Montjuic cemetery in Barcelona. Credit: Courtesy of Cementiris de Barcelona

By Alexandra Di Stefano Pironti
BARCELONA, Spain, Aug 8 2013 (IPS)

Even in death, people in Spain cannot escape the economic crisis. Funeral services carry the highest VAT (value added tax) rate, alongside entertainment like nightclubs, and luxury products.

“I paid over 7,000 euros (9,300 dollars) for my husband’s funeral, and it was a simple service, with one of the simple coffins, which cost 2,600 euros (3,450 dollars), without mementos or music, and only a few flowers. Besides, instead of a burial, we had him cremated, which is even less expensive,” Ana María Robles, a 66-year-old pensioner, told IPS.

“For a middle-class family, that price is abusive,” said Robles, who retired a few months ago after working for years in the Barcelona traffic department.

“The fact that VAT was raised from eight to 21 percent in late 2012 is appalling, and I think it’s a political mistake for funeral services to be charged the same tax as discotheques,” he told IPS. “We used to pay a reduced VAT, like in other European countries.”

But now funeral services pay the same VAT as theatres, cinemas, concerts, zoos, amusement parks, nightclubs and other forms of entertainment.

Prices have risen constantly, and the number of “entierros de beneficencia” or municipal-financed burials for those whose families are unable to foot the bill rose 20 percent between 2010 and 2011 and 38 percent from 2011 to 2012, when funeral services still paid the reduced VAT of eight percent.

With the new tax, these burials are expected to increase 40 percent this year, Valmaña said.

Since funeral services in Spain passed from state to private hands in 1996, prices have risen steadily, a source with ties to the sector, who asked not to be identified, told IPS.

“Since the liberalisation of these services, particularly since 2004, prices have risen faster than the CPI (consumer price index),” the source said.

“In 2004, a complete funeral service cost around 4,000 euros (5,300 dollars), and today a normal average funeral costs between 6,000 and 7,000 euros (8,000 to 9,300 dollars),” the source added.

Valmaña said the proportion of charity burials is the highest in 20 years, despite the fact that around half of the Spanish population pays funeral insurance, which costs 20 to 30 euros (40 to 53 dollars) a month for the simplest coverage and up to 70 euros (93 dollars) for the most sophisticated.

“We have agreements with the social services of the different city governments to bury the deceased if the family cannot afford to do it,” said Joan Ventura, director of Altima, the private company that has 20 percent of the funeral services market in Barcelona and surrounding areas.

According to Valmaña, the process to obtain an “entierro de beneficencia” is simple. The social assistant in the hospital where the person died and the city government must document that the family cannot afford a private service.

“Years ago I decided to make the ‘entierro de beneficencia’ a dignified procedure, since the deceased were buried in common graves until 2006,” Valmaña said. “Now we use the highest level of niches, which are hardest to reach and no one wants them.”

Cementiris de Barcelona also offers subsidised burial services for 300 euros (400 dollars), which is 400 euros below cost.

“The burial service is sacred for families,” Valmaña said. “They arrange a decent funeral even when they are having economic troubles and have to borrow money from the rest of the family.”

But he said the crisis in Spain, which has one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe – nearly 27 percent – has led families to save on frills, “such as the quality of the coffin or the marble marker, the flowers or the wreaths – and they even go without music in the ceremony.”

Ventura, meanwhile, blamed the problem on the change in taxes. “This business has not been affected much by the economic crisis, but it has been hurt by the increase in VAT.”

Horse-drawn carriages

The other side of the coin is the funerals of the rich, and the growing social differences in Spain.

According to a report this year by the Catholic humanitarian organisation Cáritas Diocesana, titled Inequality and Social Rights, the crisis in this country has led to a 30 percent increase in social inequality between the richest and the poorest since 2006.

The study says Spain has the highest level of social inequality in the European Union.

While the number of municipal-financed burials is on the rise, the wealthy have their pick of extravagant services.

Cementiris de Barcelona is planning a 19th-century style luxury funeral complete with horse-drawn carriages, “targeting a very rich segment of the population who are looking for something different,” Valmaña said.

For its part, Altima offers green burials, where seeds are planted with the ashes of the deceased, to symbolise, when the tree starts to grow, the cycle of life and death.

“We have planted 1,000 trees so far,” Ventura said.

Economy professor Arcadi Oliveres has become a popular face of the growing discontent in Spain because he calls a spade a spade.

