Jakarta – Tens of thousands of protesters took to the street Sunday against the US decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital, the latest show of support for the Palestinians in the country with the world's largest Muslim population.

The rally was organized by the top Islamic authority the Indonesian Ulema Council and supported by the government as well as several other Islamic organizations.

Police said 80,000 protesters gathered at the National Monument, a tower that looms over central Jakarta, waving the Palestine flag and banners reading "Free Palestine" as they chanted "God is greatest!"

"This is my solidarity as a Muslim to my fellow Muslim brothers and sisters in Palestine... the Al-Aqsa mosque, a historical mosque for Muslims, is there (in Jerusalem)," said Hermawati, from Bogor, West Java.

Dressed mostly in white, the demonstrators urged the US to change its decision.

Religious affairs minister and Jakarta's governor were among those at the protest site just a few meters from the US embassy, which was cordoned off behind coils of razor wire.

"Isn't it the government's job to work on the aspiration of the majority of Indonesians? And the government has tried its best so Palestine can achieve its rights and independence," Religious Affairs minister Lukman Hakim Saifuddin told the crowd.

Indonesia has condemned President Donald Trump's decision, with President Joko "Widodo" Widodo joining other world Islamic leaders last Wednesday in an emergency summit of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in Istanbul.

The leaders urged world powers to recognize occupied East Jerusalem as the capital of the "State of Palestine" and declared Trump's decision "null and void legally".

The UN Security Council is considering a draft resolution which would find that any change to the status of Jerusalem has no legal effect and must be reversed.

The status of Jerusalem, a city considered holy by Christians, Jews and Muslims, is a sensitive issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israel sees the entire city as its undivided capital. The Palestinians want the eastern sector, which the international community regards as annexed by Israel in 1967, as the capital of their future state.

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/17/minister-anies-join-thousands-in-rally-to-support-palestine.html

West Papua

TNI denies shooting civilian in Nduga, Papua

Tempo - December 21, 2017

Chitra Paramaesti, Jakarta – Papua Military Command Area chief Col. Inf. Muhamad Aidi has denied the rumor that the National Armed Forces (TNI) has combed and shot civilians in Mugi District, Nduga Regency, Papua. "The reports are not true whatsoever," he told Tempo today.

Aidi said that members of the Coalition for Justice, Law and Human Rights of Papua's Pegunungan Tengah had not launched any investigation to confirm the news about the shooting. Aidi added that the Coalition needs to conduct an investigation before issuing a report.

Earlier, the Coalition for Justice, Law and Human Rights of Papua's Pegunungan Tengah reported cases of violence in Mugi District, Nduga Regency, Papua, by the military and police.

Aidi suspects that the report was received from the Free Papua Movement (OPM) to spark unrest. He said that Nduga residents were intimidated by OPM to leave the village, preventing the TNI from seeking information from them on OPM hideouts. "We came there using a commercial airplane and we were shot at," Aidi said.

Aidi also denied the alleged joint operations with police to comb the region. Mugi District is a mountainous region that is difficult to reach. "There are no cops there, only the TNI," he said.

A press statement issued by the Coalition for Justice, Law and Human Rights of Papua's Pegunungan Tengah, Civil Liberty Defenders and the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (KontraS) says that the tension in Nduga, Papua, started after an attack launched by the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPN-PB) against TNI personnel on December 12.

The incident killed excavator operator Yovicko Sondak and left military personnel Second Private Didimus Abindodifu wounded. Following the incident, joint security forces combed Daragma Airport in Mugi District, Nduga Regency. But the TNI has denied the combing.

Source: https://en.tempo.co/read/news/2017/12/21/055914283/TNI-Denies-Shooting-Civilian-in-Nduga-Papua

66 arrested, 4 beaten in pro-Papuan independence rallies across

Asia Pacific Report - December 21, 2017

West Papuan students have demonstrated to reject Indonesia's occupation and were joined by an unprecedented wave of solidarity from people across Indonesia, reports the Free West Papua Campaign.

The West Papuan Student's Alliance (AMP) and the Indonesian People's Front for West Papua (FRI-West Papua) held rallies in 14 Indonesian cities on Tuesday, December 19 – Jakarta, Denpasar, Manado, Solo, Ambon, Ternate, Yogyakarta, Sula, Moratai, Malang, Bandung, Bogor, Salatiga and Semarang.

The West Papua National Committee (KNPB) also demonstrated in Port Numbay and Biak, West Papua.

The growing support from Indonesian people in solidarity with West Papua is reaching new heights and shows similarity to Indonesian solidarity with the people of Timor-Leste (East Timor) in the late 1990s, reports the Free West Papua Campaign.

While all the rallies held were peaceful, Indonesian police and police militia tried to break up the demonstrators' freedom of expression. In Malang, East Java, 66 people were arrested and some of those arrested were assaulted.

Elia Agapa from the West Papuan Students Alliance told Suara Papua: "Our mass action saw 66 of us surrounded and blocked for demonstrating peacefully. There was a clash and four of those from our mass action were wounded. One of those four people is a West Papuan woman."

The West Papua National Committee (KNPB) demonstrating in Biak, West Papua, to reject "Operation Trikora" and to show their support for the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP).

Operation Trikora

In 1961, the Dutch government (West Papua's former colonial ruler) was moving towards granting West Papua independence and on December 1 the West Papuan national flag Morning Star was raised with the promise of full independence in the coming years.

In response, Indonesia's President Soekarno ordered "Operation Trikora", a military plan to take West Papua by force, on December 19.

In the next few months, with backing from the Soviet Union, the Indonesian military launched ruthless military attacks on West Papua, from naval shelling to artillery bombing.

Hundreds of Indonesian soldiers were airdropped into the country but the West Papuan defence force managed to successfully repel Indonesian attacks. It was not until 15 August 1962 that West Papua was left unable to defend itself.

Due to growing Cold War fears of war with a communist friendly Indonesia, the US intervened and effectively forced the Dutch to hand over West Papua to Indonesia without the consulting any West Papuans.

The West Papuan defence force was disbanded and by 1963, the Indonesian military had taken full control of West Papua; their illegal occupation cemented through a so-called "Act of Free Choice", described by critics as a sham.

This year more than 1.8 million West Papuan people signed a petition rebuking that plebiscite and calling for a legitimate act of self-determination.

Source: https://asiapacificreport.nz/2017/12/21/66-arrested-4-beaten-in-pro-papuan-independence-rallies-across-indonesia/

Marking Trikora declaration, protests calling for Papuan self

Suara Papua - December 19, 2017

Bastian Tebai, Semarang – On Tuesday December 19, the Papua Student Alliance (AMP) and the Indonesian People's Front for West Papua (FRI-WP) held simultaneous protest actions around the country against the Trikora declaration that was made on December 19, 1961, 56 years ago.

The actions, which were called by the AMP and FRI-WP, were held in 14 different cities.

High-school and university students, Papuan youth and Indonesian solidarity activists took to the streets to hold peaceful actions in Jakarta, Bali, Bogor and Bandung in West Java, Salatiga, Solo, Yogyakarta and Semarang in Central Java, Malang in East Java, Manado and Tondano in Sulawesi and Ternate in North Maluku. The Semarang action was a combined cross-Java action.

The AMP and FRI-WP actions in Sula and Morotai in North Maluku, Solo and Yogyakarta in Central Java and Ambon meanwhile only involved handing out leaflets explaining why West Papuans oppose the Trikora declaration and why the Papuan nation is demanding the right to self-determination as a nation.

An AMP and FRI-WP action in the East Java city of Malang meanwhile was blocked by police. One of the protesters, Elia Agapa, explained that the action was blocked by a reactionary mass organisation (Ormas). Police, who witnessed the incident just watched and allowed it to happen, surrounded the demonstrators after it turned chaotic. A clash broke out between the AMP and FRI-WP demonstrators and a joint force of police and Ormas members.

"We had 66 people at the action, which was surrounded and prevented from proceeding peacefully. A clash broke out and six demonstrators were injured. One of the six was a Papuan woman", Agapa told suarapapua.com.

In other cities meanwhile, there were no clashes or arrests although according to suarapapua.com sources police acted arrogantly and restricted democratic space by various means. The AMP and the FRI-WP however were still able to hold peaceful actions.

The joint Central Java four city action in Semarang involving protesters from Semarang, Salatiga, Solo and Yogyakarta began with a march from the Diponegoro University (Undip) in Semarang to the Central Java governor's office. Under the falling rain, the protesters then marched around the Simpang Lima Park. Despite being soaked by the rain, the protesters remained in high spirits singing "Papua is not Red-and-White but the Morning Star" [referring to the Indonesian national flag] and shouting "Free Papua", which reverberated throughout the march.

In speeches, action coordinator Janua Adii and AMP Semarang member Ney Sobolim asserted that the claim by President Suharto that Papua was a puppet state created by the Dutch was made unilaterally. The fact is that the December 1, 1961 declaration [of independence] expressed a lofty and genuine wish by the Papuan nation to be free and sovereign in their own land without interference by other nations.

In Yogyakarta, AMP chairperson Abbi Douw asserted that independence was a political right of the Papuan people as a nation.

"Papuan independence is guaranteed under international law. The universal declaration of human rights, international conventions on civil and political rights and on economic, social and cultural rights, in the first article it states that every person has the right to hold a political position and every nation which feels itself to be of one destiny, the indigenous people, have the right to jointly declare that we are one nation and wish to determine our own future, as was done by the Papuan nation", he asserted.

In another action meanwhile, Frans Tomoki, said that the future of the Papuan nation under the Indonesian occupation of the land of Papua is a future of death. And the road on the struggle for Papuan independence is the only path that leads towards a safe life for the Papuan nation.

FRI-WP solidarity activist Riko and colleague Penthol both said in speeches that Papuan independence is fitting because it is indeed true that today the Papuan nation is colonised by Indonesia.

"Indonesia itself is also still colonised by a rogue military and capitalists who today are the accomplices of global capitalists. Their interests are to control and take all the natural wealth in Indonesia and Papua. And today, the fact is, that the ordinary Indonesian people, as well as Papuans, are still poor, powerless, and suffering amidst all this wealth", asserted Penthol.

A solidarity action by the FRI-WP and Ternate meanwhile, was prevented from going ahead by local police. The explanation for the prohibition was outlined in a letter rejecting a notification of the demonstration.

In addition to not being allowed to protest in the name of the FRI-WP in solidarity with the Papuan nation, Ternate municipal police prohibited the protesters from holding the action under a theme which included the phrase "militarism". Moreover it was expressly stated that the FRI-WP must no longer raise the issue of Indonesia colonising the Papuan nation, use the word colonisation or take up the issue of self-determination for the Papuan nation as a democratic solution.

The Ternate municipal police also demanded than when submitting a notification for the action the FRI-WP must bring an ID card which is included in the written notification and indicates the identity of the action organiser. These prohibitions meant that the FRI-WP were only able to hold the action on the campus grounds.

Reading out a statement at the end of the action, Semarang city AMP committee chairperson Jakson Gwijangge asserted that they had three main demands. First, urging the state to immediately give Papuans the right to self-determination as a democratic solution for the people of West Papua.

Second, demanding that the state close down all companies, both national and multi-national, operating in the land of Papua. Third, urging the state to immediately withdraw all Indonesian military and police, both organic and non-organic, from the land of Papua.

Notes

Operation Trikora was declared by Indonesian founding President Sukarno in the Central Java city of Yogyakarta on December 19, 1961. It was an Indonesian military operation aimed at harassing and forcing the Dutch out of Netherlands New Guinea in 1961-62 rather than one intended to suppress a nascent independence movement.

Although it is widely held that West Papua declared independence from Indonesia on December 1, 1961, this actually marks the date when the Morning Star (Bintang Kejora) flag was first raised alongside the Dutch flag in an officially sanctioned ceremony in Jayapura, then called Hollandia. The first unilateral declaration of independence was in fact made by the Free Papua Organisation (OPM) on July 1, 1971 at the Victoria Headquarters in Waris Village, Jayapura.

[Translated by James Balowski for the Indoleft News Service. The original title of the article was "Tolak Trikora: AMP dan FRI WP Aksi di 14 Kota, 66 Orang Ditangkap".]

Source: https://suarapapua.com/2017/12/19/tolak-trikora-amp-dan-fri-wp-aksi-di-14-kota-66-orang-ditangkap/

Police 'evacuate' Papuan protesters after clash with New Order vigilante

Detik News - December 19, 2017

Muhammad Aminudin, Malang – A demonstration by the Papua Student Alliance (AMP) in the East Java city of Malang ended in a clash with Pancasila Youth (PP) members who were offended by the protest.

The clash began when scores of AMP students were holding a demonstration demanding the right to self-determination for West Papua in front of the Malang City Hall on Tuesday December 19. The demonstrators enlivened the action with banners and speeches.

In the middle of the demonstration another group arrived and the situation became chaotic with police attempting to secure the action by trying to keep the two groups apart.

In order to prevent more chaos, police evacuated scores of students away from the location in trucks.

It is suspected that the incident occurred because the second group was offended by the banners brought by demonstrators which had symbols of the Free Papua separatist group and displayed the Morning Star flag.

The group that arrived also believed that the AMP was being provocative and acting against the spirit of the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia (NKRI).

"There was another group that didn't agree with an independent Papua. There was a misunderstanding. We tried to explain to the demonstrators (the students) that much of public opposes their action. We explained this", Malang City district police operational division chief (Kabagops) Police Commander Dodot Dwianto told journalists after securing the action.

Dwianto also explained that the evacuation of the students was in order to prevent anyone being hurt.

"We considered it from a security perspective, if there are victims then the police could be blamed. So we secured both of them, the Papuan students and the Ormas [mass organisation]", explained Dwianto.

Dwianto said that the police acted quickly in order to prevent a clash between the two groups.

The AMP protesters were taken to the Malang City district police offices in police patrol trucks while the other group was taken to the grounds of the Malang City Regional House of Representatives (DPRD).

The Papuan students were demanding the right to self-determination because they believe this is a democratic step for West Papua. They also called for all Indonesian military (TNI) and police to be withdrawn from West Papua.

"Perhaps there was a notification [of the protests] but the data was incomplete, the demonstrators brought banners that were deemed provocative by the other group. So we secured [the protesters], for the officers who handle permits we will see how the procedures were, whether they were correct", he asserted. (bdh/bdh)

Notes

Pemuda Pancasila (Pancasila Youth) was established by the army in October 1959, ostensibly to uphold the state ideology of Pancasila. During the anti-communist purge in 1965-66 the group took an active part in the slaughter of Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) members and sympathisers. Under the New Order dictatorship of former president Suharto the organisation became an association of notorious thugs and petty criminals who carried out dirty work on behalf of the regime. The organisation still has close ties with various factions of the military and police and has been linked to criminal activities such as racketeering and extortion. In recent years has been involved in a number of violent turf wars with other vigilante groups and attacks on leftist groups and events that it deems to be "pro-communist" or "anti-Pancasila".

[Translated by James Balowski for the Indoleft News Service. The original title of the article was "Demo Mahasiswa Papua Nyaris Bentrok dengan Kelompok Berseragam PP".]

Source: https://news.detik.com/berita-jawa-timur/d-3776593/demo-mahasiswa-papua-nyaris-bentrok-dengan-kelompok-berseragam-pp

Fuel prices in Papua only go down when Jokowi visits

Kompas.com - December 18, 2017

Ihsanuddin, Jakarta – Papuan religious figure Pastor John Djonga says that President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo's one price fuel policy in Papua has yet to run smoothly.

He says that the price of BBM (fuel) only goes down to Java prices when Widodo pays an impromptu visit to Papua. But soon after he leaves, the fuel prices shoot up again.

"He goes home, one or two weeks later, the price returns to 'normal'", said Djonga when speaking at a national seminar titled "Three years of the Jokowi-JK Administration in Papua" at the LIPI Auditorium in Jakarta on Monday December 18.

Djonga said that he has observed this directly in mountainous Yahukimo regency in the country's easternmost region.

When Widodo first promoted the one fuel price program in the regency in October 2016, Djonga concedes prices did go down to same as Java, 6,450 rupiah per litre for premium (subsidised leaded petrol) and 5,150 per litre for solar (diesel).

"Now it's back to 30,000 rupiah. Moreover in the lead up to the New Year and Christmas, last year we reached 100,000 rupiah", said Djonga.

Djonga said that the one price fuel policy has indeed been very good for the Papuan people. But unfortunately, the program has not run well due to lack of supervision.

"So then who should monitor it and deal with it? [Government] officials in the region, are there lots of regents in Jayapura or in Jakarta", said Djonga.

One price fuel

The one price fuel policy was launched by Widodo at the Nop Goliat Dekai Airport in Yahukimo on October 18, 2016.

In his greetings Widodo asserted that fuel prices throughout Papua and West Papua provinces must be the same as other regions, namely 6,450 rupiah per litre for premium.

Widodo said that there had been years and years of price injustice because the price of premium in isolated areas in Papua has reached as much as 100,000 rupiah per litre.

At the time, Widodo said that the state-owned fuel company Pertamina has taken all the necessary steps to reduce fuel prices in Papua, the first being developing nine fuel distribution agencies.

The fuel storage capacity at distributors has also been increased. Pertamina has also purchased two Air Tractor AT-802 aircraft which can transport 4,000 litres of fuel for distribution in areas that are difficult to reach by land.

Widodo said that he hoped that the in practices the distribution of fuel on the ground will live up to expectations. He cautioned against the sale of cheap fuel only being controlled by certain groups then being resold at higher prices to the public.

[Translated by James Balowski for the Indoleft News Service. The original title of the article was "Kata Tokoh Papua, Harga BBM Hanya Turun Saat Jokowi Blusukan ke Papua".]

Source: http://nasional.kompas.com/read/2017/12/18/17481141/kata-tokoh-papua-harga-bbm-hanya-turun-saat-jokowi-blusukan-ke-papua

Papuans want justice, not infrastructure

UCA News - December 15, 2017

Kanis Dursin, Jakarta – Hundreds of Papuan students and activists held a protest in Jakarta on Dec. 1 to demand that that the Indonesian military and police be withdrawn from Papua and West Papua provinces and a fresh referendum be organized there to resolve the independence issue once and for all.

More than 5,300km east of Jakarta, thousands of Papuans joined a prayer service organized by the West Papua National Committee (KNPB) in Jayapura, the capital of Papua province.

A source in Jayapura said similar prayer services were held in cities and towns in both Papua and West Papua provinces.

Papuans have openly celebrated Dec. 1 as their Independence Day, the day when their independence flag Bintang Kejora, or Morning Star, was hoisted for the first time alongside the Dutch flag in the Netherlands in 1961.

The calls for a plebiscite came nearly 50 years after 1,025 Papuan elders chose to integrate with Indonesia in a flawed referendum in July and August 1969.

Their independence demand came despite the central government granting special autonomy to Papua and West Papua in 2001.

Since taking office in October 2014, President Joko Widodo has invested heavily in West Papua (now Papua and West Papua provinces), building, among others, new airports, seaports, power plants, and roads, including the Trans Papua that links almost every town there.

To demonstrate his determination to win the hearts of Papuans, Widodo also freed some political detainees in 2015 and visits the provinces almost every other month.

However, Jakarta's seeming reluctance to bring to justice military and police officers believed to have been involved in violence and killings in West Papua, however, has raised suspicions among Papuans that the new infrastructure is part of a grand design to exert more military suppression against Papuans.

"Without human rights trials, Papuans will not only see the president as protecting suspected rights violators but also consider his infrastructure projects as being aimed at aiding the military and police to arrest, torture, or even to kill Papuans," said Laurenzus Kadepa, a member of the Papua House of Representatives (DPR Papua).

Violence and killings have gripped West Papua since it was handed to Indonesia in May 1963. Human rights activists believe tens of thousands of people have been killed since then, but the real number is difficult to gauge.

Papuans and rights activists have been pushing the government to investigate and bring to justice those responsible for past human rights violations in West Papua, including, but not limited to, the Paniai shooting in December 2014, Wamena tragedy in 2003, and the Wasior incident in 2001.

Military and police personnel opened fire on a group of protesters in Enarotali town, Paniai regency on Dec. 8, 2014, barely two months after Widodo was sworn in as president, killing four youths, including three high school students.

In 2003, members of the army's feared Special Force Command (Kopassus) and Strategic Reserve Command (Kostrad) went after a group of armed civilians in Wamena who had stormed into an army warehouse and made off with 29 firearms and 3,500 bullets.

During the chase, they rounded up dozens of civilians and tortured them, resulting in several deaths. They also burned down local people's houses, churches, polyclinics, and school buildings, forcing thousands to flee.

In the Wasior incident, Manokwari police rounded up, detained, and tortured dozens of civilians suspected of killing five members of the elite Mobile Brigade police in 2001.

Indonesia's National Commission on Human Rights said the military and police committed gross human rights violations in those three incidents and recommended that ad-hoc human rights tribunals be set up to try those involved.

Papuans had hoped that Widodo, a civilian with no ties to the previous regimes, would finally give them justice, but a joint team tasked with investigating several shooting incidents in West Papua has missed several deadlines.

In the meantime, violence continues. Nabire Police in Papua arrested KNPB activists Melkisedek Yeimo, Kris Mote, and Yulianus Boma on Dec 1.

On Nov. 29, Christian Albertho Claus Pepuho, chairman of the National Solidarity for Papua Youth and Students (Sonamappa), was beaten up by a mob in Jayapura.

Six days earlier, Sonamappa activist Riki Karel Yakarmilena was arrested for allegedly inciting people to raise the Morning Star flag during a protest in Jayapura calling for an end to American mining company PT Freeport Indonesia's operations in Papua.

In mid-November, the military claimed more than 1,200 people in three villages around Freeport's mining site were held hostage by the Free Papua Movement (OPM). The villagers were eventually evacuated but a source in Papua said some 200 Papuans opted to stay put.

"These 200 people are harassed and intimidated by the military almost every day because they don't want to leave their villages and that raises questions over the whole hostage story," a source said.

Trying members of the military and police for human rights violations in West Papua would not put an end to independence calls among Papuans but it could provide a perfect setting for the government to hold a dialogue with them.

To start with, the trials of military and police personnel responsible for human rights violations in West Papua would give justice to the victims and their families and put an end to military and police impunity.

For Papuans, the military and police in West Papua are occupation forces that treat Papuan people like state enemies that have to be subjugated.

Human rights trials would also reassure Papuans that they are legitimate citizens of the country and their fundamental rights, including rights to life and to live without fear, are protected by the state and that any violation would be dealt with firmly.

Several pro-independence Papuans and their international supporters submitted a petition to the United Nations last September. A copy of the petition, signed by 1.8 million Papuans, was also submitted to the UN Decolonization Committee in a bid to put West Papua back on their agenda.

While both the UN and its Decolonization Committee rejected the petition, it clearly shows the extent of efforts by Papuans and their supporters to achieve independence for West Papua.

Some countries in the Pacific region have also thrown their support behind pro-independence Papuans and have publicly called for international teams to investigation human rights violations in West Papua.

Bringing military and police members to justice for human rights abuses is not an easy task but risking the country's unity to save some rogue officers is not an act of statesmanship either.

[Kanis Dursin is a freelance journalist based in Jakarta.]

Source: https://www.ucanews.com/news/papuans-want-justice-not-infrastructure/81054

Hundreds of students rallied to Merauke parliamentary office

Tabloid JUBI - December 15, 2017

Merauke, Jubi – Hundreds of students and youth who are members of the Alliance of Students of the South Papua 'invaded' Regional Representative Office (DPRD) of Merauke Regency. The demonstration was to commemorate the World Day of Human Rights (human rights) every December 10.

On Monday (December 11), before heading to the office of the council, hundreds of students held speech in the Brawijaya Circle (Libra). They then rallied headed to Merauke parliament.

Various banners were carried contained condemnation to the TNI/Polri who committed acts of persecution against Papuan people, also the indigenous land grabbed for investment activities.

At the office yard, alternately a number of students made speech. They demanded the completion of number of human rights cases that occurred in Merauke Regency.

In their statement, there are number of important points read out by Frans Wanima, the rally coordinator. Some of these issues urging the government to restore the sovereignty of the land and forests of the people of South Papua.

Another thing is to close PT Korindo Group, since after 25 years of their operation, did not bring development impact and prosperity for people in the South Papua.

"We also demand to stop the custom of money penalty to the victims which despises law and make the TNI/Police officers become accustomed and legal to conduct violence and killing in South Papua," said Frans.

