In the dock for the first time this week on blasphemy charges, Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama offered an impassioned, reasoned and at times tearful defence. It was only behind closed doors, in a moment captured by a single frame, that this once hugely popular politician betrayed the private agony of the past two months.
Slumped at a table inside the North Jakarta court complex, a packet of tissues and two half-drunk bottles of water before him, he looked desolate. A woman in a hijab, his adoptive sister Nana Riwayatie, stood behind him with her arm wrapped protectively around his shoulders.
But there is no protecting Ahok, as he is popularly known, from his almost certain fate: the end of his political career, criminal conviction and jail time — and all because of a throwaway line two-thirds of experts consulted by police investigators do not believe was blasphemous.
In court this week, Ahok’s lawyers argued forcefully against the charge, which carries a maximum five-year jail term, pointing out that the law demands the prosecution prove the accused intended to offend another’s religion.
Ahok had repeatedly apologised and insisted he did not mean to offend, they said.
He did so again on Tuesday in an emotional address in which he spoke of the devout Muslim family that took him in when he moved to Jakarta to study, and later encouraged him to enter public life.
“It breaks my heart to be accused of defaming Islam because that would be the same as defaming my adoptive parents and siblings, whom I love dearly,” he said.
The bigger story in the undoing of one man by a mob that has grown in size and fervour with each victory over law and reason is, of course, the implications for Indonesia, a country on Australia’s doorstep often lauded as a model of moderate, tolerant Islam.
The persecution of Jakarta’s Governor is a complex tale that says much about the rising power of political Islam across this sprawling archipelago, the ease with which powerful political actors and Islamists have shown they can use religion to manipulate public opinion, and the shrinking space for minorities.
Ahok’s trial has not only exposed the influence of conservative Islam in Indonesia but the weakness of its democratic institutions in the face of mob pressure.
But this is a tragedy on smaller levels, too. Ahok was this city’s first openly Christian and ethnic Chinese governor in more than a half-century and — something almost as rare in Indonesia — a politician untainted by corruption.
His election in 2012 as vice-governor and running mate to Joko Widodo was a symbol of something grand in Indonesia’s nascent democracy: a pluralism not just written into its secular constitution but realised by its people through its democratic processes.
When Widodo was elected President in 2014, Ahok automatically became Governor of Jakarta, a creaking, sinking, dysfunctional city in desperate need of infrastructure investment and corrective urban planning. Even then his ascension was stridently opposed by Islamic hardliners such as the thuggish Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) on the grounds that an infidel — and, worse still, an ethnic Chinese one — should not govern a majority Muslim city.
Ahok’s determination to turn around Jakarta’s fortunes has not been universally embraced, nor did it come without casualties. About 16,000 slum-dwellers have been displaced in the name of flood mitigation and seafront development under his watch. Nonetheless, he remained popular for his anti-corruption policies, commitment to reducing the city’s notorious traffic congestion and annual flooding, and championing of free healthcare. Until recently, his re-election next February was considered a foregone conclusion. There was even talk of him running for vice-president.
But in September the blunt-talking Governor gave his enemies the ammunition they had been seeking when he challenged politically backed conservative clerics who cited a Koranic verse known as al-Maidah 51 to declare that Muslims should not vote for non-Muslims.
The verse, historically subject to differing interpretations, is regularly cited by Indonesian Islamists when a non-Muslim seeks public office. Ahok had faced it down before, and did so again when addressing a group of fishermen in the Thousand Islands off Jakarta’s coastline. “Maybe in your heart you feel you can’t vote for me (because) you are being lied to (by those) using al-Maidah 51,” he said jocularly.
“That is your right to believe them. Don’t feel bad you can’t vote for me because you’re afraid of going to hell because you are lied to. It’s OK. Don’t give it too much thought. You could end up with a stroke if you do.”
The speech, uploaded to YouTube and edited to cause greater offence, has sparked three mass protests since October — all spearheaded by the FPI and each larger than the previous one.
After the November 4 rally, which attracted 150,000 people at its height, turned violent later in the evening, President Jokowi announced an independent investigation into the blasphemy allegations. He also cancelled his first state visit to Australia.
It was not enough. On December 2, despite weeks of appeals by Jokowi to religious leaders and political opponents, more than 500,000 people crammed Jakarta’s national monument to pray for Ahok’s immediate arrest. Eleven days later he was in the dock.
“We have seen this in smaller cases,” Bonar Tigor Naipospos from Jakarta’s liberal Setara Institute tells The Australian. “When faced with a large mob, police don’t know how to do their job, so all they try to do is prevent violence from spreading, or sacrifice the smaller group, the minority.”
As for the courts, few believe the five judges hearing Ahok’s case will have the courage to acquit. Here, too, precedent suggests they will bend to public opinion.
“They have their own safety to worry about and there are pressures from all sides for them to appease the hardliners and find Ahok guilty,” says Naipospos.
The potential for mass unrest cannot have escaped the judges, just as it did not Jokowi who, in an apparent betrayal of his old running mate — until recently one of the few people who could call on the President without an appointment — joined Islamic hardliners, including notorious FPI leader Rizieq Shihab, on stage at the December 2 rally to thank the crowd for remaining peaceful.
Like many others watching the case, Naipospos sees the Ahok trial as a critical test of Indonesian democracy. “They (hardliners) are trying to send a message: Don’t question us, don’t question the things we say, don’t question our methods or you can be charged with blasphemy. How long is the government willing to let these things happen, and how far will the government let these groups go?”
