“Call me BTP.”
Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama, freed from prison on 24 January, has asked his supporters to call him just by his initials. For many, this is a symbol of the former Jakarta governor’s attempt to put the past behind him.
“I leave this place with the hope that you call me BTP and not Ahok,” he wrote in a two-page handwritten letter that was published 17 January, a week before he left the Mako Brimob mobile police detention center in Depok, a city 20km south of Jakarta. He’d served a two-year sentence after being found guilty of blasphemy for defaming the Islamic holy book, the Quran.
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