Scholar says RI suffers from nationalism crisis

Scholar says RI suffers from nationalism crisis

A'an Suryana, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Almost 60 years after it declared independence in 1945, Indonesia
still suffers from a nationalism crisis, which could lead to
disintegration, a prominent scholar says.

Azyumardi Azra, the rector of Syarif Hidayatullah State
Islamic University, said over the weekend that Indonesia had to
embark on a campaign of multicultural education in order to cure
the nationalism crisis and prevent the country from breaking up.

Speaking at a seminar entitled Ethnic Chinese and the Politics
of Multiculturalism here on Saturday, Azyumardi said the crisis
had long plagued the country and became serious during the
leadership of former president Soeharto, although it was quelled.

During his 32-year reign, Soeharto adopted monoculturalism at
the national level by putting Javanese culture above all others,
and thus creating animosity among the thousands of other ethnic
groups in the archipelago, Azyumardi said.

Ethnic acrimony came to a head in the form of many violent
clashes between Javanese and non-Javanese after Soeharto's iron-
fisted regime collapsed -- and with it the oppressive control of
society -- in May 1998.

"The end of the New Order era provided an opportunity for a
counter-reaction," Azyumardi wrote in his paper presented during
the seminar, which was organized by the Institute for Social and
Economic Research, Education and Information (LP3ES) on Saturday.

Azyumardi, however, was not present at the seminar, which was
held in conjunction with the nation's 58th independence
anniversary on Sunday.

According to Azyumardi, the counter-reaction manifested itself
in demands by many ethnic groups/regions to separate from
Indonesia after they felt that they had been treated as second-
class citizens for more than 30 years.

He said Soeharto imposed his brand of the much-hated
monoculturalism on regions and through his centralization policy,
wherein natural resource revenues were essentially stolen by
Java, while the local people in those regions became desperately
poor.

Provincialism and discrimination against other ethnic groups
in the recruitment of regional government posts has become a
common practice since the reform movement started in 1998, a
phenomenon that could lead to the disintegration of the nation,
said Azyumardi.

He also stated that separatism was a fact that Indonesia would
have to deal with in order to prevent a total break up.

In addition to possible solutions such as granting greater
autonomy, Azyumardi proposed in his paper that Indonesia should
introduce and promote multicultural education, so that people
would accept differences and respect each other.

According to Azyumardi, the concept of multiculturalism could
foster cooperation among people and encourage them to negotiate
any differences so that there would no longer be conflicts among
them.

Azyumardi said such a campaign should be started now with the
younger generation via formal and non-formal education
nationwide, so that it could create a sense of belonging, for the
younger generations, to Indonesia as a nation and state.