New York Times  |  November 4, 2016

Islamists March in Jakarta, Demanding Christian Governor Be Jailed

By Joe Cochrane

Tens of thousands marched on Friday in Jakarta, Indonesia, against Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, an ethnic Chinese Christian running for re-election as the city's governor. Beawiharta/Reuters

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Tens of thousands of Indonesians marched in Jakarta on Friday, demanding that the city’s first Christian governor in decades be jailed for blasphemy. The rally was a show of strength by conservative Islamic groups, who were offended by his earlier remarks about the Quran and want to weaken him as he runs for re-election.

The governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as Ahok, is an ethnic Chinese Indonesian and the first Christian in nearly 50 years to govern Jakarta, capital of the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation.

He has been a political target of some Islamic organizations since taking office in 2014. Some of those groups seized on comments he made in September to a group of fishermen, in which he lightheartedly cited a Quran verse that warns against taking Christians and Jews as friends.

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His comments circulated on social media, and hard-liners accused him of blasphemy, which is a criminal offense in Indonesia, and pressured the police to investigate. Mr. Basuki has repeatedly apologized to Muslims who were offended by his remark, but he has rejected calls to withdraw from the election for governor in February, which he is heavily favored to win.

“There was no intention to insult religion,” he told reporters this week. “I am sending my message to all offended Muslims: I sincerely apologize.”

Fears of violence at the rally had prompted the closing of some schools and office buildings in central Jakarta, and thousands of police officers and soldiers barricaded roads as the protesters marched. The American and Australian Embassies had warned their citizens to stay away from the protest zone.

There were no reports of arrests or significant violence, though some of the marchers chanted that Mr. Basuki should be killed.

Mr. Basuki, 50, the grandson of a tin miner from Guangzhou, China, has been a popular figure in Jakarta. Like his predecessor, Joko Widodo, who is now Indonesia’s president, he is very different from the soft-spoken Javanese politicians the capital is used to.

Brash and blunt-speaking, he is known for publicly berating civil servants as incompetent and corrupt. Opinion polls indicate that he holds a large lead over his two opponents in the election for governor on Feb. 15.

If he wins, he would be the first ethnic Chinese Christian directly elected to the office, the most powerful provincial post in the country and one that Mr. Joko used as a springboard to the presidency. Mr. Basuki, who had been Mr. Joko’s vice governor, inherited the city’s top job when Mr. Joko became president in 2014.

Indonesians practice a pluralistic brand of Islam, though pockets of the country are rigidly conservative and there are periodic outbreaks of violent radicalism. Political opponents have used Mr. Basuki’s religion and his ethnicity against him, but polling indicates that most Jakarta voters do not consider them campaign issues.

Analysts said that Friday’s march and other recent protests against Mr. Basuki were, nevertheless, attempts to weaken him ahead of the election. Analysts have also said that some of the Islamic groups that organized the march have ties to the campaigns of Mr. Basuki’s two opponents, though the groups and the campaigns have denied that. His opponents are Anies Baswedan, a former minister of higher education, and Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono, a former Army officer and the son of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who was president from 2004 to 2014.

“Precisely because religion and ethnicity are as such not electoral factors, Ahok’s opponents have to up the game,” said Marcus Mietzner, an associate professor at the Australian National University in Canberra, who closely follows Indonesian politics. “Instead of claiming that Ahok shouldn’t be governor because he’s a Christian — which hasn’t worked — they try to portray him as a blasphemist who violated the law.”

The reason, said Bonar Tigor Naipospos, vice chairman of the Setara Institute, a Jakarta organization that promotes religious tolerance, is simple but desperate: an effort to force the governor out of the race, which will go to a second round if none of the three candidates gets 50 percent of the vote.

“They know that Ahok is still strong and can easily get into the second round, while the others are far less certain,” he said. “So they think they will be safer if Ahok is defeated, or they hope he will be put in jail and not be able to run.”

The police have questioned Mr. Basuki about his September comments, but analysts saw that primarily as an attempt to mollify his Islamist critics.

Protesters passing the governor's office in Jakarta on Friday. Goh Chai Hin/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

Protesters on Friday, many of whom had arrived in groups from neighboring West Java, chanted, “Hang Ahok, hang the traitor,” and, “Cut off a hand and foot and deport him.”

Yet many of the white-clad demonstrators were smiling and taking selfies along the route. Smaller protests, in cities on Java and Sumatra, were also reported to have been peaceful.

Mr. Basuki had faced protests because of his Christianity, notably before his swearing-in, and he responded with a mixture of good humor and taunts. When Islamists threatened two years ago to storm his offices at City Hall, he assured them that they would be arrested if they did so.

Though Chinese-Indonesians make up just over 1 percent of Indonesia’s population, they have tended to wield economic clout beyond their numbers, which has often led to resentment. For decades, they were subjected to discriminatory laws and regulations, and more than a thousand people were killed in anti-Chinese rioting in 1998, mostly in Jakarta, amid protests against then-President Suharto’s authoritarian rule.

Mr. Basuki has been lauded for expanding populist programs in Jakarta initiated by Mr. Joko. He has fast-tracked infrastructure projects, including a mass-transit system; dispatched a small army of orange-clad street sweepers to spruce up the city of more than 10 million; and instituted a “smart card” program to subsidize health care and education for the poor. His main re-election slogan is the Indonesian word for work, “Kerja!”

Last year, Mr. Basuki threatened to buck Indonesia’s political system by running as an independent, after a grass-roots volunteer organization collected more than a million signatures in a petition drive enabling him to do so. But in the end, he stayed with Mr. Joko’s governing Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, the largest political party in the country.

Supporters of Mr. Basuki expressed confidence on Friday that the show of outrage over his remarks would not hurt his chances in February.

“We’re not worried about the protests,” said Richard Saerang, a leader the grass-roots organization Teman Ahok, or “Friends of Ahok.”

“We believe our criminal justice system will handle the case fairly – he did nothing wrong,” Mr. Saerang said. “It’s just a matter of perspective.”