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Exclusive: Indonesian Islamist leader says ethnic Chinese wealth is next target

Chairman of GNPF-MUI, Bachtiar Nasir, arrives at a police station to testify as a witness in a money laundering case at a police station in Jakarta, Indonesia February 10, 2017 in this photo taken by Antara Foto. Antara Foto/Reno Esnir/via REUTERS

By Tom Allard and Agustinus Beo Da Costa

JAKARTA (Reuters) – The leader of a powerful Indonesian Islamist organization that led the push to jail Jakarta’s Christian governor has laid out plans for a new, racially charged campaign targeting economic inequality and foreign investment.

In a rare interview, Bachtiar Nasir said the wealth of Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese minority was a problem and advocated an affirmative action program for native Indonesians, comments that could stoke tensions already running high in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation.

“It seems they do not become more generous, more fair,” the cleric said, referring to Chinese Indonesians, in the interview in an Islamic center in South Jakarta. “That’s the biggest problem.”

Ethnic Chinese make up less than 5 percent of Indonesia’s population, but they control many of its large conglomerates and much of its wealth.

Nasir also said also that foreign investment, especially investment from China, has not helped Indonesians in general.

Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s biggest economy, is a major destination for foreign investment in the mining and retail sectors. Jakarta is also trying to lure investors for a $450 billion infrastructure drive to revive economic growth.

“Our next job is economic sovereignty, economic inequality,” said Nasir, an influential figure who chairs the National Movement to Safeguard the Fatwas of the Indonesian Ulemas Council (GNPF-MUI). “The state should ensure that it does not sell Indonesia to foreigners, especially China.”

His group organized protests by hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Jakarta late last year over a comment about the Koran made by the capital’s governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, an ethnic-Chinese Christian.

Purnama was found guilty this week of blasphemy and sentenced to two years in prison, raising concerns that belligerent hardline Islamists are a growing threat to racial and religious harmony in this secular state.

Nasir, 49, used to have a late-night religious show on one of Indonesia’s biggest TV networks. His contract was ended under government pressure after his role in the first anti-Purnama rally was revealed.

He spoke calmly during the interview, identifying other religiously motivated objectives such as restricting alcohol to tourist areas, curbing prostitution and criminalizing adultery and sodomy. He insisted he believes in a pluralist Indonesia.

“PLAYING WITH FIRE”

Former President Suharto blocked Chinese Indonesians from many public posts and denied them cultural expression, forcing them to drop their Chinese names. Marginalized politically and socially, many turned to business and became wealthy.

The ethnic wealth gap has long fed resentment among poorer “pribumi”, Indonesia’s mostly ethnic-Malay indigenous people. During riots that led to the fall of Suharto in 1998, ethnic-Chinese and Chinese-owned businesses were targeted, and about 1,000 people were killed in the violence.

There has been no blood-letting on that scale since then, but tensions have remained. President Joko Widodo was the subject of a smear campaign on the campaign trail in 2014 that falsely claimed he was a Chinese descendant and a Christian.

Bonnie Triyana, a historian who has chronicled Chinese Indonesian experiences, said Nasir was “scapegoating” the Chinese.

“It’s very dangerous for our nation. It’s playing with fire,” said Triyana, who is an indigenous Indonesian. “They are spreading bad information to convince people that their role is to save the nation.”

In the interview, Nasir said “ethnic sentiment cannot be denied” when it comes to inequality, and the economic power of Chinese Indonesians needs to be addressed.

“The key is justice, and taking sides,” he said. “Justice can be applied if there is a preferential option for indigenous Indonesians from a regulation aspect and in terms of access to capital.”

Neighboring Malaysia, also a Muslim-majority nation with a wealthy Chinese minority, has long followed affirmative action policies that grant native Malays privileges, including job reservations in the civil service and discounts on property.

Johan Budi, a spokesman for Indonesian President Widodo – responding to Bachtiar’s comments – said in a statement to Reuters that income inequality is high on the government agenda and Indonesian Chinese get no special treatment.

“It is not true this allegation that President Jokowi gives wider space to ethnic Chinese in Indonesia,” Budi said, referring to Widodo by his nickname. He said Widodo’s focus is on the poor, including “indigenous people”.

According to the Credit Suisse Research Institute’s 2016 Global Wealth Report, the top 1 percent wealthiest Indonesians owned 49.3 percent of national wealth, making it among the most unequal nations in the world.

LINK TO POLITICS?

A Saudi-trained cleric, Nasir formed the GNPF-MUI last year to target Purnama, the now-convicted Jakarta governor.

Although Nasir is not as visible as the firebrand radical cleric Habib Rizieq who led last year’s protests, his group carries significant clout because it brings under one umbrella Islamist organizations that have national reach and strong links with mosques and religious schools.

