Mobs screaming “God is greatest” as they stone people to death; mobs calling for death to blasphemers and vandalizing churches; mobs beating liberals in the capital’s thoroughfares: these are not scenes from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, but Indonesia, a so-called model of pluralism.
United States President Barack Obama adopted the obligatory tone of visiting Western politicians when he lauded mainly Muslim Indonesia’s “spirit of religious tolerance” during a visit to Jakarta in November.
But three months later his ambassador, Scot Marciel, was forced this week to issue a statement deploring religious violence and encouraging President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to uphold the rule of law in the ostensibly secular state.
Indonesia’s cherished image as a “moderate” Muslim-majority nation has taken a battering at the hands of mobs of angry Muslims who slaughtered three members of a minority sect on Sunday and damaged two churches on Tuesday.
The attack on the Ahmadiyah sect was particularly heinous. Captured on film that is too graphic even for Indonesian television to broadcast in full, the lynchers clubbed and stoned their victims to death in front of police, then laughed at their limp, shattered bodies.
Police admit they knew the attack was coming but said they could do nothing to stop it, an explanation dismissed as absurd by human rights groups.
“It’s always the same pattern. They knew there was a potential religious conflict but they let it happen,” said Rumadi Ahmad from the Wahid Institute, a lobby group for pluralism.
“If they let such situations happen repeatedly, and if the religious figures and officials give statements to justify the violence, it’s not impossible that intolerance will increase alarmingly in the future,” he added.
Human rights activists say the latest attacks provide stark new evidence that Yudhoyono’s administration is allowing extremism to fester in the archipelago of 240 million people, 80 percent of whom are Muslims.
The appearance of sectarian violence on the main island of Java, rather than the outlying islands of the Malukus where Christian-Muslim clashes claimed thousands of lives from 1999 to 2002, has only fuelled such concerns.
And there are fears of more to come -- possibly as soon as Thursday when radical Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, the alleged spiritual leader of regional jihadist movement Jemaah Islamiyah, faces trial on terrorism charges.
Yudhoyono has condemned Sunday’s violence and ordered police to track down the perpetrators, but activists and minority leaders say they have heard it all before.
“How many Ahmadiyah have to die at the hands of mobs before the police step in?” asked Human Rights Watch deputy Asia director Elaine Pearson.
Indonesia is in the grip of a “wave of hate crimes,” she added.
Activists say a 2008 decree banning Ahmadiyah from spreading their version of Islam -- namely that their founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, not Mohammed, was the final prophet of Islam -- gave cover for extremists to act out their hatred.
Local rights groups have also demanded the resignation of Religious Affairs Minister Suryadharma Ali, who says the Ahmadiyah would be safe if they simply renounced Islam. Last year he called for the sect to be banned outright.
Donna Guest, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific deputy director, said Indonesia’s respect for freedom of religion and tolerance had “clearly deteriorated in recent years.”
Gomar Gultom, secretary-general of the Communion of Churches in Indonesia, which represents 85 percent of the country’s Christians, scoffed at Yudhoyono’s latest promise to stop the violence.
“We are furious with the president’s leadership. He keeps making promises but he’s all talk and no action,” he said.
For all this there is no question that the vast majority of Indonesians are moderate in their religious beliefs. This makes recent events all the more baffling to ordinary people.
Dudi, 45, teaches at a Catholic school in Temanggung, Central Java, where the mob set fire to the churches on Tuesday to demand the execution of a Christian man who had been sentenced to jail for blaspheming Islam.
The mob chanted “kill, kill” outside the court, then unleashed what Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini called a “very serious demonstration of anti-Christian fanaticism.”
“I’ve been living here for decades and nothing like this has ever happened. Christians and Muslims have been living peacefully here all this while,” Dudi said.
“I’m sure this is the work of trouble-makers, not our Muslim neighbors.”
wo 9 feb 2011 - 19:27