John McBeth in Jakarta and Dini Djalal in Ambon – Ambon has long been a tragedy waiting to happen. Ever since Indonesia became independent 50 years ago, a tradition of nonviolence, known as pela gandong, had kept a tenuous peace between Muslims and Christians. But beneath the veneer of religious tranquillity, migration from other parts of Indonesia had changed the demographic balance and awakened centuries-old enmities. The Moluccan island was ready to explode – and in mid-January it did.
Ironically, though, the spark may have been lit weeks before and 2,400 kilometres away in Ketapang, a crime-ridden nightclub district in the northern part of Jakarta.
On November 22, bloody religious riots in Ketapang claimed at least 14 lives. Moving to quell the unrest, Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso, a two-star general, ordered the removal of more than 200 suspected troublemakers – mostly Christians from Ambon. Three weeks later, in mid-December, they were shipped back to their birthplace in eastern Indonesia.
Tragically, police intelligence sources now say, Sutiyoso's well-intentioned move to reduce tensions in his own bailiwick may have inadvertently triggered the time bomb in Ambon. "The governor thought it would solve the problem," says a police intelligence officer in Jakarta who's familiar with events surrounding the deportation. "But he didn't realize what the consequences would be. The Ambonese who were sent back provoked trouble in what had been peaceful neighbourhoods." (After agreeing to an interview, Sutiyoso later said he was too busy to meet.)
By official counts, at least 180 people have been killed in Ambon since a January 19 street brawl between a Christian bus driver and a Muslim passenger escalated into some of the worst religious bloodshed in Indonesian history. Privately, police say the death toll could be over 1,000 – matching that of ethnic violence between Dayaks and Madurese in West Kalimantan in 1995.
Not only does the level of polarization in Ambon defy solution, but the violence there is stoking religious tensions in the bigger population centres of Java and Sulawesi. Thousands of people, most of them Muslims who had settled in Ambon, are returning to Sulawesi to escape the violence, raising fears that the trouble could next spread there.
Indeed, Ambon's crisis has major implications for communal relations across Indonesia, says Sidney Jones, director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch and an Indonesia specialist. In the Muslim community, she says, some preachers and politicians see in Ambon evidence that Islam is under siege by a Christian minority resentful of its declining influence. For their part, Indonesian Christians regard the bloodletting as another sign of their crumbling position in a Muslim-majority state.
That disturbing mix could feed into the campaign for the June general election. Many of the 48 political parties are relying on Islamic imagery to attract voters, in a way that was never allowed under former President Suharto. "I feel very pessimistic about relations between the two communities," says Father Jan van de Made, 62, who spent 30 years in the Moluccan islands before moving to Jakarta. "There's a lot of irresponsible talk which is firing up the people to dangerous levels."
Efforts by Muslim and Christian leaders to heal the widening religious rift have so far had little impact, largely because Islam has no central authority in Indonesia. Despite their genuine goodwill, Muslim figures such as Abdurrahman Wahid and Amien Rais have been powerless to prevent individual ulemas (Islamic preachers), as well as politicians and student groups, from calling for a holy war against Christians, who make up only 11 million of Indonesia's 203 million people.
Long-time observers agree that Ambon was never the haven of religious harmony portrayed by the government. When Indonesia won independence from the Dutch in 1949, Christian separatists in Ambon sought to break away from the new republic, forming their own Republic of the South Moluccas. In doing so, they left a legacy of bitterness by burning several Muslim villages – the same villages that have figured prominently in the current conflict.
The post-independence years saw an influx of devoutly Muslim migrants, mostly ethnic Butonese, Bugis and Makassarese from the island of Sulawesi. Aggressive and business-savvy, the Bugis took over Ambon's commercial life, and over time the new settlers ate away at Christian dominance. When an Ambonese Muslim became governor of the island in the early 1990s, Christians began to fear that their traditional place in the civil service and the police was also under threat.
Father van de Made recalls that his years in Ambon were punctuated by periods of high tension between Christians and Muslims, mostly over interreligious marriages and village boundary disputes. But he says that thanks to pela gandong – an unwritten creed of nonviolence, imported from the neighbouring islands of Haruku, Saparua and Nusa Laut – they never came to blows.
Others question whether pela gandong ever really worked during times of crisis. Today, it clearly is not – and it's difficult to imagine how peace will be restored. In often panicky scenes at Ambon's ports, more than 75,000 Bugis have flooded back to Sulawesi to avoid clashes between Ambonese Christian and Muslim mobs wielding spears and machetes. The fighting persists despite the presence of 6,000 police and troops. "It will take a generation before it can be solved because the atmosphere is now so poisonous," says Marcus Mietzner, a scholar at Australian National University who has studied the origins of the Ambon conflict. "They will have to separate the two groups as they did in Bosnia, otherwise it will be a mess."
Father van de Made, who saw his parish church in Jakarta vandalized during the Ketapang riots, doubts whether even that will work in Ambon. "In practical everyday life, you can't segregate people in such a small place. And sending them back to their home islands isn't really an option either. Frankly, I just can't see any solution."
