T

he Tanjungbalai Police’s move to report a woman for blasphemy after she complained about the volume of loudspeakers at a mosque near her house, which led to the worst racial violence in the country in more than a decade, has called into question law enforcers’ impartiality in handling religious conflicts.

North Sumatra Police spokesperson Sr. Comr. Rina Sari Ginting insisted that the police were right to report Meliana for blasphemy based on statements by witnesses. “It is justified by the law” the officer told The Jakarta Post on Sunday.

Meliana has not been officially charged with blasphemy as the police are seeking the opinion of a University of North Sumatra linguist to decide if what she is alleged to have said could be considered as “defaming religion”. But the police said they were now building a case against her.

Dailami, a staffer at Al Maksum mosque, a key witness in the case, said Meliana had objected to the volume of the mosque’s speakers and had asked him to lower it.

The mosque then sent representatives to Meliana’s house to ask her if she was really disturbed by the loudspeakers. “Yes, it hurt my ears,” Dailami said, quoting Meliana.

The police’s decision to report Meliana for blasphemy has sparked suspicions they are trying to appease angry Muslim residents, as those arrested and charged for their roles in the rioting, which saw the burning and looting of viharas and pagodas, are thought to be mainly Muslims.

Rina dismissed the suspicions, saying those involved in the rioting could not be charged with blasphemy even though they had ransacked places of worship. Religious defamation must have the element of verbal abuse, she said.

National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) commissioner Nur Kholis said criminalizing Meliana would not address the conflict in Tanjungbalai.

“The Blasphemy Law does exist, but it is not rigid and doesn’t specify to what extent an act can be classified as blasphemous. The implementation of this law is relative, depending on whether one feels another has offended one’s religion,” he said,

There had to be mutual understanding that although the adzan (the Muslim call to prayer) is a form of freedom of expression and a manifestation of religion, it should also know certain limits, and someone conveying an objection should not be considered as blasphemous, Ghufron Mabruri of Imparsial said.

“We cannot prosecute people who express their discomfort. In the same way we cannot prosecute citizens who object to a wedding ceremony set up on the street.”

He added that the case should be dropped as Meliana had publicly apologized and her problem had nothing to do with religion.

Yenny Wahid, executive director of the Wahid Institute, slammed the police for building a case against Meliana, saying that the police regarded their duty as more about restoring order, but less about ensuring citizens’ constitutional rights.

The Tanjungbalai incident was not the first caused by complaints about the excessive use of loudspeakers by mosques, though it was the first to trigger rioting.

In 2010, a US citizen, Gregory Luke Lloyd, was sentenced to five months in prison for a blasphemous act in Lombok. He had unplugged electricity in a mosque because he was disturbed by the volume of a Quran recitation during Ramadhan.
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