Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on Nov. 29th, 2012

[John Sifton]

Interestingly, with women's rights you actually get into some issues that don't just have to do with religious minorities only, but even for ordinary Sunni Muslim women who may not agree with some of the more extremist viewpoints that have been exposed by these groups....

There are tens of millions of Sunni Muslims in Indonesia who don't share any of these extremist viewpoints that are being articulated during these attacks. I'd like to stress that it's not as though you have a very extremist Sunni population that is attacking everybody else. It's a sliver of the Sunni population that has sort of hijacked it.

With respect to women's rights, I think the biggest issue right now is the religious harmony bill, which is moving through the parliament. It would seek to impose all kinds of silly restrictions on social mores and on morality. There is even an idea floated to legislate the length above the knee that a woman's dress could legally be.

This sort of thing is indicative of the larger problem, not just for religious minorities but for the whole country, in allowing these extremist elements to start bossing everybody around, even though they don't represent the population as a whole.

[Gary Schellenberger]

You mentioned Saudi Arabia earlier, and I've heard that from different witnesses. Am I drawing the conclusion that Saudi Arabia is maybe one of the big reasons behind some of the problems in Indonesia today?

[John Sifton]

I think that would be too simplistic. Certainly there's money coming from groups in Saudi Arabia that are more conservative. But the fact is, a lot of the groups are well funded to begin with.

Religious extremism has been bubbling up in Indonesia since 1945, well before Saudi funding sources were on the scene. But it is something to worry about, especially when groups become so well funded that they can buy elections at the local level, and things like that. You start to wonder, there's a lot of money here; what's going on?

[Gary Schellenberger]

In your opinion, how could Canada best promote respect for the rights to freedom of religion, expression, and association in Indonesia?

[John Sifton]

I think every government that has an embassy in Jakarta can play a role in telling the President of Indonesia that he needs to get tough on religious extremism, and that the international community is not just going to sit here and watch as this country goes from being a reasonably tolerant Muslim democracy to one that isn't tolerant at all.

How the Canadian embassy does that in Jakarta.... There are a number of things that can be done. You can do everything from bringing other voices into Jakarta to discuss these issues, to promoting events at which different voices can be heard, to just the raw public diplomacy of calling them out, calling the government out, and calling the president out, in particular, on his failure to address this rising extremism.

[Gary Schellenberger]

Have I any time left?

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

We have 15 seconds.

[Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you very much for those answers, sir.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

Thank you.

We go now to Professor Cotler.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Sifton, for being with us.

You described in your testimony the increased violence, harassment, discrimination, and intolerance of religious minorities and the complicity of state entities, including security services, in this. You also spoke—not today but elsewhere—about the use of prosecutions of members of religious minorities through the blasphemy laws and the like.

This brings me to a question. Prior to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to Indonesia in September, I believe you asked her to raise with the Indonesian government, as you just suggested to us through our embassies, concerns regarding the rising religious intolerance and the problematic charges that have been brought against religious minorities under blasphemy laws. Do you know what was the reaction to her making these representations to the President of Indonesia? Has there been any noticeable change since she's been there? Does that have any inferences for what we might do here in Canada?

[John Sifton]

So far, no. We have seen no evidence that the president has realized that he has to take this more seriously. Unfortunately, now we're starting to get at the tail end of his presidency, and we're going to have to start thinking about who the next president of Indonesia will be and whether that president will be able to raise these issues.

A year ago, in November of 2011, when President Obama was going to the East Asia Summit in Bali, we urged the White House to have President Obama raise these issues in his bilateral meeting with President Yudhoyono. We basically said the only person who can tell him to clamp down on this stuff is Obama, and don't miss this opportunity. Whether he did so or not, I don't know, but there's no evidence that the government has improved its record. I don't know what it's going to take.

What I would say, though, is that the efforts haven't been that strong. Perhaps Hillary Clinton raised it in the bilaterals she had with the foreign minister. Perhaps President Obama raised it in his bilaterals. But what I haven't seen are ambassadors, the United States ambassador from here in Washington or anywhere else, speaking about this very vociferously, and that's what I think is needed now.

I should also say that the UN special rapporteurs have been speaking out about this more and more. That also will play in as UN institutions, special procedures, the rapporteurs, and the Human Rights Council weigh in increasingly on this. That will also help.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

You've worked in Pakistan and have a knowledge of Pakistan. A witness's testimony before our committee has made some reference that some of what is happening in Indonesia may be reflective of some of the more troubling things developing and that have been occurring in Pakistan. Do you think that analogy has a certain validity to it, and does that influence what we might be doing by way of a response as well?

[John Sifton]

Yes, absolutely, the parallels are actually quite frightening, especially with Ahmadiyya, who face huge problems in Pakistan. Pakistan has a far worse problem with sectarian violence against Shia, and Hazara Shia, in particular, than Indonesia does, and that's something we're researching right now in fact.

The good news with Pakistan, at least, is that you have security forces in the military that would probably be more prepared to crack down on some of the sectarian violence than the President of Indonesia is.

One senior official in the White House said to me that the problem is that the man does not have a spine, and I think that pretty much sums it up. He does not have the political spine to take on these extremist groups and do what needs to be done to stop the worst effects of their hatred from blossoming into actual violence.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

When you mention about Human Rights Watch and yourself having asked the President and the Secretary of State to raise these concerns with the President of Indonesia—and you're not sure whether they were or were not raised—if they were raised, it would have been done in the way of private diplomacy. Do you think we need more public diplomacy, so that not only are these things raised, but it is known that they were raised, and therefore we would have some sense of what was the response when they were raised?

