May 2008: on Ahmadiyah and a Dying Hope

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
~Edmund Burke

I was going to be perfectly content in writing about girls and my other miserable failures but it reached an unbearable point the other night, so I have to break the melancholic run for now.
The tipping point was sometime last week when I was in a room with the best legal minds in the country and few of them seemed to be sufficiently concerned with the gov’t ban on YouTube and the troublesome provisions of the ITE Law. These are some of the most proud men in the country, many have the most impeccable rapport in integrity and visions and most are well in their golden years.

I said the whole thing sounds too much like bad memories of Harmoko’s nefarious practices of the New Order but I was largely laughed away as the paranoid little kid. That’s okay, these guys are now busy putting bad guys in prison and rewriting important laws, I trust them to have a better sense of priority and I won’t even pretend like I’m qualified to ever pass a judgment, but I was rather disappointed. Many were busy with their retirement plans and had just started getting into boating and expensive wine. It ‘s addictive, I also know that. They brought the old man down and he’s wrapped tight six feet under as we spoke, these guys well deserve their retirement years, they finished the job they were set to do, I guess.

I had some free time in the morning and downloaded the Constitutional Court decision over the Censorship body case. The Court decided that the censorship body was ‘conditionally unconstitutional’ and a new law is badly in need but stopped short of striking it down. A small but proud group of dissenting individual film makers filed the suit and they took the decision as a victory nevertheless. I called a director friend to say hello and he said that it was now ‘up those guys who deal with the papers’.

Another friend of mine spends her days in the parliament doing all the good and noble and smart stuff. She was in Aceh on work and passed me a YouTube URL over YM of the FPI guys but I didn’t give it much thought as I was running for another meeting. The picture bothered me a lot more than I cared to show but I had things to do.

Dinner was with an old friend who was considering running for a regional parliament and we chatted over drinks. He asked what I thought and I was glad for him. I told him I’d make the introductions to get support from the party core and even get the girls to go on the campaign trails and a few bits more, but I was curious what he thought of the whole Ahmadiyah thing. He comes from the conservative base but nevertheless a smart guy. I’ve worked with him for over ten years, he sits as my proxy on two companies and looked after all the numbers on almost everything I’ve worked over the years. I told him I’d do anything, but I needed to know if he’d move to support the gov’t position to ban Ahmadiyah if he was elected. It’s a hypothetical case, but I wanted to know.

The other guy on our table was another close friend of ours, a Seventh Day Adventist - similar to Ahmadiyah, also an unrecognized religion in this country. Unlike the Adventists though, the Ahmadiyah followers have YouTube videos floating all over the internet advocating their long and painful death.

The faces turned pale but I was on the roll and the YouTube video angered me like only few other things around. He hesitated to make a position – the party he’s going with is fully in line with the gov’t and I guess I knew well enough that he would be much pressured to go along. I stepped it up a notch and told him that I thought this whole Ahmadiyah thing was a despicable thing.

Just a few hours before that, we were talking about the events taking place in the same month ten years ago in Jakarta. The city was in flame and it was an end of an era. He crawled on the ground in Sudirman as soldiers beat the living shit out of everybody. I was on the different end of the street.

If he would even consider going after a group of people merely for things they’d believed in, then we can just forget about the whole political career talk. He ought to just drop the whole thing – we shall do business together, but not a bit more. It’s not something I want to be involved in. and if a friend of mine was about to take a legislative position to forbid a religion – of whatever definition – then I would do anything in my power, to make sure that he would never, ever, get anywhere near real a legislative arena. In fact, if I knew such a guy in person, I’d make it a personal mission not to ever make sure he would never be in politics.

This country is going nuts and if everyone is just getting into steps for their pretty little dance, it was ten years worth of an insult for me.

He finished his drink and left us– me and the Adventist – to chat until the wee hours. The Adventist said that it was unnecessary of me to be so aggressive in my opinions, and wondered why I was so upset. I told him they’d start with Ahmadiyah, but then again, once they’re done with the shitty little sect, they’d move on to everybody else. Hitler suspended civil rights with the Enabling Acts before he moved on to dissolve the presidency and passed Nuremberg Law. He invaded Poland and the gathering storm was in fury before you knew it. You should’ve believed the weather man.

Extremist Islamic sects are no strangers to this country. Groups like Ahmadiyah had always been everywhere. Soeharto always knew how to deal with it. Some twenty years ago, he unleashed the fury on a group in Lampung and wiped out and entire village. The people in Tanjung Priuk are still tending to their wounds and they couldn’t even get their dead proper legal papers. We never heard of those since they were hustled onto the back of the trucks and disappeared into the wilderness of the mysterious world of dead ghosts. Soeharto would’ve just wiped them out with machine guns. Ten years after the old man went down and exactly 100 days after his death, this country’s still trying to figure out what to do with the hundreds of dead men. How many people needed to die before we screamed stop?

I knew people who died this week ten years ago to empty the proud parliament building with a hope for a better place. I’ll be damned if I ever put a finger to help putting these people back in. They can go fuck themselves and their righteous damnation. I want to sit back and drink my drink.

For old memories, you live them once so you don’t have to live them again.