Bureaucrats have reputation for being boring. But not in Indonesia, whose civil service is full of dangerous radicals, according to the government itself. Officials regularly declare that a worrying share of public sector workers are in fact Islamist extremists. Ministers and intelligence chiefs denounce the “radicalism” of bureaucrats and teachers, and newspapers run stories about suspected terrorists who double as local officials.
These concerns stem, in part, from the ruling elite’s commitment to religious pluralism. 87% of Indonesia’s 274 million people are Muslim, making it the most populous Muslim country in the world. But it is not a Muslim state: the official ideology favors pluralism. Western allies have long celebrated Indonesia for combining widespread piety with a commitment to liberal values.
Yet attacks on public office also serve a lesser purpose. The greatest source of opposition to President Joko Widodo, Jokowi says, is not in parliament, where his grand coalition includes all but two parties, but among grassroots Islamist organizations. Their popularity has exploded in the past two decades as many Muslims, emboldened by the freedoms granted to them by the end of Suharto’s long dictatorship in 1998, have embraced a more conservative strain of faith.
Politicians began to worry in 2016 when these Islamists became a political force during large protests in Jakarta, the capital. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to denounce the allegedly blasphemous remarks of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, the city’s governor, who was a Christian and a close ally of Jokowi. His bid for re-election failed. Since Jokowi’s first presidential campaign in 2014, his opponents have encouraged fundamentalist vigilantes and protest groups such as the Islamic Defenders Front (fpi), who accuse the president of not being “Muslim enough”.
Echoing Suharto, Jokowi responded with repression. In 2020, he banned the fpi; six of his supporters were killed in a shootout with police that year. It also targeted the public sector. In 2019, it formed a task force to remove extremists from its ranks. Members of the force were drawn from ministries and intelligence agencies, but the government encouraged members of the public to alert it to officials’ extremist views through a dedicated website. It also began screening candidates for public office to assess their religious beliefs. Government agencies now hold seminars aimed at instilling loyalty to the state in their employees. The security services delivered lists of staff members believed to hold extremist views to administrators of public universities and bosses of state-owned companies. Appointees are warned that their opinions will harm their careers.
The lists suggest that state agencies are conducting extensive public sector surveillance, writes Gregory Fealy of the Australian National University. Tjahjo Kumolo, the minister for civil service reform, has warned civil servants that the government can detect their “digital fingerprint”. The government justifies such intrusions by claiming that Muslim extremism “is penetrating deep into the organs of the state, resulting in the capture of entire sections of the bureaucracy,” writes Mr. Fealy.
Concerns about radicalism have some merit. Indonesia has a recent history of violent extremism, with terrorist attacks on tourist sites killing dozens of people in the early 2000s. Large minorities of public officials support radical Islamism. In 2017, the Alvara Research Center, an Indonesian pollster, found that one in five civil servants and one in ten state enterprise employees wanted Indonesia to become a Muslim theocracy. A survey conducted a year later revealed that almost 60% of Muslim teachers are intolerant of other religions.
Yet the government’s claim that the state is being captured by extremists is overblown. “There is no evidence to suggest the systemic prevalence of terrorism or violent extremism within the civil service,” says Sana Jaffrey of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, an Indonesian think tank. In its first two years, the government’s anti-extremism campaign officially sanctioned only 38 officials, according to A’an Suryana, a researcher at the islands Yusof Ishak Institute, a think tank in Singapore. That’s a tiny percentage of the country’s 4.3 million public employees.
This is despite the fact that the government uses a broad definition of “radicalism”. Making remarks that “insult” the government or sharing what the task force considers “fake news” on social media can be enough to get its attention. The nebulous criteria, in turn, make it easier to sideline opponents by accusing them of being extremists.
In September, 57 employees of the Anti-Corruption Commission experienced this firsthand when they were fired for failing a civil service exam. The commission had doggedly rooted out corruption at the highest levels of Indonesian politics, making powerful enemies. After the officials were sacked, celebrities on social media with ties to the government made it known that they were members of the Taliban. One of the former officials who got the boot, Giri Suprapdiono, says he and his colleagues were actually fired because they refused to bow down to the government. But many members of the public, he said, believed the claims that they were “radicals”. This is absurd, he argues: some of those who lost their jobs were not even Muslims.
The government is “blurring the line between having views critical of the government, having Islamist views and just being called a terrorist,” Ms Jaffrey said. Many conservative Muslims now feel they need to be “very careful” when speaking out online, says Muhammad Kholid, spokesman for the Prosperous Justice Party, a Muslim opposition party. Thousands of people are discriminated against on the basis of their religious and political views, Fealy estimates.
Jokowi hopes that by cracking down on conservative Muslims, he will inspire them to moderate their views and thus protect the country’s pluralism. Since the murders of the six fpi partisans in 2020, the Islamist agitation died down. But the peace that Jokowi bought may not last. His tactics are likely to anger Muslims and drive extremists underground. On June 7, police announced the arrest of leaders of Khilafatul Muslimin, an Islamist group that taught students in its 31 schools that Indonesia should be a caliphate. It would be better for them, and for Indonesian democracy, to be taught the value of pluralism. Too bad their president does not lead by example. ■