Promoting Pluralism in Indonesia

Ford Foundation’s support attracts new scrutiny

As the founder of a feminist periodical in the world’s most-populous Muslim nation, Gadis Arivia is trying to exert a major influence on how people here think about the role of women.

The next article in Yayasan Jurnal Perempuan, or Women’s Foundation Journal, features what she promises will be “a controversial article about women and the Taliban, in which we’ve tried to show that the real issue in Afghanistan has not been about Islam but how the regime there has treated women.” Other topics in the journal: economic development, politics, and how public policy affects issues such as violence against women and reproductive health.

With the help of $180,000 from the Ford Foundation, the most-prominent private Western organization supporting nonprofit groups here, the journal has evolved from a low-budget feminist newsletter started in 1997 to a fully blooming scholarly journal that now reaches 5,000 academics, nonprofit officials, housewives, mothers, and others. A radio show based on articles from the journal is broadcast across 20 of Indonesia’s 30 provinces.

Ms. Arivia says female readers often tell her they are grateful for the journal. “Until very recently,” she says, “there never used to be much information on gender discourse or anything at all like it. Women’s issues aren’t very popular here, or at least they haven’t been until now, and I believe our work is changing attitudes in some quarters.”

Ms. Arivia’s journal is one of numerous projects that Ford has supported here since 1953, awarding a total of more than $150-million over five decades. Ford’s goals — to build and strengthen the nation’s institutions — have evolved to meet changing needs. In the past, most emphasis was placed on reducing hunger by training scholars to work on agricultural projects, for example. But today the foundation is putting a lot of its money into finding ways to encourage the expression of pluralistic views, with a special focus on the role of religious and other groups. In the past year or so, it has spent $1.5-million on projects dealing with topics such as sexuality and reproductive health, governance and civil society, and arts and culture.

Ford’s latest grant to Ms. Arivia’s publication, for $130,000, comes at a time when Indonesian sensitivities over American-sponsored activities in the Muslim world are at their highest point in years, especially in the wake of the events of September 11. Ms. Arivia, a plain-spoken professor of women’s studies at the University of Indonesia, is perfectly comfortable with the fact that her articles, such as the one about Afghan women, will cause a degree of religious-tinged prickliness here — as will the fact that she finances her work with money from an American organization.

Islam’s presence here dates back nearly 700 years to when Indian and Middle Eastern traders first brought the mystical Sufi school of Islam to Sumatra and then later to the island of Java, home to more than half of Indonesia’s population. Some 88 percent of the 225 million inhabitants of this Southeast Asian archipelago of 7,500 islands identify themselves as Muslims.

Indonesians have long demonstrated a large degree of religious and cultural tolerance, but those values have been seriously tested over the period since Ms. Arivia established her energetically liberal journal.

In the late 1990s, a regionwide economic crisis took its toll on the Indonesian currency, the rupiah, plunging it to near-worthless levels against the American dollar, which in turn led to widespread unemployment, higher prices, and social unrest.

Democratic Transfer of Power

The crisis also brought an end in 1999 to 32 years of autocratic rule by the New Order government of President Suharto, an event that ushered in the country’s first democratic transfer of power in more than 40 years.

Conditions have continued to worsen across much of the economy, however, and with their decline has come a resurgence of sometimes militant voices clamoring for an end to the country’s decades-old experiment with Westernization and the adoption of Koranic law, rigidly defined, in political life.

In October, the Indonesian government deployed some 14,000 police on high alert in this city in an effort to calm foreign nationals, particularly Americans, alarmed at calls in some fundamentalist quarters for a holy struggle against what they call Western “crusaders” living on Java.

“One person, a man, has already told us that we shouldn’t be doing what we’re doing, and that it’s disrespectful,” says Ms. Arivia with a shrug. “He said that we’re being influenced by the Americans.”

For the record, she adds, her publication works hard to protect its autonomy, and she knows its reputation depends on that independence. It isn’t in editorial thrall to any particular cultural group, much less the American establishment, she says — or the Muslim establishment.

“The issue of us working with an American organization was simply never raised by people here until the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan,” says Ms. Arivia. “Now we have readers asking about it, and so we’re having to send them letters assuring them that the Ford Foundation has never interfered in our program, never told us what we can or can’t write.”

Anti-Americanism indeed appears to be running hot across wide swaths of the Muslim world right now, says Suzanne E. Siskel, who runs the Ford Foundation’s five-person office here in Jakarta, one of 13 offices the foundation has around the world. Nonetheless, Ms. Siskel says, she wonders if the perception in the United States of how difficult things are might be more exaggerated than events here in Indonesia would suggest.