“I have called for Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to be impeached for destroying the welfare state,” he said.

But Oliveres, from Catalonia in northeast Spain, is not alone in his mission. He and Teresa Forcades, a Benedictine nun and medical doctor, have created an unusual platform representing people who are fed up with the country’s leaders who, they say, failed to do anything to prevent the severe economic crisis tearing Spain apart.

Protests, like this demonstration against foreclosures in the southern city of Málaga, are being held almost every day in some part of Spain. Credit: Inés Benítez

The platform is also supported by leftwing parties and sectors related to health, housing and education – areas that have been drastically affected by the conservative Rajoy administration’s budget cuts.

“There are good, well-intentioned, well-educated people who don’t agree with the economic decisions and the current political process,” Oliveres told IPS. “Our mission is to bring together people from these three sectors and come up with a joint candidate for the parliamentary elections in Catalonia in 2016.”

Oliveres blames the country’s political leadership, both the governing centre-right People’s Party (PP) and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), for the crisis that has driven up unemployment levels in Spain to among the highest in Europe.

Anna Torres, a sociologist from Barcelona, concurs with Oliveres. “The leaders are not connected to the people, and the parties aren’t either. That is why people are looking for answers in social platforms,” she told IPS.

“Europe has gone through many phases and has made leaps and bounds in terms of social welfare,” she said. “It would be a pity to have to go back to working in buildings that collapse, like what happened in April in Bangladesh (where 1,127 garment factory workers were killed), or to working as slaves, like in China.”

Torres said the economic model is changing in Spain. “There is a crisis in the construction industry and traditional productive activities are disappearing, and we haven’t specialised yet in highly technological industries,” she said.

“We were in the process of doing that when the crisis hit, and now there are many trained workers who can’t find jobs,” she added.

Oliveres said his group was working for “a cooperative Catalonia infused with solidarity, without an army, that helps the Third World and is independent.

“I have recently been in Granada (in the south), Alicante (in the southeast) and the Basque Country (in the north), and after hearing me explain our ideas, people want to start doing something similar,” Oliveres told IPS in an interview in the offices of Justicia i Pau, the Christian-based NGO that he heads.

“We have nearly 40,000 people who have signed up to (the web page of) our platform Procés Constituent a Catalunya since it was launched in April, and so many speaking invitations that we could visit all of Catalonia 50 times,” he said.

The Procés Constituent is one of the numerous citizen groups and associations that have emerged in Spain since May 15, 2011, when the “indignados” or 15M movement – Spain’s “occupy” movement – was born out of a protest in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square.

The encampment set up at that time in the square by protesters gave birth to the movement that is opposed to the government’s austerity measures and social cuts and is demanding jobs, affordable housing, solutions to the wave of foreclosures and evictions, economic equality, social justice, and democratic control over banks and corporations.

The growing citizen movement is also protesting the unprecedented corruption that has come to light in this country, in which high-level officials and even members of Spain’s royal family are implicated.

Analysts estimate that just 15 of the 1,600 cases of embezzlement, bribes and tax evasion in the courts today involved at least seven billion dollars in public funds. More than 1,000 of the people prosecuted in connection with the cases are political leaders.

Nearly every day a protest is held somewhere in Spain, and some observers are warning about a social uprising.

Social movements like the Procés Constituent now bring together more people than the country’s traditional trade unions. Most of these new groups are organised horizontally and decisions are reached in assemblies – the legacy left by the 15M.

The protests and demonstrations have taken many forms. An association of writers from Catalonia, Poesia en Acció, held a poetry marathon to benefit the Platform for Mortgage Victims (PAH), one of the largest citizen associations in the country, which is helping thousands of people who are losing their homes to foreclosures.

According to a report released by PAH in January, there were 363,000 evictions in Spain between 2008 and 2012.

“Poesia en Acció is carrying out actions in solidarity with social groups that are suffering because of the crisis,” poet and literary critic Guillem Vallejo, the president of the organisation, told IPS.

“In the past two years, we have focused on helping Spanish groups due to the situation in our country. We used to help countries in Africa and other parts of the Third World,” said Vallejo, who along with 60 other poets and 80 students from the group’s workshops published the book “Poesía Solidaria” (Solidarity Poetry), whose proceeds will go to PAH.

