Women must look for benefits of regional autonomy

Women must look for benefits of regional autonomy

Dr. Kathryn Robinson is head of Department of Anthropology at
the Australian National University, Canberra. A fluent speaker of
Indonesian, she has written many papers on Indonesia, her
forthcoming publication being Gender, Nation and Democracy in
Indonesia.

Dr. Robinson is also the convener of the next Indonesia Update
conference in Sept. 2001, where the topic will be gender issues.

The Jakarta Post Melbourne-based contributor Dewi Anggraeni
interviewed Dr. Robinson on issues related to women in Indonesia.
The following is an excerpt of the telephone interview.

Question: Can we use Kartini as a landmark for the beginning
of women's self-awareness in Indonesia?

Answer: We certainly can. I have just been reading Kartini's letters
again, and I was still impressed by how much of an intellectual
she was, a lot more than she was given credit for.

She was truly an extraordinary young woman. She had very
little formal education, yet there she was writing for a Dutch
feminist magazine, reading all the contemporary literature and
giving intelligent commentary on it.

She also worked with Dutch feminists who then produced an
exhibition of the work of Javanese women. And all this happened
in the late 19th century. So Kartini was an internationalist kind
of intellectual.

There certainly are women in Indonesia today who have that
kind of standing, but in Kartini's circumstances and period, she
was extremely outstanding.

Q: How far has the women's movement come since Kartini?

A: There has been a lot of critical commentary coming from women,
especially during the reformasi (political reform) period. And
there has also been some very interesting women activism. I think
it is interesting how a number of woman intellectuals and
activists are trying to find an Indonesian way of being in the
world.

Q: What are the examples of women's activism that are interesting
at the moment?

A: We have seen the opening up of the issue of violence. A couple
of years ago I did some research on Indonesian women workers in
the Middle East. I talked to the activists in Solidaritas
Perempuan. They expressed frustration at attempts to get the
government to acknowledge the problems involved in the
regulations of work that apply to those women, and then to get
those issues onto the public agenda.

These activists were very angry that they could not get any
public focus on either the sexual violence or just the physical
abuse of those women. Even worse, there were cases of women whom
they had lost contact with, women who simply "disappeared".

Some mothers received their daughters back in coffins, without
adequate explanations about how their daughters had died.

Since reformasi there was also public outrage at the May riots
in Jakarta, which opened the floodgates to all kinds of public
discourse against women. So now the Ministry of Manpower
acknowledges the problems that women workers now face and there
have been a lot more efforts by the government to try to achieve
bilateral agreements to set up some surveillance on the women's
working conditions.

We began to see high profile cases such as that of Kartini,
who was facing capital punishment in the United Arab Emirates.
That was taken very seriously, and the government was very
responsive. So activism around violence against women played a
crucial role in bringing it into public discourse.

Another issue is women's representation in public life. I
don't know if there has been such concrete achievement yet, but
it is very interesting that it has also been brought to public
discussion.

Women's activism has also been able to successfully focus
attention on the differential impact that the monetary crisis has
had on women and children as opposed to men or society in
general. People have become aware of how women and children are
negatively affected, such as the continuing lack of access to
contraception.

Q: So Kartini started by intellectualizing the issues affecting
women...

A: Yes. I also think that there is a strain of activism in
Kartini. In her letters she talked about how she would like to be
a doctor, or how she would like to be a nurse, a nurturing kind
of activism. She also came across as someone who would like to
make her mark in the world.

If you look at the articles she wrote in the magazine and
place them in today's context, you can see political journalism
in them. For a woman born into that period, and the social
constraints of the tradition and era, she was undoubtedly an
activist.

Q: The ground-breaking work she did may have been much more
difficult than that being achieved by women activists today...

A: Yes. If we look at how, under the New Order, we have the
expansion of participation rates of women in education, and in
primary schools, there was very little difference between boy and
girl participation rates for almost all of Indonesia. So today,
women are, on the whole, a lot more educated and much more able
to be open to new ideas, with much more information available to
them, hence they do not have to struggle as hard as those in the
days that Kartini was around.

Q: Women's activism of today still focuses on nurturing and
damage control, such as that of the organization, Suara Ibu
Peduli (Voice of Concern Mothers)...

A: I suppose on the one hand there is a concrete reality that
women have a natural ability for looking after children and
family. Under circumstances like the monetary crisis, Suara Ibu
Peduli were on to something when they talked about the problems
that women faced, such as trying to feed their babies on a daily
basis.

I guess that is inevitable when they struggle with women's
issues. And some feminists would argue that the nurturing role of
women should be valued. It is just as important as struggling for
gender equality.

Q: Would the existence of the State Ministry for the Empowerment
of Women rectify the situation a little?

A: I think the name change under this government is interesting.
The old name, Menteri Urusan Peranan Wanita, the Ministry for
Managing the Role of Women under the New Order, then became
Menteri Peranan Wanita, the Ministry of Women's Roles, under B.J.
Habibie. This reminded me of (the late sociologist) Harsya
Bachtiar's comment on the old name, saying that it implied that
women had to be managed -- wanita harus diurus. This I find
rather patronizing.

Now the word wanita has been changed to perempuan, (perempuan
denotes a shift in the word of "women" into a more generically
equal status for all women. -- Ed).

The word "empowerment" also moved the ministry into several
different policy emphasis. For instance in the 1970s there was an
emphasis on women's dual role.

Then in the late Soeharto era there is the movement towards
the idea of kemitra-sejajaran (equal status) between men and
women, which a lot of feminist activists chose to interpret as
gender equity between men and women.

Now the minister seems to want to introduce the mainstreaming
of gender policy to all aspects of the government activities. It
is a very ambitious goal.

