WASHINGTON - The release of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, the former governor of Jakarta, after serving most of a two-year sentence for blasphemy, is focusing attention on the law that brought down the popular politician best known as Ahok.
Ahok, an ethnic Chinese Christian in a Muslim-majority nation, was found guilty of blasphemy by the North Jakarta District Court, May 9, 2017, a month after he lost his re-election bid to Anies Baswedan, who espouses a strict interpretation of Islam.
The governorship of Jakarta is widely seen as a steppingstone to higher, nationwide office. The current president, Joko Widodo, served as governor before Ahok. That Ahok’s campaign became a flash point in the blasphemy debate highlighted the religious tension in the world’s most populous Muslim nation, as does Widodo’s selection of a cleric, Maruf Amin, as his running mate in his re-election bid. Widodo’s opponent, former Gen. Prabowo Subianto, is stressing his ties to Islamists in the run-up to the April 8-17 vote.
Ahok’s troubles began on a campaign stop, Sept. 27, 2016, when he said people should not vote for a candidate based on religious beliefs, a criticism of the notion that Muslims cannot have a leader who is not also Muslim. A video of his remarks appeared on social media, edited to suggest Ahok was insulting the Quran, triggering violent street protests by fundamentalists.
Ahok lost the April 2017 vote to Baswedan. After a high-profile trial, Ahok was convicted May 9, 2017, and later that year, on Nov. 14, a district court in West Java found Buni Yani guilty of editing Ahok’s remarks and sentenced him to 1½ years in prison. He has yet to serve his time and is working on Subianto’s election campaign, .
“Indonesia’s 1945 constitution explicitly guarantees freedom of religion, as does the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Indonesia is a party,” according to a .
“However, the Indonesian government has long enacted, and in recent years strengthened, legislation and regulations that have subjected minority religions to official discrimination. This has made minority groups extremely vulnerable to members of the majority community who take the law into their own hands,” the article said.
?
Blasphemy is defined in Article 156a of Indonesia’s 1965 criminal code as “abusing or staining a religion adhered to in Indonesia” when the act is committed with “the intention to prevent a person to adhere to any religion based on belief of the almighty God,” according to Rafiqa Qurrata A’yun, a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Indonesia .
In short, going outside the central tenets of Indonesia’s six officially recognized religions — Buddhism, Catholicism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Protestantism and Islam — can mean five years in prison. Virtually all the blasphemy cases involve Islam.
Among those minorities, other than Ahok, the person who has attracted the most attention is Meiliana, a 44-year-old Chinese Buddhist, who was found guilty of insulting Islam after asking her neighborhood mosque in 2016 to lower the volume of its sound system used in the call to prayer. She said it hurt her ears.
The mobs responding to Meiliana’s request for a quieter azan ransacked at least 14 Buddhist temples in Tanjung Balai, North Sumatra, as ethnic Chinese fled the area. She was jailed for 18 months.
Other cases included the dismissal in July by the Supreme Court of a challenge to the blasphemy law by nine members of the Ahmadiyya religious minority who “who sought .
The Ahmadiyya sect was founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad more than a century ago in what is today the Indian part of Punjab. He claimed to be the incarnation of a Messiah promised in Islamic holy texts. That challenged the mainstream Muslim belief that Muhammad is Islam’s last and final prophet.
Early last year, the Jayapura Churches Association, in the capital of Indonesia’s Papua province, to municipal authorities: Dismantle the minaret of the city’s al-Aqsa Mosque within 14 days or the group would “take their own action.” The group took no action, however, after the two weeks passed.
On May 19, 2018, militant Islamists attacked and damaged eight Ahmadiyya houses on Lombok Island, forcing 24 people from seven families to seek refuge at the East Lombok police precinct, .
?
Based on , which tracks religious freedom in Indonesia, from 1965 to 2017 there were 97 cases of blasphemy, 88 of those since 1998. Of those, 22 have .
Melissa Crouch, an associate professor at the law school at the University of New South Wales in Australia, told the