Ms. Siskel, a Los Angeles native who has worked with Ford in Asia since 1990, says “we’ve taken reasonable precautions in our lives and work, but, I have to say, a great deal of our energy lately has been spent on reassuring family and friends in the United States that we’ve been doing okay and our work needs to continue.”

Other representatives of Western-based nonprofit groups share Ms. Siskel’s view that this is not such a bad time for Americans and other Westerners to be working in Indonesia. Douglas Ramage, the Asia Foundation’s representative here, even describes the present period as one in which “the current revolutionary thinking here could ultimately mean that we end up with one of the world’s only Muslim-majority countries successfully democratizing in such a way that Islamic values will be fully accommodated in a pluralistic, democratic, religiously tolerant” context. The Asia Foundation, the other major American-led nonprofit group here, differs from Ford in that it receives money from the U.S. State Department, not just from a single private endowment.

Improving the Status of Women

For Ford, a top priority — both before and since September 11 — continues to be its support of faith-based projects aimed at improving the status of women. One major beneficiary has been Fatayat Nahdlatul Ulama, the young women’s division of the 30-million-strong Association of Muslim Scholars.

The association is the largest grass-roots organization of its type in the country, boasting some six million members. Its faith-based membership comprises women aged 20 to 40 spread out across 13 provinces, or roughly 14,800 villages. In June, it received $240,000 from Ford, on top of the $158,000 it received three years ago, to further its work to promote women’s reproductive rights and pluralistic values within a broadly Islamic context.

The group produces a variety of brochures and newsletters as well as holding seminars for women — and sometimes men — to discuss prevailing biases against women.

“Indonesia has big problems right now but most of these issues really have nothing to do with recent events involving America,” says Maria Ulfah Anshor, the organization’s chairwoman, who says domestic violence, “repressive” marital laws, and lack of contraception are problems far more pressing than any passing event outside the country. As with other potentially divisive sexual issues in this socially conservative society, she says, “our aim is to teach new ideas by using the Muslim language, the language of the Koran, using it to show that some new ideas are in fact compatible with our religion.”

Even though Ford’s work is focused on issues far removed from foreign affairs, it is impossible to dismiss the impact that the terrorist events of September 11 have had.

The first week of the U.S.-led military strikes against suspected terrorist targets inside Afghanistan also happened to be the same week during which one of Indonesia’s most popular newsmagazines chose to lead its own kind of international attack — against the work of the Ford Foundation.

Among its charges, the mass-circulation weekly Tempo accused Ford of having once played, at the urging of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a covert role in Indonesian political affairs by consciously supporting the work of individuals who were deemed to be sympathetic to the anticommunist aims of American foreign policy makers.

“These allegations aren’t anything new, but their timing this year wasn’t very helpful for us,” says Ms. Siskel, noting that much of the article’s contents had been lifted from another, similar piece that first appeared more than a quarter-century ago in the now-defunct American countercultural magazine Ramparts.

That 1975 article by the magazine’s editor, David Ransom, suggested that the foundation consciously played a role in causing intellectual discontent in Indonesia during the previous decade by financing study trips to American universities for the country’s future leaders. Named in the piece were a number of notably pro-American Ford grantees from the 1970s who went on to assume key political roles in the now broadly reviled New Order government.

On each occasion, the foundation has publicly denied the charges, which even the newsmagazine has conceded were “discredited by a number of circles” at the time.

Ford continues to work apolitically with traditional and progressive causes alike, as it always has, Ms. Siskel says, as much so in religion as in secular affairs and in its collaboration with Indonesian government agencies.

“And over recent weeks,” she continues, “many of our grantees have been trying to bring together very militant, radical voices in open discussion on the international situation, which has been a very good exercise, too.”

Often the anti-Americanism expressed in those discussions can be uncomfortable, but Ms. Siskel says she understands why such sentiments need to be expressed. In another era here, the government might have suppressed those kinds of voices, she says, leaving a foundation such as Ford with little room to work with them as it expands the contours of its Islamic-oriented work.

The fact that they are giving their views now, observes Ms. Siskel, “is actually part of a process of democratization. It may be uncomfortable for many people, including perhaps all of us, but we recognize that this part of a society is opening up, and we’re happy for that to be another part of what we’re doing.”

Gadis Arivia, the journal editor, agrees; it’s one of the many contemporary Indonesian themes her publication has already touched on.

“But I sometimes wonder,” she muses, “if, because of the incidents of September 11 and Western perceptions of demonstrations and possible unrest in Indonesia, whether donors might ever change their mind about supporting a place like ours.”

That would be “a pity,” she says, hoping that it doesn’t become a subject she’ll have to cover any time soon in her journal.