but its own members at the expense of others in society. One of the communities which suffered a great deal from severe political maltreatment was the Chinese-Indonesians.

The numerous physical and psychological suffering endured by the Chinese-Indonesians have now surfaced in public discourses. However, it is regrettable that quite a number of indigenous reformist elites are "still turning a blind eye" to them.

Despite indigenous Indonesians' frequent failure to unveil the entire racial and criminal complexity of those recent human rights violations, it is generally construed that the typically horrible experiences of this ethnic group have put in question, once again, our seriousness about maintaining law and order as well as state protection against violations of human rights.

In connection with this, the nonindigenous Indonesians' predicament has to be addressed properly and ended by the native majority as soon as possible so that the welfare and sensibility of our country and nation as a whole can be restored once and for all.

Ever since the beginning of the Dutch colonial period, the Chinese, then classified socially as Timur Asing (Oriental Foreigners), were marginalized in terms of their political and cultural roles and status.

Though unkindly perceived as racial promotion by the indigenous Indonesians, the classification which forced the Chinese into second-class citizenship (that is to say, second to Westerners or Europeans) was obviously an infringement on their right to participate in the country's noneconomic sectors.

As a result, the Chinese residents of the archipelago were not allowed to do anything but trade and distribute daily commodities such as food and clothing. The injustice derived from this racist policy unfortunately thrived and was maintained by the New Order administration.

And, in order to enhance the success of this anti-Chinese politics, the Chinese were forced to carry specially coded ID cards.

Now, the question has arisen as to how it was all possible for the "divide and rule" politics to survive for more than three decades without anyone's conscious knowledge of it -- including some of the most vocal political public figures. Also, how could only such a small handful of people have ruled the country successfully in a systemic and highly organized manner before the corrupt system was finally revealed for what it was?

Firstly, it has to be realized that the Chinese community was continuously conditioned to be a floating mass by the KKN (local acronym for Corruption, Collusion and Nepotism) regime which ruled the country with an iron fist. A classical example of the power elites' determination to sacrifice this group was their loud objections to all kinds of race-conscious self- identification.

In other words, the power-holders had a blatant objection to articulating any outward expression of the Chinese-Indonesian's political aspirations or predicaments. Worse still, the idea of Chinese "ethnicity" itself did not exist at all in the vernacular of New Order politics. Consequently, this ethnic group was structurally marginalized, abandoned, discriminated against, oppressed and finally, ignored all together.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the recent establishment of Partai Pembauran Indonesia (Indonesian Assimilation Party) and Partai Reformasi Tionghoa Indonesia (Indonesian Chinese Reformation Party) has been strongly criticized and suspected of giving rise to new modes of primordialism and social exclusivity.

It has not been broadmindedly acknowledged that the context of the awakening of political awareness was such that the inability of the New Order government to protect its Chinese citizens from looting, murder, rape and numerous other organized human rights crimes motivated members of the Chinese community to defend their rights openly. After all, they are officially and constitutionally Indonesian nationals through and through.

The ethnic polarization, the natives on the one hand and the nonnatives on the other, did not end there. By placing the Chinese in an extremely vulnerable political standing, the ruling elites used this community as a springboard for KKN practices which eventually caused a great deal of suffering for the large numbers of destitute Indonesians.

Like the colonial rulers who cruelly manipulated and exploited the indigenous people, the New Order regime cleverly made use of the handed-down discriminatory atmosphere to enrich itself materially and to carry on with its other corrupt practices.

And, had any signs of massive rejection or suspicion from the people appeared, the power-holders would have been able to easily lead those justice-fighters into anti-Chinese traps.

However, they can no longer get away with this political trickery. The colossal student movement has recently put an end to the generations of Machiavellian politics.

Another thing worth stressing here is the policy on racial assimilation which surprisingly contains in itself a big paradox. Another politically engineered product, this is largely thought of as only immortalizing the existing racial disintegration. At the same time, this is telling us once again, as Clementino dos Reis Amaral (a member of the Indonesian National Commission on Human Rights) put it, that "it was the government and not the people of the country who created racial discrimination".

In my opinion, the New Order's racial assimilation policy does not constitute a legal product deriving from a musyawarah untuk mufakat (mutual consensus) between the indigenous majority and the nonindigenous minority. More often than not, the political format of racial assimilation recommended by the New Order regime imposed only a list of formal obligatory rules for the powerless minority group to abide by unquestioningly.

That is the reason why the requirements for the desired racial harmony in this respect did not in the least reflect the universal principles of justice and human rights. The examples would normally include: unjustified pressure on the Chinese to indulge in biological assimilation, conversion to the religion of the majority and cultural genocide.

In conjunction with that mainstream racist politics, all kinds of assimilation programs jointly run with the puppet organization BAKOM PKB tended to act a priori toward the Chinese. As they were not allowed to have their own flexibility in assimilating creatively, willingly, fairly, decently or naturally (based on their diverse circumstances) with the natives, Chinese- Indonesians became in reality victims of injustices who often had to interact closely with a tyrannical majority.

In fighting for total reform as everyone's innermost desire now, the reformers should never neglect the sacrifices made by the Indonesians of Chinese descent. In addition to the Trisakti University student martyrs, now proclaimed as reformist heroes, the Chinese-Indonesians in their thousands were plundered, looted, hurt, humiliated, raped and threatened cannot but be taken into serious account.

Together with the reformist movement in recent times, the indigenous people and the nonnatives of Indonesia should work together to straighten out the road to the future which has been bent by KKN as well as other serious violations.

With the collapse of political power centering around a single hand, due to inconsistencies with its own political principles, the sovereignty is now back in the hands of the people again.

By upholding Pancasila and the 1945 Constitution and by correcting all kinds of mistreatments against them, native Indonesians should try to avoid any practices of primodialistic or ethnic nationalism and, with utmost compassion and patience, invite their unfortunate nonnative compatriots to maximize their contributions in all sectors of life for the sake of saving the nation from moral as well as economic bankruptcy.

The writer is a New Zealand university graduate and a lecturer in English. He is based in Medan.