Grave of Ahmadi dug up in West Java

NATIONAL Fri, 03/04/2011 9:12 PM

Grave of Ahmadi dug up in West Java

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The remains of a deceased Ahmadiyah follower in Bandung, West Java, were found Thursday after his grave had allegedly been dug up shortly after his funeral.

“It happened [on Thursday]. It is true, the grave of [an Ahmadi] from the Buni Jaya chapter was dug up by unknown parties, and the corpse was just left there,” Ahmad Sulaeman from the Priangan Barat chapter of Jemaah Ahmadiyah Indonesia said Friday, as quoted by kompas.com.

Sulaeman said the remains were of an Ahmadi from Bogor named Ahmad Mulyadi, whose family had been from Buni Jaya, and thus requested he be buried there.

The remains had been brought from Bogor to Bandung for burial on Thursday.

After the funeral was finished at about 9.30 a.m, a group of people had come allegedly asking the cemetary keepers to dig up the grave again.

Priangan Barat Jemaah Ahmadiyah Indonesia coordinator said he deeply regretted the incident.

“… We hope the officers take legal action, especially because [this violates] the governor’s regulation. The regulation is said to set sanctions against people conducting acts of violence against Ahmadiyah followers,” Rafiq Ahmad said.

Under the regulation, Ahmadis are prohibited from conducting religious activities openly, and local residents are prohibited from carrying out acts of violence against them.

Copyright © 2008 The Jakarta Post - PT Bina Media Tenggara. All Rights Reserved
URL: www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/03/04/grave...java.html

Body of Ahmadiyah Follower Dug Up in Bandung

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Body of Ahmadiyah Follower Dug Up in Bandung

Antara & JG | March 04, 2011

An unidentified group of people has dug up the body of an Ahmadiyah follower in Bandung, West Java and left it abandoned in the graveyard.

The damaged tomb belonged to Mulyadi, 55, of Buni Jaya village who was buried on Thursday . Shortly after the burial, a group of men came and forced the gravedigger to take the body out of the tomb.

“It’s true that the tomb of our follower from Buni Jaya was dug out,” a spokesman for the Ahmadiyah congregation in Bandung, Ahmad Sulaeman said.

“He was from Bogor but his family lives in Buni Jaya and they wanted him to be buried there,” he added.

According to Ahmad, Mulyadi was buried at 9.30 a.m. on Thursday at Buni Jaya public cemetery. Half an hour later a group of men came and forced the grave digger to unearth the body and leave it in the grave yard. The family and a number of Ahmadiyah followers later took the body and buried it on the property of another Ahmadiyah follower.

A spokesman for the Indonesia Ahmadiyah Congregation (JAI), Firdaus Mubarik, told the Globe that the incident had dangerous implications.

“This is very dangerous because it shows that haters will do anything to attack Ahmadiyah,” he said, adding that he hoped the incident would not be repeated elsewhere.

“We will probably have to bury our followers on a special land, separate from the public cemetery. We already did it in East Lombok where the Ahmadiyah cemetery is side by side with a Christian cemetery,” Firdaus said.

The national secretary of Ahmadiyah Indonesia, Zafrullah Pontoh was at a loss for words when contacted by the Globe.

“I don’t know what else to say… It was a very bad thing, I just hope it won’t happen again,” he said.

Meanwhile, the coordinator of Bandung’s Ahmadiyah congregation, Rafiq, expressed regret for the incident.

“We are deeply troubled by this. We hope the police will catch the perpetrators and punish them because we consider this a violent act.”

Copyright 2010 The Jakarta Globe
URL: www.thejakartaglobe.com/home/body...bandung/426738

Ahmadi rights: No grounds for a burial

PAKISTAN BLOGS

Ahmadi rights: No grounds for a burial

by Aatekah Mir Khan
A senior sub-editor for the Lahore city pages of The Express Tribune
November 4 2010

The police were nice enough instead to act as an escort throughout the exhumation.

Politics is a dirty business, be it at any level. Add religion to it and it makes a messy mix.

On Sunday night, the body of an Ahmadi citizen was exhumed from a graveyard near Bhalwal, because the graveyard was a Muslim one.

The police harassed the family until they acquiesced to the demand.

There are only two Ahmadi families in that area, but they have lived there for decades. According to the brother of the deceased, their elders were also buried in the same graveyard. But this time around, the clerics in Sargodha decided that they did not want a graveyard of their faith ‘polluted’.

Religion is supposed to be something between you and God, even when you are alive. Thus, people who do not give the living that freedom are wrong, but to continue hounding a person based on their religion even when he is dead is detestable. But have we heard a single condemnation from any of the politicians or the religious leaders on the outrage? No. Why? Because commenting on anything that has to do with religion (if it is against what ‘they’ believe) is shunned like playing with fire. There is no way you can leave unscathed if you dare speak up.

