Human Rights Watch (HRW) yesterday urged US President Barack Obama to press Indonesia’s leaders during his visit this week on issues including outbreaks of mob violence against religious minorities.
The New York-based watchdog said that despite warming ties with Indonesia, Obama should be forthright when he meets Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono during this week’s East Asia Summit held on the island of Bali.
Local and international human rights groups have expressed outrage over light sentences handed out to members of a religious lynch mob who killed three members of the Ahmadiyah minority sect in February.
The same court on Java island in August jailed one of the Ahmadiyah survivors of the attack, a man who almost lost his hand in the violence, for six months for defending himself and his friends.
“The Obama administration’s deepening relationship with Indonesia means being frank about Indonesia’s serious human rights challenges,” said Elaine Pearson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
“Indonesian government indifference to mob violence against religious groups and brutality by soldiers against peaceful protesters are good places to start,” she said in a statement.
Pearson called on Obama to push Yudhoyono to end discriminatory laws and protect religious minorities in the world’s most populous Muslim nation.
“Obama needs to temper his past praise of religious tolerance in Indonesia with some tough talk on religious freedom,” she added.
The Indonesian Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but rights groups say violence against minorities, including Christians and the Ahmadiyah Islamic sect, has escalated since 2008.
In February, a 1,500-person mob of Muslims set two churches alight and ransacked a third in the town of Temanggung, on Java, as they demanded that a Christian man be sentenced to death for insulting Islam.
More than 80 percent of the archipelago nation’s estimated 240 million people are Muslim. Five percent are Protestants and 3 percent Catholic.
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