“We’ll give the money raised in the marathon (12 straight hours of poetry reading and a solidarity breakfast and lunch on Saturday Jun. 15) to PAH for projects that provide activities and psychological support for children whose homes are in the process of foreclosure, while the parents try to solve their legal problems,” Vallejo said.

Several associations of motorcycle riders organised a food drive for the needy on Sunday Jun. 23, in a campaign in the Canary Islands called “Moteros contra el Hambre” (Bikers against Hunger).

The national statistics institute reports that unemployment exceeds 27 percent – or six million people out of work in this country of 47 million. There are more than 70,000 families in Spain with no members working.

Shaykh Hisham Kabbani speaks in front of tens of thousands of followers in Jakarta. Credit Muhammad Revaldi/IPS

By Alexandra Di Stefano Pironti
JAKARTA, Jan 4 2013 (IPS)

Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has found a deterrent to Islamic fundamentalists: they dress conservatively, sport short beards and Islamic caps and emulate the ways of the Prophet Muhammad.

But unlike the fundamentalists, and a seething underground of militants who have not shied from using violence to advance their views, the look-alikes are mystic Sufis who are spreading love.

“The conflict among religions is based in politics, and we don’t mix with this. Prophet Mohammed teaches love and my (spiritual) master has taught me tolerance,” said 35-year-old Indonesian photographer Muhammad Revaldi, who is among a growing number of Sufis.

“The government gives support to Sufis because they are afraid of fundamentalists,” Rivaldi told IPS, adding that most important Sufi gatherings he attends in Indonesia usually host officials from the police, military and other government agencies.

Fundamentalist movements have been mushrooming in Indonesia since the 1980s, part of a global trend rooted in growing public frustration over corruption, nepotism and an indifference by governments in Muslim countries toward poverty and growing Western influence.

Two terrorist attacks in Indonesia’s tourist haven of Bali in 2002 and 2005, killing more than 200 people, intensified the government’s determination to combat fundamentalism, not only through a crackdown by security forces, but also through a softer weapon: Sufi Islam.

Sufism is the mystical expression of Islam and seeks the knowledge and closeness of God in this lifetime. Followers of Sufism, who trace their roots to Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali, believe in the unity of existence and respect for other religions.

During a large Muslim Sufi gathering in East Java last January, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono praised the Sufi approach to Islam, saying it was religious, calm and a suitable way of dealing with disputes, conflicts and clashes in society and the nation.

Indonesia’s largest Muslim organisation, the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) – which has some 40 million followers, enjoys a cosy relationship with the government and opposes Islamic extremism – has been a pillar for Sufi organisations or tariqas. In July 2011, it organised an international gathering that attracted more than 10,000 Sufi followers.

The government supports Sufism “as an alternative to radical Islam”, Indonesian scholar Jalaluddin Rakhmat, a university professor and writer who has a large following among the country’s upper class, told IPS.

“Political Islam has brought out… conflicts within the community. People of high education – open to diverse Islamic schools of thought – need the real Islam, the inner dimension of Islam that unites not only the community of Islamic countries but also humankind, regardless of religions,” said Rakhmat.

He said that most such people live in Indonesian cities and belong to the economic upper class.

“Indonesian Islam is moderate due to the role played by Sufism,” Rakhmat said. He added that the revival of Islamic mysticism in Indonesia coincided with the resurgence of local Indonesian mysticism – known as Aliran Kebatinan – during the reign of President Suharto, whose 31-year dictatorial regime ended in 1998.

“Suharto had been very much inclined to Javanese mysticism. He even passed a decree recognising Aliran Kebatinan as part of Indonesian religiosity, having equal status as other main world religions,” Rakhmat said.

“The then economic situation – owing to the oil boom in the 1980s – had given birth to a group of nouveau riche, seeking ‘spiritual serenity’. It was at that time that Sufi study groups were mushrooming in big cities, particularly Jakarta,” he added.

Sufis “are more concerned about the purification of the self than rituals,” said Rakhmat.

When, 15 years ago, Revaldi was in search of answers to questions about his faith, he came across Shaykh Hisham Kabbani, a Sufi master from the Naqshbandi Haqqani order who was visiting Indonesia.

“I went to document a religious event and my master talked about how our ego or egotistical feelings disappear under the light of the guidance of a master. In the Sufi path people think we have to leave everything but everything is Sufism,” said Revaldi.

