Blogger Indonesia of the Week (65): Mellyana

Lend Your Ears to Minority Voices

I always like and even encourage friends around me here in India to speak up and speak out what their conscience want them to say against some malpractices some government official might have done even if you have to take a presumed or real risk of doing that.

It’s not easy. Having experienced a 32-year old “quiet” oppression during Suharto’s regime–where you’d find yourself in jail for talking something funny to some, if it could cause a “threat to national security.”

Thanks God, that era is gone. The left-over, mind you, is pretty much there in the mindset of many Indonesians on various forms. The traumatic experience against ethnic Chinese at the late 1990s are also still felt now even among some prominent intellectual of ethnic Chinese. One of them told me recently that she still felt so scary even to meet people from majority community without a friend with her. When you’ve been in traumatic experience, such feeling is understandable.But time is moving on. Unless we follow the sun and get rid of the blast from the past, we’ll become the stagnant nation who tend to look back for inspiration without even knowing what to do next.

Many ways to look ahead, to forget and heal the wound past and build the future together. And so far as building healthy relation among all Indonesian community goes, voicing a complain or a protest of what they think is their right is important through any possible means. Blog considered by many as representing the people voice should be one of effective tool to do that.

And for this reason, I am happy to read what Mellyana, a pious Christian, had to say on why it’s so hard to build a Church:

When it’s so easy to build a mosque, it’s extremely hard to build a curch. Permit become a keyword to close many curches, even though it’s been more than 10 years. Well, some of them are new curches, but still, why a curch become unacceptable to be at the same area with residential, why there are (look like) thousands procedures just to be able to build one? Hey, look how many mosque we have…just everywhere, at every corner. Not that I complain, but, hey, why can’t we just praise the Lord’s name in peace?

In which a commenter named Triesti (seems to be a Muslim) responds to her complain thus:

I am not saying what they did is right. but it happens everywhere. to put it in perspective, in holland it is not easy to build a mosque eventhough all the curches are practically empty. so i guess there are a lot of closeminded xenophobic people out there. we just need to educate people about it.

There are three things that impress me in the little discussion above: (1) Both are talking in decent way, no insult or bluffing whatsoever; (2)Both are using real name, not hiding behind anonymity; (3) The minority community is not scary anymore to voice such complain with her name and picture attached in her blog.

The difficulty of building a Church in a Muslim area is an issue that only the Goverment can solve it by amending the law regarding this problem. But the bigger picture is if such healthy discussion is going on and on peacefully, done in elegant way and with sincerity on both sides among young generation, it will create a better understanding and mindset of inter-religious relations in Indonesia in years to come. And when these young men and women become the policy maker someday, the problem like this and any other similar issues will be no more a big deal.