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United States President Barack Obama
praised “the spirit of religious tolerance that is enshrined in
Indonesia’s constitution, and that remains one of its defining and
inspiring characteristics” during a visit to Jakarta in
November 2010.
Tell that to the Ahmadiyah community in Cikeusik, Banten. Barely three
months after Obama sang the praises of Indonesia’s religious harmony, a
group of some 1,500 Islamist militants attacked 21 members of Cikeusik’s
Ahmadiyah community who were holding a prayer meeting in a private home
on Feb. 6, 2011. The militants bludgeoned three Ahmadis to death and
injured five others.
A court sentenced 12 of the perpetrators to prison sentences of
three-to-six months. Adding insult to injury, the court also sentenced an
Ahmadiyah man to a six-month prison term for attempting to defend
himself.
Police have yet to publicly release results of their internal
investigation into the attack.
As a new report from Human Rights Watch describes, religious intolerance
and acts of violence targeting religious minorities are increasingly
frequent in Indonesia. The new study documents how religious minorities,
including several Protestant groups, Shia Muslims and Ahmadiyah, are
targets of increasingly routine intimidation, threats and violence.
The harassment and intimidation has included disrupting the religious
observances of minority faiths with protests amplified by high-volume
loudspeakers and the dumping of animal carcasses, feces and rotten eggs
on the doorsteps of houses of worship.
Adding to the fear stalking religious minorities is the government’s
failure to protect the victims of these attacks and bring their
perpetrators to justice.
Groups such as the Islam Defenders Front (FPI) have become emboldened —
and increasingly more violent — in their tactics of mobilizing masses of
“protesters” to swarm minority houses of worship and harass, intimidate
or physically attack their congregants. Those gangs justify their abuses
as efforts to defend the Muslim community against Christian
proselytization and rid the country of “infidels” and “blasphemers”.
Those have not been empty threats. Setara Institute, which monitors
religious freedom in Indonesia, has compiled statistics which indicate
cases of violent attacks on religious minorities rose to 264 incidents in
2012 from 216 in 2010. Kontras, Indonesia’s leading nongovernmental human
rights organization, documented a total of 18 incidents of
religious-motivated intimidation, discrimination and violence — including
an arson attack on a Makassar church — in the first six weeks of 2013
alone.
The Shia Muslim community in Sampang
regency, East Java, knows firsthand both the depredation of violent
extremists and official apathy in confronting them. On Aug. 20, 2012,
hundreds of Sunni militants attacked the community, torching some 50 homes,
killing one man and seriously injuring another. The local police, warned
ahead of time of the impending violence, stood by at the scene of the
attack and declined to intervene.
Such government indifference to the plight of religious minorities
targeted by groups like the FPI or intolerant neighbors is a growing
concern.
In several incidents we investigated, local officials and security forces
facilitated harassment and intimidation of religious minorities — in some
cases even blaming the victims for the violent attacks. Officials have
made discriminatory statements, refused to issue building permits for
houses of worship even when all relevant regulations were complied with,
and pressured minority congregations to relocate. In two cases, local
officials have refused to implement Supreme Court decisions granting
minority groups the right to build houses of worship.
Indonesian government institutions in some instances have exacerbated
religious intolerance, in direct contravention of the guarantee in the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Indonesia
ratified in 2005, that “persons belonging to [...] minorities shall not
be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group,
to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion”.
The Religious Affairs Ministry, the Coordinating Board for Monitoring
Mystical Beliefs in Society (Bakor Pakem) under the Attorney General’s
Office, and the semi-official Indonesian Ulema Council, have eroded
religious freedom by issuing decrees and fatwas (edicts) against members
of religious minorities and using their position of authority to press
for the prosecution of “blasphemers”.
Official responsibility for the state failure to adequately confront
rising extremism goes to the very top of Indonesia’s government.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s response to rising incidents of
religious intolerance and related violence has been empty rhetoric rather
than decisive action in support of besieged religious minorities and the
rule of law.
Even worse, Yudhoyono has turned a blind eye to members of his government
who have explicitly encouraged abuses, including Religious Affairs
Minister Suryadharma Ali, whose hostile comments about the Shia and the
Ahmadiyah have included a speech he made at a March 2011 political
convention exhorting the government to “ban Ahmadiyah”and comments in
September 2012 suggesting mass conversion of Shia to Sunni Islam as the
solution to anti-Shia sentiment and violence.
The police appear to have taken their cue from those poor examples.
Police have on some occasions sided with Islamist militants at the
expense of the rights of religious minorities, ostensibly to avoid
violence. Rather than investigating and arresting groups and individuals implicated
in threats or physical attacks on religious minorities, police have
sometimes opted to persuade the victims of such attacks to leave the area
or close their houses of worship.
Shamefully, police have in some cases colluded with the attackers for religious,
economic, or political reasons. In other instances, they choose a course
of inaction due to a lack of clear directives from above or concerns that
militants outnumber the police.
Across the board, the absence of effective police action reflects an
institutional failure to hold perpetrators of violent crimes to account
and uphold the law.
The lack of leadership by President Yudhoyono to stand down religious
militants and defend religious freedom and tolerance is serving only to
ensure that religious minorities continue to face harassment,
intimidation and physical attack by vigilante thugs espousing a creed at
violent odds with Indonesian law.
While the targets today are mostly members of relatively small,
politically weak minority groups, the situation could well multiply if
the violence and harassment are not nipped in the bud. Intolerance has a
way of spreading, and a few years down the road one could see competing
groups within the Sunni majority in Indonesia trying to impose their will
on co-religionists through intimidation and violence rather than
persuasion.
What is needed is swift and decisive action by President Yudhoyono
beginning with a clear message to police and prosecutors that alleged
perpetrators of violence against religious minorities must face
investigation and prosecution. Such “zero tolerance” for violence should
be put into effect immediately.
Human Rights Watch believes the president should also make clear that all
government officials, including members of his own cabinet, who make
discriminatory comments or condone or encourage harassment of religious
minorities will face immediate consequences, up to and including
dismissal.
We are also urging President Yudhoyono to convene a high-level working
group composed of people of stature, known for their independence, to map
out a national strategy for safeguarding religious freedom and curbing
acts of violence in the name of religion. The working group mandate
should include reviewing laws, regulations and decrees that have facilitated
discrimination and violation of religious minority rights.
The clock is ticking. For each day that President Yudhoyono fails to act
against the rising trend of religious intolerance and violence, the list
of victims and grievances grows ever longer. Without a sustained and
decisive government defense of religious freedom, the “spirit of
religious tolerance” praised by President Obama becomes ever more
distant. ●
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