Explosive religious mixture for Indonesia
Relations between nominally Christian Dayaks and Muslim neighbours are set against a recent history of bloodletting that may caution opportunists who wring faith for political advantage to think twice,
JAKARTA // Indonesia’s Islamic extremists are playing with fire in trying to establish a foothold in West Kalimantan on the island of Borneo, homeland of the headhunting Dayak people who killed hundreds of Muslim settlers in the late 1990s.
Late last month, reacting to the two-year jail term given to deposed Christian Jakarta governor Basuki Purnama for alleged blasphemy, the non-Muslim Dayaks forced two leaders of the hardline Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) to return to Jakarta shortly after they arrived in Pontianak, capital of West Kalimantan province.
The FPI tried to establish a branch in neighbouring Central Kalimantan in 2012, when Dayaks said their presence was not conducive to religious harmony.
Police and military stepped up street patrols to calm the latest upsurge in tensions after West Kalimantan’s Roman Catholic governor, Cornelis M H, said he would expel FPI head Rizieq Shihab if he made any attempt to visit the province. Wanted by police on hate speech and pornography charges, Mr Shihab will not be testing that warning for a while.
His lawyers claim the charges are revenge for the leading role the 50-year-old played in pushing the blasphemy case against Mr Purnama that ended in his resounding defeat in the April 19 gubernatorial election.
West and Central Kalimantan are two of the four provinces in the Indonesian half of Borneo and home to more than 2.5 million mostly Christian Dayaks out of a total population of 6.8 million.
While they are the majority ethnic group in West Kalimantan, the combined Muslim population – comprising Malays, Madurese and Javanese – outnumber Christians by 51 to 36 per cent.
West Kalimantan is a serious worry because of the potential for re-igniting the violence which erupted there between 1996 and 1997 when the Dayaks killed as many as 1,000 Madurese migrants in Indonesia’s worst blood- letting since the 1960s.
With the police and military unable to protect them, more than 75,000 rural Madurese were forced to flee for their lives and resettle along the coast, where most remain today. The Madurese come from an island of the same name off the east coast of Java, Indonesia’s most populous island, first migrating to West Kalimantan in the early 1900s to work in Dutch colonial- era rubber plantations. The 1996- 1997 bloodshed erupted after several incidents, including the murder of four Dayak teenagers, dragged off a bus by a Madurese mob before being hacked to death, and an unprovoked attack on a Dayak girls’ boarding school.
Dayak raiding parties burnt villages and beheaded many of their victims. The three months of terror stemmed from land disputes and Dayak complaints about the Madurese being quick to anger and too quick to pull a knife.
Religion was not the major issue in West Kalimantan then, but the arrival of four Muslim clerics during the bloodshed exacerbated tensions, with rumours circulating that they were there to start a holy war.
The fallout from the Purnama case means religion could now become much more of a trigger, as happened in the eastern Indonesian islands of Maluku and Sulawesi between 1999 and 2001 when 5,000 people died in sectarian violence.
Minorities in enclaves like West Kalimantan, North Sulawesi, Bali, Papua and East Nusa Tenggara are nervous about the rise of conservative Islam.
Self-serving politicians are being largely blamed for fuelling religious tensions, oblivious to the harm it might do as Indonesia approaches the 2019 legislative and presidential elections when political temperatures will rise. A recent poll showed that more than 70 per cent of Indonesians still reject the idea of an Islamic state and that democracy based on the Pancasila, the state ideology, is their preferred form of government. That preference is reflected in the past four national elections where the Sharia- based Justice and Prosperity and United Development parties have garnered only 12 or 13 per cent of the vote. However, many Indonesian Muslims find it difficult to decide what is the more important guiding principle in their lives – Pancasila or Islam. The fact that Purnama got into trouble over a verse in the Quran – by asking whether Muslims should be ruled by non-Muslims – shows national leaders are not brave enough to address the contradiction, let alone resolve it.
In West Kalimantan, that has never really been the issue, with the current Christian governor now into his second term after replacing his Muslim predecessor in 2008.
But as the strife that struck Maluku and Central Sulawesi has shown, Islamic hardliners like to target regions where there is a tenuous religious balance to exploit. With the Dayaks, however, they may be playing with a powder keg.