The Student Alliance of South Papua also strongly rejected the efforts of Menkopolhukam, Wiranto, which encouraged the settlement of various human rights cases in the Council of National Harmony (DKN). Because, they said, it will not provide justice to indigenous Papuans who were the victims.

In response to a number of statements, Chairman at Commission A of Merauke Regency House of Representatives, Moses Kaibu, said they would follow up various aspirations in consultation with the chairman of the board.

"I cannot make decision now. Of course, the aspirations set forth in the demands will be submitted to the speaker of Merauke Parliament, Francis Sirfefa, and we will have to discuss for scheduled hearing together," he said.

On MIFEE program in Merauke

At the same occasion, MRP member, John Wob, when speaking in front of the rally at Merauke DPRD Office claimed that he once submitted a letter of rejection to the Secretary General of the United Nations related to Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE) program in Merauke Regency since 2010.

He was also written to the then President of the Republic of Indonesia (RI), Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

He said at the time, the impact of MIFEE program will make Marind people extinct, especially because it increasingly cleared community forest for investment activities.

"Frankly, there is no positive impact that Marind people can feel with the existence of MIFEE in Merauke," he said. John Wob promised to continue to speak loudly at the MRP and urged the central government to immediately revoke the MIFEE program, as it would gradually 'wipe out' the indigenous Marind-Papuans.

Three districts in South Papua are cautioned to limit investment

Separately, in the same day, three Regency in South Papua, such as Merauke, Boven Digoel and Mappi, are reminded to limit investments leading to large-scale forest clearance.

This was conveyed by Director of the Secretariat of Justice and Peace (SKP) Archdiocese of Merauke, Father Anselmus Amo, to Jubi.

At least, he said, the governments of the three regencies should oversee the implementation of investment so as not to create conflicts among indigenous peoples and environmental degradation on a wide scale.

Father Anselmus also asks government to develop local food that ensures the cultural sustainability of indigenous peoples.

In addition, he said, it is necessary to mapping customary territory of the clan boundaries so there would be certainty and protection of administration of customary territory among the people themselves.

Father Anselmus added that the three regencies need to have firm stance to ensure access to education and health for communities in their respective villages.

Previously, Pastor Pius Manu also highlighted investments made in Merauke Regency, where most indigenous peoples' forests are cleared only for palm oil development.

As more forest is cleared for the sake of investment, the habitats within it are gradually extinct, he said. (tabloidjubi.com/Zely)

Source: http://tabloidjubi.com/eng/hundreds-students-rallied-merauke-parliamentary-office/

Governor of Papua: Who sells alcoholic beverages?

Tabloid JUBI - December 15, 2017

Jayapura, Jubi – Papua Provincial Government highlights elements of security forces in Papua who allegedly masterminded the sale of liquor (alcohol), although there are regulations that prohibit the circulation or sale of alcoholic beverages (minol).

"Both the regional head and the TNI/Polri officers, have agreed to sign the integrity pact of the ban on sales and circulation of minol," said Papua Governor Lukas Enembe in his speech during the inauguration of the Regent of Puncak Jaya, 7 December, in Mulia, Puncak Jaya.

Governor Enembe said recently there was a Hercules aircraft belonging to the Air Force which brought in minol of type vodka to Jayawijaya Regency. "They do not seem to agree with the regulations set for banning minol, so who sells theminol: TNI, Police or businessman?" remarked Governor Enembe in his speech in front of the inaugurating attendees, including representatives of the police and TNI.

On the occasion, Governor Enembe asked the regent and deputy regent to tighten security at a number of entrances such as airports, to the districts and villages to prevent people from circulated minol.

He asked the security forces in charge on the Land of Papua to not make money by selling minol which potentially killing the indigenous Papuans.

"Therefore, I ask Pak Dandim Puncak Jaya for helping to supervise. If there are members who sell alcohol, do not (assigned) them here," said Governor Enembe.

Governor reminded that there had been a plane that fell for carrying minol. "We still remember the incidents of Polri's plane crash at Gunung Kembu, it brought with them alcohol, so this should not happen again," he said.

Merauke Air Force Commander: we have checked the buckets

Separately, Merauke Air Force Commander, Colonel (PNB) Awang Kurniawan, confirmed that his members have been working maximally while 32 bucket of paint containing 900 bottles of vodka alcoholic beverage (minol) packed into Hercules aircraft at Mopah Airport on 29 November 2017.

"Before the paints being ship in, they were first quarantined and checked. So, we are basically did not miss anything. Next, we will use electronic detection tool to track. Our members have worked optimally," said Danlanud, on Friday (December 8).

It is said, electronic devices are difficult to detect dozens of paint cans because they were packed very neat. Where, the label of the paint is arranged as such to prevent damage. So all of them passed and managed to ride in Hercules and flight to Wamena Jayawijaya Regency.

Danlanud also denied the involvement of its members in smuggling hundreds of vodka bottles to Wamena. "We have checked our members who served at Mopah Airport at the time and they did not involve," he said.

He admitted that this was the first incident where Hercules hauls hundreds of vodka alcoholic drinks. "It was the first time. It has never been happen before," he said.

He admitted that dozens of those buckets were taken in by some people and deposited at the airport before boarding the plane. "We took the identity of the sender as well as stated," he said.

Previously, Merauke Police Criminal Cops, Adjunct Police Commissioner (AKP) Muchsit Sefian, said that three smugglers of hundreds of bottles of vodka to Wamena with initials ST, ER, and SE have been detained by the Air Force. (tabloidjbi.com/Zely)

Source: http://tabloidjubi.com/eng/governor-papua-sells-alcoholic-beverages/

Aceh

Indonesia: Transgender beauty contest rumor sparks arrests

UCA News - December 21, 2017

Katharina R. Lestari – Seven transgender women were arrested and temporarily detained by Shariah police in Indonesia's Banda Aceh for having "bad morals" after being accused by Muslim vigilantes of holding a beauty contest at a hotel.

The women, however, denied the accusation and said they were returning home from a birthday party.

Aceh follows a strict interpretation of Islamic law, which the LGBT community says subjects them to regular harassment and persecution, especially from vigilantes who patrol streets in the province trying to catch people committing "immoral acts."

The drama unfolded on Dec. 16 when rumors circulated on social media that 55 transgender women were to take part in a beauty contest at a hotel. The rumor prompted the vigilantes to go to the hotel to disrupt the contest.

However, arriving at the hotel they found no transgender women there and left. They later came across the seven transgender women at a food stall and called the Shariah police.

"We took them to our office for their own safety. They were released on Dec. 18 after going through some spiritual formation and signing a letter saying that they will uphold moral values," said Marzuki, a Shariah police spokesman.

"Based on our investigation, they did not hold a beauty contest but a birthday party," he told ucanews.com, adding that many transgender women went home after the party and some stopped off at food stalls.

He said that they violated a 2000 bylaw and could face up to three years in jail. The bylaw stipulates that everyone is obliged to maintain and obey moral values. "We released them because the penalty is light," he said.

Riza, a program manager at True Sons of Aceh, a group helping marginalized communities, said it was probably the way they were dressed that angered people. "Nearly everyone wore elegant dresses. Perhaps this is the reason why people thought it was a beauty contest," said Riza who was invited to the party.

The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community in the province has faced almost constant intimidation since Shariah law was implemented, Riza said. "They are called to dress and have short hair like real men," he said.

Rights groups condemned the arrests. Aceh province's "abusive anti-LGBT policies have generated international opprobrium," said Kyle Knight, a researcher at Human Rights Watch.

"Last May's public flogging of two gay men in Aceh – Indonesia's first public caning for homosexuality – sparked outrage far beyond Indonesia's borders," he said.

He was referring to the case of two young men who were each caned 83 times after vigilante's burst in on them and accused them of having sex. Homosexuality is banned in Aceh under Shariah law introduced in 2002, but is not illegal in the rest of Indonesia.

"Despite Indonesian leaders' frequent touting of the country's diversity and pluralism, many minorities remain vulnerable to harassment, intimidation and violence," Knight said.

"Last weekend's detention of friends attending a birthday party is just the latest example of this. The government should condemn this vigilantism," he added.

Source: http://www.eurasiareview.com/21122017-indonesia-transgender-beauty-contest-rumor-sparks-arrests/

Trans women stalked by vigilantes and detained by Sharia police in

Gay Star News - December 19, 2017

Shannon Power – A group of trans women attending a birthday province were targeted by vigilantes in Indonesia.

The women were attending the birthday celebrations in the Aceh province of Indonesia on Saturday (16 December).

Described as a group of 'militant Islamist vigilantes' by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the group reported the women to police in the region's capital Banda Aceh.

The women were reported to the Sharia (Islamic) Law Police. Aceh is the only region in Indonesia that is legally allowed to rule with Sharia Law after it negotiated a 'Special Status' agreement with the national government in 1999.

Police detained the women for 24 hours but before releasing them, they were told off for having 'bad morals'.

Being trans or engaging in same-sex relations is not illegal in Indonesia. But under Aceh's Sharia Law both are illegal. Sharia Law also allows for the snooping and vigilante behavior exhibited which led to the women being detained.

The women's detention forms part of a pattern of anti-LGBTI sentiment in Aceh.

In May two men in the early twenties had their apartment raided by vigilantes who also filmed them allegedly in the middle of a homosexual sex act. The two men were later convicted and sentenced to 85 lashes in the capital's public square.

Sharia police arrested two women in 2015 because they were allegedly lesbians, but they were later released without charge. Earlier that year nine trans women were arrested for cross-dressing in Aceh, which police said violated Sharia Law. What is Indonesia doing about it?

In 2016, United Nations experts wrote to the Indonesian government expressing concerns about the abusive enforcement of Sharia against LGBT people in Aceh.

While Indonesia has yet to respond to this, in September it informed the UN Human Rights Council that it would 'take further steps to ensure a safe and enabling environment for all human rights defenders', including LGBT activists. But it has yet to act on its promise.

HRW said that despite Indonesian leaders' frequent touting of the country's diversity and pluralism, many of Indonesia's minorities remain vulnerable.

'Last weekend's detention of friends attending a birthday party is just the latest example of this,' wrote HRW's researcher in the LGBT Rights Program, Kyle Knight.

'The government should condemn this vigilantism, but will Jakarta speak out?'

Source: https://www.gaystarnews.com/article/trans-women-stalked-vigilantes-indonesia-sharia-police/

Vigilantes stalk Indonesian transgender women

Human Rights Watch Dispatches - December 18, 2017

Kyle Knight – Militant Islamist vigilantes targeted a group of transgender women attending a birthday celebration in Indonesia's Aceh province on Saturday.

The mob alerted the local Sharia (Islamic law) police, who detained seven women in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital, for 24 hours, and chastised them for "bad morals" before releasing them.

Everything – from the vigilante-style snooping, to the Sharia police tip-off, to the official shaming – is in accordance with local Acehnese law. Aceh, the only Indonesian province that can legally adopt bylaws derived from Sharia, makes male and female same-sex conduct a criminal offense.

Local officials have made matters worse by aggressively stoking homophobia. In 2013, Banda Aceh mayor Illiza Saaduddin declared that "homosexuals are encroaching on our city." In February 2016, Saaduddin posted to Instagram a photo of herself holding a handgun and vowing to purge Aceh of LGBT people. That same month, she announced she would create a "special team" to boost public awareness of the "threat of LGBT" people and to "train" LGBT people to "return to a normal life."

But Saaduddin is only part of the problem. In October 2015, Sharia police arrested two women on suspicion of being lesbians, detaining them for three nights before imposing on them a week of "religious rehab." In 2016, after senior government officials fomented an anti-LGBT crisis with a stream of rhetoric that demeaned and threatened Indonesia's LGBT population, authorities in one Acehnese city urged employers not to hire LGBT people.

Aceh's abusive anti-LGBT policies have generated international opprobrium. Last May's public flogging of two gay men in Aceh – Indonesia's first public caning for homosexuality – sparked outrage far beyond Indonesia's borders. In 2016, United Nations experts wrote to the Indonesian government expressing concerns about the abusive enforcement of Sharia against LGBT people in Aceh. While Indonesia has yet to respond to this, in September it informed the UN Human Rights Council that it would "take further steps to ensure a safe and enabling environment for all human rights defenders," including LGBT activists. It has yet to back its pledge with action.

Despite Indonesian leaders' frequent touting of the country's diversity and pluralism, many of Indonesia's minorities remain vulnerable to harassment, intimidation, and violence. Last weekend's detention of friends attending a birthday party is just the latest example of this. The government should condemn this vigilantism, but will Jakarta speak out?

[Kyle Knight is a researcher with the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program.]

Source: https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/12/18/vigilantes-stalk-indonesian-transgender-women

Women's rights & gender

Indonesia losing only female top justice amid rights worries

Bloomberg - December 19, 2017

Rieka Rahadiana and Yudith Ho, Jakarta – Indonesia is set to lose its first and only female constitutional justice, whose term is up next year, potentially dealing a blow to women's rights in a country where they're being challenged in the face of growing religious conservatism.

Maria Farida Indrati will end her second and final term in about eight months, leaving the nine-member board of justices entirely male on one of the two highest courts in the country – where cases on discrimination, domestic violence, early-age marriage and female political participation continually arise.

The constitutional court differs from the supreme court, where the top judges are all male and which determines final appeal in legal matters not deemed to be constitutional.

"The point of view I bring to the table is different from what my male colleagues present," the 68-year-old judge told Bloomberg in an interview.It's not a certainty that Indrati's replacement, who likely will be chosen by President Joko Widodo from a list of three candidates picked by a committee, will be male.

While her successor won't be known for several months or even until after her departure, Indrati said there are several qualified women to consider. She herself was chosen by former President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in 2008 after decades of lecturing in law at the University of Indonesia and assisting lawmakers in drafting legislation.

In Indonesia, female law students prefer a career outside the courtroom rather than in it because "women don't like to be seen as argumentative or to debate," said Indrati, who plans to return to teaching full time when her term finishes. Quotas aren't the solution to increasing women's participation in public life, including on the bench, she said.

'Be unafraid'

"It is important that women take this role and be unafraid to take this role," said the judge, who suffered from polio as a child and walks with a limp.

Although when she was young she aspired to be a piano teacher, Indrati listened to the advice of her father, a journalist and former teacher who had wanted to complete his unfinished law degree. He encouraged his daughter to study to become a law professor instead, according to her official biography.

When the constitutional court in 2015 declined a judicial review to raise the decades-old minimum legal marital age for women from currently 16 years old to 18, Indrati was the only justice with a dissenting opinion. Raising the marriage age to 18 would allow girls more of a chance to secure their futures, Indrati said. The challenge was brought by a group promoting women's health. Activists are again appealing, seeking to have the case heard again.

Last week, Indrati cast a decisive vote in the court's decision rejecting by 5-to-4 a petition by conservative academics seeking to deem extramarital and gay sex as crimes punishable by prison terms. She has also ruled in favor of other gender and minority-related cases such as pornography and blasphemy.

More difficulties

"It's not always the case where the existence of a female justice means the law will take the side of women," said Indri Suparno, a commissioner at the National Commission on Violence Against Women. "But the absence will give more difficulties to women to become more progressive."

Southeast Asia's biggest economy is considered a model of moderate Islam. The president, known as Jokowi, has put more women into senior roles compared with other Muslim-majority countries – a record nine of 34 cabinet ministers, the most among the world's most populous countries.

High profile officials include Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati, Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi – a first in the country's history – and Maritime and Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti. Rosmaya Hadi became Bank Indonesia's only female deputy governor this year. The country also imposes gender quotas for political party candidates put forward for public office.

In 2016, Jokowi launched the first nationwide survey on violence against women and children. However, he's been silent on calls from human rights groups to end virginity tests for women applying to the military and the police.

Polygamy app

Worries over women's rights have increased as attempts to hamper equality have been made more openly. A Tinder-like app, AyoPoligami, or Let's Do Polygamy, and a seminar called "The Quickest Way of Getting Four Wives" have sparked controversy. Indonesia allows Muslim men to take up to four wives if granted by a court and approved by the first wife.

Some 26 out of 153 countries have women as chief justices, or 17 percent, according to a World Bank report in 2016 called "Women, Business and The Law."

Outside court

It's possible that the challenge to the law legalizing the age of marriage at 16 may be heard again while Indrati is still on the bench. Campaigners for women's rights say that women who marry young will miss out on what's being called a demographic bonus by 2030 – when the numbers of working-age people are greater than the numbers of elderly – by not being able to further their educations and embark on careers.

The government wants to improve its professional workforce, but allowing women to marry at 16 means they likely will have to stay home and raise families instead of being able to participate, said Zumrotin Susilo, chairwoman of the Women's Health Foundation, who was involved in the first appeal of the marriage law.

A Central Statistics Agency census in 2010 found 6.7 million out of 78 million women age 15 to 64 hold a bachelor's degree, or 8.5 percent. About 500,000 women have postgraduate degrees.

"Women have to fight for the presence of female justices and build strong communications and perspective at the constitutional court," said Suparno of the women commission.

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/19/indonesialosing-only-female-top-justice-amid-rights-worries.html

Freedom of speech & expression

Police arrest doctor for alleged hate speech against TNI chief

Jakarta Post - December 16, 2017

Jakarta – The National Police's Criminal Investigation Department arrested a doctor in West Sumatra on Friday afternoon for allegedly spreading hate speech on her Facebook account.

According to the police, the doctor, Siti Sundari Daranila, 51, said that, under the name Gusti Sikumbang, she created a special account not connected to her personal account to upload specific content.

Cybercrime division head Brig. Gen. Fadil Imran said the police suspected that Siti spread hate speech in numerous posts related to blasphemy and racial discrimination.

She reportedly posted a photo of newly inaugurated Indonesian Military (TNI) commander Hadi Tjahjanto with his family, including his two step-children who are also Air Force personnel.

"Alongside the photo, the suspect wrote in the caption, 'We native people must stand together. Hadi Tjahjanto with his wife, daughter and son. His children and step-children are all Air Force personnel'," he said in a written statement, mentioning that the police were currently investigating the account to determine whether she had connections with other hate-speech accounts on the social media platform.

He added that the police had confiscated two smartphones as evidence. Siti faces up to six years' imprisonment if charged under the Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) Law. "We hope that people use social media wisely," he said. (vla/dmr)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/16/police-arrest-doctor-for-alleged-hate-speech-against-tni-chief.html

Freedom of information & the press

Media oligarchy and the shaping of news in Indonesia

The Conversation - December 20, 2017

Wisnu Prasetya Utomo – Almost two decades after the authoritarian regime in Indonesia ended, democratisation in the media has yet to reach an ideal situation. Instead, oligarchy in the media industry is strengthening and ownership has been more concentrated on fewer players.

This is not exclusive to Indonesia. We can see similar situations in other countries. Technological developments in communication, which open new information channels, coupled with media oligarchy, have resulted in a surprising turn: decreasing public trust in mainstream media. As a consequence, people find an alternative to access information, which is social media.

In Indonesia, the wave of distrust was palpable during rallies led by Islamists at the end of 2016 to early 2017. Some rally participants rejected journalists from certain media outlets. They even resorted to violence to reject the reporters.

However, the decline in trust in mainstream media has not been followed by growth of credible alternative media. Consequently, most people fall victim to hoaxes. Hoaxes and fake news become easily viral because people tend to seek information that would affirm their own beliefs. Some groups see this as an opportunity to gain money from producing fake news.

To make it worse, the internet and social media have also empowered media oligarchs. Media owners are more aggressive in buying competitors to expand their media business, integrating with other businesses, and investing in digital media and communication infrastructure.

Some media owners also enter the political arena by forming parties and placing their cadres in governmental positions. Similar to the political realm, media companies increasingly look like a dynasty: slowly inherited to family members.

Understanding media oligarchy

To understand contemporary Indonesia one must understand how media oligarchy works here. Media oligarchy shapes the news the public consume every day. News have become increasingly biased and partisans. The most obvious examples are news coverage on the presidential election in 2014. Media were between the two rival camps.

Published in 2012, a research by Merlyna Lim recorded 13 groups controlling the Indonesian media. Another research, published in 2013 by Yanuar Nugroho and team, found most of the media were owned by 12 large groups.

The number shrank to eight in Ross Tapsell's book published 2017. Tapsell said these groups rose under a political system controlled by New Order oligarchs and Indonesian laws are not strict enough to limit media ownership concentration.

The differences in the number of media groups are the result of different methods. Tapsell only counted groups owning news outlets; he did not include Femina Group and Mugi Rekso Abadi Group (publishers of women and teen magazines).

The Indonesian media oligarchs are media owners who began their business from owning a TV station or a print media. With the arrival of digital technology, they began integrating their media into various platforms. Some outlets started to provide room for citizen journalism like Kompas with Kompasiana, Tempo with Indonesiana and Liputan 6 with Citizen Journalism.

Of course, opening up a channel for citizen journalist is fine as an attempt to give public opinion a space. But those channels are now dominated by certain opinion leaders, narrowing the diversity of voices there. There have been incidents where the administrator ban articles by citizens. At the end of the day, the various platforms become more like their hosts, reflecting the interests of the oligarchs.

Experiences from other countries show when media oligarchs are stronger, the players would enter the political arena using their media as the main arsenal. This is especially true in the case of TV station owners.

In Indonesia, more than 90% of the total population watch. When media owners enter the political arena, they do so with business in mind. They can sway regulations to benefit their own businesses. The difficulty in revising Broadcasting Law since 2009 is an example.

The connection between politics, media and business is palpable in the case of Jakarta Bay reclamation. The case has earned a national spotlight in the past two years and two rivals in the TV industry – Metro TV and TVOne – have taken different stances. Their differences are not due to ideological differences but more because their owners are political players in two rivalling camps. In many issues like elections and forced evictions in Jakarta they take opposing standpoints.

Today's hot issues: reclamation and Meikarta

News coverage in Metro TV and Media Indonesia newspaper regarding Jakarta Bay reclamation support the project. The owner, media-magnate-cum-politician Surya Paloh is the founder of Nasdem party, which aligns themselves with the government. The group gives a special space for Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs Luhut Pandjaitan about the importance of reclamation.

Both outlets publish editorials supporting the project. One of them says: "there is no single reason that can justify to not speed up the Jakarta Bay reclamation". When the government halted the project, the TV station wrote in their website that the "uncertainty would harm investors" and that reclamation is good for all.

TV One, owned by political rival Aburizal Bakrie, has been critical toward reclamation. When Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, an avid supporter of reclamation, was the Jakarta governor, TV One was critical towards the project. The new governor, Anies Baswedan, wanted to halt reclamation and he got support from TV One.

Another example is the recent spike in advertising and news about a new development near Jakarta, called Meikarta. For two months recently, the advertisement and news about the planned new city appeared daily in national newspapers like Kompas and Koran Tempo. Meikarta's developer is Lippo Group, which also owns a media group publishing Suara Pembaruan, Investor Daily and Jakarta Globe.

Roy Thaniago made a rough calculation and estimated Kompas received Rp 170.2 billion (US$11.9 million) and Koran Tempo Rp 69 billion from Meikarta ads.

I have sought confirmation on the numbers but Kompas' chief editor Budiman Tanuredjo said he did not know about ads and directed me to the ad department. I got the same answer from Arif Zulkifli, a top official in Tempo group's newsroom. I sent emails to both but did not get any reply.

However, one small event caught my attention. Kompas newspaper's deputy executive director, Rikard Bagun, was present during a ceremony of a tower in Meikarta.

In total in 2017, Meikarta spent Rp 1.2 trillion for advertisement in the television and print media.

The high amount of money going to print media is good news for them, amid the decline in the print media industry where newspapers are collapsing. However, our simple content analysis found that such amount of ads have affected the direction of news about Meikarta. It's hard to find news that's critical on the subject. But advertorials are much easier to find. I counted that from October 2017, an average of three advertorial articles appeared in Kompas's digital arm, kompas.com, every day.

The two cases are examples on how media oligarchy shape the news. The public need policies from the government to free us from another media oligarchy trap enabled by the internet and social media.

Media literacy can safeguard us from entering a hoax wilderness through media literacy. Media literacy is not only about distinguishing facts and fiction, more than that, media literacy should help us understand what's behind the news.

Source: http://theconversation.com/media-oligarchy-and-the-shaping-of-news-in-indonesia-89094

Political parties & elections

Indonesia must prepare to counter 'hate spin' strategy ahead of election

Jakarta Globe - December 21, 2017

Sheany, Jakarta – Increasing intolerance and politicization of religion in Indonesia can be attributed to the practice of hate spin, which experts agree is a widespread phenomenon threatening democracy in the world's largest Muslim-majority country, especially ahead of election years.

