Basuki, urged to take flight by friends and relatives, decided to take a gamble and stay, judging that ?the people who should leave are the rioters not us. This is my country. Why should I leave??
Since then he has had his mining business destroyed by government bureaucrats and, as a Christian, endured taunts that Indonesia, the world?s most populous Muslim nation, doesn?t need ?infidel? interlopers.
Yet, Basuki has done something that not long ago seemed impossible: He?s become a successful politician, confounding predictions that Indonesian voters, who are mostly Muslims of indigenous blood, would never support an ethnic Chinese Christian, a member of a small, highly vulnerable minority that plays a major role in Indonesian business and in many professions.
Basuki, who first entered politics in his home region of Belitung, an island in the Java Sea, and is now trying to repeat his success in Jakarta, thinks Indonesia is moving toward an ?Obama moment? ? a rupture with a long and often violent history of prejudice and resentment.
A vast, sprawling archipelago, Indonesia boasts extraordinary and potentially explosive ethnic and linguistic diversity. Its total population of about 240 million is comprised of more than 1,000 different ethnic groups and subgroups, the biggest of which is Javanese. Nearly all are classified as ?pribumi,? or ?sons of the soil,? a term coined during Dutch colonial rule to designate ?native Indonesians.?
Chinese Indonesians, despite roots in Indonesia that stretch back centuries, have often been regarded as alien intruders by this overwhelming ?pribumi? majority. A 2000 census, the last comprehensive survey, put the number of ethnic Chinese at just 1.7 million ? about 0.9 percent of the population ? but the census asked people to identify their own ethnic group, something that many Chinese would have been reluctant to do. Their real number is thought to be several times higher. About a third of Indonesia?s ethnic Chinese are reported to be Christian.
Challenging the norms
On a trip to the United States in 2008, Basuki visited Denver during the Democratic National Convention and marveled at the nomination of Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan who spent part of his boyhood in Jakarta, for president. Indonesia, he said, has been breaking down old barriers, too, and will one day elect a leader from a minority.
Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=21b42f87047c25f0b71f3896c277bee5
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