Judge and Jury

It’s approaching midnight in central Java and 10 men are piling into the back of a beat-up Daihatsu pickup. Dressed in military fatigues and white caftans with red checked scarves wrapped around their heads in imitation of Palestinian fighters, these young militants from the radical Islamic Mujahidin Council are gearing up for tonight’s antivice patrol on the streets of Yogyakarta. The first target: Pasar Kembang, a rundown complex of dingy rooms and narrow corridors in the city’s red-light district. Clutching clubs topped with sickles, the Council storm through the rooms as customers flee out the back. No one is nabbed, but the 10 men vow to return. Says Abu Haidar, the group’s operational commander: “We do this to remind the people and the government that this is a holy month for Muslims.”

Couples kissing after-hours. Pedicab drivers playing poker. Hookers and their johns. All are targets for the Council as it strikes in the name of Islam. Since the downfall of former President Suharto three years ago, violent Muslim raids on bars, discos and massage parlors have become commonplace in the capital, Jakarta. But now dozens of similar groups have appeared in smaller cities on Java and Sumatra. People are regularly clubbed, beaten or intimidated. Police rarely interfere. In Yogyakarta a soldier patrolling the streets says he has no problem with the roving vigilantes “as long as their actions do not lead to anarchy.”

Rumors of extortion rackets and political manipulation are rife and any justice meted out is arbitrary. On a recent rainy night in Jakarta, hundreds of adherents to one of the most powerful fundamentalist groups, the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), cram into trucks and minivans and head for a slum on the west side of the city. Men are huddled under a blue tent playing ceki, a kind of poker. They scatter as the squad, brandishing clubs and machetes, marches in. But as FPI members smash tables and chairs and then start pulling down the tents, some locals turn and jeer. A brawl almost erupts, but the vagrants lose their nerve and flee. The militants retreat, but not before setting fire to the pile of twisted tarpaulin and scraps of wood.

The groups say they’re filling a law-and-order void. But whose law? In Yogyakarta, Haikar, a 28-year-old Mujahidin Council member, has no doubts. He vows to continue the morality raids in the ancient royal capital: “We plan to keep this up every night to teach these people the right way.”