Theresia Sufa, Bogor – Members of the Taman Yasmin Indonesian Christian Church (GKI) congregation clashed with officers from the Bogor Public Order office who prohibited them from conducting their Sunday service on the sidewalk in front of their sealed church building.
Members of GKI Yasmin have been forced to hold their service on the sidewalk since the Bogor Municipal Administration sealed their church last year.
"We had no other choice. With the church now sealed, this is the only place where we can perform our Sunday service. Why don't they allow us to?" one member of the congregation said.
He said that members of the congregation had not broken any laws by staging their religious service at the site.
An official from the Bogor Public Order Agency, Ayep Ruhiyat, said the congregation should not perform their rituals on the sidewalk as it could disrupt order in the area. But after a tense argument, the officers relented and allowed the congregation to hold a mass at the location.
GKI Yasmin has been threatened with eviction by the Bogor Municipal administration as well as locals who have questioned the legality of the church.
Bogor Mayor Diani Budiarto has been consistent in his refusal to reopen the church despite a Supreme Court ruling which upheld the legality of the church.
In July 2006, the Bogor city administration decided to revoke the building permit for the church.
The Supreme Court issued a ruling on Dec. 9, 2010, overturning the Bogor administration's request to uphold a lower court decision to close down the church.
The Bogor administration later decided to revoke the building permit for the church in March this year, arguing that there had been an error involved in the application for the permit.
On Sunday, Diani held a meeting with the top city officials in a government building across from the besieged building, but did not make efforts to meet members of the GKI congregation or respond to questions from local journalists.
Meanwhile, an organization calling itself the Bogor branch of Indonesian Muslim Communication Forum (Forkami), said it had given the city administration a one-week deadline to evict the GKI Yasmin congregation from its current location.
"By Sunday next week, the city administration should have relocated all members of the congregation," Forkami member Abdul Halim said, as quoted kompas.com.
Abdul said that the government had already provided a new location for GKI Yasmin and that its congregation had no reason to perform their service on the sidewalk. "[The mass on the sidewalk] is disturbing the public order," he said.
Separately, GKI Yasmin spokesman Bona Sigalingging reiterated the church's demand for the Bogor administration to abide by the Supreme Court ruling. Bona denied the Bogor administration's claim that the church had forged signatures from local residents when it sought approval to construct the church.
Bona said that the administration should have protected members of the congregation instead of pushing them further to the edge. "The solution to this problem is actually very simple; reopen the church and let us perform our religious service here," he said.
Bona said that the congregation would continue holding their sidewalk mass until they were allowed to get inside the church building. "We have received many threats. Some say they want to burn the church down, but we still stand firm," he said.
Earlier this month, the executive board of the Islamic Student Association (HMI) submitted a document detailing the dispute between the GKI Yasmin church and the Bogor administration to the Vatican's president of the papal council for interreligious dialogue Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran.
HMI said that many religious disputes in Indonesia were in fact engineered or fueled by political parties.