Welcome Lunar New Year

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.