Jacob Zenn – Indonesia's Islamic Defenders' Front (FPI) pressure group has this year in turns assaulted Ahmadiya and Christian places of worship, attacked journalists who reported critically on its activities, forced through intimidation the cancellation of Lady Gaga's scheduled concert, and ambushed various government police stations and courts.

While the radical fundamentalist group purports to be growing in numbers, up to 30,000 members according to the FPI leader Habib Rizieq Shihab, it is simultaneously undermining many of the secular foundations on which Indonesia was founded and has since thrived in the ongoing transition from autocracy to democracy.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's inability or unwillingness to curb the FPI's intimidation tactics, meanwhile, has dented his administration's self-touted reform credentials at a crucial time for the country's international standing as a moderate Muslim democracy. How he deals with the group in the months ahead will largely determine his legacy as a twice elected democratic reformer.

The FPI was founded in 1998 as opportunities opened up for Islamists to engage in political activities banned during former dictator Suharto's 32 years of iron fist rule. The group's first priority was to amend the first principle of Pancasila (Sanskrit for "five principles"), which forms the official ideological foundation of the Indonesian state.

The principle of godliness, including the implementation of sharia law for Muslims, was included in the original Pancasila, but independence hero and former President Sukarno replaced it with the wording that stands today, "the belief in one God" (Ketuhanan yang masa eha).

Without specific recognition of sharia law for Muslims, the FPI believes that Indonesia's economic and political system cannot be just for Muslims and that the secular state's authority is illegitimate. According to FPI leader Rizieq, the establishment of his group was an attempt by devout Muslims to eliminate non-Islamic acts in society where government authorities failed to act.

The FPI's original platform, including raids against perceived dens of immoral behaviors such as gambling, prostitution and drinking alcohol, was popular among conservative Muslims. Rizieq's growth strategy for the FPI has been to attract more conservative Muslims to the group and through various street actions gradually erode secular society. Since its founding, however, the FPI has demonstrated a propensity for violence.

In 1998, the FPI participated in the riots against ethnic Chinese Indonesians and issued a "call for jihad" against "ninja forces," which the FPI believed were government agents who targeted Islamic scholars throughout the archipelago's main island of Java. In 1999, it ordered the capture of university students who took down an FPI sign that said, "Watch out! Zionism and Communism are penetrating all aspects of our lives." In 2001, the FPI held protests against America's invasion of Afghanistan at the US embassy in Jakarta and tore down the embassy's barbed wire fence before being thwarted.

Rizieq promised in 2003 to de-emphasize mass action and focus on economic development and education to stamp out "immoral acts," but the FPI-led violent intolerance persisted. That same year FPI members invaded a church that had been meeting in a school's sports hall for 10 years on the grounds that the church was attempting to spread Christianity in a public place. In 2005, the FPI attacked the transgender "Miss Waria" contest in Jakarta. In 2007, dozens of FPI members raided a Yogyakarta discotheque because it hosted striptease shows. In 2008, the FPI destroyed cafes and vendors in the Pasar Wetan area, Tasikmalaya because they were selling food during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. In 2010, the FPI tried to forcefully tear down the Tiga Mojang statue in Bekasi, which depicts three women in traditional Sundanese attire, and a dragon statue in Singkawang city during a Buddhist celebration.

In 2011 the FPI threatened to overthrow Yudhoyono's government if he attempted to disband the group. This statement was released shortly after the FPI violently attacked the Ahmadiya community, which the FPI and some hard-line Muslims consider an heretical Islamic sect, based in Cikeusik, Banten. The group has since continued its violent ways and means.

Degrees of intolerance

To be sure, FPI-sponsored violence has not approached the levels orchestrated by Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a home-grown terror group held responsible for various bombing attacks, including the 2002 Bali bombing that killed 202, mostly Western tourists. But the two organizations' objectives run in parallel: to convert Indonesia, home to the world's largest Muslim population, into an Islamic state.

While there is scant evidence that JI and FPI have coordinated operations, the FPI has benefited from being seen as the lesser of two evils when compared to JI. Jakarta Police Chief Nugroho Djayusman reportedly said that the FPI is a "small, relatively insignificant group" that is "not ideological, except insofar as it opposed gambling, prostitution and pornography... By contrast, [JI leader Abu Bakar] Bashir's foot soldiers were a much more serious ideological group".

Indonesia's security forces have decimated JI's leadership and the group has failed to carry out any major attacks since 2009. In contrast, the FPI has been able to operate with relative impunity and little interference from Indonesian security forces. (Rizieq was sentenced to 18 months in prison in October 2008 for inciting violence at an interfaith rally where dozens of people were injured by FPI supporters earlier that year.)

JI's leadership emerged mostly from the ranks of jihadis who fought against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s and returned to Indonesia with the al-Qaeda influenced mindset that big explosions and high-spectacle attacks would win the support of the wider Muslim world. While major bomb attacks, including against Western hotels situated in the capital Jakarta, made global headlines, the violence failed to give the group a mass following.

