Welcome Lunar New Year

Onghokham, Historian, Jakarta

When I was a schoolboy growing up in Surabaya before World War II, during the Dutch colonial days and attending a Dutch elementary school (ELS), life was dominated by three calendars. The most important one around which daily life was scheduled, school terms, holidays, etc., was the European (Gregorian) calendar. There were also the Chinese lunar calendar and the Javanese calender.

The Javanese calender was used for calculating which nights were good for looking for omens, for meditation, burning incense and holding ritual meals (slametan) to ensure health and success for various members of the family or the household. Then there was the Chinese lunar calendar for commemorating Chinese celebrations, such as the Chinese New year, or Imlek, which this year falls on Feb. 1l, inaugurating the year of the goat. Imlek normally falls in the first days of spring (signifying renewal).

The Chinese, like all peasant agrarian civilizations, based their cyclical annual celebrations on the seasons. Similarly, Christmas, which also originating from an agrarian civilization, was originally celebrated as the feast of lights during the darkest days of winter. Even today in tropical climates like Indonesia, this festival is characterized by Christmas trees with white pieces of cotton attached to their branches to resemble snow.

In the same way, the Chinese New Year is commemorated in Indonesia's tropical climate as the arrival of spring, although this time of the year is usually marked by the monsoon season in the equatorial lands.

However, regardless of seasons, calenders, religion or politics, most Chinese consider Imlek, or the first day of the New Year by the Chinese calender, as a holiday and the most important day of the year.

The Chinese lunar calender does not mark Sunday as a day off, and Chinese usually take Imlek as their day off even believing that working on this day will bring bad luck.

Every Imlek should in fact be inaugurated by plenty of fireworks, a tradition in Indonesia that died out with the beginning of the Pacific War (1942-1945), and the following turbulent times.

However, this year Imlek is for the first time going to be celebrated as a national holiday because of a presidential decree issued by President Megawati Soekarnoputri.

As far as the writer knows, the Chinese calender has no religious origins nor did it originate from Confucius. Rather it was probably developed during the Han Dynasty. Some scholars state that the calender is 2,000 years old. The Han dynasty (206 BC -- 220 AD), was indeed the earliest and longest surviving imperial dynasty in China, even resulting in the Chinese being referred to as the people of Han (Han ren).

Whatever the origins of the Chinese calender, Imlek is indeed the most important of the Chinese customary (adat) festivals. The other notable other adat days converted into national holidays in the post colonial period are Nyepi (Hindu-Balinese) and Waisak (Buddha's birthday).

The policy of making an adat holiday into a national one has two purposes: First, to integrate an ethnic group into the nation and to strengthen the state's own ideology of diversity in this multiethnic and multicultural, but unified, society, and to reinforce the state ideology Pancasila, which emphasizes the same theme.

Last year's decision to make Imlek a national holiday has been welcomed by many Indonesians of Chinese origin; yet many also say that what is more important is the elimination of the many irritating, discriminatory rules and practices affecting the ethnic Chinese when dealing with the civil service, police and other state agencies.

Hopefully, making Imlek a national holiday will lead to greater integration, and the awareness that the Chinese living in these islands are as much an integral part of the Indonesian nation as any other group, an awareness that should lead to greater stability and confidence in the country, including among the members of the important business community.

One may wonder why this policy came to be implemented so relatively late given that Indonesia is a multicultural society. It must be remembered, however, if the adat days of every ethnic group, such as for instance the Hari Kesodo of the Tengger people of Mount Bromo, East Java, and many others, were to be declared national days then the Republic might end up with more than 400 annual national holidays.

Regarding the Chinese, during Soeharto's 32-year-long New Order there was a policy of eliminating all traces of Chinese culture, such as banning the use of Chinese characters, public celebrations, and even their adat festivals. The myth of those times was that the traumatic events of l965, the fall of the Old Order, and the rise of the New Order was the result of a Chinese communist plot.

However, of equally great importance is that the traditional conception of who is a citizen be not based on race but rather on citizenship, which as we know can be based on the ius soli (birthplace) -- the Anglo-Saxon, modern concept -- or the ius sanguinus (race or blood descent) -- which still dominates German thinking and has influenced traditional Dutch concepts, especially as practiced in the Netherlands Indies with its three racially segregated groupings: Europeans, foreign orientals and natives.

Of the two concepts of citizenship, the ius soli is the more modern and the more accepted, especially now given the global movement of professionals, guest workers and migrants. This modern concept of citizenship should now be adopted and practiced in Indonesia.

This could probably be brought about by educating society, especially the bureaucracy, regarding the new concept, with the subsequent necessary changes being made to discriminatory laws/regulations and policies, and with penal sanctions for bribery being strictly enforced on both sides.