Amnesty Calls On Indonesia to Stop Jailing People for ‘Blasphemy’

New report says more than 100 people jailed solely for peacefully expressing their views during Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono presidency

Jakarta Globe, Bastiaan Scherpen, Nov 21, 2014

Shiite cleric Tajul Muluk is escorted by police after being sentenced for blasphemy,
in this file photo taken on July 12, 2012. (AFP Photo/Juni Kriswanto)

Jakarta. Slamming a skyrocketing rate of convictions based on questionable interpretations of a half-century old blasphemy law during the presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Amnesty International on Wednesday called on Indonesia’s new government to usher in an era of respect for human rights.

Launching a report that discusses the criminalization of beliefs in Indonesia in the past decade, Rupert Abbott, Amnesty’s research director for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, told a Jakarta audience that the organization supports President Joko Widodo’s commitment to human rights, but that the new government has its work cut out in a climate of “intensifying intolerance.”

‘Deviant’ teachings

Freedom of religion is “one of the most pressing issues facing Indonesia,” Abbott said during the launch of the report, adding that his organization documented more than 100 cases of people being jailed solely for peacefully expressing their views in the years 2004-14 — almost one each month.

Titled “Prosecuting Beliefs: Indonesia’s Blasphemy Laws,” the report lists a number of cases that have made headlines in Indonesia and beyond in recent years, including that of Tajul Muluk, a Shiite cleric from Sampang in East Java jailed for his “deviant” teachings.

Shiite villagers from Sampang were driven from their homes in December 2011 and remain displaced.

Asfinawati, one of the lawyers representing the cleric, and a former executive director of the Jakarta Legal Aid Foundation (LBH), condemned the court proceedings that ultimately resulted in her client being jailed for four years on what she described as highly dubious grounds and with key witnesses feeling so intimidated that they refused to testify.

One of the key problems, she explained, is legal uncertainty. “There is no official legal interpretation of what can be defined as blasphemous,” Asfinawati said.

Prisoners of conscience

Besides meeting civil society activists, the Amnesty delegation this week also met with lawmakers and senior government officials. Abbott said his team had urged the government to immediately release at least nine prisoners of conscience currently behind bars.

He said Amnesty considers everyone who is jailed for peacefully expressing their political views a prisoner of conscience, including Filep Karma and Johan Teterisa.

Filep is serving a 15-year sentence for raising the Morning Star flag in Jayapura, Papua, in 2004. The flag is a symbol of the Papuan struggle for independence from Indonesia. Johan is a school teacher from Maluku who was sentenced to life in prison for unfurling a separatist flag in front of then-president Yudhoyono in Ambon in 2007.

Josef Roy Benedict, Amnesty’s campaigner on Indonesia and Timor-Leste, added that the organization was also urging Joko to find a solution for the Ahmadis driven from their homes in Lombok. This community has been forced to stay in a Mataram dormitory since their expulsion from West Lombok in February 2006. And, Benedict said, there is also the issue of discriminative bylaws on the regional level that urgently needs the president’s attention.

Turbulence ahead

At the press conference, Bonar Tigor Naipospos of the Setara Institute explained that the fall of Suharto’s New Order regime created an opportunity for hard-line Islamist groups to make themselves heard and start pushing a political agenda. These groups also managed to promote intolerant strains of thought as part of an overall religious revival in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation-state, he said.

“Religion is being used as a political tool,” Bonar stressed.

The issuance of several key fatwa’s during Yudhoyono’s decade in power by the nation’s top Islamic advisory body, the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), underlines the rising tide of intolerance. An MUI fatwa that denounces pluralism, liberalism and secularism, issued in 2005, is often seen as having set the tone for a decade of increasingly open persecution of groups like the Ahmadiyah and followers of the Shiite branch of Islam. The 1965 blasphemy law, hardly used in the era before Yudhoyono’s presidency, has since become an important tool for opponents of sects seen as deviant.

However, Bonar said that with regard to religious freedom, the precedents set by Joko when he served as governor of Jakarta were promising. He cited the examples of Joko’s unrelenting support for Susan Jasmine Zulkifli, a Christian official appointed as chief of the majority-Muslim Lenteng Agung subdistrict of South Jakarta, triggering protests, and the fact that Joko managed to resolve a church dispute in Tambora, West Jakarta.

Still, the deputy chairman of the Setara Institute warned that it would not be easy for the new government to improve the situation for minorities under siege. Pointing to the power of the Red-White coalition (KMP) of Joko’s rivals, which controls the House of Representatives, Bonar feared efforts to oppose any attempts to change problematic laws.

“The Indonesian political situation will experience turbulence,” he said.