t was the young who came first to Indonesia’s public caning of gay men. They arrived on motorbikes and on foot, from nearby boarding houses and two universities, some skipping class and the others using up their holidays. An announcement was made barring children under 18, but some stayed anyway, reluctant to break up a family outing.
By 10am on Tuesday, a 1,000-strong crowd had congealed at the Syuhada mosque plaza in Banda Aceh. As someone sang a stirring Qur’anic hymn to inaugurate the ceremony, a verse about how God created man and woman in couples, young men were perched in the trees, on trucks, and all the balconies across the street. Girls huddled between jasmine bushes.
“It’s a lesson for us, and it’s a lesson near us,” said Ratna, 20, a student at Syiah Kuala University, who was one of the first to arrive. She, like more than a dozen young people interviewed by the Guardian, doesn’t know a single gay person and believes homosexuality is a crime.
Ten people were flogged that day on a stage by a masked, gloved man in mud-brown robes with cartoonish eye-holes and a yellow-string halo. Four of them were women, lashed for adultery.
But the most severely punished were the two young gay men, aged 20 and 23, who were filmed, apparently naked, together in March by Islamic vigilantes. They were the ones who lured the unusually large and fierce crowd.
What transpired in Aceh this week is, on one level, the logical extension of sharia in an unruly region that has long been left to its own devices. But many believe that it is more sinister than that: that Aceh’s visible conservatism is an emblem of rising Islamism across Indonesia, where a toxic mix of religion and political opportunism has been percolating for some time.
Earlier this month, the Christian governor of Jakarta, Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaha Purnama, was jailed for blasphemy in a ruling that shocked many in the country and outside – including near neighbour and regional ally Australia.
