Indonesian elections

Ten of thousands of people dressed in white robes and with their heads covered gather at Jakarta’s largest mosque for a dzikir akbar: a gigantic group prayer. Spread over the ground floor and four galleries they chant religious texts in Arabic. Outside vendors offer religious DVDs and other religious paraphernalia to the mosque-goers.

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono President Yudhoyono (Democrat party) is seeking a second term. A retired army general, Yudhoyono was voted into office in 2004 in Indonesia’s first direct presidential election. His running mate Boediono is an economist, a former minister, and until recently the president of the central bank. Jusuf Kalla Kalla (Golkar party) was Yudhoyono’s vice-president but the president did not want to return for a second term with him. Kalla teamed up with former general Wiranto, who was supreme commander of the army when pro-Indonesian militias killed thousands of civilians in East-Timor in 1999. Megawati Sukarnoputri Megawati leads the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), a party which has its roots in the Indonesian struggle for independence from Dutch colonial rule. She was president from 2001 until 2004 and is the daughter of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno. Her running mate Prabowo is a millionaire and a former general under dictator Suharto.

Indonesia, nominally the biggest Muslim country in the world, is becoming more and more Islamic. Mass prayers hardly existed here five years ago; now big and small dzikirs have become a favourite pass-time. Films, books, songs and soap operas with religious themes are popular. More and more women are wearing the headscarf, and entire families do the umrah, the “minor” pilgrimage to Mecca.

Voters expect Islamic politicians especially to be above reproach, but several Islamic parties were recently involved in corruption scandals. They were alsounsuccessful in pushing agendas that Islamic parties are usually big on, such as the fight against corruption and poverty. Popular figures like Amien Rais and Abdurrahman ‘Gus Dur’ Wahid broke with the PAN and PKB parties respectively, and those parties are now being torn apart by infighting.
“People no longer see the difference between Islamic and non-religious parties,” says Din Syamsuddin, “so they’re just voting for the best party.”

via nrc.nl – International – Indonesia: The importance of looking Islamic.

The results are in by now:

Indonesia’s president swept elections to win a second term, preliminary results showed Thursday, but his opponents refused to concede defeat and called the vote undemocratic.

The National Election Commission gave incumbent Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono 62 percent in its first preliminary figures, based on more than 18.7 million ballots counted after Wednesday’s vote. That would put him well beyond a 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff in September.

Former president Megawati Sukarnoputri was running second with 28 percent, and Vice President Jusuf Kalla third with 10 percent.

The commission did not give a figure for how many ballots were cast in all. There were 176 million registered voters.

The preliminary results backed findings of an independent pollster, Indonesian Survey Circle, that conducted quick counts at 2,000 polling stations nationwide after the voting and had Yudhoyono winning 60 percent of the vote.

A final result is only due by the end of July, after all the ballots are transported to the capital Jakarta from across this vast archipelago of more than 17,000 islands and recounted

Whatever they say, people who were responsible of East Timor’s repression should not be allowed to get elected or to be present as “running mates” in the elections…:

In the cities, Indonesian troops began killing East Timorese.^[13] At the start of the occupation, FRETILIN radio sent the following broadcast: “The Indonesian forces are killing indiscriminately. Women and children are being shot in the streets. We are all going to be killed…. This is an appeal for international help. Please do something to stop this invasion.”^[14] One Timorese refugee told later of “rape [and] cold-blooded assassinations of women and children and Chinese shop owners”.^[15] Dili’s bishop at the time, Martinho da Costa Lopes, said later: “The soldiers who landed started killing everyone they could find. There were many dead bodies in the streets — all we could see were the soldiers killing, killing, killing.”^[16] In one incident, a group of fifty men, women, and children – including Australian freelance reporter Roger East – were lined up on a cliff outside of Dili and shot, their bodies falling into the sea.^[17] Many such massacres took place in Dili, where onlookers were ordered to observe and count aloud as each person was executed.^[18] In addition to FRETILIN supporters, Chinese migrants were also singled out for execution; five hundred were killed in the first day alone.^[19]

In March 1976, UDT leader Lopez da Cruz reported that 60,000 Timorese had been killed during the invasion.^[20] A delegation of Indonesian relief workers agreed with this statistic.^[21] In an interview on 5 April 1977 with the Sydney Morning Herald, Indonesian Foreign Minister Adam Malik said the number of dead was “50,000 people or perhaps 80,000″.^[12] A figure of 100,000 is cited by McDonald (1980) and by Taylor^[22]

An absolute massacre… which happened with the knowledge of the rest of the world…