If, as widely expected, Ahok is jailed for questioning a literal interpretation of al-Maidah 51, the practical consequence will be an effective ban on non-Muslims standing for office in the world’s most populous Muslim nation, where their constituencies will unavoidably be majority Muslim.
Australian National University Indonesia expert Greg Fealy says anecdotal evidence suggests many who participated in the December 2 rally “do not support fundamental changes to the role of Islam in the state. Many with whom I and other researchers spoke rejected on principle attempts to Islamise the constitution and restrict non-Muslim rights,” he writes in an analysis that nonetheless notes a “powerful undercurrent of resentment toward the Chinese and Christians” beneath the blasphemy issue.
His conclusion is that the rallies would make it harder for non-Muslim officials and those from ethnic backgrounds in Indonesia to rise to executive positions in which they have authority over the majority Muslim community.
Worse still; “The events of the past two months give a hollow ring to Indonesia’s claim to be a moderate Muslim democracy.”
An ugly side-effect of the mass support for Ahok’s conviction is more open racism towards Indonesians of Chinese descent, a group that has over centuries been sporadically subjected to discrimination and violent pogroms.
That has inevitably raised fears of fresh violence among the city’s ethnic Chinese community, many of whom bear the scars of the 1998 riots. At a recent suburban Jakarta rally an Islamic cleric reportedly described Ahok as a “pig’s pimple” and said Muslims would be “better off kissing a goat’s arse” than associating with him. On Indonesian social media networks, Ahok and Chinese Indonesians more broadly are described in offensive racial epithets such as “slit eye” or “Chinese bastards”.
For all the brutality and repression of the Suharto regime, rights activists say an unintended consequence of Indonesia’s transition to democracy and enshrined freedom of expression has been a rise in hate speech. The military general, who ruled Indonesia for 33 years until his overthrow in 1998, used the 1963 Anti-Subversion Law in equal measure to suppress the Communist Party and radical religious groups that sought an Islamic state in Indonesia, such as Darul Islam.
Political Islam was banned as a threat to the state and the modern nation’s foundational principle of “unity in diversity”.
In the name of unity, Chinese Indonesians were advised to adopt Indonesian names and, for a time, hijabs were banned in public schools. They were all threads of the same overarching policy designed to discourage a diverse population from identifying as anything other than Indonesian.
But with the end of Suharto’s venal totalitarianism has come a rise in previously suppressed groups, most notably Islamic conservatives who have targeted Indonesia’s minority religious and ethnic groups as well as the LGBTI community.
While Indonesia’s constitution enshrines the right to free speech, numerous laws — including the nation’s blasphemy law — over the years have served to severely curtail that right
“If you had tried this (anti-Ahok rallies) under Suharto you would have been arrested and locked up,” says Tim Lindsey, an Indonesian law expert at the University of Melbourne.
Though Ahok is undoubtedly the most prominent person to be victimised, Lindsey argues his persecution by Islamists mirrors a familiar pattern established during former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s years in office from 2004 to 2014. Conservative Islamic outfits such as the FPI and the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) umbrella group flourished under SBY, as did blasphemy cases. In the past 12 years there has been a 100 per cent conviction rate for blasphemy, mostly of minorities and mostly under SBY.
Just as he did during his presidency, SBY is again suspected to have found a politically expedient accommodation with Islamic hardliners, this time to further the political fortunes of his son.
Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono is now narrowly leading a three-way race with Ahok and former education minister Anies Baswedan ahead of February’s contest for the governorship of Jakarta — a position Jokowi proved is a stepping stone to the presidency.
If allegations that SBY has been funding and supporting the rallies to help his son are true, “that would fit his pattern of behaviour during his presidency, when he seemed unwilling to rein in Islamic hardliners, despite rising religious intolerance”, says Lindsey.
But he would not be the only one. A major subplot in the Ahok saga is the political tussle between three of Indonesia’s most powerful figures: President Jokowi, SBY and Prabowo Subianto, opposition Gerindra Party leader and a former presidential candidate defeated by Jokowi in 2014.
Prabowo is also suspected of aiding the anti-Ahok campaign to help his own Jakarta gubernatorial candidate, Baswedan.
But whether the political puppet masters are fully in control of the strings is unclear.
By introducing the blasphemy issue, exploiting a fierce political race between three powerbrokers, provoking anti-Chinese sentiment and harnessing the anger of those displaced by Ahok’s planning policies, the Islamists have whipped up “a perfect storm” against Ahok, says Lindsey.
“The hardliners have been opportunistic in leveraging a complex political situation to enhance their power in this particular moment,” he adds.
And in seeking to staunch the flow of blood from an issue that has cost him time and political capital, Jokowi may have helped deliver another, perhaps greater victory to hardliners.
Many fear that, by joining on stage at the December 2 rally the same Islamist leaders who a month earlier had called for his government’s overthrow, Jokowi has lent legitimacy to previously fringe elements and, by extension, helped undermine the authority of the country’s largest moderate Muslim groups _ Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama.
Both organisations advised their members not to participate in the December rally, but to little obvious effect.
It was a strategic victory for hardliners, who this week have sought to consolidate their gains by demanding a “boycott of everyone supporting the blasphemer”.
“Don’t go to their mosques, don’t listen to their sermons, don’t welcome them into your neighbourhood, don’t work for them, don’t buy their products, don’t accept their donations,” Rizieq Shihab wrote on his official FPI website on Wednesday.
The battle lines have been drawn. The question is whether Indonesian democracy’s guardians have the stomach for a fight.
Additional reporting: Nivell Rayda
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