Former Jakarta Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama currently sits in jail as the result of the much-criticized guilty verdict and 2-year prison sentence the judges rendered at the conclusion of Ahok’s high-profile blasphemy trial. Next week, the trial of Buni Yani, who spread the misleading video that led directly to Ahok’s blasphemy charge, begins.
About a week after Ahok was charged by the police with insulting Islam during the infamous speech he gave to fishermen on Jakarta’s Pramuka Island in September, police charged Buni Yani, a university lecturer who spread a short clip of the speech along with an inaccurate transcript of Ahok’s words, for “spreading religious hatred” under Indonesia’s Information and Electronic Transactions Act (UU ITE).
According to the police, Buni Yani’s fault was that his transcript of Ahok’s speech was missing some key words making it seem like Ahok said the Quran itself deceives people, where in actuality Ahok said that people use the Quran to deceive others in the full version of his speech.
However, the judges in Ahok’s trial that found him guilty did not accept the argument that the deleted words had any impact on how blasphemous Ahok’s statement was.
Despite the seeming contradiction in the legal reasoning behind their two cases, Attorney General H.M. Prasetyo said that Buni Yani’s case would continue after Ahok was found guilty.
“What Buni Yani did is different than what Ahok did, so it’s not like if Ahok is guilty, then Buni Yani is not,” Prasetyo said after Ahok was sentenced, as quoted by Tempo.
Originally scheduled to take place in Depok, officials moved the location of Buni Yani’s trial, which begins next Tuesday, to the Bandung District Court, supposedly for safety reasons.
Buni Yani has always denied the charges and said that his deletion of certain words from Ahok’s transcript were unintentional. He has also claimed to be the victim of “criminalization” by the police, just like FPI leader Rizieq Shihab, who is currently hiding in Saudi Arabia after being charged by the Jakarta Police in a high-profile pornography case.
Buni Yani asked all of his supporters to pray for him throughout his trial.
“Friends please give your prayers and support so that the criminalization against all activists can be stopped and we can be given justice through the hands of the judges, who are the representatives of God on Earth,” he said in a written statement as quoted by Republika.
