Indonesia has recently been making consistent efforts to improve its international image and become more tourism friendly. For some years, the national carrier Garuda was banned from European airspace, and a spate of crashes highlighted the lax regulation of the host of start-up budget carriers. That has all now changed.

 

But the LGBT community has again come up against state censorship in the predominantly Muslim country. (The island of Bali of course practises its own form of the Hindu religion).

 

On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 10:39 PM, an LGBT human rights defender in Indonesia sent the following message to the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission: "The ILGHRC website has been banned by Telkomsel and IM2, mobile phone operators, in Indonesia. According to a spokesperson for the internet service provider IM2, the order came from the Minister of Communication and Information who … banned [the website] due to it's content which, they determined contains pornography."

 

Subsequently, Indonesian LGBT activists who tried to access the website reported that they had received the following message: Site inaccessible. The site you wish to open cannot be accessed.

 

http://www.iglhrc.or...lease/1481.html

 

Since 2010, the Communications and Information Ministry has ordered local service providers to block access to pornographic websites. So far, more than 983,000 alleged porn sites have been banned.

 

http://sg.news.yahoo...-055004454.html

 

Having just looked at the ILGHRC website, I defy anyone to define any of its contents as pornographic.

Which country do you think is more backwards? Indonesia or Malaysia?

 

I can't really comment as while I have plenty of experience in Malaysia and lots of Malaysian friends, I haven't spent any significant time in Indonesia or with Indonesians.