Revaldi, like many other Sufis, dresses as Muslims did in the times when Prophet Muhammad was alive 1,300 years ago. It is the same style that is also favoured by Muslim radicals.

When Revaldi was traveling to Bali soon after the 2005 terrorist attacks, the passengers and crew on the plane reacted to him with horror, fearing he could be carrying a bomb.

But contrary to radical Islam, Revaldi believes in patience, not violence.

“A student who wanted to join the circle of our master was asked to clean each of the leaves of the trees of our garden, just to master patience,” Ibu Yati, a woman from the same Sufi order as Revaldi, told IPS.

“Our master teaches compassion and understanding, while fundamentalists judge people,” added Ibu Yati, a graduate in public policy who for many years worked as a government official.

”Islam in Indonesia is very beautiful, it has many varieties and is very tolerant,” said Mustafa Daood, the lead vocalist of Debu, a Sufi band that sings mystical Islamic poetry and whose members – mostly family – moved to Indonesia from the United States in 1999.

Debu, which in the Indonesian language means “dust”, interprets the songs of the patriarch of the family, Sufi master Shaykh Fattaah, who back in the United States had a vision to bring all his family to Indonesia.

At the family homes in Cinere, a suburb south of Jakarta, Fattaah composes mystical songs in nine languages, including Indonesian. His works, like those of the famous Iranian mystic and poet Jalaludin Rumi, speak of love, compassion and the unity of all creation.

(END)

To most people, holes in the ozone layer or the melting of polar ice caps can sound like distant catastrophes. “But let’s talk about concrete examples,” says an Indonesian director whose documentary film captures the lives of local farmers affected by a dramatically changing environment.

“I found in Indonesian villages that poverty and access to education are directly connected to nature because the traditional farming methods are affected by changes in the climate,” Shalahuddin Siregar, whose documentary Negeri di Bawah Kabut (The Land Beneath the Fog) has won several international awards, told IPS.

The film follows the lives of two families of Indonesian farmers in Genikan village on the slopes of Mount Merbabu in Central Java, who no longer know when to plant which crops because the seasons are not regular any more due to climate change.

“Most of the children in Indonesia’s countryside cannot continue to attend school  because parents don’t earn enough from farming to pay for school expenses, since the weather has become unpredictable and crops fail,” said Siregar, who spent three years shooting  the film.

The farmers, he says, have to supplement incomes by migrating to the cities to work as construction workers during months when they cannot farm.

With representatives from 194 countries, including environment, energy and foreign affairs ministers as well as heads of states meeting in Qatar for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP18/CMP8) from Nov. 26 to Dec. 7 to discuss future agreements to deal with climate changes their decisions would affect vulnerable communities in Indonesia and elsewhere.

“The most vulnerable people in Indonesia are small farmers, fishermen, indigenous people, forest-dependent people, women and children,” Martin Baker, communications coordinator of Greenpeace in Indonesia told IPS.

He added that deforestation, extreme weather, floods, landslides, air degradation, water quality and coastal abrasion makes those lives more difficult.

Greenpeace and other environmental groups believe that despite the environmental impacts of climate change from activities such as deforestation, the Indonesian government continues to strongly support big companies extracting the country’s natural resources for huge profits.

Indonesia loses about a million hectares of forests a year, despite a two-year moratorium that limits deforestation, following a pledge of a billion dollars from Norway.

“The government is not serious enough about working on their mitigation programmes. What we saw on the ground, the deforestation is still happening. The biggest source of emission, its root causes and its impact is not well addressed,” said Baker.

According to Elfian Effendi, executive director of the Indonesian NGO Greenomics, the government is doing only as much as it thinks it can afford to, without forgoing the economic benefits of exploiting natural resources.

“Due to unclear support and commitment from the developed countries, the Indonesian government works just based on the ‘scale’ that is affordable for Indonesia, not more,” he told IPS.

With most developed countries too busy fighting economic downturns, developing countries are raising the question of who is going to pay for climate change solutions, and they are particularly concerned about the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, which binds industrialised countries to reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases.

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s special envoy on climate change, Rachmat Witoelar, was quoted as saying that his country will try to convince developed nations to adopt a treaty on climate change and join a trust fund for mitigation efforts.

“Indonesia hopes that developed countries would show leadership in saving the earth from destruction due to climate change, the effects of which are getting stronger every year,” said Witoelar, quoted by the local news agency Antara.

