Bung Imam

By Imam Shofwan   She is said to have been breathtakingly beautiful, and even now, decades later, there are traces of what had made her so attractive to men: an oval face, cleft chin, eyes that slant upwards just so, and hair that is thick and wavy. When she was younger, her skin was also a smooth golden brown, her body slim yet full in the right places.  These days there are wrinkles around her eyes, but it is the weariness in her face and the slump in her shoulders that betray her age of 50 years – and what she has been through. Then again Lalerek Mutin, a small community east of the Timor Leste capital, isn’t known as “widow’s village” for nothing.  “My husband was kidnapped and killed by three soldiers when I was four months pregnant,” she tells me. “My child died of hunger. Now I raise my two kids from two of the three soldiers who committed sexual acts on me.” I had picked her out at random from among the 8,000 witnesses who testified before

Imam Shofwan In August 2002, a number of Islam-based political parties demanded the Jakarta Charter be included in the Constitution, which would mean that Muslims in Indonesia would have the obligation to live according to the prescriptions of Shariah law.   The effort was supported by a large number of — mainly hard-line — Islamic organizations, but nevertheless failed to pass through the House of Representatives, in part due to opposition from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) and the — also Islam-based — National Awakening Party (PKB).   The Islamists had to change strategy. In 2004 a new law on regional autonomy gave them the opportunity they had been hoping for. They set about implementing “Shariah from below” by advocating across the archipelago local Shariah laws, which often included rules such as women being required to wear the hijab, and couples wanting to marry needing to read the Koran.   Islamic groups have long argued that their brand of “Shariah from

A string of accusations on religious contempt are now being hurled at Dhani Ahmad and his rock band Dewa. Dhani does not deny that his lyrics began with an attempt to open up some kind of a religious discourse. In fact, he admits his fondness for controversial Sufi figures. It is still early in the morning. The day’s heat has yet to be felt. But not so in the infotainment programme on television. The camera is fixed on one man, and this man is announcing sternly, “A few of the lyrics and the pictures used by Dewa in their album have been taken from a poem by a heretical movement in the Middle East.” On the screen, you could read the caption which identifies them, Pertahanan Ideologi Syariat Islam (Perisai) [The Defence of the Islamic Ideology and Law]. This is not some kind of an innocent prank. Ridwan Saidi, the figure who claims to represent the aforementioned group called Perisai, is going to lodge a complaint on Dewa to the Attorney General. Ridwan is a Betawi cult

Human right cases in Indonesia are never complete. Time and again fact–finding teams are formed and evidences is found. But the court have never successed in convicting those responsible. At most it is those in the field who get punished, while top brass remains untouchable, unaffected. It was goodly. Perperators of many human right in heavy weight instead taken look like immune. The preperators of the 1965 massacres, for example, have even still never been named, let alone brought to trial. This despite the fact that Sarwo Edhie Wibowo—President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s father-in-law—has claimed that more than three milion people were killed in the at the time. Sarwo Edhie made this claim to Permadi, a legislator with Indonesian Democrat Party of Struggle (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan, PDI-P). Sarwo Edhie himself led the communist ”cleansing” operations in Java and Bali as ordered by Presiden Suharto. But it was not only communists who were killed in these o