Evidence of meeting #59 for Subcommittee on International Human Rights in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was violence.
A video is available from Parliament.
1:50 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Scott Reid
I have to stop you. We're actually over your time by more than a minute.
We have to go now to Mr. Marston, who will be our last questioner.
November 29th, 2012 / 1:50 p.m.
NDP
Wayne Marston NDP Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Welcome, sir. We're pleased to have you here.
Do you feel that this administration is giving serious consideration to the issues raised in the recent UN periodic review?
1:50 p.m.
Advocacy Director, Human Rights Watch
Well, they certainly responded to it earnestly.
But on this particular issue of religious violence, I don't think they understand what they really need to do to address the problems. That's my short answer.
1:50 p.m.
NDP
Wayne Marston NDP Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON
That's fine.
The witness testimony here has left me believing, at least, that there's a reasonable constitution in place; it's just that they're backing away from the use and enforcement or the provisions of the constitution. If that's the case, it would lead me to believe that something systemic is happening within this country, something very significant to back the people away. We watch other Arab countries who are fighting dramatically to get new constitutions and to get change, yet here it's almost like the constitution is an inconvenience.
I raised with a witness yesterday how much of that might be the people in power in Indonesia doing those things to sustain their power, thus allowing some of the abuses. Perhaps that might be one of the reasons that they're not confronting it as they should.
1:55 p.m.
Advocacy Director, Human Rights Watch
The motives for some of these extremist groups sometimes escape us. I gather that, as it's been for centuries, sometimes it's easier to campaign on hate than on ideas of how to bring your country forward. Certainly it's easy to just campaign on religious purity, making Indonesia religiously pure again, and things like that. It's very easy to campaign on that as a group, versus campaigning on more complex issues, like how to build a better health care system, or whatever.
1:55 p.m.
NDP
Wayne Marston NDP Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON
In my office, discussing it with my staff earlier, we were wondering if inter-ethnic conflict might have a play in this. We tend to go towards religion because there is that component, but I'm thinking of Aceh province and west Papua, and I'm just wondering how you would comment on that.
1:55 p.m.
Advocacy Director, Human Rights Watch
Well, Papua is a whole separate ball of wax, because there it's predominantly a Christian population. But their problem is that many of them seek to be independent of Indonesia altogether, and they face massive ethnic discrimination as Papuans.
It's important to recognize that there are a lot of ethnic issues in Indonesia, but the problems we're talking about with these radical extremist groups attacking minorities are almost entirely based on religion. Roughly 80% of all the attacks that you're seeing are taking place on the two islands of Java and Sumatra, the main populated parts. Way out in the east, the Moluccas, Papua, and so on, there are a lot of Christians out there. Are they getting attacked the way they are in Java? No. There are ethnic problems, but....
So it's really that in Java, at the centre of the political life of Indonesia, there are these radical groups that have decided to be hateful and are using it for political gain. As a result, religious minorities in those places, which are predominantly Muslim, much more than in the east, are getting attacked.
1:55 p.m.
NDP
Wayne Marston NDP Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON
I raised this yesterday: it's Muslims attacking Muslims, just the two different groups.
The troubling part, of course, and it's been part of the dialogue going around this table today, is how the authorities are not using existing law and enforcing it to prevent it.
Do you have any sense, numbers-wise, of the percentage of the population...? We're talking about thugs here, in the normal terminology we'd use. You've got your mainstream Muslim religion, you've got your mainstream people, and then you've got the ones who take it to this kind of an extreme. Is there any sense of what percentage the extremists are in this particular area?
1:55 p.m.
Advocacy Director, Human Rights Watch
It's a minority. That much is clear. You just walk around Java and you can see that it is not a particularly conservative place. It's not like walking around Quetta, Pakistan, or Kandahar, Afghanistan. It's certainly the case that extremist views, Salifist views, radical or extremist Sunni views, are not the majority opinion of most Sunnis in Indonesia.
It's not just a couple of people either. These are large, well-funded, very extremist groups that have increasing amounts of political power. So while they're not the majority, they're also not insignificant. It's not just a couple of thugs; it's actually some very disturbing and very powerful political parties with quite a lot of people behind them.
1:55 p.m.
NDP
1:55 p.m.
Advocacy Director, Human Rights Watch
Some of these groups have historical legacies going all the way back to the Japanese occupation, so it's long in the making.
