Religious tension is a near constant part of life in Indonesia. In just the past couple of months, for example, there was an attack on an Ahmadiyah mosque in Sintang, West Kalimantan, and Christian preacher Muhammad Kace and Muslim imam Yahya Waloni were charged with blasphemy. Governments across the...
Dyah Ayu Kartika When the votes were counted in Indonesia’s 2019 elections, women activists had one thing to welcome: the number of women in national parliament had increased to 20.4%, up from 17.3% in 2014. Many feminists welcomed this progress, hoping that the greater presence of women...
Dyah Ayu Kartika Many scholars, feminists and activists believe that addressing the lack of female representation in parliament and in political parties is a core issue in advancing women’s interests in Indonesia. As a result, Indonesia has implemented gender quotas for political parties’ legislative candidacies. The 2003 election...
Ihsan Ali-Fauzi, Irsyad Rafsadie, Siswo Mulyartono Retired Muslim militants are openly embracing democratic elections in the former radical stronghold of Poso in Central Sulawesi, with many planning to vote or even run for office themselves in the elections tomorrow. But in Bima, on the island of Sumbawa,...
A new app called Smart Pakem was released by the Indonesian Attorney General’s Office(link is external) (AGO) late last month. Available for public download, the app(link is external) provides a way to report, list and monitor religious groups deemed to deviate from the teachings of the six religions officially...
Dyah Ayu Kartika - March 8, 2019. “I won’t give up, I’ll keep my fire up.” That’s what rape survivor Agni said last year after administrators at Indonesia’s Gadjah Mada University, one of Indonesia’s top schools, ignored her report that she had been sexually assaulted by...
Dyah Ayu Kartika - March 4, 2019 “If Jokowi wins, there would be no azan [the Islamic call to prayer], no Qur’an study circle for children, no veil [for women]; women can marry other women, men with other men”, said three women ...
Dyah Ayu Kartika - February 5, 2019 Going into the first presidential candidate debate last month, most feminists had had low expectations, predicting women and the LGBTQ community would be left out of the discussion on human rights issues. This assumption was proven right,...
The app, which targets “deviant” sects and indigenous belief groups, comes on the back of a historic win for indigenous belief communities in the Constitutional Court in 2017. Photo by Hafidz Mubarak A for Antara....
Late last month, Indonesia’s controversial Blasphemy Law (Law 1/PNPS/1956) claimed another victim. Meliana, a 44-year-old ethnic Chinese Buddhist woman from Tanjung Balai, North Sumatra, was sentenced to 18 months in prison by the Medan District Court for complaining about the volume of the call to...
In the elections for the governorship of Aceh on 9 April 2012, Irwandi Yusuf, the governor from 2007 to 2011, lost to Zaini Abdullah and Muzakir Manaf, who became the new governor and deputy governor, respectively. Abdullah was the foreign minister of the now defunct...
