T

he congregation of the Indonesian Christian Church (GKI) Yasmin in Taman Yasmin, Bogor, West Java, demanded on Friday that the city administration abide by the law and open the church for services.

“We are against the relocation plan offered by the Bogor administration because it contravenes the law,” church spokesman Bona Sigalingging told The Jakarta Post. “The Supreme Court has ordered the reopening of our church.”

He was responding to a statement made by Ade Sarip Hidayat, administrative affairs assistant to the Bogor mayor, about the relocation plan.

Ade Sarip told the Post on Friday that the administration had made several offers to GKI Yasmin to relocate the church, citing pressures from local residents as the reason. The first option was to move the church to a plot of land on Jl. Suryakencana; the second was to offer the churchgoers Harmoni building, for which the rental fees would be borne by the administration; and the last option was to move the church to a 1,000-square-meter plot of land on Jl. Semeru.

“All of the options have been rejected by the church,” he said. “We also offered another solution in which a mosque would be built adjacent to the church, but the church has dismissed that, too.”

According to Bona, however, the administration had never made the offers to the churchgoers.

“We didn’t know anything about those offers; we only found out about them from the media. But the point is, if the solution is relocation to anywhere, anytime, we can’t accept it because we consider it to be illegal, violating the Supreme Court’s ruling and the ombudsman’s recommendations,” Bona said.

The dispute over the church building began in 2001, when the congregation purchased land in Curug Mekar, West Bogor.

Despite obtaining a building permit from the Bogor administration in 2005, Mayor Diani Budiarto later revoked GKI Yasmin’s
permit in 2008, saying the church forged documents to gain it, which the caretakers have always strenuously denied.

Diani ignored a Supreme Court ruling ordering the reopening of the church and a recommendation from the National Ombudsman Commission saying that members of the GKI Yasmin congregation should be allowed to perform religious practices in their own church.

In February, the House of Representatives also ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling and told the churchgoers to try to resolve the dispute with the local administration. The House also mandated the central government to step in and provide room for mediation of the conflict.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s Advisory Council and the National Defense Council (Wantannas) brokered a month’s negotiations between the disputing parties, but Diani skipped all meetings.

Diani sent an official letter to be read during the last meeting on Wednesday which, according to Wantannas’ secretary-general, Lt. Gen. Junianto Haroen, was in line with the council’s idea of building a mosque next to the church as a solution and, therefore, concluded that the dispute was nearly settled.

The next day, however, the administration rejected the mosque idea, saying that the offer they had made to GKI Yasmin churchgoers and local residents was obsolete.

University of Indonesia (UI) social science and politics professor, Otho Hernowo Hadi, said Thursday that Diani had only exacerbated tensions between his administration and GKI Yasmin by his absence at the mediation sessions.

“It is the responsibility of officials like Diani to lead mediation whenever there are social tensions. Diani’s absence has also reduced the public’s faith in the law.”