The Center for the Study of Religion and Democracy (Pusad) and the Paramadina Foundation, along with the Asia Foundation and the Institute of International Studies, launched the Indonesian version of Cherian George's 2016 book, "Hate Spin: The Manufacture of Religious Offense and Its Threat to Democracy" in Jakarta on Thursday (21/12).

The book argues that politicians have engaged in a strategy referred to as "hate spin" in order to mobilize supporters and marginalize opponents, which is a double-sided technique combining hate speech and manufactured offense-taking targeting minority groups.

"This book confirms what we are currently experiencing, which is not exclusive to Indonesia but is a global phenomenon," national director of Gusdurian Network, Alissa Wahid, said, alluding to George's use of prominent examples of intolerance in Indonesia, the United States and India.

She added that hate spin is a political crime, and illustrates the practice of politics without principles.

Identity politics played a major role in the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election, during which members of hardline Muslim organizations – led by the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) – mobilized masses against Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama.

The ethnic Chinese and Christian former governor lost to Anies Baswedan, and is now serving two years in prison after being convicted of blasphemy against Islam in May.

Identity politics continued on the fringes of Indonesian politics and society in the months following the election results, but was again incited to the forefront after Anies used the term "pribumi," or native people, in his first public address as leader of Jakarta.

"The Jakarta gubernatorial election is a textbook example of how effective use of hate spin can benefit its users. What FPI did... this will be a strategy to win elections, because it was proven successful," Endy M. Bayuni, chief editor of the Jakarta Post, said.

Endy warned that letting hate spin become the new norm will lead to the destruction of democracy itself, which consequently also threatens freedom of expression and freedom of religion.

The principle of majority rules in democracies is a major aspect on why hate spin can be mobilized so effectively, according to Alissa.

A 2015 study conducted by the Pew Research Center found that more than 90 percent of Indonesians consider religion an important aspect of their lives, with the global median at 55 percent.

The combination of majoritarianism and religion, therefore, makes it easier for the latter to be shaped to fit various political purposes, Alissa argues.

"There's a big narrative in Indonesia, that Islam is suppressed and on the brink of destruction, therefore Muslims must fight against it and take power. What's even bigger now is the belief that the current regime is anti-Islam," Alissa said.

Pusad director, Ihsan Ali-Fauzi, said the book translation comes at an important time in Indonesia, with regional elections set to take place in June 2018 and the country's first simultaneous legislative and presidential elections scheduled for 2019.

Homework

In his book, George highlighted the importance of building civic nationalism through the use of all available resources and through collaborative efforts from the government, civil society and the media.

"Public spaces in online platforms should be moderated so that they can be more effective," Endy said.

The current "free for all" mechanism in social media has resulted in unsound political debates, which must be tackled by developing a culture of ethics in the use of social media, Endy added.

"For a quality democracy, there must be an effort to develop that culture of ethics," Endy said.

Alissa pointed out that the common, widespread use of hate spin makes it easier for any issue to trigger hatred among Indonesians.

She also argues that law enforcement in the Southeast Asian country is another issue, because authorities place peace and order above constitutional rights of Indonesian citizens.

"We must change this law enforcement pattern so that they understand that social harmony can be achieved when they protect the constitutional rights of citizens," Alissa said.

She acknowledged that public discussions on issues of intolerance, such as the one on Thursday, must take place in more mainstream spaces where "the real battle takes place."

Endy echoed the sentiment, saying that such discussions must actively take place in mosques, where narratives of hate spin often thrive.

Source: http://jakartaglobe.id/news/indonesia-must-prepare-counter-hate-spin-strategy-ahead-election-years/

Golkar installs Industry Minister Airlangga as new chairman

Jakarta Post - December 21, 2017

Jakarta – Indonesia's oldest existing political party, Golkar, concluded its extraordinary congress on Wednesday by officially inaugurating Industry Minister Airlangga Hartarto as its chairman until 2019.

Airlangga replaced Setya Novanto, a seasoned party stalwart who is currently standing trial as part of the controversial e-ID procurement corruption case.

At the meeting, Golkar mandated Airlangga, the son of a former industry minister during the Suharto administration, to carry out a "revitalization" of the party, including organizational structure changes, based on "the needs of the party."

Speaking to reporters after the congress, Airlangga said as quoted by kompas.com it was "the president's prerogative" whether he would be replaced as industry minister or not.

Golkar, a member of the ruling coalition led by the Indonesian Democratic Party Of Struggle (PDI-P), decided to make changes to its leadership as its chances of securing votes in the upcoming 2019 legislative and presidential election were potentially under threat following Setya's implication in the corruption case. (mos)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/21/golkar-installs-industry-minister-airlangga-as-new-chairman.html

President Jokowi calls on Golkar Party to remain solid

Tempo - December 19, 2017

Antara, Jakarta – President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) has called on Golkar, one of major Indonesian political parties, to maintain its solidity ahead of the political year in 2018.

"Many have advised that Golkar must return to its character, identity as a functional party (or) a working party," he said in his speech at the opening of the party's extraordinary national meeting on Monday evening.

Jokowi said that Golkar must remain solid despite the existence of groups of party figures in it.

He said the party must preserve internal solidity well with regard to prevent disruption in the political situation in the country ahead of regional elections in 2018.

President Joko Widodo expressed appreciation to the party that has so far always supported the government's program, safeguard the state ideology Pancasila and preserve "Bhineka Tunggal Ika" (unity in diversity) principle.

He said the government is currently conducting economic development as well as infrastructure development from the periphery and is needing Golkar cadres who have understood the process of development and political policy to achieve targets.

"In view of that again Golkar must be solid. It must be intact like a banyan tree which is very strong. Golkar must become bigger and important part of political development in Indonesia," he said.

Golkar held the meeting to determine its new general chairman after Setya Novanto was detained by anti-graft agency KPK in connection with his alleged involvement in corruption.

Source: https://en.tempo.co/read/news/2017/12/19/055914227/President-Jokowi-Calls-on-Golkar-Party-to-Remain-Solid

Soeharto's daughter drops out of Golkar race

Jakarta Post - December 19, 2017

Kharishar Kahfi and Nurul Fitri Ramadhani, Jakarta – The daughter of former president Soeharto, Siti Hadijati "Titiek" Soeharto, has confirmed that she has dropped out of the race for the Golkar Party's top position.

When asked late on Monday whether she would join the race for the party's chairmanship position, Titiek said: "There's no need [to hold a race]. Everything's unanimously been agreed upon."

Titiek said she would throw her support behind the newly-elected chairman Airlangga Hartanto. "If Pak Airlangga needs me, I'm ready to join his board," Titiek said.

Titiek recently declared her intention to contest for Golkar's top post, claiming that many people wanted to see the "Cendana family" of Soeharto return to party's leadership.

Former president Soeharto was the central figure in the party when he ruled the country for more than three decades under an authoritarian regime.

In his speech at the Golkar extraordinary congress on Monday, President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo urged all members to support Airlangga, who is also Industry Minister in his cabinet.

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/19/soehartos-daughter-drops-out-of-golkar-race.html

Golkar withdraws support for Ridwan in lead up to W. Java gubernatorial

Jakarta Post - December 19, 2017

Safrin La Batu and Nurul Fitri Ramadhani, Jakarta – The Golkar Party has withdrawn its support for Bandung Mayor Ridwan Kamil after the later was slow to respond to the party's demands to pick one of its member as his running mate for the West Java gubernatorial election next year.

The party decided to annul its support for Ridwan in a letter signed on Sunday, citing that Ridwan had not shown commitment to appoint Golkar member Daniel Muttaqien as his running mate in the election, as was the condition of the party's support for him.

"This is not Golkar's fault but rather Ridwan's mistake for being slow to make a decision," Golkar West Java chairman Dedi Mulyadi, who is also the regent of Purwakarta, said on Monday.

The party's official letter to withdraw support stated that Golkar had directed Ridwan to appoint Daniel as his running mate before Nov. 25 but that Ridwan was yet to make a decision, leading to the party's sudden withdrawal.

With Golkar now leaving Ridwan's coalition, only three parties remain: The National Democrats (Nasdem), the National Awakening Party (PKB) and the United Development Party (PPP).

Even without Golkar, the three parties are still eligible to nominate Ridwan as their combined seats in the West Java Council reach 21 seats, above the 20 minimum required seats for a party or coalition to be eligible to nominate a candidate. (dmr)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/19/golkar-withdraws-support-for-ridwan-in-lead-up-to-w-java-gubernatorial-election.html

PSI encourages entrepreneurship among millennials

Jakarta Post - December 18, 2017

Jakarta – The Indonesian Solidarity Party (PSI) held an event in Central Jakarta on Sunday entitled "The Mighty Generations: The Future Is In Your Hands," seeking to promote entrepreneurship among young people.

The event featured, among others, JakCloth co-founder Andro Rohmana Putera, KokBisa YouTube channel co-founder Gerald Sebastian and Giring Ganesha, lead vocalist of popular pop band Nidji, who shared their experiences in starting businesses through digital avenues.

PSI chairwoman Grace Natalie said that the party wanted to help millennials to take advantage of the "high-tech era." "That's why we invited these successful young people who have creative mentalities and aren't afraid to fail," she said.

Grace further said PSI wanted to differentiate itself from other political parties by holding more events such as this.

"We want to share knowledge not just distribute sembako [staple foodstuffs]," she said, referring to a common tactic used by political parties to gain votes.

"We are lucky to live in a time where we don't need that much capital to start our own business," said PSI central executive board head Tsamara Amany.

The audience consisted of young people from universities and youth community groups, many of whom were interested in starting their own business.

Rado, a fresh graduate and North Sumatra native, said he wanted to open a business back in his hometown.

"My hometown is near Lake Toba, which has now become a major tourist destination. I think that there's a great opportunity for tourist businesses like homestays." He hoped he could use what he learned at the event to pursue his goal. (kmt/ebf)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/18/psi-encourages-entrepreneurship-among-millennials.html

12 parties selected to enter factual verification process

Jakarta Post - December 15, 2017

Jakarta – The General Elections Commission (KPU) said on Friday that 12 out of 14 political parties attending administrative assessments for their participation in the 2019 presidential and legislative elections had been selected to enter the factual verification stage.

Meanwhile, two other parties, namely the Berkarya Party and the Garuda Party, failed in the administrative assessments. The Berkarya Party was initiated by the son of former president Soeharto, Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra.

KPU commissioner Hasyim Azhari said the Berkarya Party and the Garuda Party were unable to proceed to the next selection process because they failed to fulfill the minimum member requirement of party memberships in regencies and municipalities.

According to the 2017 General Elections Law, a political party aiming to participate in the elections must have at least one member in every 1,000 people.

"They failed to fulfill the minimum party membership requirement," said Hasyim as quoted by kompas.com during a press conference at the KPU headquarters in Central Jakarta on Thursday.

He further explained there were two types of documents they must fulfill to be considered "eligible" to proceed to the factual verification stage. The documents must be handed over to the KPU headquarters in Jakarta and KPU local offices (KPUD).

The documents are related to party leaderships, female representatives, offices, bank accounts and party memberships. (ami/ebf)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/15/12-parties-selected-to-enter-factual-verification-process.html

Airlangga takes charge amid drop in electability

Jakarta Post - December 15, 2017

Rendi A. Witular, Nurul Fitri Ramadhani and Kharishar Kahfi, Jakarta – The newly appointed chairman of the Golkar Party, Industry Minister Airlangga Hartarto, is gearing up to face significant challenges, not only on the electoral front but perhaps more importantly in internal party matters.

He said his highest priority in reforming Golkar was ensuring party unity, and that he would not rock the boat to immediately root out the bad apples in the party.

"Golkar consists of diverse interests. My priority is to unite all elements in the party at a time when our electability, based on recent surveys, is alarmingly low at 11 to 12 percent," he said on Thursday evening.

Despite being the second-largest party in the House of Representatives, Golkar's popularity among voters has nose-dived recently, mainly as a result of the involvement of former chairman Setya Novanto in the highprofile e-ID corruption case for which he is currently standing trial.

During Wednesday's late-night plenary meeting, Golkar decided to appoint Airlangga as party chairman and remove Setya. The party will inaugurate Airlangga in an extraordinary congress on Dec. 19 and 20 in Jakarta.

Airlangga said the unity of Golkar would again be tested during the upcoming congress. "I am not sure whether all elements in Golkar are firmly behind me. The outcome of the congress will serve as confirmation of the level of support and unity in the party," he said.

The congress will mark the second time the party has appointed its chairman by acclamation, following the acclamation of Aburizal Bakrie in 2014. Aburizal's appointment then led to a prolonged internal conflict that divided the party, with rival camps claiming Aburizal and Agung Laksono as party chairman.

Airlangga's appointment did not run smoothly. There were concerns that leading party officials would oppose the plenary meeting's decision and demand a vote to elect the chairman as several other senior members had previously expressed a desire to run for the chairmanship.

Senior lawmaker and Setya loyalist Aziz Syamsuddin had stated his readiness to be a chairman candidate. Secretary-general Idrus Marham and Siti Hedijati "Titiek" Soeharto, the daughter of former president Soeharto, also planned to throw their hats in the ring.

Several party executives confirmed that Aziz was backed by Aburizal, who would use Aziz as his "tool" to withdraw Golkar's support for President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo. However, they all stepped back in the last minutes preceding the plenary meeting after lobbying by Airlangga, a top party member said.

Believed to be close to Jokowi, Airlangga has guaranteed Golkar's support for the Jokowi administration and has committed to endorsing Jokowi for re-election in the 2019 presidential election. He has ordered all party members to abide by this commitment.

"I demand all Golkar members follow the mandate [supporting Jokowi]. Going forward, [there should be] no more factions in the party," Airlangga said, adding that he would make the party more transparent.

"My other priority is to eliminate the brokerage practices that are deep-rooted in the party. We will make a system in which candidates for local leadership will no longer deal with middlemen to get on the tickets. We should also ensure that Golkar will not be a family-run party; we are a 'publicly listed party' so we should not allow any room for this to flourish," he said.

Airlangga is likely to reorganize the central board and put in people he can trust. Golkar executive chief Nurdin Halid said such an arrangement would be on the agenda of the congress.

"After the inauguration of the new chairman, we will continue with the selection and appointment of new board members and then inaugurate them," he said after the congress' organizing committee meeting. "Should any member raise any objection in the congress, he or she can be dismissed [from the party]."

Airlangga will need executives who will support his political direction. "Airlangga has a tagline of Golkar Bersih [Clean Golkar]. Did the previous [leaders] have that kind of spirit?" Golkar deputy secretary-general Ace Hasan Syadzily said.

Idrus, however, demanded that Airlangga accommodate all members. "Power sharing is important – we have to consider those party members who have the skills for that [holding positions on the executive board]."

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/15/airlangga-takes-charge-amid-drop-in-electability.html

Nationalism & state ideology

Jokowi calls for stronger spirit of nationalism, diversity

Jakarta Post - December 17, 2017

Bambang Muryanto, Yogyakarta – President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo has called on the youth wings of Indonesia's two largest Islamic organizations, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah, to continue strengthening their spirit of nationalism and diversity to maintain the unity of the nation.

"For me, nationalism is the basis for the advancement of this nation," said Jokowi in front of members of NU's youth wing, Barisan Ansor Serbaguna (Banser), and Muhammadiyah's youth organization, Komando Kesiapsiagaan Angkatan Muda (Kokam).

The President was speaking during a call for readiness ceremony for Muslim youths at Siwa Field in the Prambanan Temple tourism park on Saturday.

Around 20,000 Banser and Kokam members attended the event themed "Pemuda Hebat Jaga Bumi (Great youths protect the earth)". President Jokowi, accompanied by First Lady Iriana, later planted trees on Siwa Field.

In his remarks, Jokowi said Banser and Kokam members were carrying on the struggle of kyai (Islamic teachers) and ulema (clerics), as well as heroes that had fought for the establishment of Islam as rahmatan lil alamin (a blessing for the universe) in Indonesia.

"You have to continue advancing Islam Nusantara [Islam of the Archipelago] and Islam that promotes development. We are a country with the biggest Muslim population in the world," said Jokowi.

The President further said that many countries had learned from Indonesia on how to maintain harmony amid ethnicity and religious diversity.

"Indonesia has become a source of inspiration on tolerance and cooperativeness." (ebf)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/17/jokowi-calls-for-stronger-spirit-of-nationalism-diversity.html

Surveys & opinion polls

Jokowi above Prabowo in Pollmark survey

Tempo - December 18, 2017

Ahmad Faiz Ibnu Sani, Jakarta – A survey conducted by Polmark says that the electability of President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) for the upcoming 2019 presidential election is above that of Gerindra Party chairman Prabowo Subianto at 41 percent against 15.9 percent.

Polmark Indonesia Executive Director Eep Saefullah Fatah added that 35.7 percent voters remain undecided.

The survey was conducted on 13-25 November involving 2,600 respondents across Indonesia. The method employed was multistage random sampling with a less than 1.9 percent margin of error and confidence level of 95 percent. The question was given in a face to face interview.

On top of their mind, 41 respondents answered Jokowi as their favorite candidate, whereas 15.9 percent answered Prabowo.

Meanwhile, other candidates also came up albeit failing to garner a significant amount of support. They are the Director Executive of the Yudhoyono Institute, Agus Yudhoyono (1.2 percent); Perindo Party chairman Hary Tanoesoedibjo (1.0 percent); Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan (0.9 percent) and former National Armed Forces chief Gatot Nurmantyo (0.7 percent).

When respondents were given a set of candidate pool and their profiles, Jokowi's electability increases to 50.2 percent and Prabowo rises to 22 percent. As for undecided voters, the percentage point dropped to 9.6 percent.

Eep said that the results show that incumbent Jokowi has the most convincing electability rating. "But the presidential race is not settled yet; we may see a surprise," he said.

Gerindra Deputy Secretary General Andre Rosiade predicts that the electability rating of incumbent may drop ahead of the election. "In our opinion, the survey shows that Jokowi is not as strong [as imagined] and is beatable. And come 2019 we believe that we will have a new president," he said.

Source: https://en.tempo.co/read/news/2017/12/18/055914199/Jokowi-Above-Prabowo-in-Pollmark-Survey

Internet & social media

FPI plans to protest at Facebook Indonesia's office over blocked

Coconuts Jakarta - December 20, 2017

It looks like Indonesia's most controversial Islamist hardliner group, the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) will be pretty busy for the foreseeable future.

In addition to protests against US President Donald Trump recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and raids on stores suspected of making their employees wear Santa hats, they have also confirmed plans to protest against social media giant Facebook at the Indonesian headquarters in Jakarta.

Although FPI representatives had already called for a blanket boycott on all things American including Google, Twitter and Facebook in relation to the Jerusalem protests, recently several FPI memes have been shared online through various social media networks (yes, they seem to be dimly cognizant of the irony) stating that the hardliner group plans to physically protest Facebook specifically.

What makes Facebook so special? Well according to this meme poster calling for the protest, one of the main reasons is that Facebook has banned multiple pages and groups related to FPI, with the screen at the top (opposite a photo of fugitive FPI leader Rizieq Shihab) depicting a message from Facebook indicating that an account has been deactivated for violating the site's terms of service, which include content that promotes violence or discrimination.

The middle section includes a litany of complaints that Facebook has blocked accounts for defending Islam, being anti-LGBT, pro-Palestine, pro-Sharia and pro-Caliphate, while accounts that criticize Islamic scholars, are pro-LGBT, anti-Sharia or anti-Caliphate are allowed to exist.

It is true that FPI's previously active official pages on Facebook seem to have been taken down (as well as on Twitter and Instagram), no doubt due to their violating Facebook's TOS regarding the promotion of violence and discrimination (in the past FPI members have physically tracked down and assaulted people for posting things critical of their organization, and their leader Rizieq in particular, on Facebook).

The final section of the meme poster says that a protest will be held at Facebook's offices in Jakarta, although it does not specify a time. It also asks that FPI followers report Facebook Indonesia's head to the police for blaspheming Islamic scholars and promoting LGBT.

The last few points ask that followers not use Facebook and tell other Muslims not to use Facebook and instead move to other social media (even though all the main ones are also American and have the same terms of service preventing hate groups like FPI from existing on their platforms). The very last point asks that Muslim researchers and scientists create a social media network exclusively for Muslims that is friendly to their ideology.

Asked to confirm whether the meme was real and came from FPI, the group's spokesperson Slamet Maarif said it did indeed come from FPI. "There will be (a protest action against Facebook), but the timing has not been determined. We are still doing our initial organizational meetings," Slamet told Liputan 6.

As we mentioned above, it looks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have all banned FPI's official accounts from their platforms (possibly at the request of the Indonesian government, who have sought to remove other radical groups from the internet in the past). Will the hardliners and those who follow them be consistent and start boycotting all major social media sites soon? That sounds nice to us, but we kinda doubt it since their followers are still using Facebook to spread the word about their plans to boycott and demonstrate against Facebook...

Source: https://coconuts.co/jakarta/news/fpi-plans-protest-facebook-indonesias-office-blocked-accounts-pro-lgbt-views/

National Narcotics Agency says viral post about milk-flavored candy

Coconuts Jakarta - December 19, 2017

We've said it time and time again: there is practically zero logical reason for drug traffickers to get kids hooked on narcotics, mainly because drugs are expensive.

The idea of drug dealers constantly slipping their valuable narcotics into kids' food so that they grow up to become addicts seems like a hell of an unrealistic long-term investment.

Yet hoax stories about candy being laced with narcotics continue to spread in Indonesia, despite being consistently shot down by officials.

The latest hoax story emerged last week. It began when a concerned parent posted on Facebook accusing a milk-flavored candy of containing drugs and leading to children losing their appetite and appearing high over several days. The post even claimed that they got the National Narcotics Agency (BNN) to investigate the candy, the result of which is that it was found to contain the psychoactive drug benzodiazepine.

But that's not what BNN actually said. "The candy has been tested in a BPOM (Food and Drugs Monitoring Agency) lab and it does not contain narcotics," BNN Public Relations Officer Sulistiandriatmo said today, as quoted by Kumparan.

A member of parliament, Dede Yusuf, who had been monitoring the case, confirmed that the viral post is a hoax. He also said he received information that only one kid exhibited the symptoms described in the viral post, but it was only because he was suffering from a cold.

We get that for parents, it's easy to freak out over unsubstantiated rumors if it concerns their children's well-being. It also doesn't help that BNN Chief Budi Waseso (the man who wants to build a special prison for drug dealers guarded by crocodiles) has publicly said that drug dealers are trying to get kids hooked early, even though his agency has never been able to find evidence to back up that claim.

Yet it's truly a shame that hoaxes like these are still able to go viral. At best, it shows just how gullible and susceptible to scaremongering many people are; at worst, people like the candy producers can lose their livelihoods over this kind of fake news.

Source: https://coconuts.co/jakarta/news/national-narcotics-agency-says-viral-post-milk-flavored-candy-laced-narcotics-hoax/

Environment & natural disasters

Jakarta court rules in government's favour in case involving pulp

Straits Times - December 21, 2017

Wahyudi Soeriaatmadja, Jakarta – An Indonesian administrative court on Thursday (Dec 21) rejected a petition by a major Indonesian pulp and paper company that challenged a government decision to void the firm's 10-year business plan.

PT Riau Andalan Pulp and Paper (RAPP), the operational unit of Singapore-based pulpwood company April, said on Thursday it would adjust the plan, which governs its daily operations, to meet Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MoEF) directives.

The dispute between PT RAPP and the MoEF involved differences over government efforts to speed up the pace at which plantation companies shift off flammable peatlands. PT RAPP has large areas of peatlands within its Sumatra concessions.

The ministry had accused the company of failing to comply with new peatland protection laws, which aim to prevent choking annual haze and encourage plantation firms to move their operations to non-peatlands through land swap deals.

April (Asia Pacific Resources International Limited) has said it protects large areas of peatland, which are a major source of haze in the dry season, in its concessions. But it called on the ministry to agree a more measured move off peatlands to avoid major business disruption and job losses.

The ministry disagreed and wanted PT RAPP to revise its 10-year work plan, which all plantation companies must submit for ministerial approval. Failure to comply means a company must halt operations.

