http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/metro-madness-deafening-silence-to-christians-plight/391965
Metro Madness: Deafening Silence to Christians' Plight Simon Pitchforth | August 20, 2010 These two chaps sported purple berets with yellow pom-poms on top making them look - to my eyes at least - like a cross between Black Panther militants and a couple of camp sippers of creme de menthe. (Photo Simon Pitchforth) During the first six months of this year, there have been 33 attacks on worshiping Christians. Quite a depressing statistic and I'm sure that you have all been following these stories with a mounting sense of outrage and disbelief. Well, last Sunday, I joined the worshipers from Bekasi's Batak Christian Protestant Church (HKBP) and their sympathizers as they raised their voices in protest at Monas. HKBP is the church that has been driven out of its place of worship and forced onto a local field, which must make kneeling in prayer a rather soggy affair. Not content with this humiliation, however, those lovable rogues from the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) three weeks ago launched an all-out attack on these poor Christians, a number of whom were hospitalized in the process. Up at Monas, hundreds of worshipers had gathered. Alas, they were hemmed into the south side of the park by the police and were not allowed to head to the Presidential Palace, where I had seen rehearsals for Independence Day in full militaristic swing, neat rows of polished epaulets goose-stepping to some funky brass band boogie. No, the worshipers had to content themselves with gathering around a small truck on which a Christian youth was launching into a classically Indonesian amplified diatribe, bewailing the plight of happy clappers in the good, old R of I. The young orator was flanked by two members of an organization called the PMKRI, a Catholic student group apparently. These two chaps sported purple berets with yellow pom-poms on top making them look - to my eyes at least - like a cross between Black Panther militants and a couple of camp sippers of creme de menthe. "Where are you SBY?!" our Christian Malcolm X censured his president. The silence has indeed been deafening, as Indonesians, both Christian and Muslim, wait for some moral leadership from the kleptomaniacal carpetbaggers who rule the roost. The wheels have most definitely fallen off the Yudhoyono bandwagon over the last 12 months. "We used to have Gus Dur and Nurcolish, but now there seems to be nobody committed to religious peace. It wasn't like this when I was a child," a woman in the crowd told me. An elderly gentleman, perhaps nearer to the truth, explained, "This tension has been under the surface for 40 years in Indonesia, but now it's out in the open." Then, there followed a rousing chorus of the national anthem, as the protesters reaffirmed their Indonesian identities and the spirit of pluralism that this diverse, archipelagic nation was founded upon. I glanced over my shoulder and noted with a snigger that, viewed from this part of the park, the bulging dome of the Istiqlal mosque sits at the bottom of the main Monas phallus in exactly the position that you would expect to find something similarly spherical. I wondered if this smutty little tableau was a forewarning of Indonesia's future in which minority religions are given the shaft as an Islamic nationalist paradigm establishes itself and goes on a testosterone-fueled rampage. I noticed a girl in a jilbab wearing a backpack toward the rear of the demo. "Perhaps she's getting ready to press the detonator button," I thought, and then felt shocked that such an idea would pop into my head. How could I think such a thing about friendly, old Indonesia? Where will the country's descent into religious demagoguery lead if left unchecked? To its ultimate breakup and Balkanization? Islamic orthodoxy - orthos: right, doxa: opinions - is an approach to the great religion that seeks to end debate and replace it with a set of rules. Debate and argument are now seen as an insult to the faith and close to heresy. To the extent that the ayatollahs and mullahs are informing the world that the last word is in on how the Koran should be understood, I would submit that they are being treasonous to the good book itself. What the great religions require of their followers is intelligent engagement. The teachings are inevitably in the form of metaphors, symbols, analogies and parables. You can't get at transcendent truth by pointing at things and issuing fatwas. Islam came after Christianity and thus guaranteed that this long debate would be revived. There was now more than one book, more than one set of prophecies, more than one prophet. Now, however, many of faith would seek to end debate rather than encourage it and we've turned full circle once again. Where is the spirit of Merdeka? Simon Pitchforth is the editor of Jakarta Java Kini magazine.
