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Jakarta police chief asks `Playboy' to leave town

It took one week for a violent protest to erupt in Indonesia against a new local edition of Playboy magazine -- and one more day for police to say it should pack up its bunny ears and move out of the capital.

The police chief in Jakarta yesterday said he would ask the publishers of the legendary girlie magazine to move operations to some other city after two policemen were wounded in a protest the previous day.

Relocate

"For the time being while awaiting the investigation [of the attack], we will ask that the publishing of the Playboy magazine not be done in Jakarta," General Firman Gani said, according to the Detikcom news service.

He did not suggest an alternative location.

About 300 protesters from the radical Islamic Defenders Front protested on Wednesday outside an office building in South Jakarta where the office of Playboy's Indonesian publisher is located.

The protest turned violent when demonstrators threw stones at the building, shattering windows on several floors and damaging a fire hydrant. They also pelted policemen securing the building, injuring two of them.

Indonesia's first edition of the monthly appeared last week. The magazine, famed in the US for its rabbit logo and its pictures of naked women, contains no nudity here.

Hot seller

The local version was no more risque than editions of British men's magazines already on sale in the world's most populous Muslim country. But it quickly sold out, and copies changed hands at three times the cover price.

"We will carry out more attacks if Playboy refuses to stop publishing," Salim Ali Hamid, one of the protest leaders, said on Wednesday.

Gani told reporters that those behind the violence would be rounded up.

"Whoever is involved in the vandalizing will be questioned," he said.

Most of Indonesia's Muslims, who make up around 85 percent of the population of 220 million, practise a moderate and tolerant form of the religion.
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