Letter: Where will Indonesia go?

I just started reading The Jakarta Post again after a pause of almost a year. Except for the date, the news is virtually the same:  Muslims persecuting other Muslims, corruption and crime going unpunished, the government lacking the will or the power to act on behalf of the underprivileged.

Having just returned from several months of work in Afghanistan, I see that Indonesia is far more advanced, at least in terms of infrastructure and the existence of an emerging middle-class.

But underneath that surface, the intolerance that these examples illustrate differ from Afghanistan mostly in the lack of violence that supports it.

I am particularly disturbed by the prosecution and proposed banishment of Ahmadis, whose “deviant” beliefs have to be “corrected”.

Shades of the Khmer Rouge and other autocracies abided no diversity. Is that where Indonesia wants to go? I doubt it, and I wonder why there is no public outcry to prevent it.

Eran Fraenkel
Bogor