Carla Isati Octama – When President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono addressed a gathering of the foreign ambassadors in Indonesia last month, he drew a flurry of criticism for brushing off the rising tide of interreligious conflicts as simply media hype.

He assured the ambassadors that on this particular issue, "things aren't as bad as the mass media is reporting."

Not so, say some of the leading figures in the national media scene, who argue that the president's administration is unwilling to face up to a very real problem.

"His statement should be seen as a diplomatic one, an attempt to mask the reality," Wahyu Muryadi, chief editor of Tempo magazine, said on Thursday. "Tempo's own observations of what's happening in Indonesia show an unsettling and increasing intensity in religious conflicts."

He said it was regrettable that Yudhoyono had deflected accountability for the problem by blaming the media.

"It's unfortunate that he accused the mass media of exaggerating these stories," Wahyu said. "He shouldn't blame the media. The media only reports the facts, what we see happening with our own eyes."

If Yudhoyono had a genuine grievance about unbalanced reporting, Wahyu went on, he should have addressed them through the proper channels.

"If there is [media hype] in reporting on religious conflicts, then that's a serious violation of the journalistic code of ethics," he said. "The recourse in that case is to report it to the Press Council, not grumble in front of the diplomats."

Incidents of interreligious strife have in recent years grabbed much of the headlines in the national media and drawn the attention of rights groups abroad.

Last November, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom noted that there were "strong political forces, terrorist networks and extremist groups that continue to be serious obstacles to Indonesia's democratic trajectory and a source of ongoing violations of religious freedom and related human rights" in the country.

The group cited several cases of concern, including the forced closure of a church in West Java, the suicide bombing of a church in Central Java, Baha'is detained on charges of proselytizing in East Java, sectarian tensions re-emerging in Ambon, and individuals who murdered defenseless Ahmadiyah Muslims being handed light sentences.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also urged an end to the discrimination against the Ahmadiyah and the continued closure of the GKI Yasmin church in Bogor.

Eko Maryadi, chairman of the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), said there was no doubt that religious conflicts were a real problem and not a media-engineered issue.

"It's the president's right to say things are fine in Indonesia, but the fact remains that in the past three years, religious radicalism has been on the rise," he said. "These are all indisputable facts."

He said while it was possible that some media outlets were guilty of biased coverage of such cases, the truth was that not all religious conflicts were being reported.

Hedy Lugito, deputy chief editor of the current affairs magazine Gatra, said he believed the national coverage of religious conflicts was fair and balanced.

"I don't know what media in particular Yudhoyono was referring to, because the local media is quite wise about its reporting," he said. "Perhaps he was talking about the foreign media, because some of them do have political interests to pursue."

At Gatra, he went on, the editorial policy on covering religious conflicts was to be careful not to aggravate the problem through careless reporting. "We tend to be more careful so that the problem doesn't grow any bigger, but not at the expense of obscuring the facts," Hedy said.