Sharia Law: two gay men caned in Indonesia

June 18, 2017

"Two gay men were publicly caned in the conservative Indonesian province of Aceh on Tuesday, the first to be punished under Islamic laws introduced two years ago that outlawed gay sex. As the BBC's Rebecca Henschke reports, the case has deeply worried Aceh's gay community.

Salman (not his real name) joined the crowd of hundreds to watch the public caning.

He flinched as the convicted men, dressed in white gowns, stood on a stage murmuring prayers while a team of men dressed in hoods took turns to lash their backs with sticks.

The two men closed their eyes in pain while the crowd cheered.

"It's horrible, it's terrifying, it could happen to me," Salman said.

"I think now I should be more careful about how I behave. My partner is not in Aceh at the moment but I worry about my future."

Salman is Acehnese and stays here so that he can look after his elderly mother - leaving is not an option for now.

"There are lots of people in the gay community who are smart and have lots to contribute to Aceh but now they are scared and they have to hide their sexuality. Many others are leaving."

We were treated like animals

Gay rights activist Hartoyo travelled up from Jakarta for the caning.

Aceh is the only province in Muslim-majority Indonesia that practises Sharia law.

In 2007, he too was caught with his boyfriend in Aceh, when he was an aid worker helping to rebuild the province after the devastating 2005 tsunami.

"The police urinated on my head and beat the two of us up, we were treated like animals," he recalls.

"I was lucky that homosexuality wasn't officially a crime then," he says.

A day before the public caning, I went with Salman to the prison to meet one of the convicted men.

He was terrified, his hands and body shaking. He was nervous and said at first he didn't want help from the gay community:

"I have been deeply depressed in jail, I am trying desperately to be accepted here, I am trying to pull myself out of a dark hole."

What he wanted was to go home to his family and return to his old life, he says.

Before neighbourhood vigilantes broke down his rented room door, he was in his final years of a medical degree.

But returning to that life will be hard.

Aceh's Sharia code empowers local vigilantes to publicly identify and detain anyone suspected of violating the rules.

And that includes breaking and entering someone's house to catch people in their most private moments.

Mobile phone footage of the raid that circulated online shows the men naked and visibly distressed. One of them appears to call for help on his phone.

"Raids like that are allowed under our laws," says Illiza Sa'aduddin Djamal, the mayor of the provincial capital, Banda Aceh. "They were in a rented room."

"The neighbours were suspicious; they knew what was going on. But they needed to get proof."

In February last year, she wrote on her Instagram account that she was going to "flush" LGBT people out of Aceh, below a picture of her pointing a pistol.

"I want to save our next generation," she told me. "Imagine what it would be like if the whole world started liking the same gender."

"We don't hate them as people, what we hate is what they do."

Aceh is believed to be one of the first places Islam entered Indonesia and is often referred to as the "veranda of Mecca"."

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-40024204

So sad. Let's hope religion gets out of politics asap