[John Sifton]

That's exactly right on point. That's always our preference, for publicly raised concerns. The President was recently in Cambodia, which is a country with huge human rights problems, and he raised issues behind the scenes, but not publicly, and that's the kind of thing where we say that's a huge missed opportunity. You have to speak out while you're there.

Will President Obama visit Indonesia again during his presidency? I believe he will, and we will be urging him to use that occasion to revisit the issue of tolerance. When he first visited in 2010, he spoke about religious tolerance, but that was before the worst stuff had really picked up. I think it's time for him to go back and say we have a serious problem here; we're very concerned about what's going on here.

That's the United States. As for other countries, absolutely. Private concerns only go so far. What you need is a crescendo of voices in the embassies saying we're very concerned. For Canada, in particular, to have one of its citizens be subjected to mob violence, as you heard about earlier this week, is an especially vibrant point, to say, look, we have a visiting citizen who's been subjected to this type of mob violence; it's outrageous.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

That brings us to the end.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Sifton.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

We now go to Ms. Grewal, please.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Mr. Sifton, for your time and your presentation.

The Indonesian authorities have laws on criminal defamation to prosecute members of religious minorities in violation of their basic rights. One member of a minority group now facing criminal trial under these laws is Alexander Aan, a civil servant alleged to be an atheist. He was arrested in January and is on trial for blasphemy and inciting public unrest, which of course carries a penalty of up to almost six years in prison.

The specific charges against him relate to posts he made on a Facebook account. These criminal defamation laws allow the abuse of powerful people over the religious freedoms of citizens.

Mr. Sifton, if one recourse of action is to repeal these laws, what would you suggest is the most effective way to do this? Is this a matter that will be more effective if spearheaded internally by Indonesian citizens themselves, or is this an area in which the international community can help in some way?

[John Sifton]

I'm glad you brought up this other point, because the prosecution of people for blasphemy is another big problem we've been following.

In the case you've just mentioned of Alexander Aan, he was actually sentenced to 30 months in prison in June, and I think he was fined 100 million rupiah, which is a little more than $10,000. This is just one of the latest.

I think in March, Andreas Guntur was charged with blasphemy because of improperly teaching the Koran. In July, a Shia cleric was sentence to two years in prison. It's getting worse and worse. Regularly there are these attacks.

The first case you mentioned is a case of atheism, which raises some of the concerns we talked about earlier. It's one thing to be a religious minority, or a supposedly heretical Muslim, but the actual embrace of atheism is not accepted under the legal framework. I mean, you're supposed to sort of pick one of the six religions. That is a problem we have raised in the past, but that will require long-term social analysis and reflection and digestion of the Indonesian constitution. Long term, they ought to ask if this is the constitution they want, or do they have to think about a new direction?

How can the international community foment that? I think simply by encouraging Indonesian legal and religious scholars to interchange with others in other countries, from Turkey to Canada. Its learning from other countries: here's why we have a blasphemy law that has no criminal punishment, or here's why we don't have a blasphemy law—explaining why we don't like blasphemy laws, not because we don't respect religion, but because we worry that it gets used to silence dissent and it's used for illegitimate reasons.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

The Indonesian province of Aceh has enacted a law that allows the implementation of sharia law. Three laws have been passed since 2003 in Aceh based on its interpretation of sharia law. How has the application of sharia law impacted non-Muslims living in the province of Aceh? Could you say something about that?

[John Sifton]

I haven't discussed Aceh at all in my testimony because it's such a complex issue, and it's kind of a tangent issue. The complicity there is much more at the local level. The local autonomous government of that region has some serious problems with accepting and utilizing sharia law.

Human Rights Watch wrote a report about this, which is on our website, about the application of sharia law in Aceh. It's obviously very problematic, but it's a little more complicated to bring in the central government and make them complicit with that, because after all, they really did give that local government all the autonomy of self-government. Our problem, our fight, so to speak, as a human rights group, is really with that government of Aceh, not with the central government.

That said, there's a lot that can be encouraged, such as conditions for aid in that area, to tell that local government that we're very dissatisfied with what they're doing. International groups, international funders, donors, governments, can make their displeasure known with that situation in Aceh.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

The Wahid Institute is a Jakarta-based organization that monitors human rights in Indonesia. It has reported an almost 70% increase in government-instigated violations of religious freedom between 2010 and 2011. What would you say accounts for the largest percentage of cases involving government-instigated violations?

[John Sifton]

I think a lot of them are just simply these cases of searches, or seeking permission to build a new building. Other cases are situations where people have run afoul of the law because they have government-issued IDs from before that say they're one religion when in fact they're another, or it says they're Sunni but in fact they're Shia.

The focus on the violence makes sense because violence is very serious. The thing that religious minorities are facing day to day is just an onslaught of discrimination and harassment by government authorities.

If you have a church south of Jakarta and you want to expand to a bigger building—you buy a property across town and you want to sell your church to move there—all of a sudden, they tell you that you can't get the permit, you're not allowed to have a church there, and there's all this paperwork. This huge bureaucratic ton of bricks comes down on your head.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have reported that some—