Islamic pride fills a stadium, but Pancasila rules the polls Tom Allard in Jakarta .. April 4, 2009
Muslims for Muslims...supporters of the Prosperous Justice Party rallied in central Jakarta before the elections next week. Photo: AFP
THE cadres of Indonesia's main Islamist party, the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), came out in force this week, staging the kind of mass rally in Jakarta that the other parties could only dream of.
More than 100,000 turned up at Bung Karno Stadium on Monday, a mightily impressive turnout for a workday and by far the largest rally of any party in the nation's capital.
Chanting Allahu Akhbar - God is Great - as rock bands played and party officials spruiked their message of personal purity and anti-corruption, they gave the occasion a festival feel.
Yellow, white and black flags flew and an ondel-ondel - a giant traditional Jakarta doll directed by two men inside - roamed the expanses of the stadium field. Rather than the usual caricature based on figures from Javanese legend or modern pop culture, the ondel-ondel depicted a pious young woman, complete with hijab covering her head.
As Indonesians prepare to go to the polls next week the fortunes of Islamic parties are being closely watched.
The horrors of the terrorist attacks that gripped the nation from 2000 to 2005, and the rise of hardline Islamic movements in the Middle East, have raised concerns that Indonesia's moderate form of Islam and its secular ideology are under siege.
A former Indonesian president, Abdurrahman Wahid, popularly known as Gus Dur, is among exponents of the view. "Extremist agents" backed by "fantastic amounts of petrodollars" have infiltrated every level of Indonesian society, he contends - from mosques to educational institutions, religious councils and mass Islamic organisations. Right up to the presidential palace itself.
"Since their appearance after the fall of Soeharto, extremist movements have begun to succeed in changing the face of Indonesian Islam to become more aggressive, furious, intolerant and full of hate," he said in the preamble to a paper published by the Libforall Foundation this week.
Yet, despite Gus Dur's alarm, all the polling - and all the internal machinations within parties like PKS - suggests that Islam as a potent political force is on the wane in Indonesia or, at best, treading water.
"There's no reason to be fearful of the rise of Islamism in Indonesia," says Greg Fealy, the Australian National University Indonesianist who monitors Islam closely.
"Overall the polling is showing that Indonesian people are overwhelmingly concerned with economic performance, who can help them put food on the table and help them improve their daily lives."
A recent survey in Kompas, the country's most widely read newspaper, found only 8 per cent of respondents said religion would have a significant influence over who they voted for; 60 per cent said it would have no impact whatsoever.
The most authoritative surveys find that, as a grouping, Islamic parties are polling about 25 per cent, compared with 38 per cent in 2004, when the Western world was at its peak in Indonesia as a consequence of the Iraq invasion.
PKS, a movement that began as a Koranic study group on university campuses and took inspiration from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, is drawing significantly less support than the 7 per cent it achieved in 2004, when it garnered over 40 seats in the national parliament and three cabinet positions in the government led by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
An ill-conceived electoral advertising campaign that hailed the former dictator Soeharto as a national hero, and promoted the underwhelming performance of PKS ministers and members elected to provincial and district assemblies, is widely attributed to the party's apparently fading prospects.
To be sure it is PKS - which relies on young, educated urbanites for most of its support - that Gus Dur has foremost in his thinking in his polemic against Islamic hardliners taking over Indonesia.
But, while it is true that a couple of its leaders studied in Saudi Arabia, Gus Dur's assertion that it is funded by wealthy Wahhabis from the Arabian peninsula is backed by scant evidence in his report, except a quote from an unnamed PKS organiser who said that Saudis had provided money to help renovate 11 mosques in a district in Central Java.
Political observers in Indonesia say there is no proof of Saudi backing for PKS, and the party's chairman, Tifatul Sembiring, accused Gus Dur of "just making it up".
"We can be punished for receiving foreign money. Our law says political parties cannot receive foreign money," Mr Sembiring told the Herald.
A political analyst at the state Islamic University, Bachtiar Effendy, said proof that moderate Islam is robust in Indonesia can be found in the evolution of the PKS platform itself.
Its success in 2004 came after it formally dumped the notion of Indonesia adopting the sacred law of Islam, sharia, and becoming a caliphate, Mr Effendy said.
More recently, it has recruited non-Muslim candidates.
"PKS is abandoning its Islamic colour in order to reach a bigger audience," he said.
"Indonesia's social politics are so pluralistic. Anything that goes against Pancasila [the country's secular ideology, pronounced pan-cha-sila] cannot live in Indonesia."
Still, PKS politicians have been the driving force behind a highly controversial anti-pornography bill that outlaws any behaviour that may be sexually stimulating and which appears to give civil groups the power to enforce it.
However, in classic Indonesian fashion the new law is not being enforced.
PKS also got the President to agree to introduce a regulation that prevents the "deviant" Muslim sect Ahmadiyyah from proselytising. Its officials are keen on becoming Dr Yudhoyono's junior coalition party when the presidential elections take place on July 8.
And many of its core supporters still want sharia, a legal system based on the teachings of the Koran.
"We won't do it immediately. We will do it in stages," said Dedi Sutardi, a PKS organiser from South Jakarta.
"But it's not about chopping the hands off thieves. That perception is just Islamophobia. We will allow other religions, but we just want Muslims to be Muslims, not half Muslims."
Mr Sutardi says that would mean closing all shops during Friday prayers, requiring Muslim women to wear the hijab and introducing a "welfare community" based on the prophet Muhammad's teachings.
A decade after a massacre intended to blunt East Timor's demands for independence, Lindsay Murdoch finds that the appetite for justice continues unabated.
We confronted the mass murderer as his men hosed blood from his balcony; Leoneto Martins angrily denied the massacre in the East Timorese town where he was Indonesia's appointed mayor.
