Friday, May 30, 2008

PeRs ReLeaSe: AkSi UmMat ToLak KenAikaN BBM

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

وَعَدَ اللَّهُ الَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا مِنْكُمْ وَعَمِلُوا الصَّالِحَاتِ لَيَسْتَخْلِفَنَّهُمْ فِي الْأَرْضِ كَمَا اسْتَخْلَفَ الَّذِينَ مِنْ قَبْلِهِمْ وَلَيُمَكِّنَنَّ لَهُمْ دِينَهُمُ الَّذِي ارْتَضَى لَهُمْ وَلَيُبَدِّلَنَّهُمْ مِنْ بَعْدِ خَوْفِهِمْ أَمْنًا يَعْبُدُونَنِي لا يُشْرِكُونَ بِي شَيْئًا وَمَنْ كَفَرَ بَعْدَ ذَلِكَ فَأُولَئِكَ هُمُ الْفَاسِقُونَ

KANTOR JURUBICARA
HIZBUT TAHRIR INDONESIA

Nomor : 134/PU/E/05/08 Jakarta, 30 Mei 2008 M

PERNYATAAN
HIZBUT TAHRIR INDONESIA

“Aksi Ummat Tolak Kenaikan BBM”

Hari Jumat 22 Mei 2008 lalu akhirnya pemerintah benar-benar menaikkan harga BBM. Pemerintah telah jelas-jelas mengabaikan keberatan rakyat dan sama sekali tidak memperhatikan sederet solusi alternatif yang diberikan oleh para ahli ekonomi untuk menghindari kenaikan BBM.

Bila disebut bahwa keputusan ini demi rakyat, faktanya justru dengan kenaikan BBM hidup rakyat semakin susah. Harga barang dan jasa pasti akan naik, membuat jumlah orang miskin bertambah dan kemungkinan, bila PHK terjadi, pengangguran juga akan berlipat-lipat. Bantuan Tunai Langsung (BLT) plus sembako yang akan dibagikan kepada 19,1 juta rakyat miskin tidaklah mencukupi karena selain jumlahnya kurang, juga sifatnya hanya sementara. Lagi pula itu hanya untuk 19 juta rakyat, sementara puluhan juta rakyat lainnya yang tidak masuk kategori miskin (menurut ukuran pemerintah), tidak mendapatkan apa-apa padahal mereka juga bukanlah kategori orang kaya. Mereka ini, juga terkena dampak kenaikan BBM.

Bila dikatakan bahwa kenaikan BBM diperlukan untuk mempertahankan APBN, mengapa sejumlah solusi alternatif yang diberikan oleh para ahli diabaikan begitu saja? Tidak terlihat satupun dari alternatif itu dilakukan oleh pemerintah. Dalam iklan sehalaman penuh di semua media cetak, disebutkan bahwa pemerintah sudah melakukan penghematan Rp 30 triliun dari anggaran departemen. Bila benar begitu, mengapa BBM masih dinaikkan? Bukankah dengan kenaikan rata-rata 28,7% pemerintah hanya menghemat Rp 25 triliun? Jadi, untuk siapa sebenarnya kenaikan BBM ini dilakukan oleh pemerintah?

Berkaitan dengan keputusan pemerintah menaikkan harga BMM, HizbutTahrir Indonesia menyatakan:

  1. Menolak keputusan pemerintah itu karena kenaikan harga BBM akan menambah kesengsaraan rakyat, dan bukan cara yang sahih untuk mengatasi krisis keuangan negara. Pemerintah adalah pemimpin yang mengurus kepentingan rakyat, yang seharusnya mewujudkan kemaslahatan rakyat, bukan malah membuat mereka menderita! Rasulullah Muhammad yang mulia bersabda,

وَاْلإِِمَامُ الَّذِيْ عَلىَ النَّاسِ رَاعٍ وَهُوَ مَسْؤُوْلٌ عَنْ رَعِيَّتِهِ

“Dan imam yang memimpin manusia adalah laksana seorang penggembala, dia akan dimintai pertanggungjawaban atas rakyat yang dipimpinnya” (HR.Muslim).

