Indonesia | It’s about more than the “ban on gambling” and Islam – Finnish professor: Westerners should understand the laws they criticize

Bali bonk ban, i.e. Bali betting ban. That’s what the Australian media reported when the Indonesian government approved a new criminal law in December 2022.

The law, which will enter into force in three years, limits many individual freedoms in the world’s fourth largest country by population. But the Western community was primarily afraid of how banning premarital sex would affect the lives of tourists on the paradise island of Bali, one of the country’s thousands of islands.

The governor of Bali soon assured tourists that the sex ban did not apply to them, even though such an exemption is not written into the law. Despite the appeasement, the West had already awakened to interpret the situation of the world’s largest Muslim country.

Is Indonesia yet another example of conservative Islam winning?

Have the Western countries lost the war of values, and the world on its way to a future where there is no place for individual freedom and human rights?

The questions ignore Indonesia’s history and local cultures. In practice, Indonesia has also seen the opposite trend in recent years: it wasn’t until spring 2022 that the country approved a law prohibiting sexual harassment and forced marriage.

The new criminal law is also about more than just restricting sexuality. The purpose of the law is to completely replace the criminal law dictated by the Dutch during the colonial period.

Westerners criticizing the law should therefore find out what the new law means for the locals, says the professor of anthropology Timo Kaartinen.

“We can criticize the law from a human rights perspective, but we must understand why the new law has been enacted and be aware that this is an attempt to move forward with the legislation.”

Liberals through the glass, legislation restricting individual rights looks like a reversal instead of progress. But Indonesian lawmakers are working to introduce principles important to many communities into criminal law.

According to Kaartinen, since the 1930s, Indonesia has compared the nation to a family community, where respect for parents and harmony connect people to each other.

“This is a law with which Indonesia tries to come to terms with its own colonial past,” he reflects.

“In many family-oriented societies, marriage is seen as a matter for the whole family, not just an individual. The nation is also thought of as a family, where father and mother must be respected.”

The weight of the family is also reflected in the law, so that a conviction for premarital sex requires a report by a close relative. Few foreigners are therefore in danger of being convicted.

“What’s interesting is how the law affects those tourists who have relationships with locals or who, for example, use sex services,” Kaartinen reflects.

Multi the country that restricts premarital sex by law is predominantly Muslim, although there is also, for example, the Philippines, whose main religion is Catholicism.

In Indonesia, many locals have blamed the new laws on fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law on everyone.

According to the news agency Reuters, the parties promoting Islamic politics would have liked the moral laws to be even stricter than what was approved. However, they are in the minority in parliament, despite the fact that about 87 percent of Indonesia’s population of more than 270 million are Muslim.

But not all Muslims are in favor of restricting individual rights, and according to Kaartinen, it is a misunderstanding to blame Islam for conservative legislation.

“The new laws do not come so much from Islam, but from the old customs of the communities,” says Kaartinen. “Islamic family law actually often seems like a reasonable and rational way to organize family relationships if they have gone so badly into a knot that mediation is not possible.”

A node situation can be, for example, a pregnancy outside of marriage.

Customary law has been built into the unwritten actions and rules of the community even before the Indonesian state existed. When the Dutch came, they made customary law a legal system alongside European law.

At that time, the state judiciary only touched mainly the part of the population with Dutch ancestry. Holland justified the preservation of customary law by respecting local culture.

However, it was above all a system like apartheid, where different colonial groups were tried to be kept apart by preventing gender relations between them, Kaartinen points out.

“Not everyone was equal before the law.”

Although in independent Indonesia, everyone is covered by the public legal system, customary law and religious rights have emerged as alternative ways to deal with family matters and land rights disputes in particular. According to Kaartinen, they still have their good sides.

When state law adjudicates, common law primarily seeks agreement between disputing parties.

At the same time, they operate close to communities and are therefore an accessible and affordable option, especially for people in remote areas.

“In disputes concerning community groups, it can also be difficult for an outside judge to understand what the case is about.”

Now it works it seems that the Indonesian parliament is trying to eliminate overlapping systems and bring the thinking needed by different communities into the same law. In a country made up of thousands of islands, languages ​​and ethnic groups, this is not easy.

“If you want to strengthen the sense of community, it is difficult to summarize the ideas of different communities about kinship and morality into a single principle.”

In addition, the new criminal law is problematic due to its open to interpretation. Kaartinen has an example of an equally ambiguous moral from Finnish history: the prohibition law. Prohibiting alcohol did not stop the booze from flowing.

When a law is introduced that large numbers of people break, the law becomes selective.

“You go to prison because someone doesn’t like you, not because you did something wrong,” says Kaartinen. “In some communities, parents could even be pressured to report their children in conflict situations.”

New instead of tourists, the law primarily threatens the most vulnerable groups, for example Indonesian sexual and gender minorities, sex workers and women.

But in Indonesia, equality and democracy are held in high esteem, which goes back to the democratization movement and political reforms of the late 1990s. Criticizing the law from a human rights perspective can therefore very well appeal to Indonesians, Kaartinen estimates.

The new criminal law was first tried to be passed already in 2019, but it was overturned by the resistance of Indonesian civil society and organizations.

“I haven’t been as awake now, maybe because of the corona,” says Kaartinen. “But human rights in Indonesia are not something that can just be swept off the table. A legal principle specific to Indonesia is that the law should treat everyone equally.”