Before suggesting it was unsafe for myself and three other journalists to remain in Liquica, a seaside town of 55,000 people 30 kilometres west of the capital Dili, Martins dismissed our questions by claiming clashes between rival groups had resulted in five deaths. We suspected he was lying.
Shops and markets were closed and the usually busy streets were largely deserted, except for menacing groups of men wearing bandanas and ribbons in the red and white of Indonesia's flag. Wide-eyed terror in the faces of women searching for family members confirmed the presence of something terrible.
But on that stifling April 6 early morning 10 years ago the extent and brutality of what the world would come to know as the Liquica Massacre - the slaughter of between 30 and 100, probably 86, innocent East Timorese in the quaint Sao Joao de Brito church - was not immediately evident. Liquica was the first of many attacks across East Timor that left about 1500 people dead and thousands more raped, maimed or wounded.
While Catholics across Australia will be asked this weekend to observe a minute's silence, Eurico Guterres, an organiser of the Liquica massacre, will spend the anniversary campaigning in Indonesian West Timor for election to the national parliament. And former general Wiranto, the Indonesian in charge of the military-inspired reign of terror across East Timor that year, will be campaigning to become the nation's next president.
In East Timor events have not so neatly moved on. "When I speak with the victims, the one thing they ask me is 'when will there be justice?'," says Christina Carrascalao, a local who has begun her own crusade to improve the lives of survivors, many of them poor and illiterate farmers. "I tell them I can't answer that."
Rafael dos Santos was the Liquica church priest that terrible day. He tells how police shot tear gas into the church and how riot police, the Brimob, fired shots into the air and at people inside the church. That facilitated the entry to church grounds of the Besi Merah Putih pro-Indonesian militia, who began the massacre with arrows and spears.
"The people hit by the tear gas ran outside with their eyes closed," says Dos Santos. "Then the BMP hacked them. The name of this is murder."
The priest was bustled away at gunpoint by an Indonesian soldier as people inside his house tried to grab his robes, touching them and shouting "we are dying, we are dying".
Attackers shot dead people cowering in the priest's bedroom and troops climbed on the roof and shot several teenagers hiding between the ceiling and roof.
Only low to mid-level militia have been convicted over any of the 1999 atrocities, Liquica included. Indonesian military and police officers are beyond reach in Indonesia. Martins was among 19 accused of crimes against humanity at a Jakarta trial derided as a sham by human rights groups; all were acquitted. Guterres served two years of a 10-year sentence for crimes against humanity before being acquitted on appeal last year.
East Timor leaders - the President, Jose Ramos Horta, a 1996 Nobel laureate, and the former president Xanana Gusmao, a former freedom fighter who is now the Prime Minister - oppose calls for an international war crimes tribunal, saying reconciliation is more important than new trials. They warn of a possible backlash within the Indonesian military and destabilisation of their country's fledgling democracy.
Ramos Horta and Gusmao are scheduled to attend the Liquica church this weekend to mark the anniversary, but there will be none of the hero's welcome the latter received in 1999 on return from six years in a Jakarta jail.
Clinton Fernandes, a former Australian intelligence officer who was reporting in East Timor on 1999, says East Timorese cannot see why they should be punished for petty crimes, such as stealing a chicken, when people responsible for mass murder go unpunished. "The rule of law today cannot succeed amid a culture of impunity for horrific crimes," says Fernandes, a University of NSW lecturer.
He says the Liquica massacre shocked the world because of the clear involvement of Indonesian military in escalating violence against pro-independence supporters. The massacre also violated the sanctity of the church, where an estimated 2000 people had fled to escape violence.
"There is no statute of limitations for serious crimes such as murder, torture and sexual slavery," Fernandes says. "With time and pressure, there will be an international tribunal. It is … the only way ahead."
Carrascalao says survivors see their leaders as having opted for reconciliation over justice. "They understand the need for reconciliation but at the same time they believe there must be justice if what happened is not to happen again," she says.
Many victims have severe psychological problems and lapse into deep depression, while those bearing wound marks find it difficult to integrate in society. "Many of them [are] drunk and they cannot hold down jobs or feed their families."
Carrascalao says only five bodies were returned to families after the massacre. "Most of the families of survivors don't know where their loved ones are buried," she says.
Witnesses say that the bodies were taken from Liquica on trucks almost immediately after the massacre. When Father Rafael returned to the church after four hours, he found no bodies. A few days later, as news of the massacre reverberated around the world, the military arrived at the church unannounced, mopped up the blood and patched the bullet holes in an apparent cover-up.
Carrascalao, too, knows suffering.
Eleven days after the Liquica massacre, Guterres stood in front of a crowd of pro-Indonesian militia in Dili and called members of her family "traitors" and enemies and urged attacks on them.
Soon after, Carrascalao, then 20, and her father Manuel - a pro-independence leader from an influential Dili family - received a call from her brother Manelito, 18, who told them Guterres had stormed the family house with other militia and, with a gun to Manelito's head, was demanding their whereabouts.
"Don't come home, he will kill you," Manelito warned
The Indonesian military ignored their pleas for help. Before they reached the family home - where 100 independence supporters, half of them survivors of the Liquica massacre, had sought refuge - they were blocked by armed Indonesian police. Minutes later, Guterres led an attack on the house, killing Manelito and at least 11 others.
The United Nations says militia and Indonesian soldiers took part. A campaign of terror against independence ran for months, but the perpetrators underrated the bravery of the East Timorese, who defied the intimidation and voted overwhelmingly in a United Nations referendum in August that year to break from Jakarta's rule.
"Ten years later we want to get on with our lives but it's difficult when there hasn't been justice for what happened," Carrascalao says.
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