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Indonesia, the law will not criminalize homosexuality

“Bhinneka Tunggal Ika” (Unity in Diversity) is the motto of Indonesia, the country in the world with the largest number of Muslim inhabitants, mainly Sunnis. The country is extremely vast (1,904,569 km2 and more than 261 million inhabitants), and very diverse.

A multifaceted country

Many religions are professed within the transcontinental archipelago, in particular the Muslim faith is flanked by Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism (the largest Buddhist temple in the world is located in Indonesia). More than three hundred distinct ethnic groups live in the country, and more than seven hundred different languages are spoken, this is the reason why Indonesia is the country with the highest rate of trilingual inhabitants.

All this diversity can easily be seen by visitors in Jakarta, the capital of the country, where just a few steps from the National Monument it is possible to see the metropolis’ Cathedral and the colossal Istiqlal Mosque. The two important religious centers have been there for years, placed one in front of the other to symbolise that the country’s motto is not just random words, but something with a concrete meaning, which translates into coexistence (albeit not always easy) of all these nuances of ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity in the same group of islands.

An escalation of homophobia

Furthermore, Indonesia has also shown relative tolerance towards sexual minorities by never criminalizing homosexuality in the modern age, and by showing itself as a tolerant country, for example, when the first Islamic school for transgender people was opened in Yogyakarta, which unfortunately in 2016 was forced to close, but has reopened and resists despite pressures.

In the last few years, in fact, the national motto was distorted by a rapid escalation of hatred and violence against homosexual or transsexual men and women, unfortunately also by the police and institutions, whose duty should be instead to protect everyone indiscriminately.

Despite the fact that homosexuality is theoretically legal, it is strictly censored, thus justifying the social stigma on LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex and asexual) people. Moreover, homosexual acts are still punished in certain fundamentalist areas of the country, with penalties that can involve imprisonment or even corporal punishment such as whippings. This happens in certain circumscriptions of the island of Sumatra, and more precisely in the city of Palembang and in the semi-autonomous province of Aceh, where sharia law in enforced.

No to criminalization

All this led to the concrete risk that homosexuality would be criminalized throughout the country, with petitions proposed to make this real that fortunately were ignored by the government. And that’s not all, because there are citizens who even wanted to propose the death penalty for gay people.

In the end, this bubble of homophobia seems to have finally popped, because on 31 May 2018 the Indonesian government removed the phrase “same-sex” from a bill against fornication that otherwise would have passed into history as the first law of the country criminalising directly same-sex sexual intercourses, so now basically the law against fornication is applied to both heterosexuals and gays, without any discrimination.

An LGBTQIA victory?

G.M., a student from the city of Bandung (Western Java), explains the significance of this decision: “Since the end of 2017, part of the local political scene has tried to pass a petition that would have criminalised homosexual acts, but since then many LGBT organizations and activists have fought to prevent this from happening. Now the situation is basically no sex out of marriage for anyone, LGBT or straight.

He adds: “For the first time LGBT rights ‘won’, because the government has not explicitly discriminated against LGBT people, and all this thanks to protests and activism.” This may seem odd, because in any case the government is showing itself to be more and more sexophobic, but for G.M. this is a very positive news instead: “The truth is that many Indonesians have sex outside of marriage, and this is not considered a big problem: they certainly cannot be all arrested! A faction of our politicians tried to criminalise us, but they failed. We believe this is a good sign.

He then explains how the situation is already slightly improving: “This is why I said that we ‘won’, because now it is no longer like in 2016/17, when the police were continuously violating our privacy. The police used to break into homes and arrest people suspected of being gay, whether they had had sexual intercourse or not. This was also happening because of the stereotype that a person is gay only after he has had homosexual sex. For the moment the situation seems to be stable, there have been no anti-gay raids or searches lately.

We cannot but hope that the situation has stabilized, and that Indonesians will always remember their motto, respecting all the differences that united make their country such a wonderful one.

Giovanni Gottardo
©2018 Il Grande Colibrì
photo: Saiful Mulia (CC0 1.0)

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