Resistance and challenges

While activists claim that their work is to advance women’s interests and promote better status for women, the above discussion on resistance towards women’s NGO work in Aceh proved otherwise.

Suraiya Kamaruzzaman, a woman activist in Aceh and former leader of the NGO Flower Aceh, argues that since women’s movements were established in Aceh, they have consistently worked to promote women’s rights (interview, Banda Aceh, 14 December 2007), because many Acehnese women continue to be targets for human rights violators. During conflict, women were violently targeted by the military and GAM, and under the implementation of Islamic law, women were targeted by the WH.

Kamaruzzaman also identified several issues that impeded women’s movements in Aceh during that period. Many women’s NGOs (which she considered as the backbone of local women’s movements) did not have a strong basis at the grassroots level. They did not understand the needs of the grassroots. This contributed to the difficulty for women activists to disseminate new understandings of gender equality and women’s rights. Villagers were not familiar with the activists who came to their villages and told them how to do things. It is also worth mentioning that the history of military conflict made many Acehnese suspicious when receiving people they were not familiar with. Thus, a special approach was needed to work with the larger community.

Despite the approach used by activists, Kamaruzzaman also considered problems with women’s movements in Aceh that stemmed from the lack of adequate organizational capacity of many local women’s NGOs.

In regards to the resistance from the religious community towards the issues that women’s movements in Aceh was trying to introduce, Kamarruzzaman saw this as one of the serious challenges to the local movements. The lack of understanding towards the issue of sharia, women’s rights and status in Islam, the definition of Fiqh, and the teaching of Islamic texts among the women activists themselves is what made the movement difficult to work out. The lack of understanding of the issues mentioned above meant women activists often failed to deliver their message to their audience, especially to the religious community. While proclaiming to be activists, many, however, have only worked for women’s NGOs for a short while, and had no previous training on gender let alone on Islamic jurisprudence. These activists are dispatched to villages and to meet with the community to deliver and introduce ‘gender’ or ‘equality’ as part of their NGO’s programme but they lack the necessary knowledge, and, failing to acknowledge local wisdom, they only create confusion.

These all created resistance among traditional communities. Many thought that their social structure would be distorted by the new ‘gender equality’ programmes introduced by women’s NGOs and their activists. Suspicion from the community was also addressed towards the agenda of women’s movements of ‘empowering’ Acehnese women.

Kamaruzzaman explained to me a story of how she was confronted by one Ulama from a Dayah after she finished delivering a speech in a village. He accused her of introducing ‘Western’ values to the Islamic society. Kamaruzzaman said to me that she used all her knowledge of Islam and the teachings in the Qur’an with which she was familiar to convince the Ulama that ‘equality’ is not strange to Islam. She also reiterated the Qur’anic verse which says, ‘What makes men and women different in Islam is only their religious observance’.¹⁸ In addition, she also used the story of women’s roles when Aceh was an Islamic kingdom in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She said that after this long explanation she felt the Ulama could see her point of view. Finally the Ulama said to her ‘then I support you … I wish I knew this from the beginning’. From this incident, Kamaruzzaman argued that it is necessary for women activists in Aceh to think more carefully how they should deal with the religious community. She said, ‘In Aceh, we can not imitate the understanding of gender of A, B, or C from other places, it has to be “gender Aceh”’.

In many training courses, seminars or workshops on gender-related issues, I often see this tension and resistance among the participants. During introductory sessions when participants are introduced to the meaning of ‘gender mainstreaming’ or ‘gender equality’ most reject it. In a seminar organized by Yayasan Insan Cita Madani in Banda Aceh on 23–25 January 2008, for example, I heard participants (mostly men) asking the speakers to stop using the word ‘gender’ during the session.

When faced with resistance on ‘gender’, local women activists show their uncertainty as to how they should approach this problem. Kamaruzzaman argued that this happens as local activists still have no common understanding of how to define and understand ‘gender’. Kamaruzzaman could be correct, because during my fieldwork I often encountered women activists involved in long debates about whether they need to find a local term to replace ‘gender’, or whether they should continue using ‘gender’ as it is used in other places in Indonesia. To a senior activist like Kamaruzzaman these developments have disadvantaged women’s movements in Aceh and differences among local women activists, she says, will only weaken women’s solidarity.

Foreign NGOs, according to Kamaruzzaman, have contributed to these problems. Many Acehnese feel that foreign NGOs activists who work in Aceh are the ones who have introduced the term ‘gender’. That is why ‘gender’ is associated with ‘foreign’ or ‘Western’. These foreign activists have not anticipated the potential for resistance from the Acehnese, forgetting that the Acehnese have a long history of resistance to ‘foreign’ powers.

In response to the debate on the ‘sensitivity’ and ‘foreignness’ of the term ‘gender’, activists at Aceh Institute introduced the local term Timang, to replace the term ‘gender’. Mahdi and Zein (2008, xviii) define Timang by reference to multiple meanings: lurus or straight, sejajar or parallel, adil or just, and setara or equivalent. Timang also refers, however, to mempertimbangkan or to ‘reconsider’ and menganalisa or to ‘analyse’ reality objectively. In any case, Timang later became the title of a book, launched by Darwati A. Gani, the wife of the current Governor of Aceh, Irwandi Yusuf. In her remarks, Gani expresses her gratitude that the Acehnese have finally found a local term for ‘gender’ and use it to promote kesetaraan hubungan or equal relations between men and women.

One pro-democracy activist, Mashudi (2006), observed that to him, women’s movements in Aceh have not yet been successful in developing women’s awareness of the need for women to participate in political reform. He referred to an incident where only two women participated in the local leadership election but failed to meet the requirements of being able to read the Qur’an. He observed that from the 19 districts and municipalities that conducted local elections, there were only five women political candidates out of 258 candidates, so that only 1.94 per cent of total candidates were women. This small number of women participating in the local election, Mashudi argues, demonstrates the failure of local women’s movements to endorse women and facilitate women’s participation in local politics. Local women’s movements have failed to benefit from the political reform, which has guaranteed women’s public participation in politics. He suggests women activists expand their activities to reach women at the grassroots.

Mashudi may be correct, but to assess the success of women’s movements only by looking at how many women have participated in the local election is misleading. There is a need to take into account other problems that prevent women from taking public roles, such as whether or not women are supported by their families and the community. So far, women’s movements in Aceh have, in fact, been quite successful in developing people’s awareness about the need to ‘support’ women to take up public roles, and they have attempted to ensure that legal regulations in Aceh accommodate women equally with men.