PT RAPP had challenged the ministry's decision earlier this year to cancel the firm's business plan and sought the East Jakarta Administrative Court's help to mediate in the dispute.

A three-member panel of judges ruled against the company's petition on procedural, not legal grounds, on Thursday.

In a statement after the verdict, the company said: "PT RAPP intends to adjust the company's general working plan (RKU), as per directives from the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MoEF)."

"The newly revised (plan) will significantly impact our business activities. Nevertheless, we will comply with the directives from the MoEF."

In the meantime, the firm's pulp mill can keep operating but no planting and harvesting on the concession areas covered by the work plan can be carried out, affecting thousands of jobs.

PT RAPP was also challenging the ministry's reliance on a 2017 law that decreed plantation firms must quickly switch to non-peatlands via land swaps. The Supreme Court in October struck down the ministerial regulation, saying it was ambiguous and could cause legal uncertainty.

In its statement, the firm said: "We will continue to work to meet our commitment to conserve one hectare for every hectare planted (one for one goal), which currently stands at 83 per cent – or 419,000 hectares – of forest under conservation and restoration.

The company's concessions under the work plan cover a large area of fast-growing pulpwood trees such as acacia in Riau province, directly across the Malacca Strait from Singapore. More than half of this area is planted on peatlands.

Dr Bambang Hendroyono, secretary-general of MoEF, told The Straits Times the ministry gave PT RAPP 14 working days from Dec 8 to revise its work plan.

"We have set a target to have all work plans, that are peatland ecosystem-based, completed within this year. That is the ideal deadline," he said.

"We are facing a dry weather ahead and in 2018 we have Asian Games. We don't want to see anymore fire, haze then."

He said plantation companies, overall, did well in the recent prevention measures, adding: "But they have to reflect those in their respective work plans. Show us your plans for each year in your 10-year work plan.

"Now only about 40 per cent of the total 85 plantation companies have completed their work plans. If April group, which consists of more than 30 companies, complete their work plan, we will have 80 per cent of the 85 companies having completed their work plan.

Source: http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/jakarta-court-rules-in-governments-favour-in-case-involving-pulp-company-april

Indonesia's tsunami sensors don't work: Gov't official

Jakarta Globe - December 16, 2017

Telly Nathalia, Jakarta – All of Indonesia's tsunami buoys are inoperable due to vandalism and lack of maintenance, an official from the National Disaster Mitigation Agency, or BNPB, said on Saturday (16/12).

Indonesia is forced to rely on tsunami warnings from other countries' buoys in the Indian Ocean and on manual monitoring.

"Since 2012, we don't have buoys to monitor potential tsunamis," BNPB spokesman Sutopo Nugroho told reporters at his office in Jakarta.

According to him, all of the 22 buoys are down, as they have not been maintained properly and because fishermen use them to anchor their vessels.

When the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) issued a tsunami warning late on Friday night, after an earthquake registering 6.9 on the Richter scale struck southern Java, volunteers were monitoring the sea surface.

"We now rely on five buoys owned by foreign countries – India's buoy in the northern part of Aceh, Thailand's on the Andaman Sea, Australia's two buoys in the southern part of Indonesia, and one in the northern part of Papua owned by the United States," Sutopo said.

He added that even though disaster mitigation has improved after the 2004 tsunami ravaged the region killing hundreds of thousands, anticipating disasters is not part of Indonesian culture, which makes it difficult for the authorities to respond in time.

Without the buoys, our tsunami early warning systems are still working, but not optimally, he said.

Earthquake update

On Saturday morning, BMKG updated its data on the earthquake, saying that its epicenter was on the seashore, not on the floor of the Indian Ocean, as the agency previously reported.

"Three people died and 950 houses were destroyed by the main quake," Sutopo said. Several public facilities, including schools, hospitals and places of worship, were also damaged.

"Nineteen aftershocks were recorded so far," Sutopo told reporters.

Source: http://jakartaglobe.id/news/indonesias-tsunami-sensors-dont-work-govt-official/

Health & education

94% of babies in Bogor haven't received basic immunizations due to haram

Coconuts Jakarta - December 19, 2017

Indonesia is currently experiencing what doctors have called an "extraordinary" outbreak of diphtheria that has already killed dozens of people this year, mostly young children.

The government is currently undertaking a massive immunization program aimed at giving millions of children the diphtheria vaccine.

One of the main reasons for the outbreak, and one of the major challenges in getting Indonesian children vaccinated for diphtheria and other preventable diseases, is a growing anti-vaccination movement in the country largely fueled by unfounded suspicions that vaccines contain ingredients that are haram to Muslims, such as elements of pig DNA.

While we knew that the anti-vaccine movement has had a huge impact on immunization levels throughout the country, a statistic recently shared by the head of disease prevention and control at the Bogor Regency Health Office, Agus Fauzi, still shocked us.

According to Agus, about 94% of babies in Bogor, located just south of Jakarta, have not received mandatory basic immunization.

"There are still many people who are doubtful about whether vaccines are halal or haram," Agus said on Monday as quoted by Liputan 6.

The Indonesian Doctors Association has already assured the public that the diphtheria vaccines are halal. However, the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), Indonesia's highest Muslim clerical body, made headlines across the country last week saying they had not certified the vaccine halal, claiming that it had never been submitted to them for testing.

MUI officials did say that Muslims could take potentially non-halal medicines if it was a dire health matter but insisted that they could not yet say whether the diphtheria vaccines were halal or not.

The high percentage of children lacking basic immunizations in Bogor has already led to tragic results, with data showing that there had been nine cases of diphtheria in the regency so far this year and that two children died due to complications from the disease.

Agus said that news of the diphtheria outbreak had led to a large number of parents coming to local health centers to get their children vaccinated, and that they were hoping to get 95% of children immunized eventually. But tragically for some children, it may already be too late.

[The original title of this article was appended for length.]

Source: https://coconuts.co/jakarta/news/94-percent-babies-bogor-havent-received-basic-immunizations-due-haram-vaccine-fears/

LGBT & same-sex marriage

Indonesia's crackdown on gay men: 'It doesn't get better, does it'

New York Times - December 20, 2017

Jeffrey Hutton, Jakarta, Indonesia – Steven Handoko admits it wasn't his most dignified moment. Naked as the day he was born, the bookish 25-year-old had been invited on stage by one of the strippers hired for a party at the Atlantis Gym.

That hardly qualified as outrageous behavior in the red-light district of Kelapa Gading in North Jakarta, where the Atlantis was located. Nearby were plenty of venues with suggestive names like the Playboy Sensation, massage parlors for straight men. The Atlantis was a gay sauna in a conservative country, but given the generally live-and-let-live milieu of the Indonesian capital's night life, Mr. Handoko felt safe, if a little embarrassed.

But he wasn't. Soon after he took the stage, the police stormed the premises. Officers herded naked, cowering men into the middle of the room and began taking photos, some of which – including one of Mr. Handoko – appeared on Indonesian social media within hours. He and 140 other men were taken away.

"When a future employer Googles me, this is what they will see," Mr. Handoko, an aspiring journalist, said last week in an interview at Cipinang prison in Jakarta, where he has been held since the raid in May.

This week, prosecutors notified Mr. Handoko's family that he had been sentenced in absentia to two years and three months in prison, convicted of violating Indonesia's antipornography law, which includes a ban on striptease performances.

In Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-majority country, homosexuality has generally been tolerated, if marginalized. But that began to change last year, when the authorities, under pressure from right-wing Islamic groups, started arresting gay men in what experts say are unprecedented numbers, raiding not just bars and saunas but hotel rooms and private apartments.

The crackdown began in November 2016, when the police broke up a party in South Jakarta and detained 13 men. The most recent incident was in October, when 51 men were arrested at what is thought to be Jakarta's last gay sauna. (The Atlantis closed soon after the raid in May.)

Most of the hundreds of men swept up in the raids were released with no charges filed, and few cases have made it to trial. Nine other detainees from the Atlantis raid were sentenced last week to more than two years in prison.

But even men who weren't charged have been subjected to humiliating scrutiny and lurid news coverage, with their photos often posted on social media. Indonesian news outlets breathlessly detailed services offered at the Atlantis, like mock jail cells for role playing, and speculated that it was a hub for prostitution.

The authorities have justified the raids by citing the pornography law's loosely worded ban on material or actions that undermine public decency. Ade Armando, a communications professor at the University of Indonesia who helped draft the pornography statute, said the raids went well beyond the law's intent.

"It is not fair. It is not right what the police are doing there," Mr. Armando said. "Hotels are private places. The pornography law does not apply."

Historically, gay and transgender Indonesians have been accepted – if poorly understood – as long as they married people of the opposite sex and had children, said Tom Boellstorff, an anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, and author of "The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia."

Gay men have been caned in public in the autonomous province of Aceh, where Shariah law is enforced. But in the vast majority of Indonesia, anti-gay violence has been rare, and persecution of gay people by the state has been even rarer. While vigilante groups sometimes got headlines by shutting down gay film festivals or transgender beauty pageants, such violence was not state-sanctioned, Mr. Boellstorff said.

"Most Indonesians had no idea what 'gay' meant," he said. "This just was not on the government's radar." But that has begun to change in the last few years, as Indonesian politicians have seen advantage in appealing to hard-line Islamic sentiment.

In early 2016, the minister of higher education banned an L.G.B.T. student group from the University of Indonesia campus. Later, the broadcasting regulator banned the depiction of gay characters or effeminate men on television.

The defense minister likened homosexuality to nuclear war: While a bomb blast over Jakarta would at least be contained, he said, tolerance for gays could spread dangerously throughout the country. President Joko Widodo spoke up for the rights of L.G.B.T. citizens late last year, but to little avail; the wave of raids began the next month.

Last week, a conservative group's petition to ban all sex outside marriage, which would have effectively criminalized homosexuality, was narrowly rejected by Indonesia's Constitutional Court.

Mr. Boellstorff said the current crackdown on gay men had no precedent. "Things are worse now than they have ever been in Indonesian history" for gay people, he said.

Rights advocates had been skeptical that Mr. Handoko and the other Atlantis defendants would get fair trials. The head judge, Pinta Uli Boru Tarigan, was criticized by Human Rights Watch in 2011 for expressing contempt for the Ahmadis, a minority Muslim sect, while overseeing the trial of men charged in a mob attack that killed three of them.

Mr. Handoko said Judge Tarigan recounted the story of Sodom and Gomorrah at one of his hearings. "She had a poor record on human rights," said Ricky Gunawan, a lawyer for the Community Legal Aid Institute in Jakarta, which specializes in human rights cases.

Mr. Handoko said his family hired a lawyer chosen by the police, and he entered a guilty plea that was essentially a carbon copy of the prosecution's charges. A sister of Mr. Handoko, who asked not to be identified because she feared repercussions at her workplace, said the family had cooperated in hopes of a lenient sentence.

"We were worried that the court would be like quicksand," she said. "The more you struggle, the quicker you sink."

Mr. Handoko's sister had suspected something was wrong on the night of the Atlantis raid, when he uncharacteristically failed to respond to text messages. The next day, fearing the worst after colleagues said they hadn't heard from him, she left work early and drove home to be with her mother. On the way, cryptic messages of support began arriving from distant relatives.

At home she found her mother, a devout Christian, in tears – not just because her son had been arrested, but because he was gay.

Many Indonesians have struggled to put the news about the raids into context, because there are few positive examples of gay men in the popular media, Mr. Handoko's sister said. There is no Indonesian equivalent of "Brokeback Mountain," she said.

Mr. Handoko's mother has been supportive since overcoming her initial shock, as have other family members and friends. About once a week, she braves Jakarta's awful traffic, and the hour or so it takes to wind through security, to visit him in prison. His life there has been a dull routine of exercise, library and church. He said he hadn't been mistreated.

But Mr. Handoko, referring bitterly to the "It Gets Better" campaign aimed at bullied gay youths, was not optimistic about what the future held for a gay man in Indonesia. "It doesn't get better, does it," he said.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/world/asia/indonesia-gay-raids.html

Indonesian religion minister's contradictory LGBT 'embrace'

Human Rights Watch Dispatches - December 20, 2017

Phelim Kine – On Monday, he called for Indonesia's beleaguered lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) population to be, "nurtured, not shunned."

That would appear to mark a reprieve from the onslaught of anti-LGBT harassment, intimidation, arrests, and violence – fueled by hateful rhetoric from other government officials – that has besieged Indonesian sexual and gender minorities for the past two years.

But not so fast. Saifuddin also set strict limits on his tolerance for LGBT people. He called for "religious adherents" to "embrace and nurture" LGBT people by reacquainting them with religious teaching, while in the same breath asserting that, "there is no religion that tolerates LGBT action."

This is not Saifuddin's first foray into doublespeak. In February 2016, as Indonesian government officials embarked on a feeding frenzy of anti-LGBT rhetoric, he said: "We cannot be hostile [toward] nor hate [LGBT people] as they are also citizens of the state. This doesn't mean that we condone or allow for the LGBT movement to shift the religious values and the identity of the nation."

That same month he urged nonviolence toward LGBT people while suggesting they were "mentally ill" and in need of, "treatment – either psychological or religious."

That March he reiterated his conditional and contradictory approach to tolerance by calling for Indonesians, "to embrace [LGBT people] so they will be conscious that they live in a religious society which can't accept homosexuality."

And although Saifuddin attended an awards ceremony in August 2016 for the Alliance of Independent Journalists, which bestowed a prestigious freedom of expression award on two LGBT rights defenders, a week later he took pains to explain that he had no prior knowledge of the award winners' identities.

Such dissembling makes many LGBT Indonesians – including religious leaders like Shinta Ratri, who runs an Islamic boarding school for transgender women – skeptical of Saifuddin's embrace.

Saifuddin's flip-flops on tolerance for LGBT people are likewise no surprise to the country's imperiled religious minorities. Saifuddin's ministry is pushing a "Religious Rights Protection" draft law that in fact enshrines both Indonesia's abusive blasphemy law along with decrees that restrict religious minorities from constructing houses of worship.

Saifuddin should publicly recognize and defend the rights of LGBT Indonesians, not subject them to cowardly and contradictory platitudes on "tolerance."

Source: https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/12/19/indonesian-religion-ministers-contradictory-lgbt-embrace

Religious Affairs Minister: LGBT community must be embraced

Tempo - December 19, 2017

Muh. Syaifullah, Yogyakarta – Minister of Religious Affairs Lukman Hakim Saifuddin asked society not to excommunicate and avoid lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people.

Lukman Hakim said that LGBT people must be embraced, "They must be embraced. Not denounced or avoided," said Lukman at State University of Yogyakarta on Monday, December 18.

He urged people with religious beliefs to talk to LGBT communities to repent. In addition, Lukman asked religious figures to have an active role to embrace this community to revert back to the correct teachings of their respective religion.

"Religion teaches us that if we know that what they do is considered to be misguided, we are obliged to direct them back to the correct path," said the minister.

Previously, the Constitutional Court (MK) rejected the lawsuit submitted by a professor at the Bogor Agricultural Institute (IPB) Euis Sunarti who requested the court to expand the meaning of the Article on immoral activities in Lawbook No. 284, 285 and 292. Euis hoped that the LGBT community and people who practice consensual sex outside marriage can be criminalized and jailed.

The Religious Affairs Minister said that there is no legal or religious norm that allows LGBT and sex outside marriage practice. "According to the Law on Marriage, a marriage is religiously legal when it takes place between two different genders," said Minister Lukman.

Source: https://en.tempo.co/read/news/2017/12/19/055914231/Religious-Affairs-Minister-LGBT-Community-Must-be-Embraced

Indonesia court jails men for two years over 'gay sex party'

Agence France Presse - December 18, 2017

An Indonesian court has sentenced ten men to two years in prison for taking part in a gay sex party at a sauna, court documents show.

The group were among at least 141 men detained during a raid on a building that houses a sauna and a gym in the capital Jakarta in May.

While most were released, ten were charged and found guilty last Thursday of violating the country´s controversial 2008 anti-pornography law.

"(The defendants) have been proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt of displaying nudity and sexual exploitation collectively in public," said the documents, which have been reviewed by AFP. The North Jakarta Court also ordered the defendants to pay one billion rupiah ($73,700) in fines.

The sentencing is further evidence of growing hostility towards Indonesia's small lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.

Homosexuality and gay sex are legal everywhere in Indonesia except in conservative Aceh province, but police have used the country's tough anti-pornography laws or drugs charges to criminalise LGBT people in the past 18 months.

Rights groups condemned the decision to jail the men. "It is an abuse of these gay men's rights. It is not a crime, they did not hurt anyone," said Andreas Harsono, a Human Rights Watch researcher in Jakarta.

The men, who were tried in two separate closed court hearings, were sentenced the same day the Indonesian Constitutional Court rejected a bid to outlaw extramarital sex.

The unsuccessful petition would have affected both unmarried heterosexuals and gay people, who cannot marry in Indonesia. Its rejection was seen as a victory by LGBT communities.

Jakarta´s Community Legal Aid Institute, which often provide legal assistance to LGBT-related cases, said the timing was ironic.

"While the Constitutional Court said social norms should not be addressed using law enforcement, the North Jakarta court sentenced these people using such a problematic law," its director Ricky Gunawan told AFP.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-5190005/Indonesia-court-jails-men-two-years-gay-sex-party.html

Marriage & the family

'It's tradition': The child brides of Indonesia's Sumenep regency

Channel News Asia - December 16, 2017

Chandni Vatvani, Sumenep Regency – Bold makeup in hues of red and black lined their eyes, hair adorned with buds of jasmine, a bejewelled golden plate rested upon their foreheads, while more gold complemented vibrant clothing cinched at their waists.

Their small hands were intricately lined with a type of dye resembling henna; and while they looked like miniature human dolls, their faces were glum. Shifty-eyed, fidgety and trying to keep their nervousness in check, these are the child brides and grooms of Sumenep Regency at their wedding.

Getting to Sumenep is no easy feat. The regency is 170km away from Surabaya, Indonesia's second-largest city, on the island of Madura.

You'll have to fly from Jakarta to Surabaya, which could take anywhere between 75 and 90 minutes and then embark on a four-hour drive; this is how we found ourselves driving into the regency one morning, passing dozens of salt farms along the way.

A reception to remember

The children, six of them, were at their wedding reception being held at a field with a large tent in the district of Dungkek.

According to guests, the children had just married that morning – the oldest was a fourteen-year-old boy who married a 13-year-old; the youngest, a four-year-old child, was wed to a five-year-old boy, and the last couple were a pair of six-year-olds.

Parents of the brides and grooms took turns between standing at the entrance of the tent to welcome guests and accompany their children, who sat quietly on the sidelines of a feast held in their honour.

Alimatus Sadya, a mother of one of the brides explained that child marriage is commonplace in Madura. "If anyone asks for the hand of your first child in marriage, you have to agree," she said.

Her daughter, the oldest bride at thirteen years old, lurched forward and retched as she struggled to keep her emotions at bay. She was quickly pacified by Ms Alimatus and others around her.

The space under the tent was divided into two sections, one for men and the other for women. Plush velvet sofas with golden frames sat atop a stage on one end. This is where guests were taking photos with the newlyweds prior to the feast.

A band positioned at the centre of the tent played traditional music and female dancers were putting on a show for the men, dancing closely with them while being showered with rupiah bills.

A group of men and women in each section were also huddled together as they made a note of every gift that the families of the children received, both of monetary and non-monetary value.

Another parent, Fitri, who goes by one name as many Indonesians do, explained that the children had been matched by their parents – her son and daughter had both been married off.

"Well, over here it's like that, they're married off at a young age; it's tradition," she said with a laugh. "I am so happy."

Embedded in tradition

In 2016, the National Statistics Agency supported by UNICEF launched two reports on child marriage. The report showed that the rate of child marriage in Indonesia remains high, with over one in four girls marrying before reaching adulthood.

Based on data from 2008 to 2015, the percentage of "ever-married" women aged 20 to 24 who married before the age of 18 across 33 provinces in Indonesia ranked by average prevalence, placed West Sulawesi in the top spot, while East Java ranked 14th.

Research done in June this year by an NGO, the Rumah Kita Bersama Foundation, showed that close to 70 per cent of the people in Madura's Sumenep regency married before the age of 18.

The district of Dungkek had the highest number of child marriages in the regency, with about 80 per cent of its nearly 4,000 people – as per national population records in 2015 – having married as children.

Executive director for the foundation, Lies Marcoes Natsir, said that in Sumenep, it is usually because parents want a debt repaid.

"The people have a tradition, usually if they throw a party, they receive a lot of support from their neighbours – and this is a reciprocal occurrence, actually," she explained.

"So, they can throw a party because other people owe them a debt. Now, this has been in practice for a very long time, their ancestors did this and they always make a note," said Lies.

"So if one family has a child, and they feel they want to collect what is owed to them from their neighbours – to whom they have already provided some sort of support – 'tumpangan' is what they call it – they will organise the marriage of their child, even if the child is still little."

According to Lies, one of Indonesia's foremost experts in Islam and gender as well as a women's rights activist, the goal is to collect a debt. So, in the event of a drought for example, or in times of financial difficulty, families tend to get their children betrothed and organise a party.

In the case of younger children, the marriage is known as a "hanging betrothal". This arrangement means that while their marriage has been solemnised, they are "promised" to each other.

The children will only live together as husband and wife when they are deemed to be old enough by their parents to do so, which could be when they are as young as 14 years old. Until then, the children live separately and continue their education, only for the "husband" to visit his "wife" during holidays and religious celebrations.

A secret affair

Fifteen-year-old Uus (not her real name) married her boyfriend last year when she was just 14. He was 19 at the time and he had asked her parents for her hand in marriage. The two had known each other for a year.

"We were only married by a religious teacher... compared to just being boyfriend and girlfriend, such an unclear status, it's better to have something that is certain," she said, a reason which resonated with several of the child brides Channel NewsAsia spoke to.

Muslim marriages in Indonesia must be registered at the government's Religious Affairs Office (KUA), something Uus and her husband have not done. This means that the two do not have a marriage certificate. "We haven't gone to the religious office; I'm not legal yet," said Uus.

What the young couple have done is known as "nikah siri", which translates to mean unregistered or secret marriages – this is highly prevalent in Sumenep.

Indonesia's 2002 Law on Child Protection prohibits marriage under the age of 18 under any circumstances, and such a marriage cannot be registered at the Religious Affairs Office.

But the country's marriage laws are murky. Under the 1974 Marriage Law, which sets the legal parameters for marriage in the country, parental consent is required for all marriages under the age of 21.

With parental consent, girls can legally marry at the minimum age of 16 and boys at 19, providing they obtain approval from the religious court.

Parents can also file a petition at the religious court or district court to apply for an exemption and get their daughter to marry even earlier, with no minimum age limit, pending an approval.

"Well, if possible, we approve their request if the bride is 16 years old, because they are already mentally mature, so I think it's okay," Risana Yulinda, head of the religious court in Sumenep Regency told Channel NewsAsia.

"But sometimes in the event that the child is two months, three months shy of turning 16, we'll also approve the request because it's just a little bit of time,"

Applications to marry off children below the age of 16 years were assessed on a case-by-case basis, she said.

"Are they Muslims? Are there any obstacles to the relationship such as them being siblings? Is there a proposal from someone else? If they marry, is their husband ready to provide for them? Are they pregnant? These are all factors that we consider," said Risana.

But anecdotal evidence suggests that many parents skip getting an approval from the court. Instead, couples apply for a retroactive confirmation of the marriage when they reach an age deemed legal by Indonesian law.

According to Risana, couples generally apply for a retroactive confirmation when they need to get their paperwork in order. For example, if they need to make a passport, or if they need to make a birth certificate for their child, these situations require a marriage certificate.

There were more than 200 couples in 2016 who applied for confirmation, she said. With no way for authorities to prove that they were children when the marriage took place, such loopholes only make underage marriages all the more difficult to tackle.

While tradition is a main factor for the practice, according to observers, religion plays a key role in its support.

"Religion has made it legitimate for members of the community to say that getting a child married is the right of the guardian, and when they get a child married, they base that right on the fact that the Prophet married Siti Aisyah when she was nine years old," said Tatik Hidayati, a lecturer at the Anuqqayah Institute of Islamic Sciences.

"So they use that as a justification that Islam doesn't forbid it." These factors only add to the age debate.

An uphill battle

Records from the National Statistics Agency shows that there were 554 couples who divorced in 2016. There were also 55 cases of underage marriage sentenced by the Religious Court of Sumenep in the same year.