Yudhoyono has pledged to cut his country’s emissions by 26 percent by 2020, or 41 percent over the same period if the international community steps in to help.

When it comes to mitigating the effects of climate change Indonesia is globally important because it contains about half the world’s tropical peatlands and nearly a quarter of the world’s mangroves, which keep the highest carbon stocks of any forest type. How these are preserved or depleted has consequences far beyond Indonesia’s borders, scientists say.

Hence, Indonesia is considered both a victim and a perpetrator of climate change: On one hand the archipelago of more than 17,000 islands is extremely vulnerable to climate change, and on the other hand it is the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the United States.

“As an archipelago, Indonesia could be called a vulnerable state. Most people who live in and near the forest may get severe impacts from deforestation and forest degradation…while those who live on the shoreline may get impacts from the rise of sea levels and from floods,” Wandojo Siswanto, an Indonesian expert on forestry and climate change told IPS.

For vulnerable communities such as those portrayed in Sinegar’s film, there are no immediate solutions.

Eleven-year-old Arifin, the film’s main character, contemplates whether he will be able to continue studying after finishing elementary school as his parents grapple with harvests that have gone wrong because the rains are no longer regular, and cannot afford the school fees, uniform and shoes.

“Arifin’s father felt guilty that he could not afford further studies for his son. He had already failed to send his two older sons to school,” said Siregar, adding that in the end the boy had to go to a cheaper Islamic boarding school in another town with financial help from a neighbour.

“It was hard for the parents to send the son away from home, but they had no choice,” added Siregar. (END)

Former political prisoners of Indonesia's anti-communist purge live together in Jakarta, shunned by society. Credit: Alexandra Di Stefano Pironti/IPS

By Alexandra Di Stefano Pironti
JAKARTA, Oct 27 2012 (IPS)

If the caste system existed in Indonesia the 10 elderly people who live in Jakarta’s Kramat Street would surely be untouchables: for decades they and their families have been banned from jobs and access to education and, until 2005, their identity cards marked them as former political prisoners.

They are survivors of the 1965-66 military crackdown on the now outlawed Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), during which time between 500,000 and three million people were massacred and thousands tortured and imprisoned without trial.

Ostracised since General Suharto ousted independence leader Sukarno in 1965 and began a 32-year dictatorship marked by anti-communist zeal, the former prisoners interviewed by IPS at the old two-story villa in downtown Jakarta offered a string of traumatic tales that give but a glimpse into a blood-soaked chapter of Indonesian history that many have chosen to forget.

Pak Rosidi, an 86-year-old former agricultural engineer who graduated from the University of New England in Australia, recalled in perfect English the horrors he suffered until 1980 in the notorious detention camp of Baru Island, where a recent investigation uncovered conditions that had amounted to slavery.

“I was dismissed from my job at the Department of Agriculture in 1970 and arrested because I was Sukarnist, not a communist,” he said.

“I am speechless about my years in prison. I was beaten, and continuously electrocuted for three hours at a time during those years,” the soft-spoken Rosidi recounted.

“I had three children and I was married before I went to jail, but my wife rejected me when I returned,” he added.

Strained family ties are a common theme in the stories of former prisoners, at a time when fear pushed children to turn against their parents in a bid to escape a life of discrimination.

Like many others, Rosidi faced difficulties making a living after jail because his identity card was marked  ‘Ex Tapol’ (former prisoner). That barred people like him from decent jobs, and banned them from careers in law, politics and the military.  Their children were denied access to university education.

Ibu Snanto, now 85 and a housemate of Pak Rosidi, was in jail from 1966 to 1975 because her husband was a communist party member.

“My husband was the communist and I was only a housewife, but they arrested me and I was often electrocuted and sexually abused.  I suffer from heart problems and trauma because of those years,” she told IPS.

The massacres started against the backdrop of the Cold War on Oct. 1, 1965, when a group inside the armed forces calling itself the ‘Thirtieth of September Movement’ kidnapped and killed six senior army generals, allegedly to prevent a coup against Sukarno, who was sympathetic to the PKI.

How many were killed and tortured, and the number who were imprisoned or are still alive, is not clear.

“We have spent two years of inquiry to find the numbers of people killed, but we cannot conduct validation. We haven’t had help from military officials,” Nur Kholis, a senior executive of the official Indonesian National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM), told IPS.

