14-20 max????? So Wrong!

[Justin24]

I dont intend to start a debate on the DP. But what would have happened if Christians were found guilty of doing the same?? They would most likely be executed. This Tees me off. At least life in Prison. I mean yes 3 Christians did kill people, and they received punishment by death, but Beheading is just as bad as these men did.

By IRWAN FIRDAUS

JAKARTA, Indonesia Mar 21, 2007 (AP)— Three Islamic militants were found guilty Wednesday of decapitating three Christian schoolgirls in Indonesia and dumping their bloodied heads in nearby villages, judges said. They were sentenced to between 14 and 20 years.

The alleged members of the al Qaida-linked Jemaah Islamiyah network left a handwritten note close to the bodies, vowing more killings to avenge the deaths of Muslims in earlier sectarian violence on Sulawesi island.

"Wanted 100 more heads," said Judge Lilik Mulyadi, reciting the letter's text. "Blood must be paid with blood, lives with lives, heads with heads."

Hasanuddin, 34, who goes by a single name, was sentenced to 20 years for masterminding the 2005 attack, and co-conspirators Lilik Purnomo, 28, and Irwanto Irano, 29, each got 14 years, he said.

Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, has been hit by a string of terrorist attacks in recent years targeting local Christians and nightclubs, restaurants and foreign embassies.

But the grisly nature of the beheadings, which occurred as the children were cutting through a cocoa plantation on their way to school, gave fresh impetus to the country's war on terrorism and was followed by scores of arrests.

The three militants had faced a maximum penalty of death by firing squad, but judges ruled that they deserved some leniency for cooperating with authorities, confessing and showing remorse.

Siregar told the Central Jakarta District Court that Hasanuddin ordered the slayings and helped dumped their girls' heads in three Christian-dominated villages. Purnomo and Irano were found guilty of "ambushing and beheading" the teens, he said.

It was not immediately clear if the three convicts would appeal.

More than 90 percent of Indonesia's 220 million people are Muslims, but Central Sulawesi province the scene of religious clashes that left at least 1,000 people dead from 1998 to 2002 has a roughly equal number of Muslims and Christians.

A peace agreement ended the worst of the violence, but tensions flared after the 2005 beheadings and again in September 2006, after the execution of three Roman Catholic militants convicted of leading a 2000 attack on an Islamic school that killed up to 70 people.

In January, 15 alleged Islamic militants were killed in a gunbattle in Sulawesi. Several others were arrested, including three others who have confessed to taking part in the beheadings but have yet to be brought to trial.


Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

 

[BVS]

You do realize this is Indonesia, right?

 

[Justin24]

Yes I know that.

 

[CTU2fan]

So they confessed in order to avoid the DP. Happens here all the time.

Ask yourself this, if a Muslim did this here would they likely face a greater or lesser penalty than a Christian? We know already that the average sentence varies in the US based on race, I'm sure it would be the same for a Muslim vs. a Christian.

 

[Justin24]

So they confessed in order to avoid the DP. Happens here all the time.

Ask yourself this, if a Muslim did this here would they likely face a greater or lesser penalty than a Christian? We know already that the average sentence varies in the US based on race, I'm sure it would be the same for a Muslim vs. a Christian.

Well I don't know. The hostility between Christians and Muslims in Indonesia is pretty high.

 

[sulawesigirl4]

Well I don't know. The hostility between Christians and Muslims in Indonesia is pretty high.

And a lot of the hostility actually has much deeper roots than religion. In my experience (having actually lived in Central Sulawesi for 13 odd years), people use religion as an excuse to harass people who are of a different ethnic group, tribe or culture. So you'll have Christians out murdering Muslims, Muslims killing Christians, and of course each side has to "retaliate" in order to exact vengeance and "save face", etc.