  1. Bahwa kenaikan harga BBM tidak lain adalah jalan yang dipaksakan oleh pemerintah untuk keberhasilan liberalisasi sektor hilir migas sebagaimana ditegaskan oleh Menteri ESDM Purnomo Yusgiantoro.

‘Liberalisasi sektor hilir migas membuka kesempatan bagi pemain asing untuk berpartisipasi dalam bisnis eceran migas…. Namun, liberalisasi ini berdampak mendongkrak harga BBM yang disubsidi pemerintah. Sebab kalau harga BBM masih rendah karena disubsidi, pemain asing enggan masuk.” (Menteri Energi dan Sumber Daya Mineral (ESDM) Purnomo Yusgiantoro, Kompas, 14 Mei 2003).

Oleh karena itu, Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia menolak liberalisasi sektor migas ini karena pasti hanya akan menguntungkan perusahaan migas asing dan sebaliknya akan sangat merugikan rakyat Indonesia yang hakikatnya adalah pemilik dari migas tersebut. Maka, cara-cara seperti itu dalam pengelolaan SDA harus ditinggalkan.

  1. Akhirnya, Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia mengingatkan seluruh rakyat Indonesia, bahwa sesungguhnya negeri ini tidaklah akan bisa keluar dari krisis yang ada kecuali bila di negeri ini diterapkan syariat Islam secara kaffah. Dengan syariah itulah kita mengatur ekonomi dan aspek lain sedemikian sehingga keadilan, kesejahteraan, dan kedamaian serta kemuliaan rakyat bisa dicapai. Oleh karena itu, harus ada gerakan bersama untuk kembali kepada syariah Islam.

Maka bersama ini kami mengajak untuk bergabung bersama dengan sejuta ummat dari berbagai elemen pada Aksi Ummat Tolak Kenaikan BBM. Ahad, 1 Juni Jam 13.00 di depan Istana Negara Jakarta. Mari kita tunjukkan penolakan, kekecewaan, dan ketidakpercayaan kita. Tunjukkan pula keinginan kita untuk perubahan bagi tegaknya syariah dan kepemimpinan yang amanah di negeri ini. Tentu demi Indonesia yang lebih baik.

Terakhir, ingatlah pada sabda nabi “Ya Allah, siapa saja yang menjadi pengatur urusan umatku kemudian ia memberatkan mereka, maka beratkanlah ia” (HR. Muslim)

Jurubicara Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia

Muhammad Ismail Yusanto
Hp: 0811119796 Email: Ismaily@telkom.net

Gedung Anakida Lantai 7
Jl. Prof. Soepomo Nomer 27, Jakarta Selatan 12790
Telp / Fax : (62-21) 8353253 Fax. (62-21) 8353254
Website : http: www.hizbut-tahrir.or.id

SaMueL'S cLaSh Of CiViLiZaTiOn







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THE CLASH

Wednesday, 09 January 2008
New York Times

By FOUAD AJAMI
Published: January 6, 2008

It would have been unlike Samuel P. Huntington to say “I told you so” after 9/11. He is too austere and serious a man, with a legendary career as arguably the most influential and original political scientist of the last half century — always swimming against the current of prevailing opinion.

In the 1990s, first in an article in the magazine Foreign Affairs, then in a book published in 1996 under the title “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” he had come forth with a thesis that ran counter to the zeitgeist of the era and its euphoria about globalization and a “borderless” world. After the cold war, he wrote, there would be a “clash of civilizations.” Soil and blood and cultural loyalties would claim, and define, the world of states.

Huntington’s cartography was drawn with a sharp pencil. It was “The West and the Rest”: the West standing alone, and eight civilizations dividing the rest — Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese. And in this post-cold-war world, Islamic civilization would re-emerge as a nemesis to the West. Huntington put the matter in stark terms: “The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other’s Other. The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.”

