I mentioned in my testimony that I think three major factors are at play. One is very weak and poor leadership under the current president. Prior to this president, we had a man who was affectionately known as “Gus Dur”, who was a very staunchly reformist Muslim and made statements such as “freedom of expression is necessary if we're going to show humility to God”. You don't get that from too many Muslim leaders, even in this country. The kind of reform, openness, and democracy that a new generation in Indonesia thought would continue after the death of Gus Dur clearly has been pulled back by the weakness of the current president.
That weakness is then manifested in a second way, which is a sort of complicity with security forces for the sake of stability; that is to say, to show international investors that this is a safe place to put their money. I would argue that the humane way of achieving stability is to crack down on the religious totalitarians, not on those who seek to live up to Indonesia's constitution of diversity and secularism.
The third factor is indeed Saudi petrodollars. I'll give you a very quick example of what I mean, quite apart from the observation that I made at the airport in Jakarta. When you look at where in Indonesia sharia law is being introduced.... And I don't just mean the kind of sharia law that we would refer to here in Canada. I mean very, very harsh measures, such as caning of women, such as legislation that permits the stoning of women, and of course the imposition of the hijab and the burka on women. When you look at where in Indonesia sharia law is being introduced, you find that most of those places are places that tourists from the Arabian Peninsula are flocking to and spending their money.
Well, there's something to be said for keeping those coffers full with tourism dollars by ensuring that Indonesians defer to the culture represented by the Arabian Peninsula. Interestingly, it is couched as religious observation or religious observance, but in fact what it is—and I'll use some pretty harsh language here—is cultural imperialism from the Arabian Peninsula to a much more pluralistic non-Arab country, such as Indonesia, and it's done in the guise of tourism.