Yesterday, the Indonesian government officially banned the local branch of Islamist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir (HTI) using powers contained within a recently enacted presidential decree (Perppu) that allows officials to unilaterally dissolve civil society organizations deemed contrary to Indonesia’s foundational ideology of Pancasila.
President Joko Widodo’s Perppu on mass organizations has been heavily criticized by some conservative politicians and Islamic groups, as well as by human rights activists who worry that the decree gives the government too much power to arbitrarily ban organizations without judicial review.
One Islamic group that is not worried about being banned by the government is the infamous Islamic Defenders Front (FPI). According to FPI secretary Novel Bamukmin (of ‘Fitsa Hats’ fame (no, we’re never going to let anybody forget that)) they have a plan in place should the government try to ban them like HTI.
“For us, even if we were disbanded, there would be no problem because we would soon just make a new organization,” Novel told Metrotvnews.com today.
Novel said, FPI is just a vehicle for their cause and, were it to be dissolved, it would not take long for them to form a successor organization.
“Our goals is not to be a mass organization, mass organizations are just vehicles that can be replaced,” he added.
The government has not made any suggestions recently that they would ban FPI (though the option has been much discussed in the past), but one could easily make the argument that their ideology was counter to Pancasila as they have long campaigned for the implementation of sharia law and campaigned against non-Muslim leaders such as former Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, whom they protested against on the basis of his religion long before the blasphemy charges that eventually sent him to jail.
Could FPI just start a new organization were the government to ban them? We’re not legal experts but, theoretically, it seems like they could. But if their goals were the same they could theoretically just be banned again, and then they could try to start a new organization etc etc (which seems to be an inherent flaw in laws that attempts to ban organization).
FPI founder and leader Rizieq Shihab remains in Saudi Arabia, still hiding from Indonesian authorities after being named a suspect in a high profile pornography case, though recently his legal representatives have suggested he would return to Indonesia before September (though they have suggested he was coming back to Indonesia soon many times in the past).
