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Law and Politics in Post-Independence Indonesia 17© 2003 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore 2 LAW AND POLITICS IN POST-INDEPENDENCE INDONESIA A Case Study of Religious and Adat Courts Ratno Lukito INTRODUCTION The shift from colonial to sovereign status did not bring any direct or pervasive changes to bear on the stature of law in the young Republic of Indonesia. By the time the proclamation of independence was issued on August 17, 1945, law in Indonesia had essentially changed little since the Japanese occupation of Java.1 As most of the nation’s elite was, in the early days of independence, people who had dominated Indonesian politics during the colonial era, the revolutionary ideas of grass-roots movements had not yet penetrated common legal parlance. This elite did not constitute a radical, social element interested in the reformulation of the former colonial state apparatus. On the contrary, they were quite content to fall back on the familiar. Strategies for social revolution, or even social change were hardly mentioned formally within the legal sector at this time.2 Symptomatic of this situation was the Transitional Provision in Article 2 of the 1945 Constitution which stipulates that “All existing institutions and regulations of the state shall continue to function so long as new ones have not been set up in conformity with this Constitution.”3 Hence, to avoid creating a legal vacuum, the new government 17 Previously published as “Law and Politics in Post-Independence Indonesia: A Case Study of Religious and Adat Courts”, Studia Islamika: Indonesian Journal for Islamic Studies 6, no. 3 (1999): 65–86. Reproduced with permission of the author and the publisher, State Institute for Islamic Studies (IAIN). Reproduced from Shari’a and Politics in Modern Indonesia, edited by Arskal Salim and Azyumardi Azra (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2003). This version was obtained electronically direct from the publisher on condition that copyright is not infringed. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Individual articles are available at 18 Ratno Lukito© 2003 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore was forced to reintroduce many laws inherited from the colonial era. An example of this is the Wetboek van Strafrecht measures, enacted in 1915, which continued to regulate criminal law in Indonesia, except in those regions outside of Java where native courts remained operative. In the latter, only a few articles of laws inherited from the Dutch were applied through the provisions of Law No. 80 of 1932.4 This paper will address the development of Indonesian law in the postindependence era. In the following pages, I aim to demonstrate that changes in the country’s political climate affected both the Islamic and adat (customary) courts, in spite of the inflexibility with which both legal traditions had weathered the political upheavals of the first half of the century. To this end, the place of both adat and religious courts in post-independence Indonesia will be analyzed in light of this political change. Two major avenues of investigation will be discussed. The first explains the debate between “pluralist” and “uniformist” groups regarding legal development in the young Republic of Indonesia, while the second discusses contentions between the so-called “secular nationalists” and “Muslims”. The discussion provided in these sections is intended to provide a basis for understanding the legal controversies, which unavoidably arose as a result of the shift from a colonial to a national legal philosophy. LEGAL ISSUES IN INDEPENDENT INDONESIA Consisting of thousands islands, the Indonesian archipelago is inhabited by various ethnic, social, religious and cultural groups, each of which retains unique customs and ways of life.5 Embracing this pluralism, the Republic of Indonesia has coined the official motto: “Bhinneka Tunggal Ika”, or “Unity in diversity.” That diversity is evident in the legal dualism that exists within the unified state. In the immediate postcolonial era, several groups of laws survived the transition from the Dutch colonial government: (1) laws governing all inhabitants, e.g. the Law on Industrial Property and Patents; (2) customary laws which applied to indigenous Indonesians; (3) Islamic law applicable to all Indonesian Muslims; (4) laws tailored to specific communities in Indonesia, such as the Marriage Law for Christian Indonesians; and (5) the Burgelijk Wetboek and the Wetboek van Koophandel measures, originally applied to Europeans only, but later extended to cover the Chinese. Certain provisions in the latter, however, had also been declared to apply to native Indonesians.6 In...

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