In the first official report of its kind – released last July and based on interviews with 349 former prisoners – Komnas HAM acknowledged that ”gross human rights violations” had taken place during the purge, including “murder, slavery, torture, sexual abuse, disappearances, cleansing, forced displacement and persecution.”

The report recommends that the government of Indonesia, the world’s most-populous Muslim nation, launch a national reconciliation process, and that the attorney general prosecute those found to be responsible for the crimes.

Kholis recounted to IPS the story of a witness in South Sumatra island who saw army soldiers push 100 half-starved prisoners into the sea.

He also recounted the tale of a woman survivor in the city of Medan in North Sumatra island who was forced to lie down naked while soldiers pushed bunches of lit matches into her vagina.

Details of the anti-communist massacres are not found in Indonesian schoolbooks, and communism remains banned to this day. As recently as 2008, police summoned a group of artists in Bali to court for using symbols of the communist party during an exhibition.

Although Indonesia started its path to democracy in 1998 after Suharto was ousted as president, the current president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, also a retired army general, has also been reluctant to re-open old wounds.

Meanwhile, the 10 former prisoners living on Kramat Street want nothing more than to have their names cleared of any wrongdoing.

“I want the stigma to be taken off us and a recognition that the government says that we are good people,” 87-year old Ibu Pujiati, who spent 14 years in jail after 1965 for being a labour activist, told IPS.

Australian university professor Robert Cribb, who has written extensively about Indonesia’s recent history, believes that the government’s refusal to acknowledge the suffering of victims has had a  “profound effect” on the former prisoners.

“They have not only suffered discrimination, but they have been portrayed as unreliable citizens. Things that they believed in have been portrayed as evil,” Cribb told IPS.

The biggest Muslim organisation in Indonesia, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), whose members took part in the persecution and killing of suspected communists alongside the military, believes that the former prisoners are best forgotten.

“They should not look for compensation. The conflict should be forgotten,” As’ad Said Ali, a senior NU official, told IPS.

He justified the killings and persecution as “human nature,” saying the massacres were driven by “revenge” for previous deadly conflicts between the PKI and NU.

“We don’t like revenge because everything depends on God, but we want official rehabilitation for all of us,” said former prisoner Ibu Snanto, eliciting nods from fellow victims at the Kramat Street home.

The poetry of former prisoner Putu Oka Sukanta succinctly paints those years as a time “when human life was as cheap as a gutter rat’s.”

Seventy-three-year-old Sukanta describes Leftists as being “hunted down by hungry dogs”. Although never tried, he was jailed for 10 years for belonging to the cultural organisation Lekra, which was affiliated to the communist party.

(END)

Scattered across 17,000 islands on the Indian and Pacific oceans, the world’s largest Muslim country has found its own blend of Islam: equal parts religion, secularism and contradictions.

Add to that an extract from the Quran that says, “To you your religion, and to me mine,” and you have Indonesian Islam in a nutshell.

Dr. Abdul Mu’ti of the Central Board of Muhammadiyah – the second largest Islamic civil society organisation in the country, embracing 30 million people – told IPS that Indonesian Islam is completely unique to the country, and does not easily find comparisons in the Muslim world.

When the holy Ramadan fast began on Jul. 21, it arrived almost unnoticed in the country. Loudspeakers that usually blast prayers starting at dawn have been turned down as a courtesy to believers of other faiths; there are no ostentatious displays of piety, and eating in the streets is not prohibited, as it is in most other Islamic countries.

In a nation of 240 million where 90 percent are Muslims and most observe the fast, many customers are still seen sipping cafe lattes at Starbucks outlets in Jakarta’s glitzy malls, or bustling around food courts at lunchtime.

This is a completely different scene than in ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia, where officials have warned non-Muslim expatriates that eating, drinking or smoking in public during the holy month risks deportation.

The Indonesian government has, however, imposed some restrictions in an effort to ensure that Muslims comply with the principle of sexual abstention during Ramadan by blocking one million Internet porn sites.

“We’ll intensify (efforts to) block porn websites,” Communications and Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring told local media.

Still, “Indonesia has a maritime culture which is more democratic, open and very different from the Arab culture of the desert,” Dr. Nasaruddin Umar, Indonesia’s Vice Minister of Religious Affairs, told IPS.

“(I believe) Indonesia has the right to interpret the Quran according to its own culture,” said Umar, who based his doctoral thesis on a study of gender equality in the holy books, and firmly believes that the Quran prescribes parity between men and women.

