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Obscure author charged with defaming President Jokowi

The National Police have charged a little known author from Blora, Central Java, with defamation for writing a 436-page book they believe contains false information and baseless claims about President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo

Marguerite Afra Sapiie (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Wed, January 4, 2017

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Obscure author charged with defaming President Jokowi

T

he National Police have charged a little known author from Blora, Central Java, with defamation for writing a 436-page book they believe contains false information and baseless claims about President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.

Bambang Tri Mulyono, the author of Jokowi Undercover, was arrested by the police last Friday.

The police decided to slap Bambang with a defamation charge as stipulated by the Criminal Code (KUHP), in addition to hate speech and racism charges as stipulated in the 2008 Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) Law and a 2008 law on the elimination of racial and ethnic discrimination.

“[Bambang] has deliberately defamed the government and legal institutions in public. In this case, Jokowi, the President of Indonesia, has become the victim,” National Police spokesman Insp. Gen. Boy Rafli Amar told reporters.

The National Police have been investigating the case since early December 2016, when the cyberteam first detected the circulation of Bambang’s book on social media. The force has also received several reports from the public regarding the contents of the book.

Based on an investigation that has involved numerous experts, the police claimed the book’s contents were not based on accountable primary and secondary data, or on any historical facts.

According to police, Bambang claimed in his book, which he published by himself, that Jokowi and Jusuf Kalla were elected president and vice president in 2014 because the public had been deceived by the press.

Police claim Bambang also said Jokowi had falsified data about his father before he registered himself as a presidential candidate in 2014.

In addition, police said he wrote that Giriroto, Boyolali regency, Central Java, was a base of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), although it was not, but he gave the President a communist connection because Giriroto is reportedly the village where Jokowi’s mother, Sujiatmi Notomiatdjo, was born.

Sujiatmi, meanwhile, has strongly rejected all information written in the book, saying that the contents are libelous as they were not based on facts and truth.

The police said Bambang’s book aimed to spread hatred against the descendants of people linked to the PKI, which was disbanded in 1966, even though, as the police said, those descendents could not know anything about the 1965 coup attempt that was blamed on the party. It is unclear if that was the reason the police charged Bambang with spreading racial hatred.

The Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (ICJR) executive director Supriyadi Widodo Eddyono said the police should be careful when charging Bambang under articles in the ITE Law and the elimination of racial and ethnic discrimination law as the meaning of tribal affiliations, religion, race and societal groups (SARA) is different in the two laws.

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