Okay, okay, I know I said I’d stop doing election commentary, but
things just keep getting more and more surreal in the mother of all bizarre
presidential races. Probowo’s brother
Hashim Djojohadikusumo, who is also his business partner and bankroll, is a
Christian, bless him, and is a little peeved that Prabowo has accepted the
support of the Islamic Defenders
Front/ FPI, those thuggish enemies of religious tolerance—which of course has
Prabowo equivocating all over the place and Hashim madly trying to spin it to
sound as if Prabowo has no real knowledge that any of his “thousands” of
supporters is not on board with Pancilla.
Can it get any more slimy?
Why yes, it can—if Prabowo’s followers continue to place their faith
in him as a leader. A country gets the
leadership it deserves . . . unless of course they get the leadership that
somebody bought for them.
Indonesia: Controversial alliances open rifts in Prabowo presidential campaign
Pacific Scoop:
Analysis – By Patrick Tibke in Jakarta
June 12, 2014
An intriguing 10 days of presidential
campaigning in Indonesia has culminated in mild disarray for Prabowo Subianto’s
“red-and-white” coalition as tensions emerged among senior members of the old general’s
Gerindra party with just four weeks left until election day on July 9.
The contention in question is the coalition’s nascent alliance with a
grouping of violent thug organisations, particularly the Front Pembela Islam
(Islamic Defenders Front, of FPI), which is well-known for attacks on
Indonesia’s religious minorities and so-called tempat maksiat (places of vice
or iniquity).
Prabowo and his running mate Hatta-Rajasa’s willingness to get into
bed with some of Indonesia’s most notorious radical Islamists has called into
question the duo’s commitment to religious tolerance and human rights. Prabowo
has been accused of tacitly condoning violent bigotry and turning a blind eye
to religiously-motivated attacks on Indonesian citizens.
The most conspicuous cleavage has pitted Prabowo’s billionaire younger
brother and deputy chief patron, Hashim Djojohadikusomo, against author and
deputy chairman of Gerindra, Fadli Zon. Evidently dismayed by the possibility
of his brother’s party courting an alliance with known Islamic radicals, Hashim
has pledged to quit Gerindra if the movement ever accepted the backing of the
FPI.
As a practising Christian,
Hashim seems acutely aware of the threat to religious freedoms posed by the
thug collective, and has sought to distance both himself and his party from any such
pact with the FPI. Hashim has taken a strong stance on this particular issue
for quite some time now, and even cited “growing religious intolerance” as one
of three “urgent threats” to Indonesia’s future in an article for the Huffington
Post earlier this year.
These sentiments were reiterated by Hashim at the Jakarta Foreign
Correspondents club late last week, where the businessman cum big-money
politician also attempted to take the flak off his older brother’s back, assuring his audience that
Prabowo “has been defending Pancasila and pluralism all his life.” [editor’s note: Bwahahahahahahaha!]
Both domestic and international media remain unconvinced, however, and
key Gerindra party figures such as Fadli Zon have done little to quell the
fears of Indonesia’s persecuted minorities.
Worryingly indifferent
So far Fadli has adopted a worryingly
indifferent attitude towards serious accusations that his coalition is
currently pandering to religious extremists. Last Wednesday, for example, Fadli
proclaimed that Gerindra welcomes political support from any group, nonchalantly
adding that the FPI is just “one organisation” among “thousands” of others who
lend their support to Gerindra “every day”.
Without even a hint of concern, Fadli also dodged questions on the
FPI’s back catalogue of religious violence, telling reporters that, “We
[Gerindra] do not talk about track records, we talk about the presidential
election.”
Consequently, two of the most senior members of Prabowo’s entourage
now appear to be at loggerheads. Prabowo seems to have firmly sided with the FPI already, rendering
Hashim’s threat of resignation somewhat unsubstantiated, to say the least.
Since entering into the much-condemned electoral pact with the FPI
just before horrific mob attacks on Christian minorities in Yogyakrta at the
end of last month, Prabowo’s public rhetoric has been conspicuously
inconsistent, incorporating an unworkable mixture of both Fadli’s indifference and Hashim’s concern.
On Tuesday, May 27, at a meeting with FPI members and the group’s
grand imam, Rizieq Shibab, Prabowo spoke of the need to “embrace all community
organisations, including the FPI.” Just one week later, however, Prabowo was
under pressure to give censure to the attacks in Yogyakarta, claiming that, “We [the 'red-and-white'
coalition] do not justify violence of any sort, let alone unlawful attacks on
[different] ethnicities, religions or other groups.”
If this was true then we could
expect to see Prabowo explicitly pulling out of his alliance with the FPI, but the
embattled old general has stuck his newfound pact and merely tried limit the
damage done to his campaign by shifting the blame onto the radicals themselves.
On Thursday, June 5, for example, a spokesperson for the red-and-white
coalition, Bara Hasibuan, told the media, “It wasn’t us looking for the support
of the FPI, but it was they who came to a religious gathering to offer their
support to Prabowo and Hatta.”
Teetering on edge
The Gerindra-led coalition now appears to be teetering on the edge of
a major internal breakdown as it flip-flops on important issues of religious
violence and refuses to rescind its alliance with the FPI. Fadli Zon has since
tried to limit the impact of Gerindra’s infighting by characterising religious
conflict as something which the party needn’t have an official stance on: “We
have private opinions”, he told reporters last week, “and we have the opinions
of the [campaign] team. Differences in opinion are just normal.”
Hashim, on the other hand, has attempted to execute a sort of
smoke-and-mirrors manoeuvre in claiming that he would quit the party if and
when it agrees to accept an endorsement from the FPI, when in actual fact,
Gerindra already accepted that endorsement almost two weeks ago, and the FPI is
not shying away from making the agreement public. Last week, for example, an
FPI representative for Central Java promised 10,000 votes for Prabowo-Hatta
from FPI sympathizers in his province, based on the ‘red-and-white’ coalition’s
perceived “commitment” to Islamic law.
Gerindra’s stance on Islamic
fundamentalism and the violence which typically accompanies its advocates
remains incredibly obscure, all the more so considering Hashim’s vocal
rejection of any such alliance with the FPI. The only thing that we can say for sure is that Prabowo is looking ever more
desperate to garner votes from all sources in the final stages of the campaign
season, and is evidently willing to work with some of Indonesia’s most
reviled Islamists in order to augment his chances of victory.
As we have seen over the past week or so, however, such dangerous
politicking could have serious unintended repercussions for Gerindra’s
intra-party relations, and the fissures could well expand beyond Hashim and
Fadli to other cadres much less senior in rank. In the coming days we will see how Prabowo attempts to
patch this one up, lest he risk creating a rift between himself, his
deputy chairman and his indispensible
sibling bankroller, Hashim.
Patrick Tibke writes for Asian Correspondent.
