The Verse Edited Into a Riot
A deceptively edited video of Jakarta's Christian governor spread across Indonesian social media in 2016, helping to trigger some of the largest protests in the country's history. It ended with the governor jailed for blasphemy — and, later, with the man who altered the clip convicted himself.
In September 2016, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, the ethnic-Chinese Christian governor of Jakarta known as Ahok, spoke to residents of the Thousand Islands regency during a re-election campaign. In his remarks he referred to a verse of the Quran, Al-Maidah 51, which some interpret as barring Muslims from choosing a non-Muslim leader, and warned that people were using it against him for political ends.
A short clip of that speech, uploaded to Facebook, changed the meaning of what he said. The version that spread online omitted a key word, so that Ahok appeared to be calling the Quran itself deceptive rather than describing how the verse was being deployed against him. According to BenarNews, the original recording ran one hour and 48 minutes; the clip that circulated lasted about 30 seconds.
A clip that moved crowds
The edited video drew hundreds of thousands of people into the streets of Jakarta. On 4 November 2016, tens of thousands — by some accounts up to 200,000 — rallied to demand Ahok's arrest, a protest that turned violent that night, according to Newsweek. A second, larger demonstration on 2 December 2016, known as the “212” rally, drew crowds estimated in the hundreds of thousands and became one of the largest religious gatherings the country had seen.
Islamist groups leading the protests demanded that Ahok be prosecuted and removed from office. He denied insulting Islam but apologized for the comments. In April 2017 he lost his bid for a full term to a Muslim rival, Anies Baswedan, according to Al Jazeera.
Two years for blasphemy
On 9 May 2017, a panel of judges at the North Jakarta District Court found Ahok guilty of blasphemy and sentenced him to two years in prison. The court said he had been “found to have legitimately and convincingly conducted a criminal act of blasphemy,” NBC News reported. The sentence was heavier than the outcome prosecutors had sought, and human-rights groups called it a setback for religious tolerance in the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation.
The case rested heavily on the online version of the speech. Reporting on the trial noted that the judges considered the edited clip that had provoked the public uproar rather than the full recording, in which Ahok warned residents about people misusing the verse for political gain.
The editor in the dock
The man who posted the clip did not escape the courts. Buni Yani, a university lecturer, was charged over the video and, on 14 November 2017, convicted by the Bandung District Court in West Java of violating Indonesia's Information and Electronic Transactions Law. He was sentenced to one year and six months, BenarNews reported. Prosecutors said his transcript of the speech had dropped words, altering electronic information belonging to the Jakarta provincial government. Buni denied wrongdoing and appealed.
In 2018 the Supreme Court rejected his appeal, upholding the conviction, according to Coconuts. By then the political landscape had already shifted: an incumbent governor had been removed and jailed, and a single altered clip had shown how quickly a doctored recording could travel from a phone to the street.