History seems to be repeating itself in Indonesia. Same beats, same choruses, same incendiary statements, same rebuttals. The Indonesian government is about to deliver a fresh blow to its LGBTI communities. Yesterday’s “a threat worse than a nuclear bomb” is today’s “sacrilege” or “disease.”



Following the raids at gay bars and saunas last year and the arrest and humiliation of 12 trans women in Aceh last month, Indonesia’s House of Representatives will decide on a set of revisions to the country’s criminal code on 14 February, which has not been updated since its days as a Dutch colony. With the draft containing these revisions already circulated, the criminalisation of the LGBT communities takes on a decidedly more potent tenor. Two sections, if passed, may outlaw extramarital and homosexual sex, respectively carrying the maximum prison sentence of five years and 12 years.

Reading this draft, I realised that crass subjectivity can be weaponised. For example, the planned law against extramarital sex will make it harder for rape victims to claim their innocence when their assailants say that the rape is consensual. This will also hurt impoverished Indonesians who can’t afford to file for legal certification of their marriage (estimates put this at 55% of couples) – their fornication could be fair game in the eyes of the court.

Ricky Gunawan, lawyer for the Community Legal Aid Institute in Jakarta, tells me that the draft will bring a harsher punishment for those caught engaging in homosexual acts, regardless of their consensual nature. He says that the “catchall” criminal code could serve as grounds to punish, in addition to the 2008 anti-pornography laws that are often wielded to punish people attending gay parties, for example. “They’re trying to shove morality down our throats, using criminal laws to preside over someone’s morality,” he adds.

Presiding over someone’s morality isn’t something that surprises me about our government, but there’s something suspect about the move’s political gains or losses. It smacks of expediency. In the lead-up to the 2019 presidential election, according to the magazine Tempo, almost all factions of the nine political parties in the parliament have agreed to the inclusion of gay relationships in existing laws against harassment. Party lines have become nothing short of a currency.

“What we want is for the laws to be delayed [until after the 2019 election],” says Tunggal Pawestri, a feminist activist and one of the people who launched a petition against the revisions (which has garnered over 60,000 signatures). “[The revisions] are just a way to get votes. A lot of what’s being discussed on the floor is just a selling item.”

In theory, there is a way for the revisions to be pulled or delayed. President Joko Widodo, on behalf of the government, could write a letter of objection to the parliament. It is, however, a move believed to be costly to his political capital – something he may not want to risk losing if he is to run for a second term next year.

And though most factions in the special working group for the revisions have voiced their assent for the revisions, they don’t necessarily all agree in principle. Tempo reported that the deliberations have seen, for instance, party members not showing up to meetings. Due to limited knowledge about LGBT issues, “they’re afraid,” as Benny Kabur Harman, the head of the working group on the revisions of the criminal code in the House of Representatives, said of such members in the magazine.

The more liberal factions, such as one from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP), have also told reporters that they’d rather not barge in on people’s private lives. They argue that the revisions will function as a firewall with which to protect the LGBT communities from “the risk that the public can try to take the law into their own hands,” said PDIP member Ichsan Soelistio in an interview with the Washington Post. The “firewall” will limit the complaints solely to family members or the partners or when there’s violence involved.

Still, that the political manoeuvring has not let up on private spaces makes me doubt whether there’s a way out of this. What can be done, says Pawestri, is “more pressure on the parliament or the government to do the right thing.” After we spoke, there was a demonstration at the gates of the House of Representatives from an alliance of civil society groups strongly demanding for the revisions to be scaled back.

I’ve written this article before. I’ve asked the same questions – What statements have politicians made about the LGBT community? What new petitions have popped up on the web? Aren’t there cultures in Indonesia that deviate from traditional gender norms? Do most Indonesians know of them? – but when the private life of an Indonesian is still a question to be debated by his/her government, I know that I’ll keep asking them.