Bayu Marhaenjati – For a year now, the congregations of two churches in Bogor and Bekasi have been holding joint Sunday services outside the State Palace in Jakarta to draw the president's attention to the discrimination they continue to face, but to no avail.
On Sunday they turned out again, men, women and children worshiping under the searing sun and closely watched by dozens of anti-riot police personnel.
Yet there should be no reason, said Bona Sigalingging, for them to be out there when by rights they could be praying in the comfort of their own churches.
"It's truly reprehensible that the discrimination against the GKI Yasmin and HKBP Filadelfia congregations has been allowed to go on for years, without the central government or the president doing anything to enforce the rulings in our favor," he said.
Bona is the spokesman for the GKI Yasmin congregation from Bogor, which has been locked out of its church since 2008 by the municipal authorities, in direct violation of two Supreme Court rulings and an order by the Indonesian Ombudsman to allow them back in.
Bogor officials' initial pretext for revoking the church's permit was that the signatures required to obtain it were fake. It now says that its refusal to abide by the rulings of the highest court in the land is based on residents' opposition to the church.
The HKBP Filadelfia congregation is the victim of a similar injustice. Since 2007, it has been forced to worship on the street outside the church in Bekasi as district authorities continue to deny it a permit.
The congregation has won rulings from the West Java State Administrative Court and the Supreme Court ordering district authorities to issue the permit and reopen the church. But the officials have refused to comply, citing residents' opposition to the presence of the church in their midst.
For Bona, the lack of response from President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to their plight is puzzling, given how promptly he moved recently to retake control of his Democratic Party in the light of plummeting poll numbers.
"He was so quick to save his party, but what about saving GKI Yasmin and HKBP Filadelfia?" he said.
"This is the fifth year that we've been locked out of our church, and a full year since we began praying in front of the State Palace. It doesn't make sense that after all this time, the president has done nothing whatsoever to enforce the court rulings."
The two congregations have sent around 7,000 letters to the president, via the State Secretariat, which has confirmed that it received them, Bona said.
"Yet [presidential spokesman] Julian Pasha claims the palace never received them. If there's an official receipt from the State Secretariat, then where are the letters? Besides, this is such a high-profile case that there's no way the palace isn't aware of it," he said.
"We've never had the chance to speak with the president. The highest we've gone is to the home affairs minister, but he's clearly on the side of the Bogor mayor."
The minister, Gamawan Fauzi, has repeatedly claimed that regional autonomy rendered the central government powerless to force the Bogor and Bekasi administrations to comply with the court rulings.