JAKARTA — Almost as if on cue, the first issue of Playboy Magazine to be published in predominantly Muslim Indonesia has resulted in charges of indecency being leveled against that country’s editor-in-chief and first centerfold.Kartika Gunawan may have run afoul of her nations decency laws by appearing in lingerie for the premier edition, released in April.
Police have proclaimed that Gunawan and Erwin Arnada are suspects in breaking an article of the country’s criminal decency standards. If they are, each will face two years and eight months of prison time, if found guilty.
The publication anticipated resistance and encountered it when it first announced that it would publish an Indonesian based version of the popular softcore skin mag, and relocated its publishing offices from the capital city of Jakarta to the island of Bali, which is more tolerant.
Currently, a small but determined bloc of hard-line Islamic members of parliament are determined to ban art, literature, and culture which they deem offensive or erotic. Playboy, naturally, qualifies. As Indonesian law stands now, mere declaration that someone is a suspect is a step in the formal process of investigating a crime and indicates that the police believe there is enough evidence to build a case.
Although she confesses to being worried, Gunawan says she has the “full support” of her family and believes that what she did was legal. “I am not sorry, because every decision I made was well considered,” she told reporters recently, after having been interviewed by police on Thursday. “I was not trying to make a sensation, many more people posed more vulgar than I did.”
In addition to her work for Playboy, Gunawan has worked on number of soap operas, but had never done any modeling.
The Indonesian version of the magazine is exceptionally tame by American standards, but still managed to attract violent protests when its 100,000 copies were released. A group calling itself the Islamic Defenders’ Front threatened to take its history of nightclub violence into the publishing world. In April the group claimed responsibility for stoning the Playboy office. Nervous advertisers are yanking the ads.