The FPI's methods, on the other hand, have steered clear of terrorist violence and have pursued their fundamentalist aims through mass protests, intimidation and acts of thuggery. Having avoided the terrorist label, the FPI has been able to promote itself more effectively as a morality police force. At times it has linked up with other conservative Islamic institutions, such as the Islamic Defenders Legion (LPI), the Indonesian Mujahideen Council (MMI), and Kokam, the youth wing of the Muhammadiyah mass Muslim group.

FPI claims to receive funding only from member donations. However, it has also reportedly received from funds from wealthy Indonesians and even the state intelligence agency to carry out ideologically-motivated attacks, including the attempted attack on the US embassy during the protests against the publication of cartoons viewed as insulting to the Prophet Mohammed in 2006.

According to Indonesian police records, the FPI engaged in violence and destructive behavior in 34 cases in 2010 and 2011 in West and Central Java and North and South Sumatra, statistics that do not include Aceh, Sulawesi, and Kalimantan where the FPI has clashed respectively with Christian, Ahmadiya and indigenous Dayak communities. In February this year, the Dayak community organized thousands of its members to protest at the airport when four FPI members were scheduled to arrive to build a regional office in Palangkaraya, Kalimantan. Outnumbered, the FPI members never disembarked the plane.

This year the FPI's targets have fallen into three main categories: Ahmadiya, Shia, Buddhist, Christian and other non-Sunni Muslim places of worship; public places deemed as non-Islamic, such as alcohol shops and stalls that serve food during the Ramadan fasting period; and displays of Indonesia's pre-Islamic heritage, such as dangdut music and waying puppetry.

FPI violence and intimidation has now successfully shuttered dozens of churches across the country. After hundreds of FPI members protested in front of a Ahmadiya worship sites in Aceh on April 30 this year, local authorities sealed off the buildings to Ahmadi worshippers. Three days later, 16 other undung-undungs, or small unofficial houses of worship, in the area were also sealed off by district officials on the pretext that they had been built without proper permits and that locals had "complained" about them.

This action had wider implications for the estimated 120,000 Christians in Aceh who have been unable to obtain government permission to build new churches and are now barred from worshipping in "unofficial" churches.

In yet another example of the FPI's rising religious intolerance, dozens of FPI members armed with sticks and stones attacked an Ahmadiya mosque in Singaparna, West Java during preparations for prayers in April. The FPI justified its actions on the grounds that the Ahmadiyas had refused to stop praying from the Koran after being warned doing so was heretical. One witness said the police and other state officials had been notified about the FPI's plan to attack but because of the fear of confronting the FPI did nothing to stop them.

Flawed role model

The FPI's rising intolerance and challenge to secular society comes at a time when many Western leaders had hoped to hold Indonesia out as a glowing example for the Arab Spring-inspired democratic transitions underway in the Middle East and North Africa.

In July 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got the ball rolling on the Indonesia-Arab Spring connection when she stated that, "In the year of the Arab Spring, there has never been a better moment for Indonesians to share what they learned from their own transition to democracy with the people of Egypt, Tunisia, and other nations that are now on that same difficult journey."

More recently, in April 2012, British Prime Minister David Cameron said at Al Azhar Islamic University in Jakarta that, "If Indonesia can succeed, it can lead the world in showing how democracy can offer an alternative to the dead-end choice of dictatorship or extremism."

Indeed, the uprisings seen recently in the Arab World resemble the mass pro-democracy street demonstrations in 1998 that led to the overthrow of Indonesia's military-backed, authoritarian Suharto regime. Indonesia's democratic progress since has often been held up as a shining example not only for transitional Arab states, but for the entire Muslim world.

Freedom House, a non-governmental organization which conducts research and advocacy on democracy, political freedom and human rights, rates only Indonesia and Senegal as having "fully free" political systems among 47 Muslim-majority countries worldwide. FPI's attacks on religious minorities, which constitute more than 12% of Indonesia's estimated 242 million population, and assaults on traditional Indonesian culture, however, is more reminiscent of the Salafist-Jihadist strands of intolerant Islam seen in many Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

If Indonesia is to truly serve as a democratic model for these countries, Yudhoyono's government needs to enforce the law and bring a halt to the FPI's rising intimidation and violence. Yudhoyono promised on July 1, without naming the FPI, to "take firm action against groups that force their own will and violate the constitutional rights of others."

Two factors may motivate Yudhoyono to finally make good on that promise. As a lame duck president, Yudhoyono may have begun to think about his legacy and whether he will be remembered as the president who failed to rein in the FPI. He may also be reassured by groups in Indonesia, such as the Indonesia Without FPI Movement, which are threatening legal action against FPI if the government does not take action. Between the violence-prone FPI and newly established pressure groups pushing for rule by law and secularism, his choice as a self-professed democratic reformer should be clear.

[Jacob Zenn is an international affairs analyst and legal adviser based in Washington D.C. He specializes in comparative analysis of insurgencies in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Nigeria, and South America. He can be reached at zopensource123@gmail.com.]