Asia Pacific
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesia
was thrown into turmoil on Wednesday after the National Police named
the Christian governor of the country’s capital a suspect in a blasphemy
investigation over comments he made about the Quran. Outrage over those
remarks set off bloody street protests this month.
The
governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, Jakarta’s popular leader, has been
barred from leaving the country as the authorities continue their
investigation of him, Tito Karnavian, the national police chief, said at
a televised news conference.
Mr. Basuki, who is known as Ahok
and is running for re-election in February, has been a political target
of radical 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.
Islamic
groups opposed to Mr. Basuki, who is an ethnic Chinese Indonesian and a
political ally of President Joko Widodo, staged a huge protest march
through the capital on Nov. 4 that ended in violence, with one killed
and hundreds injured, as protesters set cars ablaze and battled with
riot police officers.
Political
analysts have said that the protests against Mr. Basuki were
orchestrated by national opposition parties to sabotage his campaign,
and also to embarrass Mr. Joko, who in 2014 became the first Indonesian
president from outside the country’s traditional political elite or
military.
Nonetheless,
the Indonesian National Police, under heavy public scrutiny by
conservative Islamic groups, elevated a continuing inquiry.
Mr.
Karnavian said at the news conference that despite strong disagreement
among investigators that the governor had violated Indonesia’s archaic
blasphemy laws, the case would go to trial.
“We
agreed to take the case to an open judiciary process,” he said, citing a
need for transparency and referring to the recent trial of an
Indonesian woman convicted last month of murdering her friend by spiking
her coffee with cyanide at an upscale cafe in central Jakarta this
year.
Some
Indonesian analysts said the protests were motivated more by politics
than by religion, adding that the groups that organized them had done so
at the behest of opposition political parties. The political parties
have denied that, but they have joined in the calls for Mr. Basuki to be
prosecuted.
Mr. Basuki, 50, is the first Christian in several decades to be governor of Jakarta.
Indonesia
is the world’s most populous Muslim majority nation, but its people
practice a pluralistic brand of Islam. Parts of the country, however,
are rigidly conservative, and there are periodic outbreaks of violent
radicalism.
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