Peter Alford, Jakarta – There was a characteristic absence in President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's response to Indonesia's latest outburst of sectarian violence – any mention of religious identity.
It began last Sunday in Sampang regency, Madura island, when 200 villagers confronted a party of 30 Shia children leaving their hamlet for religious school after the Idul Fitri holiday.
The mob grew to almost 1000, according to Komnas HAM, the national human rights authority, and its rampage left two men dead, six seriously injured, 35 houses burned and a community of 500 people terrorised and dispersed.
"(A) complex problem and not purely because of the difference of beliefs between the two communities," was the closest Yudhoyono came to acknowledging the victims were all Shia Muslims and their attackers all Sunnis.
Komnas HAM chairman Ifdhal Kasim bridled at official descriptions of the incident – the third assault on the hamlet in eight months – as a communal conflict. "We are saying the state has failed to protect its citizens with Shia beliefs. There was no clash, it was an attack."
Yudhoyono's persistent refusal to acknowledge victimised minorities – whether Shias, Ahmadiyah "heretics" or Protestant church-builders – is symptomatic of "his complete failure to set an agenda of religious tolerance", particularly in the Muslim sphere, says Australian National University's Greg Fealy, an authority on Indonesian politics and Islam.
During SBY's eight years in power, there has been "a great narrowing of the limits of acceptable Muslim behaviour", says Dr Fealy, and increased readiness by authorities to use the blasphemy law against heterodox movements.
Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population, about 87 per cent of the 238 million total, and 99 per cent of those are Sunni, the Pew Research Centre says.
With its tradition of Javanese tolerance, secular government and freedom of worship enshrined in the state doctrine, Indonesia remains probably the safest majority-Muslim society for religious minorities – but is becoming less so each year.
As authoritarian regimes crumble in the Middle East and North Africa, Mr Yudhoyono's Indonesia is the open Muslim society model that Western leaders urge on "Arab Spring" revolutionaries.
But enthusiasts find themselves hotly contradicted, not just by international rights groups but by Indonesian liberals.
Jakarta's Setara Institute, which focuses on religious freedom, published a five-year survey in January showing that, aside from a severe spike in 2008, incidents of discrimination and oppression of minorities had increased steadily. Setara noted the President urged tolerance in 19 speeches last year but "all the delivered messages seem (to leave) no footprint".
Mr Yudhoyono at least acknowledged a sectarian element in the Sampang incident, the third attack on that community in eight months, but Home Affairs Minister Gamawan Fauzi, sent to East Java to investigate, swiftly decided there was none at all.
"The Sampang incident is a purely criminal case that developed out of a family conflict and later gained momentum within the local community. It is not an anti-Shi'ite situation."
That was at odds with Komnas HAM, which has monitored Sampang's intra-religious strife since 2007. The shift of a locally prominent clerical family from Sunni persuasion to Shi'ism in the 1980s was a central element in the tensions, later aggravated by a rupture between brothers Tajul Muluk and Roisul Hukama.
But that was only in 2009 when Mr Roisul, the younger, returned to the Sunni fold, becoming an influential figure in the East Java chapter of Nahdlatul Ulama, the largest of Indonesia's mass Muslim organisations. Mr Roisul is now in custody, accused by police of fomenting Sunday's violence. Tajul was jailed for two years in July on a questionable blasphemy conviction. His house and religious school were burned in the earlier attacks.
His blasphemy was openly teaching Shia doctrine, which East Java NU and the local Indonesian Ulema Council chapter complain is heretical.
However Nahdlatul, Ulama's national council has repeatedly ruled Shia is a legitimate stream of Islam, not a "deviant sect", and chairman Said Aqil Siradj repeated this week that violence was intolerable.
But SBY's Religious Affairs Minister, Suryadharma Ali, formerly an East Java NU man, has called this year for Shia preaching to be suppressed.
Many of the President's difficulties spring from the post-Suharto devolution of central government authority to the regions, which has degenerated into unruly localism.
Provincial jurisdictions interpret laws as they choose, governors run personal patronage networks, while regents and mayors defy Jakarta and the national courts with impunity.