The roots of the escalation in religious intolerance and related violence began in 2005 when Yudhoyono opened the Indonesian Ulama Council congress, the umbrella organization of many Muslim groups.
Source/Credit: Human Rights Watch
By Andreas Harsono | May 14, 2014
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s legacy of worsening religious intolerance and related violence will be one of the biggest challenges his successor will face. Indonesia holds presidential elections on July 9.
While Yudhoyono likes to speak about Indonesia’s “religious harmony,” over the past 10 years the country’s religious minorities, including Christians, Shia, Ahmadiyah and some indigenous faiths, have become increasingly besieged by often violent Sunni Islamist militants. Yudhoyono’s response to that intolerance has been empty rhetoric and turning a blind eye to elements of his government passively or actively complicit in abuses of the rights of religious minorities.
Islamist militants have grown accustomed to attacking minorities with impunity. In certain cases, in which the security forces and prosecutors have actually intervened in such incidents, the result has frequently been the prosecution and imprisonment of representatives of the victimized minorities—not the perpetrators, with charges of “blasphemy” or “creating unrest.”
The roots of the escalation in religious intolerance and related violence began in 2005 when Yudhoyono opened the Indonesian Ulama Council congress, the umbrella organization of many Muslim groups, by announcing his intention to “take strict measures against deviant beliefs.” In March 2006, Yudhoyono’s cabinet produced a decree dedicated to “Religious Harmony, Empowering Religious Harmony Forums, and Constructing Houses of Worship.”
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Read original post here: Yudhoyono’s Sectarian Legacy
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