Suria Rajini from Sahanivasa Institute, India, a member of Asia Pacific Research Network (APRN)’s Board of Conveners (BOC), was detained by immigration officials upon her arrival in the Soekarno Hatta airport at 8:30am on 3rd May 2011 via Malaysia Airlines. She was forcefully deported to Kuala Lumpur and was made to take an immediate flight to India. Her passport was confiscated and was returned only after she successfully boarded the plane to Malaysia. More so, she was not even allowed to use her mobile phone and communicate with anyone while being detained in the airport.

Suria flew to Jakarta to participate in the civil society activity on the Open Forum Asian Regional Synthesis Workshop on CSO Development Effectiveness and attend the APRN BOC meeting. Suria was blacklisted and denied entry because of her participation in a demonstration, which she happened to participate without prior explanation by the local organizers, in Jakarta in the past.

As a moderate and secular Muslim country, Indonesia continues to be the fulcrum of inter-faith dialogue forums, essential not only to ASEAN but the broader global community as well. While many hold the belief that Indonesia is well-positioned to make ASEAN people-centered and participatory due to its active civil-society sector with more than 25,000 organizations of myriad interests and purposes, the status of human rights and civil society engagement in the country ought to be questioned in light of the expulsion incident.

Indonesia, as a country with a recent successful transition to democracy, recognized the need to continue to interact regularly with the people, and this is where the role of civil society groups is important because they are actually able to do it faster and cheaper. As this year’s chair of ASEAN, Indonesia hopes the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) will be more effective in fulfilling its mandate, reflecting the members’ commitment to respect human rights. More so, Jakarta aims to project an ASEAN that is more inclusive, an objective coherent with this year’s theme ‘ASEAN Community in a Global Community of Nations’. Clearly, for an ‘ASEAN Community in a Global Community of Nations’ to be realized, recognition of the participation of dialogue partner countries like India and its CSOs is entailed.

Suria’s experience, however, only testifies to Indonesia’s limited civil society engagement. Indeed, an enabling environment and rightful recognition of CSOs as equal development actors in their own right have yet to be realized in this country. The Indonesian government will first have to respect and legitimize civil society participation if it wants to ensure the democratic legitimacy of ASEAN and more importantly, if it wants to be recognized as having practiced a genuinely people-centered approach during its ASEAN chairmanship.

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Vice-President: ASEAN governments need to involve civil society in ASEAN integration <Accessed on 10 May 2011> http://aseancivilsociety.net/en/news/press-release/item/64-vice-president-asean-governments-need-to-involve-civil-society-in-asean-integration

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