Lesbumi: Indonesia a tolerant country

Jakarta, NU Online
Indonesia has long been and will always be a tolerant country for respecting any different beliefs and races.<> 

The statement was made by activist of the Indonesia Muslim Artists and Culturalists Association (Lesbumi) M. Dienaldo, saying that those viewing Indonesia is a country that nurtures hostility against religious minorities knew nothing about the most populous Muslim country.

"I think there have been some foreign mainstream media deliberately discrediting Indonesia as if it is the most racially intolerant country," he told NU Online here on Monday.

Dienaldo said that Indonesians believed that Indonesia is a tolerant country despite campaigns by some fundamentalist groups and concerns over harassment of religious minorities.

A report recently released by the World Values Survey, a global study of social attitudes carried out by Swedish economists, shows that Indonesia is skeptical about diversity and is racially intolerant, as fewer people want to live in neighborhoods with people from other races.

The report, which asked respondents from more than 80 different countries whom they would not like to have as neighbors, found that 34.7 percent of respondents in Indonesia in 2001 said they would not want “people of another race” as their neighbors. This percentage decreased slightly in 2006 with 30.7 percent of respondents saying they would not like to live next to people of a different race.

Responding to the findings, University of Indonesia (UI) sociologist Paulus Wirotomo said that just because more than 30 percent of respondents in Indonesia were reluctant to have neighbors from a different race, did not mean they were racially intolerant.

“Some people may be reluctant to have neighbors of a different race, but it doesn’t mean that they would violently attempt to oust those people from their neighborhood,” Paulus told The Jakarta Post on recently.

“Just because they opt not to interact with people from different races doesn’t mean that they are intolerant,” he added.

According to him, the main probable cause was the fact that Indonesia was not as culturally diverse as Malaysia or Singapore, where people from many races live in the same neighborhoods.

“Indonesia is not as ‘international’ as those countries, and some people are still afraid to interact with people from different races, particularly those who live outside big cities.”

Hamid Fahmi Zarkasyi, a Muslim scholar and chairman of the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought and Civilizations (INSISTS) and Hermawan Hanny, a pastor at a Catholic Church in Depok, West Java were of the same view that Indonesia is a tolerant country .

"If the measurement of tolerance is to provide the same opportunity for each religion to practice their beliefs, Indonesia can rank highly," Zarkasyi said.

Hermawan, the pastor, agreed, stating: "All Indonesians must be aware and carefully respond to radicalisation movements. Any radicalisation must be punished accordingly."

Indonesians of all faiths must work together to prevent radicalisation, he said, starting with education at an early age focused specifically on tolerance.

"We want more tolerance and harmony from every religion and not radicalising kids with a strong religious background in their early age," Hermawan said.

Editor: Sudarto Murtaufiq