On March 8, 2008, Komnas Perempuan – Indonesia’s National Commission on Violence Against Women – launched a report on the outcomes of ten years of reform in terms of women’s right to live free from violence. The main outcome has been in the realm of policy-making in which 29 new policy breakthroughs have been produced at the national, local and regional levels. At the national level, eight new laws are notable achievements, including a domestic violence act, an anti-trafficking law, a children’s protection act, a witness protection act, a new law on citizenship which provides better protection for women married to non-nationals.
As many as 236 new institutions have also emerged, in these past ten years, specifically to address violence against women – one of which is Komnas Perempuan itself which was established by Presidential Decree. This number includes 41 community-based women’s crisis centers, 42 special units within hospitals (mostly police hospitals), and 23 local centers established by local governments to provide support for women and children victims of violence. This past year, Indonesia’s national police created a special unit for women and children which housed the 129 special women’s desks created from the bottom-up through the initiatives of retired policewomen and local police heads.
All of these achievements reflect the undeniable vibrancy and breadth of the Indonesian women’s movement since the reform effort began in 1998. This new energy within a newly-constituted women’s movement was triggered by the shocking sexual violence which happened during the mass riots in May 1998 and led to the end of the 32-year New Order regime.
The Indonesian women’s movement is not unchallenged, however. Komnas Perempuan also notes that, at the same time, there are 27 new policies at the local level – produced by local parliaments and governments – which are discriminatory towards women. These policies have names like the prohibition of prostitution although the term is defined so loosely that, in effect, it is a license to detain any woman who is out at night, or who lives nearby places of prostitution. Most of the women who were detained under such a local regulation are poor and struggling to make ends meet for their families. Other similar local by-laws are formulated as ‘against indecent acts’, using an Islamic term ‘maksiat’. The next most common discriminatory local by-laws regulate women’s dress, obligating women civil servants to wear the Muslim headdress, or jilbab, for example. The enforcement of the latter by-laws are rather patchy, actually, betraying the underlying motive behind the creation of these policies, namely a politics of identity which uses religion and morality as a tool for mobilization of support. As everywhere else in the world, this kind of politics targets women as symbols of a community’s purity and morality, and ends up controlling women’s bodies and behavior, denying her the autonomy to determine and realize her own vision of herself as a human being.
In Aceh, the long-awaited peace, which finally came through after the devastating tsunami, brought in the Sharia Law as an officially-recognized regime for local government policy-making. In this ‘new’ Aceh, policy-making is focused on regulating women’s dress and behavior rather than on ensuring that Acehnese women who have been victims of the decades-long armed conflict can receive the kind of support and assistance they need. Under Aceh’s Sharia regulations, for example, unmarried women who are in close proximity with men who are not their guardians are subject to punishment by lashing in public, enforced by a sharia police force and sharia court. This is unprecedented anywhere in Indonesia and introduces an anomaly within the national legal system. It is not only women who are losing out from these new religious-based precedents, but also the integrity of Indonesia’s legal system itself.
Ultimately, for women, the reform process has brought about contradictory forces. While there are Indonesian women who have benefitted substantially from the outcomes of the reform, the same women are also under threat by the new directions emerging from the politicization of religious identities and from the rise of religious fundamentalism. These contradictory forces are all inseparable parts of the bumpy and messy, yet necessary, democratization process in Indonesia overall.
Indonesia’s Constitution, ammended four times during the reform years, actually contains the vision of a pluralist nation, the resounding commitment to social justice and humanity, and, more recently, the guarantees of human rights for all its citizens, including corrective measures such as affirmative action for social groups which have been systematically discriminated. During the past decade of reform, the Constitution has been further enhanced by the ratification of several international human rights covenants and conventions. These are strong foundations to guide Indonesia’s struggle in overcoming the contradictions arising from a practically free-for-all reform process.
In this period of democratization, Indonesia faces a challenge in the re-imagination of its nation. Every weakness in the visioning and governing of the nation by the national and local leadership is an opportunity for a politics of symbols – in Indonesia’s case, mostly religious symbols and identities – to take a hold in strategic institutions of the state: legislative, executive and judicative. The time has come for more and more citizens, who have so far stayed silent at the margins – women and minority groups – to take more active part in this re-imagination of the Indonesian nation.