While there is no official data on whether the two overlap, or how many of the divorced couples married as children, authorities say the high divorce rate can be attributed to child marriage, and that they are working to tackle the issue through community engagement, by implementing various programmes.

"In fact in our planning programme, the most ideal age for women (to marry and bear children) is 21 years old, for men it is 25, which is the most ideal. According to their mental state, they are ready," said Herman Poernomo, Head of Sumenep's Empowerment of Women, Child Protection & Family Planning Office.

"If you marry your child off and he or she isn't happy or prosperous, then what's the point?" asked Herman, with the question he said he generally posed to parents wanting to marry off their children.

But many parents in Sumenep feel bound to the practice out of fear of their girls becoming so-called "spinsters", a status attached to societal stigma.

Sumarni was married at the age of 13. While she has a daughter of her own now, she said her parents were worried that she would always remain single, which is why they arranged for her marriage. "The first night (together) I didn't know anything, I only knew how to cry."

According to Sumarni, once a child is married, they become their husband's responsibility, and this also motivates many parents to marry their children off.

There is also a general sense of concern among parents in the regency of their children spending time in close physical proximity with members of the opposite sex, sparking fears among parents who worry that it "could lead to something."

Authorities have said that they cannot force parents who are accustomed to these traditions forego the practice, but what they have been trying to do is familiarise them with the consequences in an effort to approach the issue with sensitivity.

Marrying as children is detrimental from a health perspective as well, parents are told. "A child who marries below the age of 15 and then gives birth, from a physical point of view it is not her time to give birth yet, so a woman's reproductive organs are not ready for pregnancy," said Hajah Kusmawati, head of health promotion at the regency's health office.

She also cited the list of possible health conditions a pregnant child might go through in the course of giving birth, the extremity of which, is death.

"Abortion or the aborting of a baby because the child isn't ready (to become a parent), internal bleeding, having a baby born underweight, then there's also asphyxia, and a long labour.

"On the psychological front, the child is still a teenager, she will still wants to 'have fun playing'; automatically, she won't be optimal in taking care of a child she gave birth to," Hajah said, adding that the parents or grandparents will take care of the child in such cases.

Data cited by the regency's health office said that of about 69,200 teenagers in Sumenep, nine were pregnant in 2016, lower than the office's 15-person estimate for the year.

According to Hajah, while children in the regency still got married, nowadays, they were likely to wait to before having children, at least until they turned 18 years old.

The health office, just like Sumenep's Empowerment of Women, Child Protection & Family Planning Office, also engages the community with their programmes, which propagate healthy marriages at the age of 21 for girls, and 25 for boys.

In addition to their familiarisation programmes, the department provides counselling for children and parents as well, including having a dialogue with those who attempt to legitimise the practice by bringing religion into the matter.

Despite these programmes, the regency's authorities emphasised that the country's conflicting marital laws are an obstacle in their efforts. According to them, the onus is on the central government to revise the rules.

Mounting pressure

Religious teachers have always played a key role in advising members of the community on traditional practices.

"Some traditions need to be upheld while others, child marriage among them, don't," stressed K Safraji, head of the Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI) in Sumenep regency, or the Indonesian Ulema Council, Indonesia's highest clerical body.

In 2015, Indonesia's Constitutional Court rejected an application to raise the marriageable age for girls from 16 to 18 years, on the grounds that raising the marriageable age would not guarantee a reduction in divorce rates nor would it solve health and social problems.

But, in a landmark moment, female clerics this year urged the government to do just that. They issued an unprecedented fatwa or edict against child marriage after a three-day congress held in Cirebon, West Java province.

While an edict is non-binding, it is influential – and serves as a guideline for Muslims to practice their faith according to the local context.

Earlier this year, the government also said that it would seek the help of male clerics, who deliver Friday prayer sermons in mosques to campaign against the practice of child marriage.

In Sumenep, these movements have begun but haven't made much progress yet, with majority of the clerics in there unaware of the efforts.

"So far, no one from the government has come to familiarise us with these efforts yet to prevent child marriage," said Lestariyadi, a cleric and head of the Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesia's biggest Muslim organisation, for Sumenep's Batang-Batang district.

He added that he was optimistic about a positive change, at least for Sumenep's children, if authorities spread word about the programme and got everyone on board to carry it out. Indonesian Ulema Council Head, K Safraji said they had already begun engaging the community to spread awareness on the problem.

The Council also implemented a strict vetting process when families approached them to get their children married he said, being sure to ask questions about age, and whether the couple had gone to the Religious Affairs Office to register their marriage.

One problem he said which still occurs and which they are trying to tackle is the manipulation of data. "Just sometimes, there is some manipulation done by the parents, where they will tell the Office that a child is say already 16 years old, when in reality, he or she is just 11," he said.

Committing to a sustainable goal

Indonesia has committed to achieving its Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, its aims include eliminating all harmful practices against girls and women including child marriage.

But the Indonesian Coalition to End Child Marriage (18+ Coalition) in November issued a statement saying there had been no significant decrease in the number of child marriage rates in the past eight years.

The group cited data from the National Statistics Agency which showed child marriage rates were 27.4 per cent in 2008, and while they declined to 22.8 per cent in 2015, the rates went up to 25.7 per cent in 2017.

The group has accused the government of failing to commit to its goal. "This indicates that the alleviation of child in marriage Indonesia has suffered a setback," the group said in its press release.

Indonesia is ranked 37 on the global child marriage index and is the second highest in Southeast Asia after Cambodia. With statistics like these, Lies Marcoes Natsir of the Rumah Kita Bersama Foundation said the situation concerning child marriage had reached a "critical" phase – at "emergency" level.

But while the problem is multi-layered, Lies is optimistic that the issue can make headway on certain conditions which should be addressed ahead of others.

"There are two conditions that I believe should be addressed immediately. The first one, is the state's willingness to explore the possibility of reproduction and sexual education," she said.

Pregnancy is also one of the reasons children are forced to marry she explained. "We conducted research in 2014-2015 in nine regencies across five provinces, and we found that out of 52 children who were married, 36 among them got married because they were pregnant, pregnant and underage."

In this context, the Religious Affairs Office (KUA) and the Religious Court fall under pressure from parents. According to Lies, if the Religious Affairs Office declines to approve their marriage, parents would then go to the village branch and marry off their children without officially registering them, or, they would manipulate data such as the date of births and make the marriage happen.

The second issue according to Lies has to do with mindset. "I believe is that if the child is already pregnant, what should be done – the child has two choices – either abortion or to bring the pregnancy to full term without having to marry."

Lies went on to explain that the government must be brave enough to be able to tell people not to punish the baby or the mother, whether for being illegitimate or having so-called "bad morals".

"If the government or all of us can be open and honest about these facts, then there is hope," she said. "But if this is not carried out, even if there is a national effort, or a coalition among the ministries, but they do not want to be open about sexuality, then it will be very difficult."

Source: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/it-s-tradition-the-child-brides-of-indonesia-sumenep-regency-9478014

Corruption & abuse of power

Golkar to withdraw from KPK inquiry at House

Jakarta Post - December 21, 2017

Jakarta – Under the leadership of Airlangga Hartarto, the Golkar Party will withdraw its support for the controversial inquiry initiated by the House of Representatives to probe the work of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK).

Happy Bone Zulkarnaen, an aide to Airlangga, said that with the move, Golkar expected to improve its standing ahead of the 2019 general election. Golkar's electability rating has taken a hit following graft allegations leveled at some of its politicians, including outgoing party chairman Setya Novanto.

"The mood of the moment is for us to protect the KPK," Happy said as reported by tempo.co on Wednesday.

Happy said the planned move to withdraw support for the inquiry was consistent with Airlangga's plan to clean up the party and improve its chance of success in the 2019 election.

Following the KPK's move to investigate cases in which lawmakers had been implicated, the House launched an inquiry into the antigraft body as it believes the latter has become a super body and is plagued with irregularities.

The political party of President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), meanwhile, said it had no plan drop its support for the House inquiry.

"We have not received a directive to change course. We continue to support the inquiry," PDI-P central board member Trimedya Pandjaitan said as reported by tempo.co.

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/21/golkar-to-withdraw-from-KPK-inquiry-at-house.html

Celebrity lawyers fail to show up for questioning in BLBI graft probe

Jakarta Globe - December 15, 2017

Alin Almanar, Jakarta – Prominent lawyers Todung Mulya Lubis and Abdul Hakim Garuda Nusantara failed to attend questioning on Thursday (14/12) as witnesses in a high-profile graft case related to the Bank Indonesia Liquidity Assistance (BLBI) bailout funds.

The lawyers would have testified against former Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency (BPPN) chairman Syafruddin Arsyad Temenggung, who was named a suspect in the case earlier this year.

The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) investigators did not explain why Todung and Abdul failed to show up, but said the meeting will be rescheduled.

A total of Rp 144.5 trillion ($10.64 billion) in BLBI funds were disbursed to 48 commercial banks during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98.

Bank Dagang Nasional Indonesia (BDNI) received Rp 28 trillion from BLBI and had to return Rp 4.8 trillion, but Syafruddin issued a letter releasing BDNI owner Sjamsul Nursalim from the obligation to pay Rp 3.7 trillion of the debt.

Such letters should only have been released officially by the BPPN in coordination with the Financial Sector Policy Committee (KKSK), whose involvement in the BLBI scheme is also currently being examined by KPK investigators.

"The witnesses had been hired to provide legal assistance for KKSK," KPK spokesman Febri Diansyah told the Jakarta Globe.

Thursday's questioning would have been "on what the witnesses knew of the conditions at BDNI and of Sjamsul Nursalim at that time," Febri said.

KKSK was established by then President Habibie to oversee the BPPN when it was trying to get money back from BLBI recipients.

A 2002 presidential instruction issued by Habibie's successor, President Megawati Soekarnoputri, strengthened KKSK's mandate. The KKSK was headed by then Coordinating Economic Minister Dorodjatun Kuntjoro-Jakti.

Its members included then Finance Minister Boediono, National Development Planning Board Chairman Kwik Kian Gie, State-Owned Enterprises Minister Laksamana Sukardi and Trade and Industry Minister Rini Soemarno.

Dorodjatun, Kwik Kian Gie and Laksamana Sukardi have all faced KPK questioning as witnesses in the BLBI case.

The prolonged graft investigation commenced about four years ago. Former BPPN chairman Syafruddin remains the sole suspect in the case.

Source: http://jakartaglobe.id/news/celebrity-lawyers-fail-show-questioning-blbi-graft-probe/

Terrorism & religious extremism

Indonesian women migrant workers are becoming increasingly radicalized

Jakarta Globe - December 19, 2017

Sheany, Jakarta – Indonesian women migrant workers in Hong Kong have been targeted by extremist groups to raise funds for acts of terrorism through social media, experts said on Tuesday (19/12).

According to Solahudin, a researcher at the Terrorism and Social Conflict Studies Center at the University of Indonesia, social media has played a key role in the radicalization of Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong.

"The radicalization process occurs very rapidly, because extremist groups on Facebook, Telegram and Whatsapp spread their propaganda very intensively," Solahudin said during a public discussion in Jakarta, citing popular used social media platforms.

Women make up around 95 percent of more than 150,000 Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong. Most of them are employed as maids, nannies or caretakers for the elderly.

In July, Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC) published a report estimating that there are 45 Indonesian women migrant workers in Hong Kong actively supporting the Islamic State.

A number of terrorist cases in the past year have been traced back to Indonesian women who had previously been migrant workers.

That includes a woman who prepared to carry out a suicide bombing attack at the presidential palace in Jakarta last December. More recently, another woman was involved in plans to detonate a chemical bomb in the West Java city of Bandung in August. Both plans were foiled by the police.

Radicalization traditionally occurs among or between people with close relations, such as parents and children, or teachers and students. However, Maulana Syahid, head of the international law sub-directorate in the National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT), said that the development of technology and cyberspace has changed this.

"Groups like [Islamic State] are very good at utilizing cyberspace. People without relations in day to day life are now exposed to the dangers of being radicalized," Maulana said, adding that both online and offline activities often influence each other in the radicalization process.

Chairwoman of the International Migrant Alliance (IMA), Eni Lestari, said radical groups have used social media to exploit vulnerable migrant workers.

"Many migrant workers express their struggles and hardships through social media... and this becomes a tool [for extremist groups] to exploit them easily, by tapping into their vulnerabilities," Eni said.

Established in 2008, IMA is a global alliance of organizations made up of grassroots migrants, refugees and displaced persons with 120 member organizations from more than 30 countries.

More freedom, higher threat

The alarming trend of radicalization among Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong can also be traced to the freedom of expression enjoyed by Hong Kong residents, as opposed to their counterparts in Saudi Arabia or Malaysia; countries where many Indonesian migrant workers are also employed.

"Migrant workers in Saudi Arabia or other countries in the Middle East do not have the same freedom as migrant workers in Hong Kong," Maulana said.

Easier access to information in Hong Kong means that radical content is also more likely to reach a willing audience. According to Solahudin, migrant workers in Hong Kong are targeted by extremist groups for fundraising purposes.

"Migrant workers in Hong Kong are the target of several groups, especially those affiliated with Islamic State. Their earnings are relatively higher than migrant workers in other countries, and some of them are active donors to extremist groups," Solahudin said.

Source: http://jakartaglobe.id/news/indonesian-women-migrant-workers-becoming-increasingly-radicalized-social-media/

Religious intolerance & vigilantism

Indonesian police warn Islamists against raids in search of Santa hats

Reuters - December 21, 2017

Jakarta – Indonesian police appealed on Thursday for tolerance and respect for other people's religious celebrations after an Islamist group threatened to raid businesses to check for Muslims being forced to wear Santa Claus hats or other Christmas garb.

The hardline Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) said this week it would conduct "sweeping operations" in the world's biggest Muslim-majority country, and that forcing Muslims to wear Christmas attire was a violation of their human rights.

Indonesia is home to several religious minorities, including Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and people who follow traditional beliefs. The constitution guarantees freedom of religion in an officially secular state though tension between followers of different faiths can flare.

"There can be no sweeping operations... members of the public should respect other religions that are carrying out celebrations," national police chief Tito Karnavian told police during a security exercise in the capital, Jakarta.

The FPI said it aimed to enforce a fatwa, or decree, issued by Indonesia's Islamic Clerical Council in 2016 prohibiting business owners from forcing employees to wear Christmas clothing.

"We will raid businesses in anticipation of them being stubborn about this and we will be accompanied by police," said Novel Bakmukmin, head of the FPI's Jakarta chapter.

Employers forcing staff to wear Christmas clothes were violating their rights. "Businesses should be aware that there should be no forcing," he said.

The Islamic Clerical Council's decrees are not legally binding but serve as guidelines for Indonesian Muslims.

Christmas is widely celebrated across Indonesia and holiday decorations are ubiquitous, especially at shops, restaurants and malls where many enthusiastic workers – even Muslims – don Santa hats or elf costumes.

The FPI built its reputation with raids on restaurants and bars serving alcohol during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. In recent years, it has turned its attention to Christian celebrations.

The group has also said it wants the Jakarta city government to stop sponsoring New Year celebrations, which attract many thousands of people. About 90,000 police officers will be on duty cross the country during the end-of-year holidays, in an operation largely aimed at preventing militant attacks.

Attacks on churches in Jakarta and elsewhere on Christmas Eve in 2000, killed nearly 20 people. Ever since, authorities have stepped up security at churches and tourist spots for the holiday.

[Reporting by Djohan Widjaya and Kanupriya Kapoor; Writing by Kanupriya Kapoor; Editing by Robert Birsel.]

Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-christmas-season-indonesia-security/indonesian-police-warn-islamists-against-raids-in-search-of-santa-hats-idUSKBN1EF0KK

Islamic Defenders Front warns it'll raids stores suspected of forcing

Coconuts Jakarta - December 19, 2017

Last year, the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), the country's highest Muslim clerical body, released a fatwa saying it was forbidden for any Muslims to wear "attributes" of any non-Muslim holidays or for business to force their Muslim employees to wear them (the "attributes" the fatwa refers to are, in reality, almost always the Santa Claus hats that become ubiquitous in Indonesian malls and shops around Christmas).

Predictably, the hardline Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) took it upon themselves to enforce the non-legally binding fatwa by conducting raids (or sweeps as they're often referred to in the local press) on stores. In some instance they were even escorted by the police in their sweeps while other times they were blocked by law enforcers.

Government officials ranging from Tito Karnavian, the head of the National Police, to Wiranto, the coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, have warned that no sweeping by vigilante groups would be tolerated this year.

Of course, FPI is ignoring those warning and said they're going to go sweeping once again this year should the need arise.

"If (there are cases of Muslims being forced to use Christmas attributes) that have been reported but not followed up, then yes (we would sweep) we would not want Muslims to be forced," said FPI Jakarta leader Muhsin Alatas in an SMS to CNN Indonesia today.

Specifically, Muhsin said they would act if there were reports of employees complaining about being forced to use Christmas attributes that were then ignored by the police.

Muhsin said that FPI along with other Islamic organizations would then meet with any swept company's owner to make them sign a statement pledging not to force their Muslim employees to use the non-Muslim holiday attributes.

The Jakarta FPI head was careful to say that while they would accept complaints from the public, they would not act on them directly but would instead direct them to the police to take action. If the police didn't act on that information, then he said FPI along with other Islamic organizations would take the matter into their own hands.

"So the police must follow up on community reports so that the people are happy and proud," Muhsin said.

MUI did remind the public about its anti-Christmas attributes fatwa this year and reminded employers not to make their employees wear them. But it had also issued warnings to moral vigilante groups like FPI not to conduct sweeps. We'll see if they follow MUI's warning, or if they will disobey it to enforce their fatwa.

Source: https://coconuts.co/jakarta/news/islamic-defenders-front-warns-itll-raids-stores-suspected-forcing-employees-wear-santa-hats/

Sex, pornography & morality

Alleged adulterers in sea for 'cleansing', fined and banished from

Coconuts Jakarta - December 21, 2017

While modern laws exist in Indonesia, cultural traditions still play a huge part in the lives of people in many parts of the country, including for punishing immorality.

A video taken in Palu, Central Sulawesi has gone viral recently, showing the area's uniquely traditional punishment method for adulterers. The video showed locals gathering at a beach on Monday to witness two alleged adulterers being walked out to sea until the water was about knee-deep, before they were told to sit in the water for a "cleansing" rite.

According to media reports, the rite lasted for about an hour. The alleged adulterers were then fined some millions of rupiah before they were banished from their village for good.

While this very public act of shaming is not legally mandated by law in the region, the media also reported that the cleansing rite was attended by local government officials, religious figures, as well as police chiefs, suggesting that it is commonly accepted among locals.

This is despite the fact that adultery can be punishable by up to nine months imprisonment under the country's Criminal Code (KUHP), but only if the cheating party is reported to the authorities by their spouse.

"Throughout the activity, the situation was safe and controlled. The two (alleged adulterers) were caught in mid-November," said West Palu Police Chief Sudirman, who was in attendance, as quoted by Tribun.

Public shaming for adulterers and people getting intimate out of wedlock is unfortunately common in Indonesia, especially in rural areas. Last month, a man and his fiance were stripped naked and paraded on the streets in Tangerang after locals, including a neighborhood chief, wrongly accused them of committing an "immoral act" at the woman's home.

[The original title of this article was "Alleged adulterers from Sulawesi bathed in sea for 'cleansing', fined and banished from village".]

Source: https://coconuts.co/jakarta/news/watch-alleged-adulterers-sulawesi-bathed-sea-cleansing-fined-banished-village/

Bengkulu drafts 'dress code' bylaw to curb sexual violence

Jakarta Post - December 20, 2017

Jakarta – The Bengkulu Provincial Legislative Council (DPRD) is drafting a regional bylaw on child protection and family resilience that stipulates proper dress and bans "sexy clothing" in public, reports kompas.com.

"The bylaw comes from concerns over sexual violence and rape against women and children in Bengkulu. This is one of our efforts to mitigate such cases," the head of Commission IV overseeing health and education affairs, Muharamin, said on Tuesday.

Bengkulu caught national attention in 2016 for a sexual violence case. In the case, 14-year-old student YY was gang-raped and murdered by 14 male students in her hometown in Rejang Lebong regency. The case triggered a nationwide movement urging better protection of children and women, as well as a call to put an end to sexual violence.

Muharamin admitted that the draft contained a ban on wearing provocative clothing in public, especially for students. For example, female students should not wear skirt uniforms that rise above the knee or tight-fitting clothing. The draft bylaw also stipulates how people should dress in public spaces and at formal events.

Once the draft was completed, the Bengkulu DPRD would start the deliberations next year, he said, adding that most party factions and executives had indicated their approval of the draft.

The director of the PUPA community learning center for women and children in Bengkulu, Susi Handayani, criticized the draft bylaw, saying that it should not only stipulate a public dress code.

"Boys and girls must also be taught to respect each other. Female health reproduction must also be given attention," she said.

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/20/bengkulu-drafts-dress-code-bylaw-to-curb-sexual-violence.html

Censorship machine ready to block porn in Indonesia

Jakarta Post - December 19, 2017

Jakarta – With pornographic content flooding the internet, the government is set to use a censorship machine starting next year to surf the net to block porn.

The machine would begin operations in January after a handover process on Dec. 29, Communications and Information Ministry's information applications director general Samuel Abrijani said.

"The control room is located on the eighth floor of the Ministry's office," he said on Monday as reported by Antaranews.com.

The censorship machine uses a "crawling" system to automatically analyze inappropriate content based on inputs and categories set by the ministry. Samuel said the system was different to surveillance.

"Crawling is not meant for surveillance, in which we monitor [activities] silently, but looks for the [inappropriate content]," he said adding that the ministry would not use it for surveillance measures against people.

Besides aiming to block pornographic content, the machine could also be used by request by other institutions such as the National Narcotics Agency (BNN) to look for narcotics related content or the Food and Drug Monitoring Agency to search for unregistered food and drugs sold to the public.

The ministry acquired the machine worth Rp 211 billion (US$15.6 million) through a tender process in August.

Reports have said that the country is among the top three in world for the number of residents who access pornographic content via the internet. (vla/rin)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/19/censorship-machine-ready-to-block-porn-in-indonesia.html

Indonesian province plans to outlaw 'sexy' clothes as solution to

Coconuts Jakarta - December 18, 2017

Throughout much of Indonesia, government officials are becoming increasingly aware that the country is facing a hidden epidemic of gender-based violence.

While women's rights activists are fighting to get the government to enact a draft bill to comprehensively address sexual violence (through mechanisms such as increased protections for victims and witnesses, increased access to justice, recovery and reparation mechanisms for victims) the regional representatives council for Bengkulu (DPRD), a province on the island of Sumatra, has a different idea for preventing violence against women and children in their region.

Their solution? Outlawing sexy clothes. The DPRD of Bengkulu is currently discussing a draft regional regulation (raperda) on "child protection and family protection," a major component of which is a prohibition on sexy clothing.

According to reporting by local newspaper Rakyat Bengkulu, seven of the eight political parties in the DPRD have voiced their support for the proposed legislation.

Ir Muharamin, the chairman of DPRD Bengkulu's Commission IV, said he strongly supported the draft bill due to emergency levels of violence against children in Bengkulu reported this year, saying that there had been 105 cases of violence and 126 cases of rape in that time.

The media reports on the bill we've seen did not clarify what, if any, specific definition of "sexy clothes" is being used in the draft regulation. Muharamin did apparently mention that, while the bill had the overwhelming support of most political parties, they were still discussing whether it would require all women, especially Muslim women, to wear headscarves and whether the law would apply to women inside private residences as well as in public.

Unsurprisingly, the Bengkulu chapter of the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) has voiced its strong support for the bill, especially the prohibition on so-called sexy dress.

"The incidences of sexual crimes are not solely caused by the mistakes of the men, but also many are caused by sexy women's clothes that do indeed invite intentions. So (this regulation) is not only about protection, it would also require women to protect themselves," said the head of the Bengkulu MUI Fatwa Council, H Supardi Mursalin, as quoted by Rakyat Bengkulu, in a statement that could be used as a textbook example of victim blaming.

The head of the PAN faction in the Bengkulu DPRD, H Parial, said that the law would give severe sanctions to those who violated the law by wearing clothes that were, for example, too tight or too transparent. Ultimately, he believes that doing so will "limit the intention of perpetrators of crimes to do undesirable things."

