Jokowi says he wants drug dealers killed. OK, dumb but at the same time, drug dealers can harm a portion of the population. You would think that efforts to take over all the population government would be met with even more force. It should be. Words are not going to do it.
In relation to the drug problem, words are actually doing it. Portugal has had greater success at stemming the tide of drug addiction and mortality than any other country on Earth. They did it by treating drug addiction as a public health issue rather than a criminal issue, by giving people therapy instead of incarceration.
It has worked. Past history teaches us that Duterte et al. will fail, and fail humanity in general, too.
Terrorism, extremism are not public health issues and I am not suggesting we treat them as such. We don't need to deradicalize people in mental health facilities. We do need to avoid open conflict with them, though.
You're dealing with people who are committed to a belief that thrives in the face of adversity, real or imagined. Coming down hard on them may validate their worldview, and may push some of them deeper into extremism. It will also push common people on the fence into their camp.
Secularism and tolerance are the antidote for religious extremism. Heavy handed dictatorships may suppress them (or more likely finance them so they attack targets away from them...), but in that case the "cure" is worse than the disease.
Pancasila as it is expressed to Indonesians today is part of the problem. There is collusion of mosque, church, stupa or mandir and state. So long as this is true, religious extremism will thrive. The freer and more open the society, the more likely it is for these extremist groups to exist on the periphery. It's true, Muslim extremists commit terrorist attacks in liberal democracies, but they do so as the exception to the rule and without input on the direction of our democracies.
The same cannot be said of Indonesia.
