Out of many, bombs

Bhinnêka tunggal ika tan hana dharma mangrwa.

They are indeed different, but they are of the same kind, as there is no duality in Truth.

From a 14^th century Javanese poem, Katawan Sutasoma

Within the span of a few days last week, religious violence erupted in dramatic fashion in Java, first in the west and then, a few days ago, in Central Java, in a city about 40 miles from where we live.  There’s nothing unusual about such events in Indonesia – the newspaper regularly reports on them – but the magnitude of these reveals the deep divides coursing through this nation, religious, ethnic, linguistic. They celebrate their pluralism here, but they suffer from it too, that old story.

In West Java last week, six Ahmadis were killed in a outburst of violence from Muslims. Depending on who you listen to, Ahmadis are either an branch of Islam that follows a prophet who appeared in India in the 19^th century, or a apostates who follow a false prophet. They have been subject to persecution all over the world, particularly in places like Pakistan, where they are constitutionally forbidden from calling themselves Muslim, and more recently in Indonesia; following a series of violent demonstrations in 2008 by Muslims against the Ahmadis, the Indonesian government declared that proselytizing by Ahmadis was illegal, and Indonesia’s top Islamic body declared them to be “deviant.” Since then, things have been difficult for them in Indonesia. Last week, in a city called Pandelang, six were killed.

It’s become something of a crisis for the President here, known by his initials SBY.  He can’t seem to devise a way to curtail the violence, in part because he doesn’t want to antagonize the Muslim community. It’s fairly clear that authorities have done little to curtail the violence; last week a minister suggested it was up to God to take care of things.

In Temanggung, a city sort of near us (though one we haven’t visited – it’s the wrong way from us) last week a “Christian” man charged with blasphemy was sentenced to five years in prison, the maximum legal penalty for blasphemy. In October, he’d been distributing pictures of Mecca doctored in an extraordinarily offensive way – think the Indonesian equivalent of Fred Phelps, and you’ll get a sense of his utter tactlessness; I don’t want to describe them here because I don’t want to occasion a mob outside my house, but they were gross, and certainly blasphemous.  When the verdict of five years was announced, crowds inside and outside the courthouse were aghast: they wanted the death penalty.

They immediately went on a rampage, burning and completely destroying three churches in the immediate vicinity. It was sudden and terrible and overwhelming. Absurd too, from my eyes, and scary.

I come from a pluralistic society, of course, one where the strains on pluralism were tense enough last fall to make the national headlines in Indonesia. E pluribus unum is a nice sentiment, though that unum is pretty difficult to get to.  The national motto in Indonesia is Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, from the poem above, a Javanese phrase meaning “Unity in Diversity.” When our guard quit unexpectedly just after we moved here, our landlady told us we’d like the new one better, because he was Christian. The Chinese community in Indonesia (which has been here for hundreds of years – it’s a phrase not unlike “the African community in the United States” for African-Americans) regularly suffers from outbreaks of violence and destruction. And for years the Indonesian government implemented a policy called transmigrasi, which sent people from the staggeringly over-crowded island of Java – and other places too - off to other less populated parts of Indonesia, a move which not coincidentally served as a kind of on-going Javanese colonization as well.  Often, those moves engender tremendous tension as well.

            I believe in bhinneka tunggal ika, of course – not out of any sort of touchy-feely sentiment, because it’s the only real hope for anything positive in the world. Sometimes, though, it feels a little like believing in Santa Claus. But ho ho ho anyway.