"In essence we want to suppress the high number of crimes against children and women. So far, the number of rapes, domestic violence and murders is very high. In addition, it is caused by other factors such as pornography as well as a lack of awareness in terms of religion," Parial said.

If you think this kind of thinking is limited to a province like Bengkulu, you'd sadly be mistaken.

It was actually the horrific gang rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl in Bengkulu in April 2016 that put the issue of sexual violence into the national spotlight after women's rights advocates drew media attention to the tragic case.

However, instead of placing the blame squarely on the perpetrators, Female Empowerment and Child Protection Minister Yohana Yembise insisted the girl's parents were also to blame as they had been busy working instead of protecting their child and even suggested that the parents receive sanctions for their culpability in their daughter's horrific murder.

Source: https://coconuts.co/jakarta/news/indonesian-province-plans-outlaw-sexy-clothes-solution-violence-women-children/

West Jakarta authorities struggle to tackle social ills with arrests

Jakarta Post - December 16, 2017

Jakarta – In response to residents' complaints about social problems in several areas of West Jakarta, the Social Support, Observation and Control (P3S) taskforce of the West Jakarta Social Affairs Agency, along with personnel of the West Jakarta Military Command, conducted a raid on people considered to have "community-related or social problems" (PMKS) on Friday night.

During the raid, the agency took 17 people into custody. Four of them are reportedly sex workers, the others are buskers, beggars and alleged drug users.

They were taken to the Bina Insan Social House in Kedoya, West Jakarta, to be registered and undergo counseling aimed at keeping them off the streets.

The agency says it is busy day and night monitoring and disciplining people it categorizes as having PMKS, but agency head Surya said some people were playing cat and mouse with the authorities.

He added there were some locations where raids had proven unsuccessful, because information on the measure had been leaked beforehand.

"We will fire our officers if we find out that they have leaked information [about the raid]," he said Saturday, as reported by wartakota.tribunnews.com. (rdi)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/16/west-jakarta-authorities-struggle-to-tackle-social-ills-with-arrests.html

Land & agrarian conflicts

Yogyakarta airport developers warned not to 'steal' people's land

Jakarta Post - December 16, 2017

Bambang Muryanto, Yogyakarta – The National Commission for Human Rights (Komnas HAM) has demanded that state-owned airport operator PT Angkasa Pura I consider human rights aspects while working on the construction of a new airport in Kulonprogo, Yogyakarta.

The project should be free from human rights breaches, in particular when it comes to land ownership, the organization said. "Please, do not steal the citizen's lands in the name of infrastructure development," said Komnas HAM commissioner Choirul Anam.

Choirul added that he had received reports from local activists claiming that people of Glagah village were being forced by the company and police to give up their land. Thirty of some 2,700 families living on the disputed land reportedly insist on staying in their homes. Choirul suggested the company engage in dialogue with the people to find a solution.

"This is not only about land ownership; the eviction also threatens the people's culture and social wellbeing," he said, noting that violence could create even more problems.

Meanwhile, PT Angkasa Pura, through the manager of the New Yogyakarta International Airport (NYIA) construction project, Sudjiastono, claimed it had done everything in line with the law on land procurement for public utilities construction.

According to the regulation, he added, the company was allowed to forcibly evict people who refused to give up their land in return for compensation through the court. "We've respected the people's rights by giving them compensation, more than they deserve to get," he said. (vla/dmr)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/16/yogyakarta-airport-developers-warned-not-to-steal-peoples-land.html

Indigenous culture & rights

Acknowledgment of indigenous rights only 'symbolic,' commissioner says

Jakarta Post - December 21, 2017

Moses Ompusunggu, Jakarta – The government has only acknowledged Indonesia's indigenous cultural diversity through "symbolic" activities while at the same, it has failed to fully protect indigenous communities across the country, a rights advocate said on Wednesday.

National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) commissioner Sandrayati Moniaga said one of the 'symbolic' activities staged by the current administration was Indonesia's 72nd Independence Day celebration held at the State Palace in Jakarta on Aug.17, during which President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo, his Cabinet ministers and all participants wore traditional attire from the archipelago.

However, when it comes to its responsibilities to provide administrative and legal acknowledgment of indigenous people in Indonesia, the government's efforts have been "minimal," Sandrayati said.

"Criminalization has become a logical consequence of the state's attitude toward indigenous people, in which it has not yet acknowledged their presence and their rights, especially their land," Sandrayati told a press conference held by the Alliance of Indigenous People of the Archipelago (AMAN).

Komnas HAM last year launched an national investigation into the condition of indigenous people living in forests in Indonesia. The investigation revealed the numerous human rights violations they had suffered from a long time.

Sandrayati said indigenous communities had long been denied access to their own customary boundaries, creating long-standing economic and social problems as a result of their lack of freedom to harness natural resources.

She said the problems stemmed from the designation of customary forests as state land by the Suharto administration in the 70s to 80s, paving the way for the massive expansion of forestry, mining and plantation businesses. (ebf)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/21/states-acknowledgment-of-indigenous-people-only-symbolic-commissioner-says.html

2017 not 'a friendly year' for RI indigenous people: Alliance

Jakarta Post - December 20, 2017

Moses Ompusunggu, Jakarta – Indigenous communities in Indonesia have faced rampant rights violations throughout 2017, a rights group said on Wednesday.

Alliance of Indigenous People of the Archipelago (AMAN) secretary-general Rukka Sombolinggi said indigenous leaders fighting to defend their land had been criminalized this year while the government was slow to acknowledge custodial forests.

Rukka further said there had been a decline in trust of indigenous people toward the government of President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo, who had pledged to improve their livelihoods and defend their rights during his presidential campaign in 2014.

"We were enthusiastic in 2014 and remained that way until 2015. We were a bit disappointed in 2016 and finally we lost our spirit in 2017," Rukka told a press conference.

She said 2017 was filled with violence against indigenous people, who found themselves in a difficult position as they defended their land.

Rukka further said AMAN was disappointed by the lack of progress in the acknowledgement of custodial forests by the government, although various rights groups had submitted a map of customary boundaries that covered 8.2 million hectares across the country.

Jokowi acknowledged in 2016 the forests belonging to nine indigenous communities that covered 13,122-ha while this year, his administration had acknowledged only 3,092-ha of forests. (ebf)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/20/2017-not-a-friendly-year-for-ri-indigenous-people-alliance.html

Jakarta & urban life

Jakarta is sinking so fast, it could end up underwater

New York Times - December 21, 2017

Michael Kimmelman, Jakarta – Rasdiono remembers when the sea was a good distance from his doorstep, down a hill. Back then he opened the cramped, gaily painted bayside shack he named the Blessed Bodega, where he and his family sell catfish heads, spiced eggs and fried chicken.

It was strange, Rasdiono said. Year by year, the water crept closer. The hill gradually disappeared. Now the sea loomed high over the shop, just steps away, held back only by a leaky wall.

With climate change, the Java Sea is rising and weather here is becoming more extreme. Earlier this month another freakish storm briefly turned Jakarta's streets into rivers and brought this vast area of nearly 30 million residents to a virtual halt.

One local climate researcher, Irvan Pulungan, an adviser to the city's governor, fears that temperatures may rise several degrees Fahrenheit, and the sea level as much as three feet in the region, over the coming century. That, alone, spells potential disaster for this teeming metropolis.

But global warming turned out not to be the only culprit behind the historic floods that overran Rasdiono's bodega and much of the rest of Jakarta in 2007. The problem, it turned out, was that the city itself is sinking.

In fact, Jakarta is sinking faster than any other big city on the planet, faster, even, than climate change is causing the sea to rise – so surreally fast that rivers sometimes flow upstream, ordinary rains regularly swamp neighborhoods and buildings slowly disappear underground, swallowed by the earth. The main cause: Jakartans are digging illegal wells, drip by drip draining the underground aquifers on which the city rests – like deflating a giant cushion underneath it. About 40 percent of Jakarta now lies below sea level.

Coastal districts, like Muara Baru, near the Blessed Bodega, have sunk as much as 14 feet in recent years. Not long ago I drove around northern Jakarta and saw teenagers fishing in the abandoned shell of a half-submerged factory. The banks of a murky canal lapped at the trestle of a railway bridge, which, until recently, had arched high over it.

Climate change acts here as it does elsewhere, exacerbating scores of other ills. And in Jakarta's case, a tsunami of human-made troubles – runaway development, a near-total lack of planning, next to no sewers and only a limited network of reliable, piped-in drinking water – poses an imminent threat to the city's survival.

Sinking buildings, sprawl, polluted air and some of the worst traffic jams in the world are symptoms of other deeply rooted troubles. Distrust of government is a national condition. Conflicts between Islamic extremists and secular Indonesians, Muslims and ethnic Chinese have blocked progress, helped bring down reform-minded leaders and complicated everything that happens here, or doesn't happen, to stop the city from sinking.

"Nobody here believes in the greater good, because there is so much corruption, so much posturing about serving the public when what gets done only serves private interests," as Sidney Jones, the director of the local Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, put it. "There is no trust."

Hydrologists say the city has only a decade to halt its sinking. If it can't, northern Jakarta, with its millions of residents, will end up underwater, along with much of the nation's economy. Eventually, barring wholesale change and an infrastructural revolution, Jakarta won't be able to build walls high enough to hold back the rivers, canals and the rising Java Sea.

And even then, of course, if it does manage to heal its self-inflicted wounds, it still has to cope with all the mounting threats from climate change.

How it got so bad

As far the eye can see, 21st-century Jakarta is a smoggy tangle of freeways and skyscrapers. Spread along the northwestern coast of Java, this capital of the nation with the world's largest Muslim population used to be a soggy, bug-infested trading port for the Hindu kingdom of Sunda before local sultans took it over in 1527. They named it Jayakarta, Javanese for victorious city.

Dutch colonists arrived a century later, establishing a base for the East India territories. Imagining a tropical Amsterdam, they laid out streets and canals to try to cope with water pouring in from the south, out of the forests and mountains, where rain falls nearly 300 days out of the year. Thirteen rivers feed into the city.

After independence in 1945, the city began to sprawl. Today, it is virtually impossible to walk around. Parks are rarer than Javan rhinos. A trip to the nearest botanical garden requires the better part of a day in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

"Living here, we don't have other places to go," said Yudi and Titi, a young professional couple who one recent Sunday had made the roughly hour's round trip from western Jakarta to the center of the city just to spend a few minutes walking up and down a chaotic, multilane freeway briefly closed to traffic. "Without cars, at least you can breathe for a few minutes," Titi said.

The most urgent problems are in North Jakarta, a coastal mash-up of ports, nautically themed high-rises, aged fish markets, abject slums, power plants, giant air-conditioned malls and the congested remnants of the colonial Dutch settlement, with its decrepit squares and streets of crumbling warehouses and dusty museums.

Some of the world's most polluted canals and rivers weave a spider's web through the area. It is where the city is sinking fastest. That's because, after decades of reckless growth and negligent leadership, crises have lined up here like dominoes.

Jakartan developers and others illegally dig untold numbers of wells because water is piped to less than half the population at what published reports say are extortionate costs by private companies awarded government concessions.

The aquifers aren't being replenished, despite heavy rains and the abundance of rivers, because more than 97 percent of Jakarta is now smothered by concrete and asphalt. Open fields that once absorbed rain have been paved over. Shores of mangroves that used to help relieve swollen rivers and canals during monsoons have been overtaken by shantytowns and apartment towers.

There is always tension between immediate needs and long-term plans. It's a similar story in other sinking giants like Mexico City. Here, all of the construction, combined with the draining of the aquifers, is causing the rock and sediment on which Jakarta rests to pancake.

Construction has skyrocketed as businesses and foreigners have arrived, and also because rural Indonesians have been fleeing the lowlands of Sumatra and Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo. They have been driven out by coal mines and tobacco farms. The effect on the countryside has been disastrous, with the burning of rain forests to make way for palm oil producers and textile factories causing fires so smoky they have caused air pollution to spike as far away as Malaysia, contributing to climate change.

These factories also dump tons of waste and chemicals into waterways, contaminating the city's drinking water supply.

And many of the rural poor have settled in Jakarta in informal developments, or kampungs, that cluster along canals, their houses teetering above the water on stilts, the waterways underneath becoming default sewers.

All of these homes, all of this sewage and garbage now jam pumping stations that the city has had to build because gravity no longer drains the rivers and canals naturally.

To halt the sinking, the city needs to stop the digging of wells, which means Jakarta must provide residents with reliable, clean, piped-in water and, to clear the waterways, somehow – at a cost of untold billions – retrofit one of the world's biggest cities with a sewer system, or something approaching it.

Cleaning the canals and rivers will also require policing the factories that dump chemicals, which means grappling with corruption – and resettling many of the informal communities. But resettlement depends on finding land and then building thousands of new homes for displaced residents, most of whom don't want to move in the first place.

A difficult solution: Evictions

One afternoon I met a man named Topaz in the ruins of an evicted waterfront kampung named Akuarium. A soft-spoken 31-year-old events organizer, Topaz described himself as a third-generation resident of what used to be a thriving informal neighborhood with four-story buildings and bustling streets filled with shops.

That was before the bulldozers arrived. The Akuarium had been reduced to mounds of broken masonry and concrete.

"The government said the eviction was about cleaning the river, but I believe it was about politics and development," Topaz told me, reflecting a belief widely held among residents. He showed me around the tattered, windswept tent he shares with a dozen other squatters not far from where his family home used to be. Over his shoulder, several luxury waterfront apartment towers were under construction. "I saw promotions for those towers that showed Akuarium turned into a park," Topaz said.

Jakarta's former governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as Ahok, ordered the eviction. He is ethnic Chinese, a geological engineer by training. As governor, he tackled several of Jakarta's big problems, or tried to. He tried, but failed, to wrest control of the water supply from the private companies. He assembled a sanitation crew, called the Orange Army, to remove sediment and garbage from rivers and canals.

And he cleared out some of the kampungs that obstructed waterways. The efforts began to make a difference. Rains that once caused days of floods drained within hours.

But many people forced out, like Topaz, resisted the moves, convinced that the evictions were really intended to enrich developers, not improve drainage. Akuarium became a hotbed of protest against the governor.

Capitalizing on residents' resistance and the piety of the urban poor, the hard-line Islamic Defenders Front teamed with some of the governor's political rivals and religious conservatives to tap into a vein of anti-Chinese populism. Ahok's enemies escalated what had been a conflict over the displacement of a fishing community into an argument about whether a non-Muslim should lead a Muslim-majority city.

The governor found himself regularly attacked at Friday prayers. He lost his re-election bid, and the Islamists, who exploited anger against him, had him brought up on charges of blasphemy. He is serving two years in prison.

The new governor of Jakarta, Anies Baswedan, who ran a campaign that drew support from Akuarium's angry residents, announced in November as one of his first acts that he planned to rebuild some of the shelters at the kampung.

At another evicted settlement called Bukit Duri, I met Agus Fadilah, 34, a motorbike-taxi driver, gazing at the rubble of what used to be his house on the banks of the Ciliwung, one of the city's main rivers. Bulldozers were still moving piles of debris, and a few women were scavenging for family belongings.

Upstream, several other kampungs had already been cleared, the river widened, its banks lined with concrete and surrounded by high concrete walls, now tagged with graffiti. The river there looks imprisoned, but water flows more easily.

"I was raised here, my job was here," Mr. Agus said, noting that he, his wife and two young children had been relocated to a new apartment building hours away. They make long daily commutes because they want to keep the children in their old schools.

"I know why they did this," he told me. "It had to do with the river. I know this was not legally our land. But it was my home."

Residents of Bukit Duri filed a class-action lawsuit against the government to protest the evictions. Recently, a district court judge ruled in their favor.

"It's not that nobody should move," argues Elisa Sutanudjaja, a kampung advocate and the executive director at the Rujak Center for Urban Studies. "These poor communities don't all want to stay in place, but they do want to stay together and near their jobs, and they want legal status. "Mostly, they want to be consulted," she said.

They also want to show, where possible, that moving isn't the only solution. In a leafy kampung called Tongkol, residents during the last couple of years have installed their own septic tanks and kept their stretch of the Ciliwung clean. A young architect named Kamil Muhammad, from Architecture Sans Frontieres-Indonesia, designed a low-cost home made of concrete, bamboo and reused brick. It stacks seven tiny apartments under a covered communal roof deck.

The project is a template for cheap, do-it-yourself housing that can free up space along Jakarta's waterways critical for flood control.

"We want to demonstrate to the government that kampungs can actually be beneficial to the river," Kamil told me as we looked over the river from the roof deck. Below, banana and star fruit trees shaded a riverside promenade of colorful facades and vegetable gardens.

JanJaap Brinkman, a hydrologist who for decades has been studying Jakarta for the Dutch water research institute Deltares, sympathizes with residents of communities like Akuarium and Tongkol. Eviction isn't a cure-all, or even possible, he said, considering how many countless thousands of Jakartans now live atop the canals and rivers in informal developments. At the same time, Mr. Brinkman stressed, moving people is necessary, and bungled evictions squander a meager reservoir of good will and precious time.

"We need big steps now," he said. "If all the discussions get tied up with fishermen and development, there will eventually be a massive calamity and deaths and no choice but to give up on whole parts of Jakarta."

Halting progress

There is occasional talk here about the Indonesian government moving its capital elsewhere, to shrink the city. Politicians issue decrees prohibiting developers from digging wells and imploring residents to store rainwater. Enforcement is negligible.

Mr. Brinkman drove me one morning to the city's new 16-mile Eastern Flood Channel, its banks lined with parkland. The channel has helped relieve flooding. From there we toured a century-old water gate, also recently repaired. "A few years ago this was solid waste," Mr. Brinkman said, gesturing across the wide, murky water. On the opposite bank, sanitation crews in bright orange outfits gathered around garbage trucks. They belonged to Ahok's Orange Army.

"This gate is nothing like it used to be," Mr. Brinkman said. "You used to be able to walk across the water, it was so clogged with garbage and sediment."

As he spoke, one of the orange-clad sanitation workers leaned his head back, polished off a bottle of water and tossed the empty plastic container over one shoulder into the river.

Real progress is often thwarted here. The most ambitious move by the city is the construction of what's called the Coastal Wall, now rising like a black cliff from Jakarta Bay. It's a quasi-temporary barrier to hold back the rising sea and compensate for subsidence – built extra high because, like the rest of North Jakarta, it is expected to sink, too. With subsidence at the current rate, the Coastal Wall itself may be underwater by 2030.

Even more alarming, Mr. Brinkman showed me one spot along the waterfront where the wall ends and all that holds back the sea is a low, crumbling concrete rampart. The water was only a couple of feet below the top when we peered over the embankment.

"If this wall breaks, there's simply no holding back the Java Sea," said Mr. Brinkman, gesturing from the rampart toward the city. "Jakarta will flood all the way to the center of town, six kilometers from here. I could take you to 20 other places just like this."

The Coastal Wall belongs to a larger project that Indonesian officials undertook three years ago in collaboration with the Dutch government. Called the National Capital Integrated Coastal Development program, it imagines supplementing the Coastal Wall with a second barrier, a Giant Sea Wall, or massive dike, miles out to sea, in effect closing off Jakarta Bay entirely.

The dike would not just block rising waters. According to the original plan, it would also become the spine for an immense new megadistrict and ring road, a $40 billion development – and a windfall for real estate moguls and Dutch consultants – designed in the shape of a garuda, the national bird.

The Great Garuda, as it came to be called, was Jakarta's Big Idea. Or it was until just lately.

The government has now backtracked on the megadistrict idea, while still envisioning the dike itself – the very notion of which has provoked understandable skepticism. As environmentalists have pointed out, if the city doesn't first clean up its rivers and canals, a dike will turn an enclosed Jakarta Bay into the world's largest cesspool.

The development scheme was also linked to discredited plans for reclaimed islands inside the bay. Delayed for years by recession and legal wrangling, the islands started to get built in 2013, marketed as posh oases of condominiums, yacht marinas and golf courses primarily to customers in places like Malaysia and Singapore.

Enraged fishermen sued, claiming that the islands destroyed their traditional fishing grounds. When one developer was exposed for bribing local officials, a scandal erupted and construction was halted.

At the same time, the islands had become tied up with the Great Garuda. Officials, including Ahok, realized that a tax on the islands' developers could help Indonesia pay for the giant dike, along with other costly initiatives to clear waterways and stop the sinking.

In essence, a plan that environmentalists and many poor fishermen agreed would wreak environmental havoc on the bay and North Jakarta was being touted by Jakartan leadership as a means to save the city itself – and from climate change.

Ardhasena Sopalheluwakan is among the climate scientists here who think the best approach was never to construct a giant dike but "to give back part of North Jakarta to nature," as he put it to me one recent morning. The idea would be to "reintroduce mangroves and rejuvenate some of the dozens of reservoirs that were actually part of old Jakarta."

From Mr. Brinkman's perspective, just "counteracting subsidence will account for 90 percent of what this city needs to do to deal with climate change."

Tokyo was in a similar predicament after World War II, he likes to point out. It had sunk about 12 feet since 1900. But the city poured resources into new infrastructure and established stricter rules about development, and within a decade or two made itself a global model of urban innovation, better able to cope with the effects of climate change.

"Jakarta could become a 21st-century version of Tokyo in the 20th century, an example for urban redevelopment," Irvan Pulungan, the climate change adviser to the city's new governor, imagined.

But "a city that can't deliver basic services is a failed city," he added. "On top of conventional issues like flooding and urbanization we now have climate change, tipping the scale. And at this rate, people will be fighting in the streets for increasingly limited resources like clean water and safe living spaces."

Like Tokyo half a century ago, Jakarta is at a turning point, he said: "Nature will no longer wait."

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/21/world/asia/jakarta-sinking-climate.htm

Sandiaga threatens 'shoot to kill' for drug dealers fleeing arrest

Jakarta Post - December 20, 2017

Ivany Atina Arbi, Jakarta – Jakarta Deputy Governor Sandiaga Uno has declared that the administration will take a hard stance in its fight against drug trafficking in the capital, including a "shoot to kill" policy for drug dealers that resist arrest.

"We are serious [in fighting drugs], we will '810' drug dealers who try to evade authorities' pursuit," Sandiaga recently said at City Hall, referring to the police code for shooting and killing a potential suspect that attempts to flee arrest.

He added that the administration had been cooperating with the Jakarta Narcotics Agency.

Amnesty International Indonesia recorded that at least 80 suspected drug dealers were shot dead this year by law enforcement personnel, a significant increase from 18 last year.

The growing number of shooting deaths by law enforcement has raised concerns that the country's fight against drugs could follow in the footsteps of the controversial anti-drug policy in the Philippines.

Amnesty International recorded that 7,000 people had been killed up to February 2017 in anti-drug operations in the Philippines, which has reportedly been tainted by many irregularities.

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/20/sandiaga-threatens-shoot-to-kill-for-drug-dealers-fleeing-arrest.html

Catholic priest says no to Christmas celebrations at Monas

Jakarta Post - December 19, 2017

Jakarta – Catholic priest and social observer Benny Susetyo has said that Governor Anies Baswedan's plan to celebrate Christmas at the National Monument (Monas) square in Central Jakarta is unnecessary.

"The Christian tradition calls for the celebration to be held on church premises," Benny said as quoted by Warta Kota on Monday.

Benny emphasized that it was important for Christian believers to remain modest for the celebration, adding that the city's budget could be better allocated for more productive matters.

"We do not need funds from the regional budget for the Christmas celebration. [The celebration] is not that important. It would be better to allocate the budget to help support poor children," he said.

Benny also warned that the celebrations might disturb public order as a huge crowd of Christmas revellers would worsen traffic around the venue.

"Many residents will be affected [if the celebration is held]," he said, saying that the historic square should be restored to its original function as a cultural preservation site.

Despite rejecting Anies' plan, Benny said he was convinced that Anies' invitation to Christians to celebrate Christmas at Monas square was not made with any vested interests.

Earlier this month, Governor Anies Baswedan announced plans to organize a joint Christmas celebration at Monas square. Deputy Governor Sandiaga Uno stated that the administration was even willing to pay for the event.

Last week, the Indonesian Communion of Churches (PGI) in Jakarta turned down the offer in favor of holding an indoor event instead. (gis/dmr)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/19/catholic-priest-says-no-to-christmas-celebrations-at-monas.html

City tightly selecting, editing meeting videos before uploading

Jakarta Post - December 18, 2017

Jakarta – The public is able to once again access videos of Jakarta executive meetings on YouTube for significantly shorter durations of four to 13 minutes per video as a result of tight selection and editing.

