Establishing a Secure Place for Indonesian Society - Essay Example

WHY IT HAS BEEN DIFFICULT FOR CHINESE INDONESIANS TO ESTABLISH A SECURE PLACE FOR THEMSELVES WITHIN INDONESIAN SOCIETY

Introduction

Odds are stacked against Indonesian’s minority groups. Some of the common identifiers for the minorities include race, religion and ethnicity. This brings out the minority non-indigenous groups (among them the Chinese Indonesians), Semites and Jews as a discriminated lot in the country. Hadler (2004: 292) points out that Jews (some of who are Semites) endured years of self-denial and openly rebuked pro-Israel slogans in order to appease the local authorities and to shield themselves from the subjectivity that could arise from belonging to an unrecognised religious faction. Likewise, Chinese Indonesians could not publicly display their cultural or religious beliefs for the entire Suharto regime (Dieleman, Koning and Post, 2011: 1), which again places them at an equally suppressed position as are the Semites and the Jews. Chinese Indonesians have perennially found it difficult to be accepted within the Indonesian society. The reality of this form of racial discrimination has become evident through a series of homophobic attacks on persons of Chinese descent living in Indonesia. In this essay, the factors that have made it difficult for Chinese Indonesians to fully integrate with the rest of the Indonesian society are explained. Touching on social, historical and legal discrimination both during the colonial and post-independence eras, and criminalization and government sponsored attacks, this essay clearly draws in the hand of the Indonesian government in enacting and sustaining policies that have led to the obvious alienation of Chinese Indonesians.

Factors That Have Made It Difficult for Chinese Indonesians to Be Accepted within Indonesian Society

Historical, Social and Legal Alienation

In order to understand the difficulties that Chinese Indonesians encounter in their attempts to seek acceptability within the Indonesian society, it is important to reflect on their supposed role and how this is taken (appreciated or otherwise) by the local communities. It is also important to put into context the historical perspective of the hostilities meted out on this particular groups in order to both understand their genesis and the path taken in addressing or propagating the issue. Literally, the local communities’ hostility towards Chinese Indonesians constitutes racial and ethnic discrimination. Undisputedly, Chinese Indonesians have lived in Indonesia for decades now, despite their continued perception as a foreign population. However, as will be outlined below, they have maintained their cultural identity throughout the decades they have been in the country. Notably, the most recent large scale homophobic attacks on the Chinese Indonesians happened in the late 1990s towards the end of the reign of President Suharto. Lindsey and Pausacker (2005: 1) provides a clear historical context of the colonial to post-colonial alienation of Chinese Indonesians; where they were regarded as ‘Foreign Orientals’ by the Dutch and later ‘of foreign descent’ in the Indonesian law. Being a minority but having lived in the island for centuries, this form of classification is unnecessary and it serves to present them as lesser citizens. This means that historically, the Chinese Indonesians have been regarded as outsiders, thus justifying their exclusion from social life. Colombijn and Barwegen (2009: 838) noted that the social setting of urban cities in Indonesia was heavily accentuated by ethnic backgrounds of the locals, such that people of a similar racial or ethnic background tended to coalesce at particular sections of the cities. This trend, the authors note, was carried over to the post-colonial period, and attempts to stop this kind of stratification were unsuccessful.

Setijadi-Dunn and Barker’s (2010) account of the supposed role played by Chinese Indonesian film makers vis-à-vis the actual role they played shows the perpetration of an intentional scheme to erase their cultural contribution to the Indonesian film industry. Setijadi-Dunn and Barker (2010: 28) stated that against popular belief that indigenous Indonesians were the first to produce movies featuring the culture and lives of indigenous Indonesians, “ethnic Chinese filmmakers gave the people of the Indies their first cinematic visualization of what Indonesia was”. This account counters the mainstream account provided by Indonesian film historians who have deliberately overlooked the role of the minority Chinese Indonesians in advancing local cultural films. But unlike the locals whose films initially hardly featured their minority group, Chinese Indonesians provided a blend of the various cultural backgrounds of the people living in Indonesia during and after the colonial era, an approach that is disapproved by the local film industry historians and which leads to the exclusionism advanced against these culturally blended films. Clearly, the reason behind the enduring suppression of the view that Chinese Indonesians have made any form of contribution to the cultural understanding of the Indonesian society is driven by the deliberate efforts to erase their role in the history of the country.

