“Let’s not have any future victims of vigilante justice.” SITI ZUBAIDAH, widow of Indonesian lynch victim
Man accused of stealing from mosque beaten and burnt to death
JAKARTA
HIS last words were “I’m not a thief”. But the mob, believing he had stolen an amplifier from a mosque, refused to accept the denial.
They beat him to death and burned his body as onlookers filmed the proceeding. A triumphant cry went up as he burst into flames.
The lynching this month of Muhammad al-Zahra, 30, in Bekasi, a gritty, industrial suburb of Jakarta, has shocked Indonesia and opened a broader discussion about why vigilante mobs continue to torture and execute petty criminals.
Last month in Surabaya, a large city in East Java, two young men accused of stealing were beaten by a huge crowd and struck with stones before being rescued by the police. That same month, a video surfaced of residents tying up, interrogating, beating and burning a man on suspicion of stealing in Madura, an island off East Java; the man survived. In June, a theft suspect in Madura was tied to a tree and fatally beaten by villagers.
“Vigilante justice, like the case that just happened in Bekasi, happens so frequently,” said Alghiffari Aqsa, a lawyer at the Legal Aid Institute, a nonprofit organisation based in Jakarta. “It reflects a lack of trust towards legal institutions. The police are seen as insufficiently responsive.”
Nearly two decades after Indonesia began its transition to democracy, its judicial system remains weak, plagued by corruption and inefficiency. Despite a significant expansion of police ranks in the last decade, the police are widely considered ineffective at solving everyday illegality.
Mob attacks increased 25 per cent between 2007 and 2014, according to the National Violence Monitoring System, a World Bank programme that records vigilante killings in Indonesia.
From 2005 to 2014, there were 33,627 victims of vigilante violence in Indonesia, 1,659 of whom died, the programme found. Even that figure most likely underestimates the scale of the issue, as the programme only monitors violence in half of Indonesia’s provinces.
“The legal system is seen by many people as too lenient on petty theft,” said Sana Jaffrey, a doctoral researcher at the University of Chicago who ran the World Bank programme for five years.
For many poor residents the loss of a motorbike, or even something as minor as chickens, could damage their livelihood.
Celebrity preachers swarmed his rented home to meet his widow, Siti Zubaidah, 25, and denounced lynching as un-Islamic. Vice-President Jusuf Kalla, a multimillionaire, dispatched a representative to visit Siti, who was six months’ pregnant, to pledge financial support.
This time, the police acted swiftly, arresting a pair of men accused of being ringleaders of the mob and pledging to investigate further. Those men did not even know what Muhammad was accused of, a police official said.
“They thought he was a motorbike thief,” the official, Rizal Marito, told news website Tempo. “They didn’t know it was just an amplifier.”
Siti, Muhammad’s wife, was in shock. She said she had not had a chance to consider how her children were going to fare. All she knew was that the mob had committed a great evil.
“Let’s not have any future victims of vigilante justice. If this keeps up, how can we be considered a nation of laws?” she said.
Even Rojali Babelan, the caretaker of the small mosque who accused Muhammad of stealing the amplifier, said he had regrets about the killing.
Rojali, in an interview, recounted his version of events that day. Not many visitors came to the isolated mosque, he said, so he took note when Muhammad stopped by, ostensibly to pray.
After he left, Rojali realised that the amplifier was gone, and, suspecting Muhammad, chased him down by motorbike.
Rojali eventually found him at a market in a bustling part of the city. Muhammad, shocked to realise that he had been followed, dropped a bag with the amplifier and ran off, Rojali said. “It was definitely my amplifier.”
When people asked Rojali what the commotion was about, he said Muhammad was a thief. A cry went up, and Muhammad was captured and beaten to death.
“I really didn’t agree with that punishment,” Rojali said. “The community should have let the police handle things.” NYT