Moslem community sidelined by Soeharto govt: Scholar

JAKARTA (JP): Moslem scholar Nurcholish Madjid has said the religious tension and riots of the last two years reflected the Moslem community's deep seated-frustration at being deliberately sidelined by the Soeharto government.

Nurcholish claimed Saturday that the Soeharto government, in a calculated manner, sidelined Moslem groups in the economic sector, and instead preferred to work with ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs.

He argued that the Soeharto government in its early years, tried to avoid furnishing Moslem entrepreneurs with political "leverage" because most were aligned to the now defunct Masjumi political grouping which was considered a potential rival to the New Order government's political apparatus.

"(Moslem) Indigenous entrepreneurs were not protected because most of them belonged to Masjumi," he said during a seminar here titled In Search of Harmony in the Midst of Ethnic and Religious Plurality.

Such a situation persisted from Soeharto's early years in the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

It was only then that Soeharto began to turn his attention to the Moslem groups who's political clout began to emerge and which he used to solidify his political base.

It was these long years of economic neglect, according to Nurcholish, which fostered the frustration.

"Indonesian Moslems are victims of political injustice and economic discrimination that stimulated buried revenge," he remarked.

Nurcholish warned that such frustrations could easily be manipulated and spark outward anger.

Riots which erupted in Situbondo, East Java, and Tasikmalaya, West Java, were possible evidence of this.

A mob attacked several churches and Christian schools in Situbondo in October 1996 following discontent over a court ruling against a local Moslem member of an obscure sect who was accused of blasphemy against Islam.

Five people were killed in the incident.

At Christmas that year the quaint little town of Tasikmalaya was also hit by a riot after three Islamic boarding school teachers were beaten up by police.

The teachers were summoned by police to explain a claim they had punished a police officer's son.

Mobs went on the rampage, attacking shops, churches, factories and police posts. The riot, which developed into an anti-Chinese attack, left four people dead.

Nurcholish, rector of Paramadina Mulya University, expressed concern that these known feelings of discontent were being manipulated to spark horrendous acts for which Moslems were being made the scapegoat.

The most recent example was the fact that Islamic groups were being portrayed as perpetrators, especially in the foreign media, of the May riots.

"In Islam, racism is a sin," Nurcholish asserted.

He urged the government to implement policies that allowed equal opportunities for all without political, ethnic or racial prejudice.

Anthropologist Tapi Omas Ihromi said the government should facilitate, and not aggravate as it did in the past, a conducive climate for relations among the nation's diverse ethnic and religious groups to flourish.

She concurred with Nurcholish, arguing that racial and religious tensions were not an inherent part of the relationship but had been contrived as a political tool since as far back as the Dutch colonial period.

"Historically, the discrimination was built up by the Dutch colonialists as a part of their divide et impera (divide and rule) strategy to divide the nation," Tapi said. (01)