In the area of Kalimantan (another part of Indonesia) where I went to high school, in the time during the economic crash and the political upheaval of the Suharto regime failure, people were out taking heads and reverting to this kind of "group" retaliation. On the surface you would have thought that it must be because of their religion, but in actuality, it had more to do with land rights. In the 70s and 80s the government relocated thousands of settlers from the over-crowded island of Java to the "primitive" backwaters of the other islands. Cuz, you know...those jungle people weren't using the land. Well, you can imagine what happens when tensions over new people coming in and settling on your land festers under a military iron fist where you can't seek justice. Once the military force is gone, all hell breaks loose. Anyways, not to say this was the case in this story, but just keep in mind that most things are way more complicated than you'll know from reading a short news article.

But what would have happened if Christians were found guilty of doing the same?? They would most likely be executed.

As to how the judicial system would have treated this case were the perpetrators, I would question your basis for making the assumption that it would have been different. Do you have any proof to back it up? I can't say either way, but I do know that freedom of religion to Protestants, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Catholics as written in the Constitution. How any individual judge's personal beliefs affect his or her rulings is another matter, but again, I don't think you can just make the assumption you have without more investigation.

 

[yolland]

In the area of Kalimantan (another part of Indonesia) where I went to high school, in the time during the economic crash and the political upheaval of the Suharto regime failure, people were out taking heads and reverting to this kind of "group" retaliation. On the surface you would have thought that it must be because of their religion, but in actuality, it had more to do with land rights. In the 70s and 80s the government relocated thousands of settlers from the over-crowded island of Java to the "primitive" backwaters of the other islands. Cuz, you know...those jungle people weren't using the land. Well, you can imagine what happens when tensions over new people coming in and settling on your land festers under a military iron fist where you can't seek justice. Once the military force is gone, all hell breaks loose. Anyways, not to say this was the case in this story, but just keep in mind that most things are way more complicated than you'll know from reading a short news article.

I haven't followed Indonesian politics closely since grad school, but I do recall that Poso, the district of Central Sulawesi where these attacks (as well as the 2000 rioting briefly mentioned in the article) took place, was indeed one of the areas made to absorb large numbers of relocated Javanese under Suharto's transmigrasi policy...with attendant environmental damage above and beyond the socioeconomic upheavals--major roads cut through the jungles, extensive deforestation to make room for new settlements (which often failed anyway, as the migrants lacked farming skills, or proper knowledge of how to farm in thin jungle soils without causing massive erosion and overgrazing), etc. While most scholars don't believe transmigrasi was intended to achieve demographic re-engineering, religious or otherwise, but rather was a continuation of earlier Dutch policies of forced relocation to promote 'balanced population density' and 'efficient resource allocation', nonetheless, in practice it's certainly had the effect of creating religious-sectarian conflicts--or as you say, land-rights conflicts played out along those lines.

It is true that human rights groups have frequently criticized militant trials--across the board--in Central Sulawesi as often unfair and imbalanced. My understanding is that corruption among judges is not per se considered to be a significant problem, but rather the frequency with which judges and juries are intimidated, harassed and threatened by other militants on both sides. I don't know much about this particular case, however.

I don't really see the 2000 massacre for which those 3 Catholic men were executed as making a good comparison here, though, Justin--those men were convicted of leading the killing of 70 Muslim civilians (actually this is the first time I've seen a figure below 100 quoted for that, but whatever) who'd taken refuge from the rioting in a school building, as well as of being crucially involved in other incidents from that riot, which killed about 200 people... the single deadliest episode in the Poso conflict's history. And those were thoroughly gory killings too--the civilians hiding in the school were hacked up alive with blunt instruments and dumped in the river. So, as far as it goes, it makes sense that they'd receive a harsher sentence.

 

[deep]

I dont intend to start a debate on the DP. But what would have happened if Christians were found guilty of doing the same?? They would most likely be executed. This Tees me off. At least life in Prison. I mean yes 3 Christians did kill people, and they received punishment by death, but Beheading is just as bad as these men did.

How bad is it to conspire to murder a whole family so you can rape a 14 year old girl?

so murder the whole family, grandparents, parents and children, repeatedly rape a 14 year old girl
then murder her

then burn her body

then cover it up

and lie about it

 

[Angela Harlem]

There's a gross imbalance in Indonesia's 'Justice System', Justin. It's worse than the US. Hard to stomach, huh.