As far as I know, the Quran doesn’t say anywhere that a Muslim is ordered – or even allowed – to disturb a dead man’s peace, even if he is not a Muslim-even if a non-Muslim is buried in a Muslim cemetery!

According to the police, they did so because they were afraid that unless they did what the clerics had asked (read: told) them to do, there would be a law and order situation. If you think it is strange that the police bend so easily to the whims of clerics, please don’t be. We live in a country where religion was infused into politics with such skill that even decades later, no one dares to spoil the fancy ‘finish’. If anything, everyone wants to add a cherry on top. The Hudood Ordinance and blasphemy laws are just two glaring examples of no-go-areas. If you need recent examples, then the unanimous condemnations of Nawaz Sharif – who ‘mistakenly’ called Ahmadis our brothers after the attack on their worship places in Lahore – and Nilofer Bakhtiar – for suggesting that there was nothing wrong with selling alcohol at TDCP motels – should help job your memory.

Just on Monday, there was a rally taken out by some religious parties at The Mall, which brought the city to a halt, Now usually, whenever there is a rally or a protest there, the police are willing to impose Section 144, but on Monday, they did not. The police were nice enough instead to act as an escort throughout. The reason? They did not want to be on the ‘wrong side’ of religious leaders. It’s fairly simple, really. Just like George W. Bush spelled it out: either you are with us or you are against us (and honey, you do not want to be against us). Why would they want to be? They can slap you with a fatwa and declare you worthy of being killed.

Keith Olbermann, an MSNBC anchor, wrote in August about the Ground Zero ‘mosque’ and appealed to Americans not to fall victim to “prejudice and religious intolerance and our greatest enemy: stupidity, exploited by rapacious politicians.” In the same column, he wrote how he interprets Pastor Martin Niemoller’s ‘Then they came’: “But Niemoller was not warning of the Holocaust. He was warning of the willingness of a seemingly rational society to condone the gradual stoking of enmity towards an ethnic or religious group, warning of the building-up of a collective pool of national fear and hate, warning of the moment in which the need to purge, outstrips even the parametres of the original scape-goating, when new victims are needed because a country has begun to run on a horrible fuel of hatred — magnified, amplified, multiplied, by politicians and zealots, within government and without…Niemoller was not warning of the holocaust. He was warning of the thousand steps before a holocaust became inevitable. If we are at just the first of those steps again — today, here — it is one step too close.”

URL: http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/2739/ahmadi-rights-no-grounds-for-a-burial/

No place for Ahmadi body in a Muslim graveyard

Pakistan Punjab

No place for Ahmadi body in a Muslim graveyard

November 2, 2010

Interred body of an Ahmedi exhumed from a Muslim graveyard after protests held against the burial.

BHALWAL: Interred body of an Ahmadi was exhumed here on Sunday from a Muslim graveyard after some local clerics led protest against the burial and the Sargodha tehsil police forced the dead man’s heirs to remove it from the graveyard.

Shehzad Waraich, who died on October 30, was a resident of Chak 24 North.

Shehzad’s brother told The Express Tribune that several members of the family including his grandparents and parents were buried in the same graveyard. He said there never had been any objection or disapproval.

He said that their families were the only two Ahmadi families in Bhalwal, a town with a population of only a few thousands. Chaks 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 and 24 have three government graveyards, shared by the residents of the area, he said.

He said that the people of his village, Chak 24 North, had not objected to his brother’s burial in the Chak 19 graveyard, so he had buried the body there. “Some of our elders are also buried there, we decided to bury him in the same graveyard,” he added. Waraich’s body was buried in the Chak 19 graveyard on the morning of October 30.

He said that on October 31, Sadar Division SHO Azhar Yaqoob and DSP Ghulam Murtaza came to their village along with other police officials and asked his family to remove the body of his brother from the Muslims graveyard of Chak 19.

“I told him that our elders were all buried in the graveyard. Neither the people of my village, nor of Chak 19 had raised any objection,” he said.

He said that the police told him that some local clerics in Sargodha had objected to the burial and in the interest of law and order, asked him to remove the body of his younger brother.

He said that the family, some relatives and the police then exhumed the body from the graveyard on Sunday.

“I don’t think that the police were forced to do this. The way I see it, the police forced us.”

Saleemul Din, an Ahmadi community spokesman condemned the police action. He said, “To this day, 30 Ahmadis’ bodies have been exhumed for similar reasons. The police do have no right to humiliate the dead from our community like this. Yet, they have been doing it since 1984.”

Sadar Division DSP Ghulam Murtaza said that some clerics had approached him and asked him to remove the body. He said that they had threatened him with protest movement against the police if the body of the Ahmadi man was not exhumed. In view of the sensitivity of the situation, he said, he did his best to resolve the matter peacefully by ordering the removal the body from the graveyard.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 2nd, 2010.

URL: http://tribune.com.pk/story/71177/no-place-for-ahmedi-body-in-a-muslim-graveyard/