Those 19 young Arabs who struck America on 9/11 were to give Huntington more of history’s compliance than he could ever have imagined. He had written of a “youth bulge” unsettling Muslim societies, and young Arabs and Muslims were now the shock-troops of a new radicalism. Their rise had overwhelmed the order in their homelands and had spilled into non-Muslim societies along the borders between Muslims and other peoples. Islam had grown assertive and belligerent; the ideologies of Westernization that had dominated the histories of Turkey, Iran and the Arab world, as well as South Asia, had faded; “indigenization” had become the order of the day in societies whose nationalisms once sought to emulate the ways of the West.

Rather than Westernizing their societies, Islamic lands had developed a powerful consensus in favor of Islamizing modernity. There was no “universal civilization,” Huntington had observed; this was only the pretense of what he called “Davos culture,” consisting of a thin layer of technocrats and academics and businessmen who gather annually at that watering hole of the global elite in Switzerland.

In Huntington’s unsparing view, culture is underpinned and defined by power. The West had once been pre-eminent and militarily dominant, and the first generation of third-world nationalists had sought to fashion their world in the image of the West. But Western dominion had cracked, Huntington said. Demography best told the story: where more than 40 percent of the world population was “under the political control” of Western civilization in the year 1900, that share had declined to about 15 percent in 1990, and is set to come down to 10 percent by the year 2025. Conversely, Islam’s share had risen from 4 percent in 1900 to 13 percent in 1990, and could be as high as 19 percent by 2025.

It is not pretty at the frontiers between societies with dwindling populations — Western Europe being one example, Russia another — and those with young people making claims on the world. Huntington saw this gathering storm. Those young people of the densely populated North African states who have been risking all for a journey across the Strait of Gibraltar walk right out of his pages.

Shortly after the appearance of the article that seeded the book, Foreign Affairs magazine called upon a group of writers to respond to Huntington’s thesis. I was assigned the lead critique. I wrote my response with appreciation, but I wagered on modernization, on the system the West had put in place. “The things and ways that the West took to ‘the rest,’” I wrote, “have become the ways of the world. The secular idea, the state system and the balance of power, pop culture jumping tariff walls and barriers, the state as an instrument of welfare, all these have been internalized in the remotest places. We have stirred up the very storms into which we now ride.” I had questioned Huntington’s suggestion that civilizations could be found “whole and intact, watertight under an eternal sky.” Furrows, I observed, run across civilizations, and the modernist consensus would hold in places like India, Egypt and Turkey.

Huntington had written that the Turks — rejecting Mecca, and rejected by Brussels — would head toward Tashkent, choosing a pan-Turkic world. My faith was invested in the official Westernizing creed of Kemalism that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had bequeathed his country. “What, however, if Turkey redefined itself?” Huntington asked. “At some point, Turkey could be ready to give up its frustrating and humiliating role as a beggar pleading for membership in the West and to resume its much more impressive and elevated historical role as the principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West.”

Nearly 15 years on, Huntington’s thesis about a civilizational clash seems more compelling to me than the critique I provided at that time. In recent years, for example, the edifice of Kemalism has come under assault, and Turkey has now elected an Islamist to the presidency in open defiance of the military-bureaucratic elite. There has come that “redefinition” that Huntington prophesied. To be sure, the verdict may not be quite as straightforward as he foresaw. The Islamists have prevailed, but their desired destination, or so they tell us, is still Brussels: in that European shelter, the Islamists shrewdly hope they can find protection against the power of the military.

“I’ll teach you differences,” Kent says to Lear’s servant. And Huntington had the integrity and the foresight to see the falseness of a borderless world, a world without differences. (He is one of two great intellectual figures who peered into the heart of things and were not taken in by globalism’s conceit, Bernard Lewis being the other.)

I still harbor doubts about whether the radical Islamists knocking at the gates of Europe, or assaulting it from within, are the bearers of a whole civilization. They flee the burning grounds of Islam, but carry the fire with them. They are “nowhere men,” children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither. If anything, they are a testament to the failure of modern Islam to provide for its own and to hold the fidelities of the young.

More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington’s pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West — openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is “dubious” whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history’s passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington’s that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision.


Fouad Ajami is a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and the author, most recently, of “The Foreigner’s Gift.”