GNPF-MUI includes Salafist intellectuals like Nasir, Rizieq’s Islamic Defenders Front and their urban poor constituency, along with middle class and politically connected Islamic groups.

Nasir said GNPF-MUI is a “religions movement”, not political. However, he is widely seen as allied to opposition leader Prabowo Subianto, who lost to Widodo in the 2014 election and could be a candidate for the presidency in 2019.

Greg Fealy, an expert on Indonesian Islamic groups from the Australian National University, said GNPF-MUI is developing a national agenda following the Jakarta governor’s conviction.

“They are trying to harness that movement to link the Islamist agenda with inequality. It is, in effect, targeting Chinese non-Muslims,” he said. “This is all part of a pitched battle in the run-up to 2019.”

(Edited by John Chalmers and Raju Gopalakrishnan)

Global Wealth inequality is becoming a risk

A general view of the low-income neighborhood known as Boca la Caja next to the business district in Panama City

OXFORD, England (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Growing global wealth inequality is becoming a fundamental risk to democracy and to economies around the world as more people feel government rules “rigged” in favor of the rich leave them with few options, investors and governance experts said Friday.

“It’s very dangerous,” said Ngaire Woods, dean of the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. “If people can’t aspire to succeed within the system, they will aspire … outside the system, in ways that break the system.”

That frustration is feeding into everything from the contentious U.S. presidential race to growing dissatisfaction over the amount of aid money that lands in the hands of rich-nation consultants rather than reaching the poor, experts said at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford.

In the United States, for example, “trickle down” economic policies that support tax cuts for the rich with the aim of boosting economic growth and jobs have led to a $2 trillion annual redistribution of wealth from the bottom 99 percent of earners to the top 1 percent over the last 30 years, said Nick Hanauer, a former venture capitalist and now head of Civic Ventures, which aims to drive social change.

If the trend continues, by 2030, the top 1 percent of Americans will earn 37 to 40 percent of the country’s income, with the bottom 50 percent getting just 6 percent, he said.

“That’s not a capitalist market economy anymore,” he warned. “That’s a feudalist system and it scares … me.”

Globally, half of the world’s wealth is now held by just 1 percent of the world’s population, according to a 2015 report by Credit Suisse, a financial services company.

That trend toward greater inequality – driven in part by tax policies and shifts such as the growing power of corporate lobbyists in the United States – is leading to the increasing belief that political systems can no longer deliver results for many people, said Darren Walker, president of the U.S.-based Ford Foundation.

Many people feel that “the political apparatus of democracy is corrupted” and the result is “dissatisfaction by huge swathes of the population about the potential of democracy to deliver anything of value and meaning to their lives,” he said.

SUITCASE OF MONEY

It is also putting the United States in an odd spot when it comes to enforcing anti-corruption rules overseas, including in the aid business, he said.

U.S. aid groups ask, “Can we really trust Africans to spend this money in the way Congress has appropriated?” Walker said. “People say, ‘Poor you, you have to bring a suitcase of money when doing things in Africa.'”

“But we have the same thing in the United States – but you don’t have to bring a suitcase. You bring a check. And you get the same effect. You give it to the officials’ fundraiser and say, ‘By the way, I need you to do this for me,'” he said.

“It’s no different (except) it’s legal,” he added. “We need to (see) our own culpability in this inequality.”

Aid agencies and social enterprises – businesses that strive for social good as well as profits – also are part of the problem when huge sums of money they spend on bringing people out of poverty in poor countries end up in the pockets of rich-world consultants, the experts said.

Donors “make a lot of fuss holding us to account on the money we get,” Woods recalled a frustrated representative of an Indonesian organization saying. “But for every dollar we get, 80 cents stays in the beltway (around Washington DC),” she said.

Many organizations – including USAID – are now trying to improve that percentage, delegates at the Skoll Forum said. But progress in helping aid recipient countries build their own systems to take care of their own problems has been slow.

BUILDING CAPACITY

The goal of giving “capacity building grants”, Walker said, should be to make sure “you don’t need to go back to Africa. So there is a rich, robust civil society there. That’s the vision, and we’re a long way from it.”

Investing more in civil society groups in poor countries, rather than just U.N. organizations, is one way of bringing change, said Degan Ali, the executive director of Adeso, a local charity working in Somalia and the Horn of Africa.

Reversing growing inequality will depend largely on revamping government policies and making rules fairer, changes that often need to be driven by public pressure, panelists said.

Those might include everything from ensuring that civil servants don’t change with each election to eliminating private schools to drive funding into improving state-run schools, the panelists and audience members said.

Woods noted that her own university education in New Zealand was funded by taxes. “That opportunity is one we’re all agreed is open to far too few people today. We have to think about why,” she said.

(Reporting by Laurie Goering; editing by Ros Russell:; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, women’s rights, trafficking and property rights. Visit http://news.trust.org/climate)