Kiss and cell

Keep your kisses short

Unrelated people who kiss each other on the lips for more than five minutes at public places in the Indonesian city of Tangerang will face arrest, local media said on Friday.

The government in Tangerang, a suburb west of Jakarta, defended the regulation as a practical guideline for its officers to follow up on tough and heavily criticised anti-prostitution laws passed by the city council last year.

“Please do not dramatise this. We will not arrest people at will as we are not oppressors,” Ahmad Lutfi, head of the city’s public order department, told the Koran Tempo newspaper.

Lutfi declined to comment on whether officers would be armed with stopwatches, Tempo reported.

It was not clear if the guideline referred to an uninterrupted five-minute kiss.

Kissing in public is generally frowned upon in Indonesia, especially in rural, predominantly Muslim areas, but giving a time limit for such behaviour is unheard of.

Around 85 percent of Indonesia’s 220 million people follow Islam, giving the sprawling archipelago the largest number of Muslims of any country. Although most are moderates, there is a growing tendency toward showing Islamic identity and conservative attitudes.

That backdrop, along with the recent devolution of power to regional governments, has given several regions space to create tighter rules on morality.

The new anti-prostitution laws in Tangerang, a city of more than one million, sparked complaints from liberals in February after a female restaurant worker waiting for her husband on a street at night was picked up because police officers thought she was a prostitute.

At the national level, draft legislation addressing pornography issues has been circulating for years in parliament and debate on it is reaching a peak. The original draft proposed a ban on public kissing on the lips but it is unclear whether the particular article will survive in the final version.

Kiss of death

Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim nation, but it does not enforce Islamic Shariah law on a national level. But in recent years, several regions have issued bylaws to regulate personal behavior in line with Islamic morality.

The law would also ban couples from touching each other in a sensual way, and opening each others clothing, it said. The paper said violators would face "arrest," but gave no details.

Despite moves to popularize a more conservative brand of Islam, most of Indonesia's 200 million Muslims practice a moderate form of the faith and are tolerant of other faiths and lifestyles.

In Indonesia -- as in many other Asian countries -- couples, married or not, rarely kiss on the lips in public. Women often kiss their husband on the hand when saying goodbye in front of others.

Cina Benteng

Tangerang also has a significant community of Indonesian Chinese, many of whom are of Cina Benteng extraction -- "Benteng" means fortress in Indonesian. They were descended from laborers who were brought there by the Dutch colonials in the 18th and 19th centuries, and most of them are still laborers and farmers.

They are culturally distinct from other Chinese communities in the area: while almost none speak any dialect of Chinese, they are culturally very strongly Daoist and maintain their own places of worship and community centers. They are ethnically mixed, yet identify themselves as Chinese. A large Chinese cemetery is also located in Tangerang, most of which are now developed into suburban communities such as Lippo Karawaci and Alam Sutra.