Video recordings of executive meetings were initially made public during the tenure of then Jakarta governor Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama before he was jailed in May for blasphemy.

The move was regulated under a 2016 Jakarta gubernatorial regulation. However, the current administration decided to stop making meeting proceedings public because of mockery, said Deputy Governor Sandiaga Uno last week, which drew harsh criticism.

Jakarta Communications, Information and Statistics Agency head Dian Ekowati said the administration would review the content of each video before uploading it to YouTube in an attempt to prevent people from having the wrong perception of the administration's policy plans.

The administration decided to resume uploading the videos on ThursdayHowever, the administration will not, for instance, upload videos of discussions on planned policies as it could result in misperception among the public, Dian said.

"We will review the footage first to see what can be delivered to the public," Dian said on Monday as quoted by kompas.com.

Dian said she hoped the administration would revise Jakarta Governor Regulation No. 159/2016 on uploading videos of leadership meetings.

The regulation stipulates that meeting recordings should be uploaded no later than three days after a meeting. "We hope the regulation can be reviewed because three days are not enough for us to review the videos," Dian said. (cal)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/18/city-tightly-selecting-editing-meeting-videos-before-uploading.html

Jakarta nightclubs targeted following drug raids

Jakarta Post - December 18, 2017

Jakarta – Nightclubs across Jakarta have been put on notice following a raid on the MG International Club in Grogol Petamburan, West Jakarta, on Sunday, as the city authorities plan to intensify operations against nighttime entertainment centers.

The operations against nightclubs will be aimed at curbing drug use, Jakarta Public Order Agency (Satpol PP) head Yani Wahyu Purwoko said on Monday.

The production and sale of liquid methamphetamine at MG club was uncovered during the raid, which was conducted by the National Narcotics Agency (BNN) in cooperation with Tanjung Duren Police and the military.

The raid resulted in the city administration immediately shutting down the club.

Yani said the agency would hold routine patrols to monitor nightclubs in Jakarta, especially those suspected of facilitating drug-dealing activities.

"We will first check the administrative licenses and operational hours of the clubs as well as the activities inside," Yani said as reported by wartakota.tribunnews.com.

The patrols would be conducted by the agency and the Jakarta Military Police (Pomdam Jaya), Yani added.

Last month the city administration closed down the Diamond Discotheque in West Jakarta following allegations that drug distribution occurred inside the venue.

In October, Anies ordered the shutdown of Alexis Hotel and massage parlor in North Jakarta for allegedly facilitating prostitution. (cal)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/18/jakarta-nightclubs-targeted-following-drug-raids.html

City administration resumes publishing meeting videos

Jakarta Post - December 18, 2017

Jakarta – The Jakarta administration has resumed uploading videos of executive meetings on YouTube, after the decision to halt uploading the material earlier this month incurred strong public criticism.

The Jakarta Communications, Information and Statistics Agency restarted uploading the videos last Thursday, with the newest videos concerning upgrades to Block VI of Central Jakarta's Senen Market, the restoration of the Ciliwung River near Kampung Pulo in East Jakarta, leakage at Luar Batang embankment in North Jakarta, a discussion on improving the welfare of Thousand Islands residents, and the governor's direction on the performance of city officials.

Other sets of videos covered the preparation for New Year's Eve activities, cooperation with the National Land Agency (BPN) in regard to land certification, and Public Order Agency head Yani Wahyu Purwoko's response to criticism of his agency by the Indonesian Ombudsman.

Two videos of meetings from last month were also uploaded. One of them was about the realization of tax revenues while the other was about the 2017 city budget absorption.

The duration of the videos vary from four to 13 minutes, significantly shorter than those uploaded during the administration of former governors Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama and Djarot Saiful Hidayat, which used to last for half an hour to one hour for a single video.

Previously, Deputy Governor Sandiaga had admitted that videos of various meetings were no longer being uploaded to YouTube, because many people "made fun" of the new leaders as they watched the videos. (dis)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/18/city-administration-resumes-publishing-meeting-videos.html

PGI refuses to celebrate Christmas at Monas

Jakarta Post - December 15, 2017

Jakarta – The Indonesian Communion of Churches (PGI) has said it will not participate in a Christmas celebration planned by Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan at the National Monument (Monas) in January 2018. Instead, the PGI has chosen to celebrate the occasion indoors.

"We decided to celebrate Christmas at an indoor venue instead of at the Monas because we didn't want to cause a disruption at the monument, which is a neutral venue," the chairman of PGI's Jakarta chapter, Manuel Raintung, said during a press conference on Friday.

Manuel said PGI Jakarta gave suggestions to the governor last Monday on several indoor venues in which the celebration could be held, including JIExpo Kemayoran and Mega Glodok Kemayoran Mall in Central Jakarta.

"We appreciated the positive initiative [of the governor]; however, we needed to consider that not every religion celebrates their religious holiday openly," he said, adding that celebrating Christmas outdoors in Jakarta was unusual.

Separately, PGI spokesperson Jeirry Sumampow said PGI would invite the governor to attend the PGI Christmas celebration in January. "I haven't received any information about the exact date and location yet, but we will invite them [Anies and Deputy Governor Sandiaga Uno] to the event regardless," he said.

Anies announced earlier this month that the city administration would hold a Christmas celebration at the Monas, where several Islamic organizations have held events in the past, including a reunion event of last year's 212 rally that saw Muslims demand for the prosecution of former Jakarta governor Basuki "Ahok" Tjahaja Purnama for blasphemy. (dpk)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/15/pgi-refuses-to-celebrate-christmas-at-monas.html

Sport & recreation

Activists urge government to improve air quality ahead of Asian Games

Jakarta Post - December 19, 2017

Callistasia Anggun Wijaya, Jakarta – Several environmental activists from the Clean Air Movement have urged the government to pay attention to air quality in Jakarta ahead of the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta and Palembang, South Sumatra given the high level of air pollution in the country.

Committee for the Phasing Out of Leaded Fuel (KPBB) executive director Ahmad Safrudin said from 2011 to 2016 the air in the country had been exposed to pollutants such as particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5), Sulfur Dioxide, Ozone, Carbon Monoxide, Nitrogen Oxide and Lead.

The toxic air had been caused by the use of motor vehicles, forest and land fires, power plants and smelters, construction and waste processes, as well as household activities, Ahmad said on Monday.

"The health of international athletes competing in Indonesia in August 2018, could be threatened by the poor air quality in Jakarta and Palembang. They may fail to break records or get sick," he said in a statement.

Ahmad said last year 58.3 percent of Jakarta residents suffered sickness as a result of air pollution, leading to a total of Rp 51.2 trillion (US$3.8 billion) being spent on getting medical treatment.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to improve the air quality, the Jakarta administration has planned to set vehicle emissions tests as a requirement to renew vehicle registration certificates (STNK).

The Jakarta Environment Agency plans to procure seven sets of vehicle emissions test equipment next year to go ahead with the plan.

Indonesian Consumers Foundation (YLKI) researcher Sudaryatmo said the government should provide access for residents to monitor the air quality.

The regulations on ambient air and emissions standards should also be revised by considering the impact of pollution on people's health. "The standards of ambient air quality and emissions should be based on the latest health research, not on the interest of the industries," Sudaryatmo said.

Researcher from the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law (ICEL), Margaretha Quina, said the government should engage the public in revising Environmental Minister Regulation No. 21/2008 on ambient air quality standards and Government Regulation No. 41/1999 on air pollution control.

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/18/activists-urge-government-to-improve-air-quality-ahead-of-asian-games.html

Transport & communication

Indonesia's mega fast-rail project runs into trouble

Asia Times - December 21, 2017

John Mcbeth – What China Wants These Days, It Usually Gets. But Not, It Seems, In Indonesia And Not When It Involves Buying Land For Infrastructure Ventures, Particularly When Money Fails To Talk.

After Being Pushed Out Of The 142-Kilometer Jakarta-Bandung Fast-Rail Project For Seeking Sovereign Guarantees, The Japanese Must Be Smiling Behind Their Hands Now China Finds Itself Hamstrung By An Issue It Should Have Seen Coming.

As Much As President Xi Jinping Complains To Indonesian Counterpart Joko Widodo About The Slow Progress, The US$5.9 Billion Venture Will Not Be Going Anywhere Until PT Kereta Cepat Indondesia-China (KCIC) Acquires At Least 210 Hectares Of Prime Industrial Land On Jakarta's Eastern Outskirts.

Overall, The Joint-Venture Developer Needs At Least 550 Hectares Spread Across Nine Cities And Districts Along The Route Of The Planned Rail Link. This Was Originally Supposed To Have Been Completed In Time For The 2019 Legislative And Presidential Elections.

But It Is Not The First Time A Major Project Has Suffered Long Delays Over Land Acquisition. Japanese Developers Adaro Energy Spent Three Years Haggling Over The Price For A 10% Stake In The Site Of A $4 Billion, 2,000 Megawatts Coal-Fired Power Station On Java's Northern Coast.

Transport Experts Believe Buying The Land Is Crucial, Not Only To Secure The Right Of Way For The Rail Track, But More Importantly For The Sort Of Associated Commercial And Residential Development That Is Necessary To Make The Project Financially Viable.

With Fares Unable To Cover Costs, So-Called Transit-Orientated Development Has Been Incredibly Successful In Building Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway (MRT) Network And Other Similar Projects Around The World, Which Otherwise Could Not Have Survived Without State Subsidies.

Under Indonesia's 2012 Property Law, The Concept Of Eminent Domain Can Only Be Applied If Acquiring Land Is In The Public Interest. In This Case, The Rail Track May Qualify, But The Property Needed For A Money-Making Commercial Development Is Not.

Apart From The Property Around Cikampek And Karawang, Which Will Be Utilized For Both The Right-Of-Way And Associated Development, Another 330 Hectares Of Rice Paddies, Forest And Residential Land Has Still To Be Acquired At The Bandung End Of The Line.

Industrial Estates Are Already Complaining About The Railway Cutting Across Their Access, While Land-Owners Refuse To Accept The Low Prices They Are Being Offered. And The Firm Hired To Make The Acquisitions Is Not Even Registered With The Justice Ministry.

A China Development Bank Loan Will Cover 75% Of The Total Funding, With 60% Of The 20 Trillion Indonesian Rupiahs ($1.5 Billion) In Equity Coming From Four State-Owned Construction, Railway, Toll-Road And Plantation Companies. The Rest Is From The Chinese Consortium Beijing Yawan High Speed Rail.

But Now, $800 Million Has Been Added To The Original Cost And Widodo Wants The Chinese To Boost Their Equity Stake From 40% To 90%. This Is Obviously A Clear Admission That State Firms Are Struggling Financially After Taking The Lead Role In This Ambitious Infrastructure Program.

Even A Third Of The Rp12 Trillion Those Four Companies Are Now Committed To Is In-Kind, Representing Land Made Available By Plantation Firm PT Perkebunan Nusaantara, And State-Run Toll Road Operator PT Jasa Marga, Along Various Sections Of The Route.

Both Sides Are Still Talking About The Change In Stake-Holding, But As One Senior Indonesian Official Told Asia Times: "Acquiring The Land Is A Nightmare. It Was All Too Optimistic. I Can't See How Rini (State Enterprise Minister Soemarno) Can Solve This Problem. It Might Take Four To Five Years."

As With The Framework Agreement Reached With Mining Giant Freeport, Which Never Touched On The Key Issue Of Valuation, The Indonesians Are Indulging In The Now Familiar Practice Of Making It Appear Progress Is Being Made.

In January 2016, Widodo Attended A Ground-Breaking Ritual That Was Meant To Launch The Project, Even Though It Was Clear Then There Were Many Obstacles To Overcome. Last July, Soemarno Attended A Similar Ceremony Marking The Start Of Construction Of A Rail Tunnel 25 Kilometers West Of Bandung.

A Presidential Favourite Who Actively Pushed For China's Involvement After Widodo At One Point Canceled The Whole Project In 2015, Soemarno Has Denied Reports The China Development Bank Is Withholding Loan Disbursements Until The Land Procurement Process Has Been Completed.

But Government Sources Familiar With The Project Say The Chinese Are Currently Providing Only Bridging Funds To Cover The Cost Of The Detailed Engineering Design, Which Has Widened The Right Of Way From 4.5 To Five Meters, And Other Preparatory Work.

Japan's Original 2008 Study Had The New Link Starting At Central Jakarta's Gambir Station And Proceeding Underground Through The Inner City. Once Above Ground, It Would Follow The Existing Rail Track To Cikampek, 75kms East Of Jakarta, Before Turning South Through The Mountains To Bandung. But The Complications Involved In Running Fast-Rail Through Urban Areas Has Forced The Chinese-Led Joint Venture To Move The Departure Point Southwest To Halim. The Site Is An Airbase Which Doubles As A Second International Airport In The Southern Suburbs.

That Will Be A Deterrent To Many Potential Passengers Traveling To And From Bandung, Indonesia's Fourth Biggest City. Braving Heavy Traffic To Halim From Other Parts Of The Overcrowded City Will Multiply Travel Time And Make Alternative Modes Of Transport More Attractive.

Although The Design Speed Is Now Expected To Be Reduced To An Average Of 250 Kilometers Per Hour, The Straighter Alignment Demanded By Fast-Rail Means The Railway Will Run On New Tracks, With 71.6kms At Ground Level, 53.5kms Elevated And 15.6kms Underground Tunnels.

Even Then, There Will Be Major Engineering Challenges, Most Of Them Presented By The Tunneling And Deep Cuts Required In Unstable Mountain Soil. In The Early 2000s, For Example, A Landslide Carried Away A 300-Meter Stretch Of A Newly-Laid Double Track.

The Delays Also Mean It Will Fall Well Behind Other Complementary Projects In The Cikampek-Kawarang Area, Including The $2.6 Billion Kertajati International Airport, The New Container Port Of Patimban And The Lippo Group's State-Of-The-Art Meikarta City.

The Airport Is Expected To Open Next Year, Relieving Some Of The Pressure On Jakarta's Main Soekarno-Hatta Airport, Which Is Already Undergoing A Major Expansion To Handle 60 Million Passengers A Year. But That Is Still Short Of The 100 Million Expected In 2020.

As For Japanese Investment, It Is Already Concentrated Around Manufacturing Plants In The Cikarang-Cikampek-Karawang Industrial Corridor. In Fact, Japan Is Funding The $1 Billion First Phase Of The New Port That Is Scheduled To Be Completed In Early 2019.

Yet Still On Hold Is A Proposed $25 Billion Medium-Fast Rail Link Between Jakarta And Surabaya, Offered To The Japanese Earlier This Year As Compensation For Missing Out On The Jakarta-Bandung Project, Which Outraged The Tokyo Government.

The New Line Is Designed To Cut The Time For The 685-Kilometer Journey To Indonesia's Second Biggest City From 12 Hours To Five Hours, But At Least 70 Percent Of The Track Might Need To Be Elevated To Avoid Nearly 1,000 Level Crossings Along The Route.

The Good News Is If It Ever Goes Ahead, It Will Likely Follow The Same Right Of Way As The Existing Double-Track Rail Line, Without The Need For Acquiring Large Parcels Of Land. In That, The Japanese Could Have The Last Laugh.

Source: http://www.atimes.com/article/indonesias-mega-fast-rail-project-runs-trouble/

Government disburses Rp 25.29t to 34 toll road operators

Jakarta Post - December 18, 2017

Jakarta – The government through the State Asset Management Agency (LMAN) has disbursed Rp 25.29 trillion (US$1.77 billion) to 34 toll road operators, tribunnews.com reported on Monday.

The funds would be used to acquire land for toll road projects, collectively grouped as National Strategic Projects (PSN), said Public Works and Housing Ministry road director general Arie Setiadi Moerweanto.

"The construction of the toll road projects has taken place quickly because [the developers] frequently check to know when the funds will be disbursed," said the official over the weekend.

LMAN director Rahayu Puspasari said the disbursement of the funds demonstrated the commitment of her institution to accelerating the construction of the infrastructure projects.

Previously, LMAN disbursed Rp 11.65 trillion to acquire 17,177 plots of land for the toll road projects. The Rp 25.29 trillion fund for land acquisition was included in the revised 2017 state budget. (bbn)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/18/government-disburses-rp-25-29t-to-34-toll-road-operators.html

Retail & service industry

Aqua denies violation of business competition law

Jakarta Post - December 20, 2017

Jakarta – PT Tirta Investana, the producer of Aqua bottled water, has denied any wrongdoing after the Business Competition Supervisory Commission (KPPU) ordered the company to pay Rp 13.84 billion (US$968,800) in fines to the state on Tuesday.

The commission also fined Aqua's distributor PT Balina Agung Perkasa (BAP) Rp 6.29 billion.

PT Tirta Investama lawyer Rikrik Rizkiyana said as reported by kompas.com that his client was disappointed by the KPPU's decision, saying that the commission did not consider facts he presented during the hearings.

KPPU's decision was based on a report by PT Tirta Fresindo Jaya (Mayora Group), the producer of bottled water brand Le Minerale, in October, 2016, which complained that Aqua and its distributor had tried to prohibit several shops from selling Le Minerale bottled water.

KPPU found that the companies had threatened to downgrade the status of several shops that sold Le Minerale bottled water from star outlet (SO) to wholesaler (WO). With the change in status, the shops would have to buy Aqua at higher prices.

Rikrik said that he and his client would study the verdict document before making an official legal response to the KPPU's decision. (bbn)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/20/aqua-denies-violation-of-business-competition-law.html

Armed forces & defense

Jokowi ally restores 'neutrality' in Indonesian military

Asia Times - December 21, 2017

John McBeth, Jakarta – It took Air Chief Marshal Hadi Tjahjanto, the new Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) commander, just 12 days to impose his authority by reversing his predecessor Gen Gatot Nurmantyo's mischief-making reshuffle of more than 80 military officers in the final days before he was compelled to step down.

Tjahjanto, 54, gave no reason for the unprecedented step, but with Nurmantyo openly harbouring political ambitions – and still on active service until next March – it was clearly aimed at shoring up President Joko Widodo's support base.

As one of the youngest officers to hold the military's top post, Tjahjanto is not due to retire until November 2021, a period which comfortably covers the 2019 legislative and presidential elections, in which Widodo is favored to win a second term.

Parliament approved Tjahjanto's appointment without a voice of dissent, apparently mindful of the backing he had received from chief political minister Wiranto, Defence Minister Ryamizard Ryacudu and maritime coordinating minister Luhut Panjaitan, all retired generals.

The new commander is likely to restore the neutrality of the armed forces after Nurmantyo openly used his position to forge links with hard-line Islamic groups campaigning against the re-election of ethnic-Chinese governor Basuki Purnama, a Widodo ally, in Jakarta.

The appointments of some of the 32 senior and 53 mid-level officers may still go ahead, but Tjahjanto is expected to weed out those who are perceived to have personal debts of loyalty to Nurmantyo going back to earlier in their careers.

That applies to the former South Sumatra region commander Maj-Gen Sudirman, 54. The senior-most officer in the reshuffle, he was plucked from his post of chief of army operations to head the 25,000-strong Army Strategic Reserve (Kostrad).

Sumatran-born Sudirman, 54, was widely seen as a Nurmantyo protege and placing him in charge of Indonesia's main regular combat force, with its two motorized infantry divisions and supporting arms, would have been unacceptable.

It is not clear who will now replace current Kostrad commander Lt-Gen Edi Rahmayadi, 56, when the Aceh-born infantry officer quits the army two years before his retirement date to run in next year's North Sumatra gubernatorial elections.

The low-profile, but capable, army chief of staff Gen Mulyono will probably be retained until his retirement in 2019, but military analysts expect next few faces in other strategic posts, including the Indonesian Special Forces (Kopassus), the Jakarta regional command and military intelligence (BAIS).

Although the top TNI position is meant to be rotated among the three services, the cycle was broken in 2015 because the air force commander was too new and Widodo wanted an army general anyway to counter a then-rebellious police force.

Tjahjanto has had a close relationship with Widodo dating back to when he commanded the airbase in Widodo's hometown of Solo in Central Java and cemented further when he was brought in as the president's military secretary in the early days of Widodo's rule.

He always seemed destined for the top after being promoted to the three-star position of Defence Ministry inspector-general, then swiftly elevated to air force chief just three months later, in January 2017.

Tjahjanto is likely to work hard at improving relations between the military and the police – relations which have never been good but which deteriorated to their lowest point during Nurmantyo's two-years at the helm.

That is likely to be made easier by the fact that police chief Gen Tito Karnavian is another hand-picked Widodo appointee. He was jumped over the head of several other more senior officers last year.

Fluent in English and French, and with conversational Mandarin and German, Tjahjanto, like many Indonesian air force and navy officers, has a world view that is likely to tamp down overt nationalism and improve the TNI's external relations.

At a parliamentary hearing just a day before his appointment was confirmed, he discussed changes in the world order, Islamic radicalism, cyber warfare, China's growing influence and maritime security.

Analysts noted the stark contrast with Nurmantyo, an ultra-nationalist whose paranoia extended to bizarre warnings of a new communist threat and a so-called "proxy war" waged by foreign interests aimed at taking over Indonesia.

A 1982 military academy graduate, the Javanese general would have only been a captain when the United States suspended all military co-operation with Indonesia over the 1991 Dili churchyard massacre, a ban that stayed in place until 2005.

As a result, he and a generation of Indonesian officers were deprived of the opportunity to train overseas, an education that perhaps would have widened their horizons and stifled a national tendency to buy into wild conspiracy theories.

He claimed foreigners were jealous of Indonesia's economic performance and its rich store of natural resources and shared the widely-held suspicion that US Marines training in northern Australia had their eyes on seizing Papua, the country's easternmost province.

Late last year, he unilaterally suspended military relations with Australia after a junior Indonesian officer sent him perceived derogatory material about East Timor and Papua in Australian training manuals.

Under any normal circumstances, a country's leader would have been fully justified in sacking the head of the armed forces if he suspended military ties with a friendly neighbor without informing either him or his administration.

But Tjahjanto was only made air force chief last January and Widodo, his patience close to breaking point, must have realized he needed more time in that job as a newly-minted four-star before he could justify bringing him in as Nurmantyo's replacement.

Source: http://www.atimes.com/article/jokowi-ally-restores-neutrality-indonesian-military/

New Military chief partially cancels Gatot's major reshuffle

Jakarta Post - December 20, 2017

Marguerite Afra Sapiie, Jakarta – New Indonesian Military (TNI) commander Air Chief Marshal Hadi Tjahjanto has revoked the rotations of 16 of 85 high-ranking officers ordered by former commander Gen. Gatot Nurmantyo earlier this month.

The cancellations were set out in a TNI commander decree letter dated Dec. 19 that has been circulating among the press and has been confirmed by TNI officials. The letter was issued more than a week after Hadi was officially inaugurated by President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo on Dec. 8.

"Yes, it's true. A few [of the rotations] have been revised according to the organization's needs," TNI spokesperson Maj. Gen. Sabrar Fadhilah told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.

The cancellations include the rotation of Army Strategic Reserves Command (Kostrad) commander Lt. Gen. Edy Rahmayadi, who was previously set to be assigned to the Army headquarters ahead of his planned retirement and his plan to run in the 2018 North Sumatra gubernatorial election.

His planned replacement, the Army Chief of Staff's operation assistant Maj. Gen. Sudirman, will also remain in his current post, according to the letter.

The timing of the mass rotation ordered by Gatot has been called into question, as it came on the heels of the announcement of Hadi's sole candidacy as Gatot's successor. (kmt/rin)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/20/new-military-chief-partially-cancels-gatots-major-reshuffle.html

Foreign affairs & trade

Australia and Indonesia fail to meet free-trade deal deadline

Sydney Morning Herald - December 21, 2017

Jewel Topsfield and Karuni Rompies – Australia and Indonesia have conceded they will fail to pull off a free-trade deal this year despite repeated commitments from Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, President Joko Widodo and other ministers.

The failure to meet the end-of-year deadline is embarrassing for the Australian government, which had used the proposed free-trade deal – Indonesia's first in almost a decade – to spruik the improving relationship between the two countries.

Australia and Indonesia agreed to restore defence co-operation following a bilateral meeting between Malcolm Turnbull and Joko Widodo.

"I won't sacrifice the quality of the agreement for speed. If it takes a little bit longer, so be it," Trade Minister Steven Ciobo told Fairfax Media.

