Law on mass organizations is merely about power
Abdil Mughis Mudhoffir and Rafiqa Qurrata A’yun*
President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo recently issued a controversial regulation in lieu of law (Perppu) that revised the 2013 law on mass organizations (Ormas), in response to increasing Islamic radicalism and vigilantism. The targets are organizations believed to be spreading ideologies that contradict state ideology Pancasila and the Constitution.
This controversy divides those who believe the law is an effective way to protect society from intolerant groups and those who argue that the Perppu could lead to authoritarianism all over again.
Both camps, however, agree that there an increase in the number of vigilante groups and in Islamic radicalism. They also assume that a legal approach is needed to address that issue, but disagree on the legal measures.
Many analysis have shown that strong security measures do not guarantee diminishing Islamic radicalism. Its agents even appeared during the authoritarian regime. In Malaysia and Singapore, security instruments have been used mostly to silence opposition under the pretext of countering terrorism, similar to the Indonesian Subversion Law.
As the scholar Vedi Hadiz shows in his 2016 book on Islamic populism, violent and non-violent Islamic political movements seek solutions to political and economic discontent.
Under the New Economic Policy that absorbed rural MalayMuslims into the urban industrial sector, for example, Malaysia curbed Islamic radicalism.
In Turkey, the Islamic underground movement was diminished when the Justice and Development Party (AKP) — a vehicle for low- and middle-class Muslims — won power through elections.
Similarly, Indonesia has many legal instruments that could be used to curb vigilantism. However, the rise of vigilantism is not because the state is unable to punish the perpetrators or because of a lack of legal instruments, but because non-state violence has repeatedly been used for political interests in Indonesian democracy.
Many violent organized groups, which articulate both religious and nationalist identities, remain prevalent even though Indonesia has experienced almost two decades of democratization. The recent Jakarta gubernatorial election showed the significant role of Islamic vigilante groups in mobilizing religious sentiment to garner support from the increasing Islamized society.
In response to the supposedly increasing Islamic radicalism, other opportunist elites have also benefitted from the mobilization of other groups that have engaged in violence, like Banser — the militia wing of the nation’s largest Islamic organization, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) — by articulating the discourse of tolerant Islam.
In South Sulawesi, the researcher Michael Buehler found that Laskar Jundullah, an Islamic paramilitary group, had been used by some regents to enforce sharia bylaws, a means for political elites to open up “new sources of revenue.” In Lombok, the researcher Kari Telle also revealed that Islamic vigilante groups serve the interests of local politicians.
Other examples can be found in, for example, Surakarta, Central Java, and in many parts of West Java and North Sumatra, where violent organized groups are part of the alliance of political and business elites in accumulating power and capital.
The legacy of such practices can also be traced back to the New Order era when state power was consolidated through the mobilization of many civilian militias to exterminate suspected communists and their alleged followers in 1965.
Therefore, legal arguments on the Perppu Ormas mass organizations distract from the complex aspects that nurture and spread vigilantism and radicalism, while opportunist elites in power continue to produce laws and regulations for political means.
Criticizing the Perppu, therefore, should instead be directed toward the political motives behind its enactment. The words of Otto Kirchheimer, a legal theorist, come to mind, that courts in political life function “to eliminate a political foe of the regime according to some prearranged rules.”
Similarly, the Perppu can be seen as a means to consolidate Jokowi’s power ahead of the 2019 general election, especially from among sections of society that embrace tolerant Islamic discourse. The regulation is also driven by the perception that the victory of Anies Baswedan in the latest Jakarta gubernatorial election, who ran for the Gerindra Party of Jokowi’s former presidential candidate rival Prabowo Subianto, was supported primarily by Islamist groups.
However, as Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI) — which has little record of violence, unlike Islamic vigilante groups — has been the first and only organization banned so far, this clearly shows the Perppu, at least initially, was aimed at the easiest target within the political and business alliance. The Perppu also contains a political message to Jokowi’s rivals to distance themselves from Islamist groups, with officials also stating that other organizations may be dissolved.
The move targeting the HTI also resonates with the interests of the NU, which had long been frustrated with the spreading influence of the organization and its campaign for a caliphate, primarily in one of its strongholds, East Java.
That is why the NU is in the front line supporting the Perppu Ormas, to the advantage of Jokowi.
Previous policies on radicalism also confirm Jokowi’s political motives to weaken the alliance of his rival and to identify his political supporters, instead of seriously addressing the real problems.
The proposed appointment of university rectors directly by the President as well as the intense promotion of Pancasila reflect not only the logical fallacy in identifying the roots of radicalism and vigilantism, but also pave the way for the mobilization of the ultra-nationalist movement for the 2019 general election.
Therefore, a harsh legal measure targeting organizations that supposedly oppose Pancasila will become a useful instrument for opportunist elites not only to mobilize political support in electoral competition, but also to silence the perceived opposition, which happened in the past.
We should therefore be on the alert against such pretexts, which do not help us address radicalism and vigilantism.
*Abdil Mughis Mudhoffir, a graduate of the Pesantren Ciganjur Islamic boarding school, is pursuing his PhD at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne. He is studying the proliferation of Islamic vigilantism in Indonesia. Rafiqa Qurrata A’yun is a lecturer in criminal law, School of Law, University of Indonesia. She is researching Blasphemy Law.
This article has been published in The Jakarta Post, August 30,2017