I thought the concept of kemitra-sejajaran was interesting
because I am aware that in Indonesia a lot of people are troubled
by feminism, because they see it as a Western concept. And there
often is an assumption that it is about hostility or antagonism
between men and women. So the concept was introducing an
indigenous way of talking about gender equity.

Today we have come a long way because the President, Gus Dur
(Abdurrahman Wahid) and First Lady Ibu Sinta Nuriyah, publicly
take a stance for gender equity. If you look at Gus Dur's
activity before his presidency, as the chairman of Nahdlatul
Ulama (NU) he facilitated dialog on gender equity and similar
issues.

In some ways Gus Dur made the concept fashionable, to the
extent that government officials feel more comfortable with it
unlike under the New Order when there was some latent hostility
against the concept. There was, for instance, a public promotion
of women's domestic role. There was not much of a symbolic
commitment by the government towards women's role in public life.

Q: Was gender diversity affected by the concept of making
everything uniform drive (uniformisasi) of the New Order
government?

A: I went to a conference in Makassar in August, where regional
autonomy and local culture were discussed. One of the problems
that came through was indeed uniformisasi of the New Order.

A lot of it was related to the mid 1970s village role that was
introduced, the common village structure for all of Indonesia.
People saw it leading to the diminution of regional identity and
local culture. I think it is important to remember that the
difference in gender orders is an important aspect of cultural
diversity in the Indonesian archipelago.

If we look at the ethnographic literature, there is a huge
difference in the kinds of relationship between men and women at
the local level, in terms of practical things like how property
is distributed between men and women, and in ways local people
access property.

In the New Order, through Dharma Wanita and (government-
sponsored woman organizations) PKK in particular, a uniformed
type of family was promoted, based on a uniformed set of
relations between men and women. The government was
Indonesianizing everyone, we can say.

Q: Do you think uniformisasi is on the way out now?

A: I would presume so. I am not sure uniformasi has been
altogether successful. I think at this point in time there are
many women who think about regional autonomy and what
implications it has on women.

In the conference I mentioned previously, the participants
seemed to think that cultural autonomy was very important. Indeed
there has been a push to reinforce respect for local culture
conditions throughout various regions.

However these things have to be well audited. In particular
places there may be a need for women to struggle again. For
instance, in some parts of Indonesia the traditional law
guarantees property rights, but in other parts there are
different kinds of kinship where women's property rights are more
tenuous and more vulnerable. So there are different kinds of
struggle that women need to take on.

Q: Do you think that with regional autonomy these differences
will become more emphasized?

A: There may be two possible kinds of movement. On the one hand
there are women who want to use the more abstract concepts of
social justice and human rights to argue against practices like
polygamy or in some of the more patrilineal societies, the denial
of property rights to women.

On the other hand, it is likely that people would want to also
emphasize aspects of their local traditions, which they see as
empowering women and being more democratic.

Q: So are there also pitfalls for women in regional autonomy?

A: Yes. If I can go back to the August conference in Makassar,
there was a talk by Andi Mallarangeng, who was then from the
ministry of regional autonomy. He was of the opinion that, in
regional autonomy, people should be relying on their local
customs and local traditions to manage their everyday relations,
provided that it was not neofeudalism or antihuman rights.

A big discussion followed. If the democratic rights of the
local communities were going to be upheld, was it not their right
to decide whether or not they wanted to reinstate their
traditional practices, even if the traditional practices
incorporated aspects of neofeudalism, or the degradation of
women?

Yes, there might be a possibility that women would have to
struggle for the rights that they had won in the past. Even when
the Indonesian republic began, women had the franchise.

In terms of basic political rights, men and women had the same
rights. It is possible that some people would try to challenge
some of those things, under the guise of regional tradition and
culture.

It is not clear to me if the minister of the empowerment of
women is going to have a legal reach to overcome these potential
problems.

Q: How do you see the role of Islam in the emancipation of
Indonesian women? Many women at the grassroots level, who may be
wary of Western ideas, may be more open to the reach of, for
instance the women of the Paramadina foundation...

A: That is probably true. I know for example that many of the
pesantren (Islamic boarding schools), especially in East Java,
have been acting as agents of social change, in the general
sense, such as in women's income earning opportunities.

Since Islamic organizations do have roots reaching down into
villages, and legitimacy in the eyes of Islamic people, they have
a real opportunity to make interventions into people's lives.

Aisyah, one of the oldest women's organizations, also has
those kind of aspirations, which involve the improvement of
conditions in women's lives. So there is a long history of
Islamic organizations in Indonesia being involved in improving
the social role of women.

The support for women has not only come from other women, it
is more widespread. Remember when there was a lot of opposition
from some Islamic members of the community for Megawati
Soekarnoputri's presidency?

There was an attempt by some people to bring out textual
interpretations, based on the restriction of women's public
participation. It was, however, widely rejected, not only by the
general public, but also by Islamic scholars who rejected that
those were the correct interpretations of the Islamic texts.

Q: How do you see the next five years in terms of prospects for
women?

A: I think in the next five years economic issues will have to
loom pretty large, in terms of what sorts of employment
opportunities there are for women, and what impact the ongoing
economic problems will have in some parts of Indonesia, such as
the educational participation of women.

And it is very likely that the monetary crisis will cause a
decline in contraceptive rates. Those who are dependent on
privatized family planning programs may not be able to afford it.
This is a pressing issue because it may have an impact on the
fertility rate and the rate of abortions.

With regional autonomy, an issue of concern is how much
political participation women can have in the regional
legislature.

If the economic crisis continues, another concern is whether
more women will be pushed into low-paying employment.