Crackdown on punks in Indonesia

Banda Aceh, Indonesia
In his canary yellow t-shirt and skinny jeans Banu Prasdana looks like an ordinary Indonesian kid. But last year when he sported more than a dozen piercings and a Mohawk and wandered Banda Aceh's streets playing rock ballads on his guitar he had a canny ability to unnerve the local police, who considered him a menace to a social order governed by strict Islamic law.
Now he and a group of other 20-somethings have dialed back their image and spend Saturday nights in Aceh's provincial capital in a park trying to look inconspicuous. Some are jobless and without homes, some come to the park to chill with friends late into the night, a common practice here.
Officials say they drink, use drugs, and disturb others by not showering and appearing sloppy. They're just exploiting their freedom of expression and disrespecting Aceh province's conservative morals, says Police Chief Iskandar Hasan.
But Prasdana says the police misunderstand them. People need to see beyond the way they dress, he explains, referring to a recent charity concert they hosted to raise money for flood victims. Their aim is more about highlighting discrimination and social inequality.  “Being a punk is not about [just] freedom, but rebellion; a struggle against injustice.”  
But as the battle between the conservative authorities and Aceh’s punks has heated up, many of them have gone into hiding, which worries some who see the punks as a welcome challenge to the form of Islamic law adopted in Aceh.

The danger of challenging conservativism

In a province where alcohol is outlawed, unmarried couples are not allowed alone together after dark and women’s dress is strictly dictated by law, being a punk has a much broader definition than it does in other places of the world. For many, it is a form of revolt against the government’s interpretation of sharia law, which they say is merely a means of restricting expression.
“People are not resisting sharia in a religious sense, but as a legal product,” says Reza Idria, a lecturer of Islamic political philosophy at Aceh’s Syiah Kuala University.
He was once a punk in the late 1990s, and still wears the smallest hint of a spike in his hair. The punk movement today is not unlike it was then, he says, estimating that there are around 200 punks broken into smaller groups that rival one another.
What they share is the belief that sharia has become a political tool, used by the authorities to appeal to conservative voters. But to many in this conservative Islamic province, not accepting the terms of sharia means you are against your religion, says Idria. “So it’s difficult, it’s dangerous.”
That danger was made real last December, when sharia police arrested 65 punks during a charity concert for which they allegedly did not receive a permit. Prasdana, who had ditched his Mohawk shortly before the arrests, says several of his friends were among those caught in the dragnet and taken to a police “re-education camp.”
Over a 10-day period police forced the youths to shave their heads, bathe together in a lake and say daily prayers as part of what they called moral rehabilitation. Human rights groups cried foul over their treatment, which also drew criticism from international punk communities.
“I felt sorry when it happened,” says Prasdana, calling the arrests a misunderstanding. “Some people think we look naughty, or like bad boys. That’s why they can’t accept us.”
Authorities insist the punks often steal, drink liquor, or disturb people by appearing unkempt and threatening.
“They don’t just disturb society, they have no morals,” says Hasan, the police chief. That’s why they need discipline and “rebuilding.”

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