JAKARTA: Hundreds of Indonesians protested outside the Chinese Embassy in Jakarta on Friday calling for an end to Beijing’s oppression of its ethnic Uighur minority.
The rally in support of the ethnic Muslim group began after Friday prayers and was the second held outside the embassy in a week.
On Thursday, more than 100 members of the youth group Laskar Merah Putih also protested against China’s treatment of the Uighurs.
Rally organizer Slamet Ma’arif said the protest voiced its “condemnation of China’s oppression against our Uighur Muslim brothers.”
“We demand the Chinese government stop forbidding Muslim Uighurs to exercise their religion,” Ma’arif said.
He called on the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to investigate China’s treatment of the Uighur and take its findings to the International Criminal Court.
“We condemn the Indonesian government’s idleness regarding the Uighurs’ problem and its failure to carry out our constitutional mandate which states that colonialism should be abolished in the world,” Ma’arif said.
Arini Soemardi, a teacher who attended the rally, told Arab News she wanted to express solidarity with oppressed fellow Muslims.
“The Indonesian government has not said much about this. The government should strongly voice its opposition to the oppression in accordance with our constitution,” she said.
Indonesian leaders have been reluctant to comment on the Uighur issue, opting for talks “under the radar” instead of what officials describe as “megaphone diplomacy.”
Retired general Moeldoke, the presidential chief of staff, said earlier this week that Indonesia does not want to meddle in China’s domestic affairs.
Xiao Qian, China’s ambassador to Indonesia, told Moeldoko earlier this month that reports of China’s alleged mistreatment of its Muslim minority are false.
In a report released in June, the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC) said that China’s systematic repression of ethnic Uighur Muslims “has caused little angst in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country.”
“The fact that China is Indonesia’s largest trading partner and second-largest investor adds to the reluctance among officials to voice criticism, but it is not the major factor in Indonesia’s muted response,” IPAC analyst Deka Anwar said.
The report said that Chinese diplomats have “gone the extra mile” to make sure that Indonesia’s two largest Islamic organizations, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah, remained silent.
China also arranged a junket in February for Muslim leaders and reporters to see the Uighurs’ living conditions in the “vocational training centers.”
The report alleges that “NU delegates apparently took their host’s claims at face value” because an NU cleric said after their return that they did not see any concentration or internment camps during the trip.
Muhyiddin Junaidi, head of the Indonesian Council of Ulema’s international department, who led the invited delegation, told a forum on Dec. 20 that the group was strictly monitored throughout the visit to three cities.
“We were under heavy surveillance and could not go anywhere other than what was planned in the itinerary. We asked to go to the mosque for Friday prayers and were taken at the last minute. We saw there were no young people performing prayers, only old men, because the young ones were at work,” he said.
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