I Am An Indonesian Citizen!' - Inside Indonesia - The Peoples and Cultures of Indonesia

4/18/22, 5:31 PM ‘I am an Indonesian citizen!
’ - Inside Indonesia: The peoples and cultures of Indonesia
‘I am an Indonesian citizen!’
Written by WARD BERENSCHOT AND GERRY VAN KLINKEN  Print
Digital citizens and citizen journalism are an important evolution in Indonesian citizenship.
(Anton Muhajir)
What does exercising citizenship in Indonesia's democracy look like?
In 1997, a lively public meeting took place in Semarang to commemorate the Youth Pledge of the
early anti-colonial movement. The Solo poet Moedrick M Sangidoe read out a poem that started
like this:
https://www.insideindonesia.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3399:i-am-an-indonesian-citizen&catid=223&tmpl=component&print=1&la… 1/4
4/18/22, 5:31 PM ‘I am an Indonesian citizen!’ - Inside Indonesia: The peoples and cultures of Indonesia
I am a citizen of a country
No longer clear what kind of country
I am a citizen of a country
(Aku warga sebuah negeri / yang tak jelas lagi wajahnya / aku warga sebuah negeri)
It went on sarcastically to say he was so numbed by state ceremonies, he forgot he’d only had
rotten dry rice to eat. That sounded a bit like the Roman cry ‘I am a Roman citizen’ (Civis
Romanus sum), claiming the right to protection. Seven months later, Suharto was forced to step
down.
Citizenship in Indonesia today has evolved beyond the Suharto-era "state ceremonies". (Digitised:
Wahid Hasyim)
Citizenship is back in Indonesia. The New Order tried its best to castrate the concept by
picturing it as a duty only to obey, but democracy is making ordinary people realise they have
rights too.
This special edition of Inside Indonesia looks at citizenship. We won’t do ‘civics education’ here –
let’s leave that to the school textbooks. Instead, we look at the way flesh-and-blood Indonesians
practise it on a daily basis. What do they do? What do they believe?
Focusing on citizenship is a change from blaming or praising elites for everything that happens in
this country. As if people were just passive electoral fodder! After all, if democracy goes well in
Indonesia, it goes well because citizens make it work, not just because elites have built the right
institutions. Conversely, if democracy worsens, it is also because citizens didn’t do enough to
protest the selfishness of their elites.
These articles were among more than fifty presented by Indonesian and foreign researchers at a
remarkable conference on citizenship at Gadjah Mada University in December 2016
(http://fib.ugm.ac.id/main/2016/11/conference-from-clients-to-citizens-citizenship-in-
democratising-indonesia.html). Of course, the seven we present here don’t cover everything
there is to say about this vast subject, but we hope they will open some new perspectives on
popular participation in the state. They show that citizenship is the basis of all politics, including
in a country in the Global South like Indonesia. We touch on four themes.
Citizens protest. The best evidence that Indonesians have shed the passive New Order idea of
citizenship is Zamzam Fauzanafi’s piece (/digital-citizenship) on ‘digital citizens’. People in
Banten take to Facebook to rage about corruption by their leaders – not always politely, but
certainly loudly.
Citizens organise. Hari Nugroho (/labour-takes-a-citizenship-approach) explores a labour union

whose demands go far beyond the minimum wage. Maybe like the labour movement that
pioneered the welfare state in Europe, these unionists want education and subsidised health care
too. Unfortunately, they are not yet pulling in the votes; money politics is the enemy of
citizenship.
Citizens volunteer. Vita Febriany (/from-mother-to-citizen) looks at a form of New Order

citizenship that did survive into the Reformasi era. Local women who volunteered for a 1980s
community health scheme turned themselves into valued local leaders. Many are still active
today.
Citizens include. Or do they? The next four articles introduce a sense of debate about what is
likely the core issue of citizenship anywhere: who belongs, and who doesn’t? On the one hand, as
Yearry Panji Setianto (/indonesia-s-diaspora-citizens) shows, some Indonesian citizens are ready
to expand the political community to the whole world. Limiting it to one nation-state no longer
makes sense. Wealthy, cosmopolitan Indonesians living in America and elsewhere want to
contribute to their country as dual-nationality citizens.
On the other hand, decentralisation has strengthened a xenophobic kind of local citizenship that
increasingly rejects Indonesians from other regions. The twin articles by Safrudin Amin (/we-
are-natural-born-children-you-are-adopted), a long read, and Laila Kholid Alfirdaus (/when-
home-is-not-home) follow strangers who intend to settle in new communities in North Maluku
and Central Java, respectively. There, they face discrimination and even violence. To ‘belong’
there, a national identity card is not enough – one must be recognised by local custom. All
around Indonesia today, ‘stranger’ citizens find their national citizenship rights reduced as local
politics favours the locally born.
Finally, Chris Chaplin’s study (/islam-and-citizenship) of a middle class religious sect in Makassar
raises the question of minorities. An increasingly common theme of public discourse in Indonesia
is that the state is a moral community that belongs primarily to adherents of the majority Sunni
Islam. Moreover, religious cadres demand that the state to interfere in people’s sexual and
religious lives much more than liberals think is desirable.
We hope this edition makes you think as much as it did us. We look forward to your reactions.
Ward Berenschot (berenschot@kitlv.nl) and Gerry van Klinken (klinken@kitlv.nl) are both
researchers at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV)
in Leiden.
Inside Indonesia 129: Jul-Sep 2017 (/edition-128-apr-jun-2017)

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4/18/22, 5:31 PM ‘I am an Indonesian citizen!

’ - Inside Indonesia: The peoples and cultures of Indonesia

What does exercising citizenship in Indonesia's democracy look like?

No longer clear what kind of country

Citizens organise. Hari Nugroho (/labour-takes-a-citizenship-approach) explores a labour union

Citizens volunteer. Vita Febriany (/from-mother-to-citizen) looks at a form of New Order

Inside Indonesia 129: Jul-Sep 2017 (/edition-128-apr-jun-2017)

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