“The Arab cultural interpretation of the Quran has been very dominant. But, according to the Quran there is no need to use chador (a robe that covers women from head to toe) or jilbab (a headscarf many women wear in Indonesia),” he told IPS.

Indonesia’s public space has a distinct flavour that sets it apart from most other Muslim countries: Indonesian girls in miniskirts walk together with others wearing headscarves, men and women hold hands in public and concerts and television programmes often feature women in headscarves dancing in a very suggestive manner.

Contradictions abound

However, there are limitations to religious acceptance. On official identity cards, Indonesians are forced to choose between only six accepted religions in the country.

Also, atheism is illegal according to the country’s constitution and just last June an Indonesian man was sentenced to two and a half years in jail for propagating his atheism on the Internet.

Blasphemy, also considered a felony, earned a Shiite cleric a two-year prison term in July for causing “public anxiety” because his teachings deviated from the mainstream Sunni Islam practiced in Indonesia.

His arrest came amid anti-Shiite attacks that rights groups say were led by Sunni Muslims.

Members of the minority Ahmadiyah sect who, contrary to mainstream Muslims, do not regard Muhammad as the last prophet, are often attacked.  The most recent incident took place last month when a mob attacked the homes of six members of the Ahmadiyah community while a group of journalists was attempting to shoot a documentary about them. Four people were injured in the brawl.

Some Christian churches have been forced to close under pressure and last May a group of radical Muslims in West Java prevented a Christian congregation from holding a service by hurling sewage and frogs at them, according to a parishioner quoted by a local newspaper.

“On paper, Indonesia respects and protects the religious and ethnic diversity of its citizens. But this beautiful ‘social contract’ between the state and its people unfortunately means almost nothing on the ground,” Bona Sigalingging, spokesman for the Yasmin Indonesian Christian Church (GKI), told IPS.

“It is a manufactured image being sold to the international community,” he added.

Umar insists the government is working very hard to prevent similar incidents of communal and religious strife.

“The Ministry of Religious Affairs has deployed a special task force to contain radicalism,” said Umar, author of a book on the radicalisation of Quranic interpretation.

He says radical Islam, which peaked with the 2002 bombings on the resort island of Bali that killed 202 people, mostly Western tourists, has largely been brought under control following a police crackdown on perpetrators and a process of re-educating extremists.

“The Government has 60,000 penyuluh, or religious advisers, distributed all over the country and their function is to (educate) on the moderate aspects of Islam. They use my books and programmes,” Umar noted.

And though Indonesia has introduced 79 Islamic laws since the beginning of its democratic process in 1999, many of them have never been enforced, Mu’ti told IPS.

“Shariah or Islamic laws are a product of political propaganda by local leaders who do not represent the aspirations of all Muslims (here). So, many laws passed by local administrations are not fully implemented,” he stressed.

Only in the autonomous province of Aceh, which is believed to be the place where Islam was first established in Southeast Asia, is there mandatory implementation of Islamic laws such as caning for imbibers or flogging for adulterers.

But few officials want to see this practice repeated throughout the country.

“I disagree with attempts to establish a Muslim state in Indonesia because it will exclude other religions,” said Mu’ti, hinting at the fact that Christmas, the Chinese New Year and a host of other religious holidays are today celebrated throughout the country, particularly in the larger cities.

Despite optimism, tensions in some regions continue to boil over. This patterns of intolerance, if allowed to continue, could risk souring Indonesia’s unique blend of Islam.

A week after the start of Ramadan a bar in South Jakarta was ransacked by a mob of more than 100 people for serving alcoholic drinks, local media reported.

The local news website kompas.com quoted the mob’s alleged leader, Habib Bahar (33), as saying, “It is usual for me and my followers to raid sinful places during Ramadan.”

(END)

Unless the rapid deforestation in one of the world’s most richly-forested countries is controlled, Indonesians may one day wonder, “where are all the flowers gone.” To those lyrics by legendary U.S. singer Joan Baez they might also have to add, and where are all the tigers, elephants, orangutans, birds and ancient forest communities gone.

Forestland being cleared for palm oil plantation in Palangkaraya in the Central Kalimantal province. Credit: REDD+Task Force

While the 1960s icon was singing against the U.S. war in Vietnam, green groups in Indonesia are waging war against deforestation, in a country that is home to about 15 percent of all known species of plants, mammals and birds. Some are already critically endangered as a result of deforestation by the palm oil, mining and paper industries.

