JAKARTA // More than 200,000 white-clad Muslim conservatives packed rain-swept central Jakarta on Friday in a peaceful demonstration demanding the arrest of the ethnic-Chinese city governor Basuki Purnama, whose re-election chances have slipped since he was indicted on blasphemy charges two weeks ago.
A 22,000-strong force of troops and police threw a tight cordon around the demonstration in parkland surrounding the country’s national monument to prevent a repeat of the violence that attended another anti-Purnama rally on November 4.
Police have refused to arrest Mr Purnama, who is one of three candidates in next February’s gubernatorial race. But with his poll numbers dipping badly there are concerns that some political parties and other opposition elements are using the latest protests to try to destabilise the Joko Widodo government itself.
President Widodo and security officials have openly referred to a possible insurrection, with police earlier on Friday arresting the estranged sister of ex-president Megawati Sukarnoputri, leader of Mr Widodo’s Indonesian Democratic Party for Struggle (PDI-P), a retired general, a political activist and five others for alleged treason.
But most are considered nationalist gadflies and opportunists who pose little danger to the state and whose agendas are generally thought to be a lot different from the hardline Muslim groups involved in the demonstration.
The authorities claim that nine Islamist militants rounded up in Jakarta over the past two weeks were implicated in a plot to seize the weapons of police and soldiers guarding the demonstrations.
An even bigger threat was a bomb found in a West Java farmhouse during a recent raid, which was said to have three times the power of the device used in the 2002 nightclub bombing on the island of Bali, which killed 202 people, most of them tourists.
Police say the alleged bomb-maker is an agricultural science student with links to militant leader Bahrun Naim, who joined ISIL in 2014 along with several hundred other Indonesian radicals.
Mr Widodo was Jakarta governor for two years until the presidential election in late 2014, when he handed over to Mr Purnama, whose careless criticism of a Quranic verse purportedly forbidding Muslims from voting for non-Muslim leaders got him into hot water.
After working hard in the past few weeks meeting with political parties and Muslim leaders in an effort to defuse tensions, the president walked from the nearby state palace to the national monument to join the protesters for Friday prayers.
Most media attention has focused on the political manoeuvring going on behind the scenes, but senior party sources say that apart from weakening Mr Widodo, there is little justification for an attempt to remove him halfway through his term.
More worrying in the long run for many analysts is Mr Purnama’s possible conviction, which will be seen as another victory for hardline elements who have spent the past decade of democratic rule chipping away at the country’s secular foundations.
Mainstream Indonesian Muslims may still be strongly opposed to the creation of a Sharia state, but they have great difficulty separating the mosque from state, as prescribed in the 1945 constitution.
Said Iqil Siradj, the moderate leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, the country’s influential 30 million-strong Muslim organisation, is clearly disturbed over the number of its members who took part in the two rallies.
Seeing it as a challenge to his leadership, he recently called on Mr Widodo to ban radical Islamist organisations and close extremist-run Islamic boarding schools “that oppose the pillars on which this nation is built”.
The refusal of the Indonesian elite to engage in a conversation about the conflict between conservative interpretations of the Quran and the constitution continues to bedevil political discourse, particularly where it applies to Chinese Christians and other minority groups.
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
