No, Indonesia’s electoral commission chairman Arief Budiman is not a brother of late Chinese-Indonesian political activist Soe Hok Gie
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on May 1, 2019 at 06:58
- Updated on May 1, 2019 at 06:59
- 2 min read
- By AFP Indonesia
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The claim was made in a number of Facebook posts, including here and here.
Below is a screenshot of one of the Facebook posts:
The image shows Budiman (left) posing with a person wearing a red jacket emblazoned with the logo of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P). The same logo can be seen in this official website of the party. The person pictured on the right has not been identified.
Translated to English, the text above the picture reads: “Arief Budiman (the KPU chairman) is a brother of Soe Hok Gie, the birth name of Arief Budiman is Soe Hok Djin..”
The text at the bottom of the image translates to English as: “An intruder and also an enemy of the state”.
The caption of the post translates to English as: “It is clear, right?..”
"Soe Hok Gie" refers to a Chinese-Indonesian political activist who died in the age of 26 in 1969. Soe Hok Gie's profile has been published by Indonesian news outlets, such as Merdeka here and Tirto here.
He did have an older brother named Arief Budiman, a retired sociologist and former political dissident, whose birth name is Soe Hok Djin. But this Arief Budiman is a different person from, and nearly twice as old as, the KPU chairman.
According to this report by Kumparan, Budiman, the retired sociologist, was 77 years old when he was interviewed in May 2018.
Below is a cropped photo of retired sociologist Budiman taken in 2018, as shown in the Kumparan report:
According to a profile of KPU chairman Arief Budiman published here on the KPU’s official website, he was born on March 2, 1974, meaning he is currently 45 years old.
Below is his photo on the commission’s official Facebook page:
Below is a side-by-side screenshot comparison of the two Budimans:
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