Another form of alienation that the government has sponsored is the indigenization program that was meant to make the Chinese Indonesians part of the local populations; literally, both in culture and identity. As Aguilar Jr. (2001: 505) noted, indigenization was meant to “remove a feeling of inferiority on the part of our people (referring to indigenous Indonesians), while on the other hand removing the feeling of superiority on the part of the group concerned”. This was done through promulgation of the term Cina to denote the Chinese Indonesians and banning of the better, more acceptable term Tionghoa (p. 505). In paper, the above explanation for the change in the definition term for the Chinese was meant to bring equality by demoting the Chinese to the level of the locals and enhancing the feeling of dignity among locals in paper. However, the entire indigenization plan was intended humiliate the local Chinese and make them inferior in the eyes of locals. This effectively set a precedent for collision between the two groups, since such a demotion of one group and the promotion of the other was inherently bound to create conflict. Whether the military rulers envisaged such violence at the time they made the pronunciation is not of great relevance now, seeing that the outcome has been demeaning treatment of a section of the population that has lived in Indonesia for decades. While the humiliating change of identifying terms was done in 1967, it is worthwhile to note that this came roughly a year after the 1965 to 1966 wave of violence against Chinese Indonesians stopped. As indicated in the following subsection, this violence was, like the 1998 one, planned and sponsored by the local security forces. Apparently, designating Chinese Indonesians the demeaning title Cina was the culmination of the humiliation started through the mass killings of the previous two years. More appropriately, it is worthwhile to note that the actions of the armed forces have consistently been driven by a desire to deprive the local Chinese of an identity and entitlement to their claim of belonging after centuries of settlement in Indonesia.

While Koning and Dahles (2009) is basically constructed to provide insights into the effects of spiritualism among Chinese Indonesian and Chinese Malaysian managers, the authors further state that since 1930, the population of Chinese Indonesians was next accounted for in the 2000 population Census, providing a hiatus of 70 years within which the development and growth of this section of the population remains unknown. Even at this point, there were serious concerns for misrepresentation of their actual numbers (p. 33). This could have been due to a fear of being identified as so, or merely due to manipulation of the population data to advance the minority tag assigned to the Chinese Indonesians. Whichever of these reasons applies to the actual occurrence, it provides a galvanizing point for local politicians to sustain an onslaught against the Chinese Indonesians, a section of the population that the system is designed to deprive an equal status with the indigenous communities.

Criminalization and Government Sponsored Attacks

Being a minority group, Chinese Indonesians have appeared an easier target to divert attention from often spiralling social and economic pressures. The involvement of local police and army units in planning and executing crimes and murders against the Chinese minorities has been confirmed through a number of investigative reports including by such authoritative organization as Human Rights Watch. Panggabean and Smith (2011: 231) point out that the eyewitness accounts of those who presented their views and evidence to the Joint Fact Finding Team (TGPF) following the 1998 attacks on Chinese Indonesians corroborate the allegations that state security elements were involved in the planning of the ensuing violence and directly worked with criminal gangs to execute the crimes. According to Hoon (2006: 149), the violence that erupted in 1998 was an indication of the failure of the assimilation/ indigenization program ran by President Suharto’s government. Importantly, the TGPF comprised state selected investigators, which implies that for them to have associated security officers with racial crimes can hardly be contested. Curiously, as Panggabean and Smith (2011: 235) noted, all the looting and torching done in the entire period of the riots affected Chinese properties. Coming at a time when President Suharto was facing major criticism over his mishandling of the economy, Panggabean and Smith (2011: 232) was also concerned that a common characteristic of the affected cities is that only those in which the local authorities and the security agents could not manage to control the crowds of protestors experienced the events. As noted in the preceding subsection, the 1998 violence against Chinese Indonesians was not the first such government sponsored killing of this minority group. Melvin (2013: 65) suggests that previous accounts by investigators of the killings of the 1965 to 1966 period tended to dissuade those interested from the notion that despite largely targeting locals aligned with the PKI, the local Chinese were also targeted. This is due to a cover up initiated and maintained by the army. However, as Melvin recounts, recent evidence points to targeted killings of the Chinese Indonesians, a scheme run without following the script drawn to facilitate annihilation of the PKI.

Conclusion

This essay explored the reasons why the Chinese Indonesians, a minority ethnic group within the larger context of the Indonesian society has found it so difficult to establish a secure place for themselves within Indonesian society. The essay finds that as was the norm during the colonial era, urban Indonesia, within which most of the local Chinese live, was characterized by a trend of racial groupings, where persons who share similar identities tended to share neighbourhoods. Furthermore, Chinese Indonesians have distinctly stuck to their original cultural identity, which makes them easily identifiable from most of the rest of the population. The government’s attempts to kill off this trend did not bear fruit after independence, and soon after, the rise of Suharto dramatically increased the amount of violence directed towards Chinese Indonesians. Two cases in point are the 1965 to 1966 and the 1998 mass killings that resulted from government sponsored chaos in large cities. Inevitably, and despite the many attempts to delink the Chinese Indonesians from the history of Indonesia, this essay proves that their misfortunes have been the result of government sponsored programs that were meant to lower their influence for preservation of local political uniformity. The forms of alienation have been undertaken at the legal, social, and historical fronts.