Opting to start at the opening of the somewhat controversially-titled "Re:Horny95", an exhibition of current big names in Jogja's art scene, at the Jogja National Museum, Lolly and I wandered around the southwestern section of the city. Without an address for the museum, I relied on my memory of previous visits. The magnetic coordinates in my wrists guided us straight to the museum, with a necessary stop by a bakpia bakery. We arrived early and sat for a few minutes on the back of the motorbike, eating the sweet, dense, buttery biscuit/cookies. After a quick run-through of the exhibit allowed by an errant security guard, we were escorted back outside, and while waiting for the actual event to open, I received a series of text messages from a friend who coordinated our next intended destination.
She was upset because her event had been wrecked and disassembled by a group of haughty, slow-moving police. Having coordinated a series of plays and songs as the end of a week of anti-homophobia activism, she had gathered a series of pro-LGBT communities in the Alun-Alun kidul -- the southern public park of the city. Upon arriving, they were greeted by an aggressive group of men dressed entirely in white, with their heads masked by black and white keffiyehs. Although the only people aware of the planned events were the local police, someone had alerted the Front Pembela Islam, and a group from the FPI arrived to disrupt the events.
Worried about the safety of the participants, she asked if Lolly and I could drive around the park and determine whether the FPI group was still there. Tracing the square road bordering the park, we came to face the gathering of rowdy men in the southeastern corner. Lolly snapped a quick, blurry photo (see above), and we drove off to find our friend, her community of lesbians, and members of the various pluralist/anti-homophia communities in Jogja.
The FPI, or Islamic Defender Front, is a fundamentalist group which employs violence to deconstruct businesses, communities and events that are considered to be anti-Islamic. Within the last two months, they effectively shut down two other events. They surrounded a hotel in Surabaya and threatened the lives of the participants of a conference for the International Gay and Lesbian Conference, causing the local Police to revoke the permission they had previously provided to the conference organizers. Following this, they attacked a community training of warias (a male-to-female transgendered figure common throughout Indonesia). They forcibly entered the room, threw chairs and bottles at the participants, and wounded many of the warias.
A trend is developing. Members of the FPI are intimidating and attacking people while the police and military watch. And although the national motto is Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, or Unity in Diversity, the police and military seem satisfied to remain spectators as the unity of one portion of the population is enhanced through the forcing of others to the margins. It is difficult not to implicate the police and military in the increasingly structural violence against LGBT-idenified individuals, Christians, Ethnic Chinese, and anyone deemed too liberal. Is it getting easier to be cast as "anti-Islamic"? It is certainly easy enough for members of the FPI to intimidate and use violence -- intimidation and violence which is seemingly validated by the lack of legal repercussion from the State.
Shaken up by the aggressive and somehow ghostly presence of the FPI in the carnival-like setting of the alun-alun, Lolly and I sat with the community members in a restaurant not far off. With unease, we chatted, as if to create a new purpose for gathering -- we weren't displaced from the park, but had gathered instead to hang out and socialize. And while it was nice to chat with new individuals from various communities, I couldn't help but share in the disappointment that so much preparation and energy could be denied its deserved outlet.
The night served as a reminder that while Yogya feels like a bohemian city with space for everyone from any kind of background, its openness also allows for the existence of (often invisible) of hard-headed, narrow-minded groups riding on Fundamentalism's moral high-ground.
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