Inciting violence

Why are activists of the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) allowed time after time to get away with violence and incitement to violence? The banners that they reportedly displayed at the Hotel Indonesia roundabout on Sunday, March 18, are plain, straightforward incitements to murder. "We will behead communists" is palpably criminal. Why were no arrests made.

What these people mean of course is that they will kill anybody they believe to be a communist, irrespective of the evidence. It is a well-known fact that many of those slaughtered in the anti-communist (PKI) bloodbath in 1965-66 were simply deemed to be communists or had only the most tenuous connection with them. That period ought to have lessons for the present.

In any case this atavistic language of the FPI should be roundly condemned for what it is, a return to the darkest period of Indonesia's history when all political differences and scores were settled by violence. Indonesia's situation cries out for a moral voice that clearly and unequivocally opposes the use of violence and any incitement to it.

DAVID JARDINE

Jakarta