He said "great progress" had been made towards a "high-quality" Indonesia Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement. "But there's still more work to do."

Talks have foundered in a protectionist climate, with Indonesia expressing reluctance to fully open its markets if it harms local industries and legislative constraints to Australia's push to open university campuses in Indonesia.

The two countries have also been at loggerheads over alleged dumping of paper, with Indonesia filing a complaint against Australia in the World Trade Organisation in the middle of negotiations

The economic relationship between Indonesia and Australia is notoriously lacklustre given they are close neighbours, with successive Australian ministers describing it as "undercooked".

In 2016, Indonesia was only Australia's 13th-largest trade partner, with a paltry 2.3 per cent share of total trade.

When President Jokowi visited Sydney in February, Mr Turnbull said the two leaders were "very committed to concluding a high-quality bilateral free-trade agreement... by the end of this year". "It's a very strong friendship and it gets stronger all the time," he said.

President Jokowi concurred: "We agreed that negotiation over the Indonesia-Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement will be concluded in 2017 as Prime Minister Turnbull previously mentioned."

After meeting in Jakarta in September, Indonesia and Australia's trade ministers bullishly predicted the 10th (and penultimate) round of negotiations in November could be the last.

"The meeting was so positive that we... the CEPA agreement can be signed by our two country's leaders by the end of this year at the latest," said Indonesian Trade Minister Enggartiasto Lukita at the time.

But on December 20, Mr Lukita said: "We never said it will be completed by the end of 2017. In fact in the latest APEC meeting, Prime Minister Turnbull told President Jokowi that it would be completed by March."

Mr Lukita said there were some "tough issues". "I told [Australia], you have to step back, because we have stepped back."

He said 94 to 95 per cent of the agreement had been finalised, with just a few sticking points remaining.

"Actually they [Australia] want to invest, they want more shares, but we only want to grant this much. It's not stagnant, it's merely about the numbers."

Asked if this concerned the education sector, Mr Lukita replied: "Yeah, education."

Mr Lukita said there would be another round of negotiations, the 12th, in the second week of January. He joked that if the countries wanted to settle by March they should not let the Australian negotiating team go home before reaching agreement.

Indonesia Australia Business Council president Noke Kiroyan said the delay was a "bit disappointing" but the end result was what was most important.

However, he warned the deal would need to be finalised in the beginning of next year or Indonesia would become preoccupied with the 2019 presidential elections. "If we have it within a few months I think that's still a good outcome," he said.

Australia Indonesia Business Council president Philip Turtle said it was "unfortunate" that the agreement would not be concluded this year.

"But any delay is a small price to pay for an agreement that will ultimately deliver benefits for many years to come," he said. "Much better to get it right than rush it."

Mr Turtle said the council had observed the goodwill and intent between the negotiating teams and remained hopeful that any remaining sticking points could be resolved soon.

Lowy Institute research fellow Matthew Busch has been critical of the "ill-advised rush to strike a trade deal" given the Australian government had framed it as a testament to the relationship.

"It will be undeniably awkward if IA-CEPA is too hard and must be rolled into next year," he wrote in The Interpreter earlier this month.

Mr Busch told Fairfax Media it was sensible for Australia and Indonesia to keep working towards the stated objective of a high-quality agreement.

"It was never going to be easy or quick to conclude with Indonesia what is a novel framework for trade and investment liberalisation," he said.

"This is especially so because Indonesia is not an active trade negotiator and does not have a strong domestic constituency for reducing barriers for inbound goods, services, and investment.

"The desire to include investment, for example in education, only enhances the task, as barriers exist in law or regulation and cannot simply be ruled out with the stroke of a pen on the CEPA."

The two countries have already announced (twice) that Indonesia will reduce tariffs on imported Australian raw sugar and Australia will eliminate import duties on Indonesian herbicides and pesticides under the deal.

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/business/world-business/australia-and-indonesia-fail-to-meet-freetrade-deal-deadline-20171221-h08qz0.html

Seafood exports increase, but reach only half of the target

Jakarta Globe - December 16, 2017

Dames Alexander Sinaga, Jakarta – Indonesia's seafood exports reached $3.62 billion in October, only 51 percent of this year's target, a senior official at the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries said on Friday (15/12).

According to Nilanto Perbowo, director general of product competitiveness at the ministry, the value has, however, increased by 6.38 percent from the past year.

"The export value of Indonesia's seafood products has increased and it is higher than of some competitor countries in Asia – such as Thailand, Vietnam, China and the Philippines," he said, adding that the value increase was thanks to the popularity of prawns, tunas, crabs, squids and seaweed.

The main importers were the United States, Japan, China, the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations countries.

As the ministry's 2017 export target was $7.62 billion, Nilanto said it was a too optimistic expectation. "If we look at this number, it was unlikely for us to achieve the targeted export value set last year... It seems we were too optimistic."

He added that the 2018 target is $5.3 billion. "Hopefully we will reach it," Nilanto said.

Source: http://jakartaglobe.id/news/seafood-exports-increase-reach-half-target/

Indonesian trade hits lowest monthly surplus in November: BPS

Jakarta Post - December 15, 2017

Stefani Ribka, Jakarta – The monthly trade surplus hit US$130 million in November, the lowest level this year, the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) announced Friday.

In November, exports increased slightly by 0.26 percent month on month (mom) to $15.28 billion. The increase was lower than imports, which rose 6.42 percent to $15.15 billion.

"The surplus is very thin and it has gone down starkly since September at $1.78 billion. The surplus in October stood at $1 billion," said BPS head Suhariyanto.

Import growth came from mostly capital goods, which grew 20.65 percent mom to $2.64 billion, followed by consumer goods, which grew 8.22 percent and raw materials at 3.32 percent.

"We hope that this capital goods import growth will affect our economic growth positively at the end of this quarter in terms of investment," he added.

Non-oil and gas imports grew 1.22 percent and oil and gas imports increased 7.37 percent. Meanwhile, non-oil and gas exports increased 1.82 percent and oil and gas exports declined 14.22 percent.

"The thin export growth was caused mainly by the decline in mining exports in November after it went up significantly in October. Imports, meanwhile, were up in all categories of goods [consumer, raw materials and capital goods]," Suhariyanto explained. (bbn)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/15/indonesian-trade-hits-lowest-monthly-surplus-in-november-bps.html

Mining & energy

Dozens of renewable power plants fall into disrepair

Jakarta Post - December 19, 2017

Jakarta – The government says 68 renewable energy plants, mostly constructed in remote areas that are not connected to the electricity network of state-owned electricity company PLN, have sustained damage.

"Fifty-five 55 projects worth Rp 261 billion (US$18.27 million) have sustained minor damage, while 13 others worth Rp 48.85 billion sustained heavy damage," said the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry's energy conservation and renewable energy director general, Rida Mulyana, in Jakarta on Monday as reported by tribunnews.com.

Rida spoke to journalists to clarify reports claiming failure at 142 energy renewable power projects.

He explained that between 2011 and 2017, the government constructed 686 renewable energy power plants worth Rp 3.01 trillion (US$210.7 million) that were financed through the state budget.

Rida said only 68 projects worth about Rp 305 billion had been handed over to regional administrations to supply electricity to the public. They are among 126 projects worth Rp 1.04 trillion.

He said heavy damage at some of the plants had been caused by landslides, flooding or lightning and the plants could not be fully operated. He did not elaborate on the condition of plants that sustained minor damage.

He said this year, the ministry had allocated Rp 8.9 billion for renewable energy plants, but had not managed to find business partners for the projects. Next year, the ministry has allocated 17.68 billion for similar projects. (bbn)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/19/government-acknowledges-dozens-of-renewable-power-plants-sustained-damage.html

LNG imports not a wise decision, PGN says

Jakarta Post - December 16, 2017

Viriya P. Singgih, Jakarta – State-owned gas company PT Perusahaan Gas Negara (PGN) has reminded the government not to hastily import liquefied natural gas (LNG) amid the current oversupply situation.

PGN head of marketing and product development Adi Munandir said many countries, including Indonesia, had been facing an oversupply of LNG due to an increase in global production amid sluggish demand. As a result, Indonesia had found it hard to find buyers for its LNG cargoes, he added.

For instance, PT Badak NGL, the operator of a major LNG plant in Bontang, East Kalimantan, has failed to find domestic buyers for 38 LNG cargoes this year, or 22.2 percent of its full-year production of 171 cargoes. Hence, it has sold those 38 cargoes on the spot market.

"This condition might have led foreign gas suppliers to sell their LNG at far more competitive prices and encouraged many industrial players in Indonesia to import rather than buying domestic LNG," Adi said recently.

"As there has already been an oversupply in the domestic market, imports will only increase the number of uncommitted LNG cargoes in the country and further make the upstream gas sector unattractive."

In 2018, PGN has been tasked by the Upstream Oil and Gas Regulatory Special Task Force (SKKMigas) with marketing uncommitted LNG cargoes produced from the Sanga-sanga block in East Kalimantan. The company has stated its commitment to undertake the task without any fees.

The Sanga-sanga block, operated by Virginia Indonesia Co LLC, produces 7.84 million tons of LNG throughout this year. (dmr)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/16/lng-imports-not-a-wise-decision-pgn-says.html

'Watch the sky and pray': Bali's volcanic Mt Agung looms large but local

South China Morning Post - December 15, 2017

Nathan Thompson – Ketut Suweni shovels gravel on the slopes of Mt Agung while the volcano spews ash clouds. For a second her sandal slips on the pile of black and grey stones and she stumbles onto her hands and knees.

"I keep an eye on the volcano while I work," she said, wiping grime from her face. "The ash is quite light right now but if the sky turns dark I will leave."

Trucks carrying sand and gravel, and a few locals on motorbikes, are the only traffic left in the danger zone around Mt Agung. Roughly 100,000 residents were evacuated in September when the ground shook and geophysicists predicted a major eruption. About 55,000 are living in dank, wet evacuation camps outside the 12km danger zone.

The volcano is in Bali – the Indonesian island home to 4 million and popular with tourists, although many are choosing to holiday elsewhere since the eruptions. Currently, hotels have 25 per cent occupancy compared to 80 per cent this month last year, according to the Malay Star.

However, miners like Suweni do not have a choice. They need the US$73 for each truck they fill – a fee they split. Suweni earns about US$15 a day. This gravel is used to build roads and in rock mixture to make bricks.

"We do not have a licence to mine here," she says. "We have a partner who pays the police off."

About 70 per cent of the miners do not have permits, according to Wired magazine. It is cheaper to bribe the police than get a licence that requires the group to pay for land restoration once the project is complete.

Suweni works in sandals and thin, patterned clothes shovelling rocks. Above her, on a ridge cut from the mountain, men swing hunks of rock into grinding machinery.

They all dashed for safety on November 25 when a colossal ash cloud darkened the sky and cinders fell like rain. The volcanic ash clouds grounded flights in Bali and the nearby island of Lombok for several days, causing travel chaos. Magma glowed like a cigarette against the dark clouds but it did not spill.

Within days, Suweni was swinging her shovel again. "I'm very worried," she says. "But we must earn money."

At the main observatory in Rendang, Dr Gede Suantika, a geophysicist, expressed concern for the miners. "They should leave for their own safety," he said.

"We have sirens set up around the volcano that may be able to warn them. But if the volcano releases hot clouds there may not be enough time for them to escape."

Hot clouds, known as pyroclastic flows, are clouds of fast-moving volcanic matter. Most of the 1000-plus people who died during the last eruption in 1963 were killed trying to outrun hot clouds.

The state of alert remains at its highest level but Suantika said: "If the ash clouds remain small then we will consider reducing it in a couple of weeks."

Not that Suweni would know. She says her group do not listen to the radio for updates and none of them have smartphones. "We can only listen to the mountain," she says. "If the earth shakes, we run."

It is not easy for people to leave their livelihoods even if it is dangerous. Ketut Urianda has not seen a customer at his restaurant and guest house on the edge of the danger zone for a fortnight.

"People here struggle to earn a living," says Urianda, a retired teacher. "Rice farming is unpredictable as the crops can fail and you can't get a job in the tourism industry if you do not speak English."

Balinese miners are part of a worldwide industry. Sand and gravel "account for the largest volume of solid material extracted globally," according to a 2014 report from the United Nations Environment Programme.

It is used in the multibillion-dollar construction industry and as countries start to ban sand exports, citing environmental damage, the value is likely to rise.

Suweni and several other women wait at a damp bus stop for their husbands or friends to take them home. "Usually I live near here but now I'm staying with family further away from the volcano," she says.

Her drive back to where she is staying goes through eerily deserted streets and past boarded up houses, speckled with grey ash. "I just watch the sky," she says. "Watch the sky and pray."

Source: http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/2124391/watch-sky-and-pray-balis-volcanic-mt-agung-looms-large

Economy & investment

Real income of farmers, construction workers declines as result of

Jakarta Post - December 15, 2017

Jakarta – The Central Statistics Agency (BPS) has said that, despite the increase in income of both small farmers in villages and construction workers in urban areas, their real income has declined as a result of inflation.

According to the BPS, although the income of small farmers increased by 0.21 percent in November, the inflation rate in villages was 0.21 percent in the same month, thus decreasing farmers' purchasing power.

"The real income of small farmers declined by 0.15 percent," said BPS head Suhariyanto in Jakarta on Friday as reported by tribunnews.com.

He called on the government to pay attention to the fate of small farmers because Indonesians relied on the agricultural sector.

Similarly, the income of construction workers in urban areas grew by 0.02 percent in November, while the inflation rate in these areas was 0.2 percent.

It meant that the real income of construction workers in urban areas declined by 0.18 percent, Suhariyanto said. (bbn)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/12/15/real-income-of-farmers-construction-workers-declines-as-result-of-inflation-bps.html

Analysis & opinion

Constitutional Court ruling a reminder that the state is not uniform

Indonesia at Melbourne - December 19, 2017

Hendri Yulius – After almost two years of intense debate, the Constitutional Court last week rejected a challenge to the Criminal Code (KUHP) that would have criminalised sex between people of the same sex. Lesbian, gay bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Indonesians and human rights activists are understandably celebrating the outcome as a victory against rising Islamic conservatism.

The challenge was submitted by a conservative group called the Family Love Alliance (AILA), which sought to amend Criminal Code articles 284 on adultery, 285 on rape and 292 on same sex relations with a minor. The court did the right thing, with a majority of judges rejecting the petition on the grounds that it was up to the legislature to criminalise acts, not the Constitutional Court.

Putting this legal attack on homosexuality in its broader context, the episode illustrates how the state has been influenced by and is responding to the internationalisation of the concept of 'sexual citizenship', or the demands of sexual and gender minorities for citizenship rights. And it has been far from uniform in its response.

2016 was a pivotal year for LGBT Indonesians. With the expansion of marriage equality in many western countries (especially the United States, following the Supreme Court ruling in 2015) and broader international momentum for LGBT rights, Indonesian ministers, legislators, and religious conservatives engaged in months of vicious public condemnation of LGBT sexuality, conflating it with moral degradation and even a 'proxy war' by developed, western nations. During this time there was immense fear that Indonesian LGBT activists were seeking to import same-sex marriage into Indonesia – despite the fact that this had never been among their demands.

The effect was twofold: LGBT identities were cast as politically threatening to the nation, and the term LGBT was inadvertently publicised among everyday Indonesians. Now the term is no longer understood as simply an acronym for different gender and sexual identities, rather it now denotes any individual with non-normative gender and sexuality. The term has increasingly been used to refer to individuals with visible non-normative gender expression, for example, a biological male with feminine mannerisms. As the term 'LGBT' sounds foreign to many members of the public and can mean almost anything, conservative groups have used it to spread moral panic and solicit public support.

The systematic denouncements of LGBT identity by national politicians are part of what has been described as the international polarisation of sexuality rights. LGBT rights, particularly the legal recognition of marriage, has become a barometer of human rights progress in many countries, and at the same time, provoked a conservative backlash in many others, as we have seen in Indonesia. Public officials in countries like Indonesia attempt to equate opposition to LGBT rights with resistance to neo-colonialism or western imperialism.

Although Indonesian gay and lesbian movements have been around since 1982, recent attacks on LGBT Indonesians are related to the internationalisation of LGBT identity and rights and Indonesia's democratisation after the collapse of the Soeharto regime in 1998.

The emergence of democratic governance brought greater human rights protections in Indonesia. But it also allowed previously suppressed conservative Islamic groups to acquire more political power. They have targeted religious and sexual minorities, and attempted to spread moral panics, as a means to gain public support and consolidate their power. One example of the success of this movement was the passage of the Pornography Law in 2008.

The democratic era also coincided with the globalisation of LGBT identity and rights. The introduction of the Yogyakarta Principles, which treat gender and sexuality as a basis for claiming citizenship rights, the appointment of an independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) at the United Nations, and laws on marriage equality in some countries have increasingly seen LGBT rights become a mainstream human rights issue. This globalisation of LGBT identity has come up against increasing conservativism at the local level, with significant impacts for sexual minorities. But what has been the response of the state?

Reflecting on the national anti-LGBT campaign in 2016, it is tempting to view the state as a coherent entity that simply submitted to the demands of the conservatives. And it is true that many government officials denounced LGBT Indonesians. However, looking closer at the government response, this stance was not uniform. Although Vice President Jusuf Kalla initially demanded that the UN Development Programme stop funding LGBT programs in Indonesia, he also argued that the state did not need to interfere with issues of sexuality. The coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs at the time, Luhut Panjaitan, said LGBT people should be treated equally before the law. And late in 2016, President Joko Widodo said the police must act to protect LGBT people and other minorities who face threats.

As it is comprised of diverse actors, institutions, and practices, the state is not always unified. Rather, it is fragmented or split, and contains multiple contradictory and shifting political positions. Policies and practices across institutions are not always coherent. Recognising that the state is not a homogeneous entity therefore helps to identify not only individual actors, but also the power relations among them and their proximity to conservatives. Last week's five-to-four decision by the nine-judge panel of the Constitutional Court demonstrates this 'split state', while also helping to identify potential allies.

But significant cause for concern remains. Proposed amendments to the Broadcasting Law also aim to purge "LGBT behaviour" from the media. The draft criminal code being deliberated by the House of Representatives already contains provisions prohibiting sex outside marriage. And AILA has vowed to take its advocacy to the legislature.

While it is sometimes easy to become despondent about the rights of LGBT Indonesians, the recent Constitutional Court decision can be understood as a reminder that the state is not uniform. It is important to be aware of the diverse actors and institutions that exist and the unpredictable moves that might result. LGBT and human rights activists could put their efforts into identifying and strategically working with allies who might help to forestall the conservatives' moves.

[Hendri Yulius is a researcher and writer. He is the author of a number of books, including Coming Out, now available at Gramedia. He holds a master's degree from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.]

Source: http://indonesiaatmelbourne.unimelb.edu.au/constitutional-court-ruling-a-reminder-that-the-state-is-not-uniform/

Religio-political forces on rise in Indonesia, new paper argues

Asia Times - December 18, 2017

John McBeth – The 100,000-strong crowd that turned out in downtown Jakarta for Sunday's protest over US President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israeli's capital again demonstrates the newfound power of what academia calls religio-political entrepreneurs.

It was the largest pro-Palestine protest in the Indonesian capital in memory, though outnumbered by the massive crowds who demonstrated against Jakarta's ethnic-Chinese governor Basuki Purnama in November and December 2016, which brought about his downfall.

In the context of today's political environment, however, the influence of Indonesia's religio-political organizers, who first surfaced during last April's gubernatorial race, could have serious implications for President Joko Widodo in the run-up to the 2019 national elections.

Built around surveys conducted before and after the Islamic mobilization that ended in Purnama's defeat, a new paper argues that its success can be ascribed to the ability of those same figures to organize around an effective narrative.

Written by Australian National University Associate Professor Marcus Mietzner, Indikator Politik Indonesian executive director Burhanuddin Muhtadi and Lembaga Survei Indonesia (LSI) researcher Rizka Halida, it calls the 2016 protests "an important shift in Indonesian politics" and notes that opposition to non-Muslims holding political positions has only hardened since then.

The paper identifies prospective presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto, former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, self-exiled Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) leader Rizieq Shihab and fellow hardliners Bachtiar Nasir and Al-Khaththath as the key players in stirring Muslim perceptions of political and economic deprivation.

Analysts are already speculating about a coalition between Prabowo and Yudhoyono in 2019, with the former president's 39-year-old son, Agus Harimurti, on a list of Prabowo's possible running mates.

Although Agus was a failed candidate in the Jakarta gubernatorial election, the retired army major performed well on the stump and could help Prabowo attract the 80 million millennials who make up a big chunk of the 185-million-strong Indonesian electorate.

Analysts believe growing inequality in Indonesian society and the Widodo government's failure to create jobs for school graduates is leading the underprivileged to consider alternatives to what they see as a failed capitalist system.

In its seventh Global Wealth Report, released this year, the Credit Suisse Research Institute described Indonesia as the world's fourth most unequal country, noting that the top 1% of an adult population of 164 million control half of the vast nation's US$1.8 trillion wealth.

"The problem with the trickle-down theory is that there has been no trickle," Ma'ruf Amin, leader of the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), told the recent annual conference of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world's largest Islamic organization, which has called on the Indonesian government to come up with a new economic model.

Amin, who also led Sunday's protest, was Yudhoyono's most influential religious adviser during his decade-long presidency, issuing controversial fatwas against secularism, pluralism and liberalism that played no small role in spoiling Indonesia's tolerant reputation.

Nasir, a Saudi Arabia-educated cleric, has made it clear the next target of the anti-Purnama coalition is ethnic-Chinese-owned conglomerates whose disproportionate hold on the economy is fast becoming the central message of an electoral game-plan to deprive Widodo of a second term in 2019.

The most important finding from the recent opinion surveys is that since last year's mass mobilization, there has, in fact, been a sharp increase in the number of Indonesian Muslims who believe non-Muslims should not hold any high political office.

Purnama's defeat and his subsequent two-year prison term for blasphemy stemmed from him questioning a verse in the Koran that Islamic conservatives interpret as meaning that political positions should only be reserved for Muslims.

Indonesia is clearly still a long way from electing a non-Muslim to be president. Even a non-Javanese is a stretch, with Sulawesi-born B J Habibie the only exception – and then only because the fall of president Suharto left him, as vice-president, to assume office.

But in the latest LSI poll, an average of 49.6% of the respondents believe non-Muslims should not aspire to be president, vice-president, governor, regent or mayor – a 7.3-percentage-point increase over a similar Wahid Institute-commissioned survey taken in March last year.

Indeed, because that poll showed attitudes were moderating prior to the 2016 Islamist mobilization, it can only be concluded that the themes propagated by the protest organizers and their political backers were responsible for moving the conversation beyond religion.

Many of those drawn to the mobilization message or who were radicalized in the period during and after the protests were Muslims from lower socio-economic strata, though the paper found that since 2010-2011 the rich and highly educated have formed a proportionately larger share of the Islamist community than in previous years.

The same trend applies to Indonesia's youth, with 52.4% of junior-high-school and 47.5% of senior-high-school students opposed to non-Muslim governors, significantly more than the 40% polled in 2016; university students stayed much the same at 43-44%.

"The rejection of non-Muslims in political positions, support for the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), and the perception of an economic gap between Muslims and non-Muslims all grew in intensity after the mobilization," the paper notes.

Worryingly, support for the agenda of the FPI increased from 15.6% to 23.6% between June last year and August this year, despite Shihab having to seek sanctuary in Saudi Arabia to escape pornography charges.

Strangely, attitudes among Muslims on a cultural and social level continued to moderate, as they have done over the past seven years, with those objecting to non-Muslim places of worship in their neighborhoods declining from 52% to 48.2%.

But the paper's authors say this can be explained by the fact that participants were told that joining in the protests did not make them racist and that Islam remained tolerant to other religions – even though some of the rhetoric since then has told a very different story.

"Clearly, core Islamist ideas have consolidated among the Muslim population as a result of the mobilization," they say, noting that while protest leaders may have achieved their objective, a Muslim society long viewed as inherently moderate is inherently susceptible to exclusivist ideas.

The paper questions the government's repressive actions in dealing with the protests, which included bringing unrelated legal cases against some of the organizers and skirting the judicial process in banning the Islamic organization Hizbut Tahrir for openly promoting a caliphate. "In defending themselves, democracies must be fierce," it says, "but also fiercely law-abiding."

Source: http://www.atimes.com/article/religio-political-forces-rise-indonesia-new-paper-argues/