Jakarta – Indonesian Institute for Science (LIPI) researcher Amin Mudzakir has revealed that that based on the results of a LIPI survey in 2018, there are three regions where there is a high-level of acceptance of fake news or hoaxes.
“The three regions are Aceh, West Java and Banten”, said Mudzakir as reported by the Antara state news agency on Friday January 18.
These three regions, said Mudzakir, have a high-level acceptance of hoaxes related to the revival of communism, the criminalisation of ulama [Islamic clerics] and the alleged entry of millions of foreign workers (TKA) from China.
According to Mudzakir, the LIPI survey wanted to gain a picture of the level of intolerance in nine Indonesian provinces, namely Aceh, North Sumatra, Jakarta, Banten, West Java, Central Java, Yogyakarta, East Java and South Sulawesi.
The results, he said, was that in regions with a strong affiliation with political Islam, there was a high-level of acceptance of hoaxes.
“Religion is an understanding that provides a bases for the belief that communism is wrong, and was used by the military during the New Order era [of former president Suharto] to campaign against communist ideas”, he said.
Mudzakir explained that by political Islam he means people who have an affiliation with the now defunct Masyumi Party, so they have an antipathy against communism and in regions where the party won in the 1955 elections such as West Java the level of anti-communist sentiment is high.
He believes however that in several regions where the influence of Indonesia’s largest Islamic mass organisation Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) is strong such as East Java, the resistance to the communist hoax is very high.
“The PBNU [NU Central Leadership Board] has even said that the issue of a PKI [the banned Indonesian Communist Party] revival is a hoax, if we go back a bit, during the era of Indonesia’s 4th president [and former NU leader] Abdurrahman Wahid there were efforts at reconciliation and he repeatedly said that the PKI has been defeated and could not possibly be revived”, he said.
Contrary to this, he said, organisations such Indonesia’s second-largest Islamic mass organisation Muhammadiyah, have taken an ambivalent position on the communism hoax and have never expressed a firm position on the PKI revival issue.
As a consequence, Mudzakir said that grass-roots society does not have a basic reference to check whether or not the PKI hoax is true or not. (Antara/DAL)
Notes
Masyumi Party – An urban based Islamic party dominated by merchants and small capitalists, it scored the second highest number of vote (21%) in the 1995 elections. The party was dissolved in 1960 by Indonesia’s founding president Sukarno because of its support of the US backed military rebellions in Sumatra and Sulawesi in 1956.
In Indonesia’s northern-most province of Aceh, which because of its special autonomy status is the only province in the country allowed to enact sharia-based (Islamic) laws, religion and identity politics dominate the political discourse and the rhetoric of government officials and political parties, and are reinforced in ordinary people’s daily lives through numerous sharia-based regional regulations and strict enforcement of conservative Islamic values by sharia police and local law enforcement.
[Translated by James Balowski. The original title of the article was “LIPI: Jawa Barat, Aceh, dan Banten Tertinggi Informasi Hoaks”.]
