Who wants to visit Aceh – for pleasure, not mere curiosity? While visitors describe Aceh's towns and villages as friendly, what kind of place would pass a law on stoning people to death, if proven guilty of adultery?
Alas, a place like several others in Indonesia, where vote-hungry politicians have been allowed to carry out crazy notions on the pretext of establishing local "identities". Tuesday can be listed as the saddest day in the nation's post-Soeharto era, when finally we proved at the extreme level that we can be as senseless as others in trying to shape better states and communities – either through manipulation or ignorance.
Some would be quick to distance themselves – Aceh is different, it gained special privileges as the result of a peace deal to end the war against separatists. But it is similar in regard to being part of a nation whose leaders have shamelessly failed to draw the line on what laws and regulations can be issued at the local level.
The result has been "sharia"-inspired legal instruments across several provinces, issued without enough consultation on how such rules stand alongside our national ideology and Constitution, not to mention the international conventions that we are bound to. One is the UN Convention on Human Rights, which politicians have thrown out the window as a useless "Western" legacy, it seems, while our President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, PhD, has never lifted a finger against attempts to legalize "religious and cultural values" as local rulers see fit.
As our first president to enjoy direct votes from millions, SBY has yet to grasp the significance of that direct statement of trust from the majority of citizens. If he did, he would dig into our history and into the views of many of our intellectuals and plain ordinary people, to find that our communities can shape local identities in more civil ways than arresting women loitering in the dark, let alone execute barbaric modes of justice.
SBY's party, mind you, does not condone death by stoning: Aceh's Democrats just nodded to stoning between four to 100 times, not between 40 to 200 times as required in the new ordinance, with little regard for defendants being killed long before the 20th strike.
SBY should take a cue from the Aceh administration: Vice governor Muhammad Nazar asserted that the government would not carry out the law. "In Islam, the law must protect its citizens' human rights," he said.
The protests greeting several qanun, or laws, including the most extreme passed on Tuesday, suggest that such laws are not everyone's idea of building life anew, after decades of war and a devastating natural tragedy.
While some argue that such punishment has a history in Arab-Islamic theology, there is little to actually support stoning for this matter in the Koran. Muslims should not become apologists for questionable Arab traditions which defy logic.
Likewise, the local rules regulating morality in other places do not mean Indonesians in general embrace them as part of our renewed lives after the New Order. A clear sign was the failure of Islamic parties to gain more votes in the election this year. Our leaders just need to read those signs, in Aceh and elsewhere.