1:55 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Scott Reid
Thank you, Mr. Marston.
Thank you to our witness.
We're about to wrap up here. We have a bus waiting, by the way, to take you back to Parliament Hill in time for question period.
I wonder if you'd just indulge me in asking a question or two.
I was thinking about the thoughts you had with regard to the nature of the violence, and of course this is an obvious thought, but it had not crossed my mind until you said it. Indonesia is, of course, an archipelago. It's in the nature of an archipelago that one cannot simply pick up and wander from one island to the next, if one doesn't have means. That does suggest that this would primarily be intra-ethnic rather than inter-ethnic. Java and Sumatra are both very large islands. Although Java is smaller, it is enormously populous. Are those two islands ethnically homogenous, or are they ethnically heterogeneous?
In the case of Sumatra, I'm also thinking about the settler issue, people coming over from Java to settle there. Does that have any relationship at all, not just to violence in general, but to violence that purports to be religious?
2 p.m.
Advocacy Director, Human Rights Watch
There are a few things you could say about the alleged Christianization that is waved out as a red flag by some of the Sunni militant groups. One does need to wonder why the Christian faith is growing in Indonesia. It is. It has gone from 8% to roughly 10%. I don't know exactly what the latest numbers are, but there has been a growth of approximately 2%.
2 p.m.
Advocacy Director, Human Rights Watch
You can say a lot of things. Part of it is proselytization by these groups, but either way, it doesn't matter; people are entitled to proselytize. It's free speech, but it's used as a red flag by groups saying, “Oh, you know, if things keep going, Sunni Islam is going to be defeated.” That gets flagged, and part of that is movement. You have people moving into Java for the jobs or to urban centres. In urban centres there is more ethnic diversity, so, yes, you do have it, but if you go up to Sumatra, you're not going to find many Christians up there.
2 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Scott Reid
Right.
Just thinking further, going back many decades now to the 1950s, there actually was a Christian separatist movement, was there not, in the Moluccas?
2 p.m.
Advocacy Director, Human Rights Watch
The Moluccas and Papua both.... They don't define themselves as Christian. It's a separatist movement, but I don't think it's religiously defined.
2 p.m.
Advocacy Director, Human Rights Watch
Yes, for Papuans, the Christian aspect of it is not the first thing on the lips of the....
2 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Scott Reid
Right. At any rate, I was thinking of the Moluccas, actually, the Maluku Islands, but that's not a centre of this violence anyway, is it?
2 p.m.
Advocacy Director, Human Rights Watch
No. There are a lot of problems in the Moluccas, and there have been some isolated incidents, but if you look at the raw numbers of attacks, they tend to be more in Java and Sumatra.
2 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Scott Reid
I have one last question.
Looking beyond Indonesia—and perhaps this is an unfair question. If it is, you're free to just say that it's outside your area of expertise. One of the things that has struck me as we've had hearings of various sorts over the past few years—we've looked at Iran, for example, and Iraq, and a number of other countries. I am struck by the thought that the majority of persecution of Muslims in the world would seem to be at the hands of other people who are Muslims, different sects or different streams. I don't know if that's a fair thought.
There seems to be some kind of systemic problem.... That's not a fair way of putting it. There seems to be some kind of phenomenon going on that is in existence.
When I think about it, that's not even a question. That's just a kind of comment I throw out, but do you have any comment back on that?
I guess what I'm really asking is this. Are Indonesia's problems parochial to Indonesia, or are they part of a wider problem that we should be thinking about?
2 p.m.
Advocacy Director, Human Rights Watch
It very much is a wider problem.
Afghanistan has problems with Shia groups facing discrimination in certain local areas. It's much more homogenous, though.
Pakistan, which is almost entirely Sunni, minority Shia, has huge problems.
Iran is terrible with respect to the small number of Sunnis it has.
The Bahá'í, who we haven't talked about at all here, is a very small population. The Bahá'í of Indonesia are facing a lot of problems with these groups as well, but the Bahá'í face far worse problems in Iran and Egypt than they do in Indonesia. Just today, the Egyptians are debating their constitution, and there are a lot of issues they have to sort out as well.
This is by no means just Indonesia. This is a problem you see in all of these countries, which have Shia, Sunni, and a small number of other faiths, such as Bahá'í, Hindus, and Sikhs.