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Bekasi church bulldozed over permit issue
Nothing left: Members of a congregation of the Batak Christian Protestant Church sit outside near the ruins of their church after an excavator demolished it in Taman Sari in Bekasi, West Java, on Thursday
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span class="inline inline-none">Nothing left: Members of a congregation of the Batak Christian Protestant Church sit outside near the ruins of their church after an excavator demolished it in Taman Sari in Bekasi, West Java, on Thursday. The local government demolished the church on Thursday because it had no building permit, local media reported on Thursday. (Reuters/Enny Nuraheni)
After years of struggle to obtain a building permit for their house of worship, the congregation of the Batak Protestant Church (HKBP) in Taman Sari, Setu district in Bekasi regency, watched the local administration demolish their unfinished church building.
“It’s over. The church building was demolished at around 2:45 p.m.,” Rev. Torang Parulian Simanjuntak told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.
The HKBP Taman Sari congregation went to the church on Thursday morning in an attempt to block the demolition of the church as public order officers (Satpol PP) arrived at the location. They held a prayer service, hoping that the demolition would not happen.
A bulldozer arrived at the location at noon. Members of the church’s congregation began to cry and wail while some tried to prevent the bulldozer from moving closer to the church. Many broke down when the machinery began to tear down the walls of the church — located on Jl. MT Haryono — they could be heard pleading with the Satpol PP officers to stop the demolition.
Rev. Advent Leonard Nababan said that the Satpol PP officers did not respond to the congregation’s demand.
“The [Bekasi regency] administration showed their arrogance,” Leonard said.
Torang said the demolition was illegal. “The Bekasi regent should have first given us the demolition order; but we have not received any letter from the regent,” he said.
“We will file a lawsuit against the Bekasi regency administration,” Torang said, adding that the church’s congregation, comprising more than 600 Christians, would still hold their services near the demolished church.
HKBP Taman Sari had struggled to obtain a building permit for the church, built in 1999, due to objections from the predominantly Muslim neighborhood.
Bekasi Police operations chief Comr. Muryono said that officers were deployed following orders from the regional administration to prevent chaos during the demolition.
“The process was guarded mainly by the Satpol PP [officers] because this is their section,” he said. “We dispatched 300 personnel, only as a back up. The military was also there to help [safeguarding].”
According to Muryono, the regional administration was enforcing the 1996 bylaw on construction permits (IMB) and the targeted building was not actually a church.
“It’s a building without a permit. The management has been told long before to register the building but did not heed the warnings, that’s why the administration is demolishing it. That’s what we were told.”
Deputy Regent Rohim Mintareja said it was a combination of the problems surrounding the construction permit and the administration avoiding conflict with locals opposing the presence of the church that had led to the demolition. tempo.co reported.
Choirul Anam of Human Rights Working Group said the incident was the latest piece of evidence proving that the government failed to protect religious freedom in the country.
“The incident shows that the international accusation that Indonesia is intolerant and fails to protect religious freedom is accurate,” he told the Post.
Choirul said that he would report the case during a UN human rights committee hearing on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in Geneva, Switzerland, to be held next Thursday.
The Wahid Institute, which promotes pluralism and peaceful Islam, stated in its report last year that religious intolerance in the country has grown steadily in the last four years.
The report showed that the number of religious intolerance cases in 2012 stood at 274, up from 267 in 2011. In 2010, the institute recorded 184 cases and 121 cases in 2009.
Major cases of religious intolerance include the banning of church congregations from worshipping at the Yasmin Indonesian Christian Church (GKI) in Bogor and the HKBP Filadelfia in Bekasi; the ban on Ahmadiyah teachings as well as the demolition of a mosque in the predominantly Christian city of Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara. (nai/fzm)
