Julia Suryakusuma, Jakarta
Someone once said, “Life is like a wild horse. Ride it or it rides you”. A big enough challenge, you might think, but imagine if you were trying to manage two wild horses, each wanting to go in a different direction.
The first horse is democratization and liberalization, and the second is the conservative traditional forces (religious and traditional) that emerged after the Pandora’s box of Reformasi was opened in 1998. This is the plight of women in Indonesia at the moment — trapped in a carriage tied to two wild forces heading in opposite directions — and that is why we are going nowhere fast.
Of course all of Indonesian society is caught in the push and pull of these two horses, but it’s worse for women. Gender bias always means they are more much more likely than men to be losers when social, economic or political change occurs. What this means in practice is that whenever the reform horse deliver benefits for Indonesian society, there is usually a countervailing effect — that other horse! — that largely neutralizes it for women.
Take political representation as an example. Just last week the House of Representatives passed a new bill on political parties and freedom of association, pluralism, gender equality and peaceful settlement of internal disputes (The Jakarta Post, July 12, 2007) that raised the quota of women’s representation in political parties to 35 percent. Sounds great in principle, huh?
Sure — except that not one political party from the 2004 elections has yet been able to meet the existing 30 percent quota. The result is that women make up only 12 percent of the House (for 2004-2009), and in the regional legislatures the figure is even lower, at only 7-8 percent. So, pass as many noble-sounding statutes as you want, but women’s political participation will not be achieved simply by fiat. Imposing a quota that has no real sanctions if not implemented will do nothing to shift resistance to gender equality among political institutions and electors. Why?
There are three reasons.
First, political education for women is still very low.
Second, a deep-seated culture of patriarchy that marginalizes women still dominates politics.
Third, post-Soeharto governments have all felt constrained to play a two-timing pragmatic game (they prefer to call it “Realpolitik”, I think).
They court the favor of the international world and the local reform constituency with rhetoric that supports liberal democratic values, but at the same time they woo domestic electorates, including more conservative communal and rural elements. This they do mainly by letting them do pretty much what they want at the local level.
This is why the SBY government enthusiastically endorses gender equality at every opportunity but consistently turns a blind eye to an increasing number of ultra-conservative and religiously motivated regional regulations (PerDa) that breach the decentralization laws and blatantly discriminate against women, all of which runs contrary to human rights guarantees in Chapter XA of our reformed Constitution and a whole swathe of laws.
So what happened to the Reform movement? It’s still there and still pushing hard, but it’s becoming clear it is a movement that has generally only won changes that benefit a small elite, rather than the majority of women. Yes, there is change for the better when it concerns women like myself, from the middle and upper classes, but for the majority things haven’t really improved.
Most are still spiraling downward, with an increasing number falling below even the low official poverty line, burdened by the demands of work and family (shouldering the dubious ‘honor’ of the peran ganda, multiple role of women), and the imposition of a conservative brand of Islam ascribing women a position that renders them close to powerless.
The result is that Indonesia’s ancient economic dualism — a small wealthy elite exploiting a vast, poor majority — is now also a dualism of gender and social freedom. As a citizen living in a housing complex in Cinere, south of South Jakarta, I thrive in Indonesia’s new atmosphere of open expression. And I can get away with wearing shorts and a tank-top when I go for my morning walk.
But just outside my housing complex lies the boundary with Tangerang, an area where the local PerDa ordinances prohibit women from exposing their arms and legs, limit their freedom by barring them from being outside on their own after dark and expose them to the risk of arrest for wearing lipstick. And so poor women living just a few hundred meters away are losing their jobs and can no longer support their families.
Likewise in Aceh local women are punished severely for not wearing jilbab, or caned just for being caught in the company of a man — which makes riding ojek (motorcycle taxis) to work impossible. And there are places in South Sulawesi where even non-Muslim civil servants now have to wear jilbab in the office. Yes, I’m better off than I was under Soeharto, but these women most certainly are not.
One option being taken by our increasing numbers of impoverished, unemployed and marginalised women is to sacrifice their lives by becoming overseas (or internal) migrant workers, separated for long periods from the children they are working to feed. They earn revenue for the nation, but what do they get in return? Not even legal protection or diplomatic support, with Indonesian women workers in Asia and the Middle East facing poor wages and conditions, abuse, violence, sexual assault and even murder.
Eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, and violence against women (including domestic violence, which is on the rise) and ensuring access to education and health services are all among the UN Millennium Development Goals that the Indonesian government has committed to achieving by 2015. They are all also issues that directly affect the majority of women in Indonesia, but which are not of pressing importance for the elite.
The new political representation reforms and affirmative action quotas are, however, a product of the elite and will most likely result in increased recruitment of more elite women to positions in political parties. These will be women who, of course, are already most likely not hungry or in poverty and can afford a good education and good health services.
The aim of increasing women’s political representation was to address the pressing issues that affect the majority of poor women. For now, the two seem like separate activities.
And anyway, is women’s political participation a guarantee of more women winning decision-making positions that matter? Apparently not, if you look at the case of the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS). PKS has a relatively high level of women’s participation (good for vote-getting), but that is not matched by a corresponding representation in its leadership. Could it possibly be that the strong Islamicist belief that a woman’s place is not in the public domain has something to do with this? Duh.
Indonesia is overdue for real gender equality that will mean when reforms are introduced they apply to women as well as men, and to poor women as much — if not more — than their elite sisters. This means the government, as the driver of the carriage, needs to get the horses going in one direction — and that must mean applying the whip to the conservatives to bring them in line with the reformers, fast.
The way we’re going, it’s very hard to know where we’re going, but it looks a lot like backwards to me.
The writer is the author of Sex, Power and Nation. She can be contacted at jsuryakusuma@gmail.com.
