By Nick Gier
In 1991 I went on a two-week Smithsonian tour of Bali, the Indonesian island most famous for its dances, craft arts, and Hindu festivals. As I boarded a Garuda International flight in Los Angeles, I was impressed that a nation that is 90 percent Muslim would name its airline after a Hindu deity.
In every major building, we saw pictures of then President Suharto, the army general who ruled Indonesia with an iron fist for 32 years. This past month Suharto died after a prolonged illness. Suharto was praised for getting the economy going again, but he was widely criticized for human rights abuses.
Under the leadership of its first president Sukarno, Indonesia played a major role in the Non-Aligned Movement. Although Sukarno claimed to be neutral in the Cold War, the U.S. nevertheless was suspicious of his friends in the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), which increased its vote from 16.4 percent in the 1955 elections to 34 percent in 1957.
In the late 1950s, the U.S. had been secretly funding right-wing elements in the Indonesian military, and on September 30, 1965, left-wing officers, fearing that they would be purged, murdered six top generals, all of them U.S. trained. Major General Suharto stepped in, took control, and planned a national-wide crack down on the PKI and the labor unions. Although there was no evidence that the PKI had anything to do with the military revolt, Suharto ordered his troops to track down leftists wherever they could be found.
Lacking sufficient intelligence, the CIA provided Suharto with a very long list of names, and, in addition, 50 million rupiah, arms, and ammunition. The best estimate of the slaughter is 500,000 dead. Another 300,000 civilians died in military action in East Timor and other places where Indonesians dared to protest Suharto’s rule. When I asked our Balinese guide what he thought of Suharto, he expressed utter disdain for him. Comprising only 1.6 percent of the 1965 population, 50,000 Balinese were sacrificed to Cold War ideology. Some of those killed were members of our guide’s family.
Starting in the 7th Century A.D., Hindus and Buddhists from India established prosperous kingdoms in Indonesia, and the largest Buddhist stupa in antiquity is found at Borobudur on the island of Java. Today Muslim shadow puppeteers entertain large audiences with night-long performances of the Hindu epics—the Mahabharata or the Ramayana—moving all the figures, reciting the verses, and playing a drum all at the same time—a single master artist working without a break.
Contrary to widespread conception, Islam did not spread in Indonesia by the sword. Primarily because of the effectiveness of peaceful Sufi missionaries, most Indonesian kings embraced Islam voluntarily. The Balinese, however, were not willing to convert. As Muslim armies gathered on the western tip of Java, only several miles from Bali, our guide told the story, most likely apocryphal, that spies spread the rumor that Balinese troops had dipped their spear points in pig fat. For whatever reason, the invasion of Bali was called off, and today three million Hindus preserve their rich culture on this beautiful island.
From 2002 to 2005 there were three terrorist bombings, two on
Bali, specifically targeted at popular tourist locations. A total of 234 people
were killed, but the perpetrators were arrested and they will be executed in a
few weeks. As they have in India, radical Muslims in
Indonesia have also attacked Christians. An especially gruesome attack occurred
on the island of Sulawesi, where three Christian girls were decapitated. Again
the police reacted quickly and jailed ten Muslims who were responsible."
In a 2006 poll only 10 percent of Indonesians supported the killing of civilians for the reason of protecting Islam. Polling the citizens of another moderate Muslim nation, University of Maryland researchers found that 79 percent of Moroccans said that killing civilians was never justified. What is interesting, and not a little shocking, is that in the same poll only 46 percent of Americans said "never" to the killing of civilians.
Since 1998, when Suharto was ousted in nation-wide protests, Indonesians have had regular elections, and they even elected their first female president in 2001. Significantly, she was Megawati Sukarnoputri, Sukarno`s daughter. In the 2004 parliamentary elections, parties that identify themselves as Islamist got 35 percent of the vote while the secular parties received 47.6 percent, but in 200 regional elections since then not a single Islamist candidate has won a seat. The largest Muslim organization in Indonesia with a membership of 70 million has recently redefined an Islamic state as one that is “just and prosperous,” not one that follows Sharia law. They have also have decided to support Sukarno’s liberal policy of religious tolerance, one that accepts the existence of all faiths.
In December, 1992, Hindu fundamentalists in India destroyed a mosque that they claimed was built on the birthplace of the Hindu God Rama. (For more information read this column.) I would like to contrast that with my last night in Bali, when I heard the chanting, 400 hundred voices strong, of Rama’s monkey army crossing a causeway to Sri Lanka to help recapture Sita, Rama’s wife who had been kidnapped by a demon. The divine name Rama now divides Indian Hindus and Muslims, but for centuries the stories of Rama have brought Indonesians together in traditional theater and dance across this moderate Muslim nation of 235 million.