As Indonesia marks the first year of a two-year moratorium on deforestation that followed a pledge of a billion dollars from Norway, a coalition of international and local green groups urged Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono this week to strengthen the moratorium so that it becomes a real instrument to reduce, and ultimately halt, deforestation in the country.

“The existing moratorium only suspends the issue of new forest use permits, it did not order a review of existing permits. There are other glaring loopholes in the moratorium which need to be addressed if Indonesia is to honour its international commitments,” Yuyun Indradi, forests policy adviser, Greenpeace Southeast Asia, said at a press briefing Monday.

Such concerns are being raised ahead of the Rio+ summit on sustainable development next month.

The environment groups say the ban is being undermined by weak legislation and weak enforcement, and provides little extra protection for forests or carbon-rich peatlands, and nothing to protect the rights of forest-dependent indigenous peoples and local communities.

They added that if deforestation rates continue to average more than a million hectares a year, all of Indonesia’s forests will have been destroyed within the next 50 years.

Earlier this month, the groups said they had witnessed continuing forest destruction by several companies despite the moratorium. They estimated that 4.9 million hectares of primary forests and peatland, out of a total 71.01 million hectares covered by the moratorium, will be lost to palm-oil industries, coal mines and other forest conversions by the end of May.

Last week, Indonesia’s Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), one of the world’s largest paper companies which has been most criticised by green groups, announced that it will suspend natural forest clearance from Jun. 1, and will hold better environmental procedures.

The announcement brought a quick reaction from Greenpeace, denying good practices from APP. It said images from their latest overflight in February indicate ongoing clearance of forests across Sumatra region.

Deforestation is devastating wildlife. Fewer than 400 Sumatran tigers remain in the wild, orangutans on Sumatra island have gone down from 1,000 in early 2000 to less than 200 in 2012, while only 3,000 Sumatran elephants are still in the wild, half the number since 1985, the groups say.

“It is reasonable to expect that there are many threatened undocumented species,” Louis Verchot, a scientist with the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), told IPS.

Deforestation has also affected whole communities of indigenous people dependent on the forest for food, shelter and their livelihood. Since most of the land belongs to the state, the government has given up ancestral rights of the native communities to businesses, according to indigenous rights groups.

The deforestation taking place in Indonesia goes much beyond the archipelago’s more than 17,000 islands. The country is the third largest emitter of climate changing greenhouse gases after China and the U.S.

Greenpeace says a large volume of the gases comes from the destruction of Indonesia’s peatlands, considered the world’s most critical carbon stores. They are believed to store about 35 billion tonnes of carbon, and when drained, burned and replaced by acacia, eucalyptus or palm oil plantations, they release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

While green groups believe Indonesia should do more to stop deforestation, some Indonesian officials believe the country needs more incentives to do so.

“The Ministry of Forestry needs a budget of 5 trillion rupiah (538 million dollars) per year to fight deforestation,” Darori, director general of the Forest Protection and Nature Conservation from the Ministry of Forestry told IPS. With a wave of his hand Darori, who like most Indonesian people goes only by one name, dismissed the billion dollar pledge by Norway as “not enough.” Indonesia “needs the support of the world” to carry out this task, he said.

Commenting on Darori’s remarks, Greenpeace spokesman Indradi said money “is never enough if we cannot solve the corruption problems in the forestry sector.”

CIFOR’s Verchot said, “the pledge by Norway was not supposed to solve the whole problem, but it has transformed the discussion in Indonesia, and in that sense it is successful…Norway’s pledge over several years is significant and if it paves the way for additional REDD + money, then the programme can become sustainable.” REDD+ (Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Plus) is a global mechanism to reduce emission and deforestation as well as forest degradation.

Darori, the Indonesian official, told IPS that authorities have given eight-year jail terms to 12 plantation owners in Sumatra for illegal logging, and imposed five billion rupiah (534,000 dollars) fines on each.

Indonesian President Yudhoyono has pledge to cut emissions in his country between 26 percent and 41 percent with the help of the international community by 2020. But he has pointed out the importance of the contribution of the forest-based industries to the country’s economy.

A recent study showed this contribution to be approximately 21 billion dollars a year – 3.5 percent of the national economy. The sector employs around 4 percent of the working population. (END)