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speech. The Information and Electronic Transactions Law, for example, allows courts
to imprison anyone accused of defamation via the internet or other digital media
(such as cell phone texting) for up to six years. With these laws readily available
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to aggrieved business owners and officials, corruption exposés, letters to the editor,
customer service complaints, and even private emails have all provoked lawsuits that
have landed people in prison.
In the post-Suharto era, the internet, the twenty-first century’s primary driver of
modernization, also came under increasing attack by Islamic conservatives who por-
trayed it as a hydra-headed threat to public morality. In their effort to impose religious
controls over public expressions of sexuality, which they branded “pornography,” such
groups villainized the internet to reestablish moral standards. After three years of
deliberation, a parliamentary committee released draft legislation in 2006 proposing
bans on suggestive dancing, public kissing, wearing scanty apparel, and any other act
that could “arouse desire.” The proposal set off protests among critics worried that
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its language, encouraging the public to “participate in the prevention of the produc-
tion, dissemination, and use of materials of pornography,” would empower groups
such as the Islamic Defenders Front in their campaigns to police public morality. Such
groups, for example, had already carried out attacks on nightclubs they regarded as
“dens of sin.”
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Shortly before its passage in October 2008, its sponsors claimed that an amended
version of the antipornography bill “accommodated all interests in society.” Even after
revisions, however, many believed that the bill’s prohibitions were untenably broad
and vague, defining pornography as all “pictures, sketches, illustrations, photographs,
articles, sounds, voices, moving pictures, animations, cartoons, conversations, body
movements or other forms of messages . . . that contain obscenity or sexual exploita-
tion.” Although over one hundred legislators walked out on the proceedings in pro-
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test, members of conservative Islamist parties held sway, and the legislation passed
into law.
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Deeper Transformation
Even with the antipornography law’s passage, conservative alarm over the
nation’s impending moral crisis continued, with rhetoric reaching beyond the nation
to invoke a higher order. In retrospect, it seems that the country’s relative stability
since 2004 had fostered a resurgence of the corporatist values of integralism across a
widening spectrum of Indonesian society. Not only did orthodox Islamic groups seek
rigid controls over gender and a purge of heterodox Muslim believers, even journal-
ists’ associations, once strong advocates of civil rights, moved to exclude entire media
genres, particularly “infotainment,” from legal protections. The continuing appeal of
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integralist ideology, reinforced by Muslim mass mobilization, provided a strong politi-
cal foundation for future attacks on freedom of expression.
Mitigating these trends, however, a new logic transforming the country’s political
culture began competing with and even replacing New Order perceptions of normality
and deviance. For a half century under both Sukarno and Suharto, the corporatist doc-
trine of integralism had assumed an underlying congruity in the interests of citizens
and rulers that provided the rationale for the curtailment of civil rights. From this idea
of essential harmony, Suharto’s later enforcement of “positive interaction” among the
media, state, and society helped his regime stigmatize the airing of conflict and jus-
tify closing off channels of dissent. In effect, this doctrine rejected the individualism