Mietzner blames the rapid deterioration of the situation in Ambon on the erosion of central authority and, in particular, the failure of the armed forces to act more promptly. "When there were problems in 1994-95," he recalls, "the military would go in, take the troublemakers out by the truckload and give them a course in discipline. This time it didn't happen." In other trouble spots, the military has often allowed riots to run their course, then moved in when the momentum faltered. If that was the strategy in Ambon, it failed miserably.
Jones of Human Rights Watch and others say one of the worst mistakes was the early decision to send in an Army Strategic Reserve (Kostrad) battalion from Ujung Pandang, the capital of South Sulawesi. Given its origins in that strongly Muslim province, Christians were quickly convinced the unit was there to support the Muslims – and there is evidence it did just that. On the other side of the coin, however, the Christians who dominate the local police and army territorial units appear likewise to have sided with their religious brethren.
Indonesia's armed-forces commander, Gen. Wiranto, has since fired the Ambon police chief, a Javanese, and ordered the withdrawal of the Sulawesi troops. In addition to two other battalions and a 1,100-strong riot-intervention force already in Ambon, he has recently deployed a further 3,000 troops from the Surabaya-based 1st Marine Brigade and two Kostrad battalions from East and Central Java. Wiranto has also sent 18 of the army's top Ambonese officers to the island to shore up morale.
"We're exhausted," sighs a soldier at Ahuru, a recently razed village now divided into Muslim and Christian sectors. The troops, a mixture of Ambonese Christians and Javanese Muslims, stand in the narrow buffer zone, where stray poison-tipped arrows sometimes land. They watch houses burn in the valley beneath the village and keep a wary eye on gangs armed with spears and sickles.
Ahuru and other battlegrounds have become the source of legend. Stories abound of disembowelled pregnant women and mutilated priests, revving up fear and resentment and swelling the ranks of thousands of refugees already sheltering in mosques, churches and army posts. At the Al-Fatah mosque, a sanctuary for 300 terrified and homeless people, Muslim leader Mohamad Jusuf Ely talks of forgiveness, but in the same breath mutters: "I pray every day that those who burned my house will be punished."
Ely says Muslims in Java and Sumatra call him daily. At first they offered food and financial aid. Now they're promising "warriors" as well. With radical Muslims intensifying their protests over the central government's failure to control the situation, a South Jakarta mosque recently called on Muslims to sign up for jihad, or holy war. "Our brothers are being killed. Of course we're serious," says Eggi Sudjana, the hardline leader of the 600,000-strong Muslim Workers' Brotherhood Union.
Remarks like this are setting Indonesia's Christian minority on edge and eroding attendance at Van de Made's Catholic church – still under repair after a mob used wooden pews and a pile of Bibles in an attempt to set it alight in November. Not all Muslims think alike on the issue, however. "Sudjana just makes Islam look worse," says Mohamad Hikam, a researcher at the Indonesia Institute of Social Sciences. Hikam believes that Sudjana, a firebrand unionist and one-time ally of Prabowo Subianto, the now-disgraced commander of Indonesia's special forces, is seizing on the Ambon riots to win votes in the coming elections.
Many Indonesians blame the Ambon tragedy on a wider political conspiracy. "People were calling us from Java and Sumatra and saying there will be war," says Father Martin Liang of Ambon's Silo Protestant church. Indeed, across the bay from the provincial capital, the Muslim hamlet of Waylete was razed by Christians days before the riots began, fuelling tensions in the city. In neighbouring Hative Besar, also destroyed, the village's only Christian was warned there would be trouble and escaped in time.
Ambon Governor Saleh Latuconsina sees these incidents as evidence that provocateurs are behind the violence. "They want the trouble to spread to other areas," he says. (A Muslim aristocrat, Latuconsina took up his post last June, shortly after Suharto's resignation. Ambonese Christians argue that by appointing him to replace another member of his extended family, Jakarta was affirming its policy of sidelining Christians and keeping them out of local-government jobs.)
The riots in Ambon have strengthened the widely held conviction that the communal clashes erupting around the country are the work of either Suharto and his family and supporters, or disgruntled officers loyal to Lt.-Gen. Prabowo. All of these parties have denied the charges. But even Lt.-Gen. Bambang Yudhoyono, chief of staff for territorial affairs, has lent some credence to the idea of a plot. "Aside from local problems, it seems there is a network at the national level which is trying to create a chaotic situation," he told Tempo, a local newsweekly, in early March.
Muslim leader Wahid, who heads the Nahdlatul Ulama, an organization with 30 million members, has indirectly laid the blame for the Ambon riots on two men: Yorrys Raweyai, the Irianese-Chinese leader of a thugs-for-hire group called Pemuda Pancasila, and Maj.-Gen. Kivlan Zein, who was removed from his post as Kostrad chief of staff last year because of his close connections to Prabowo.
But in the absence of proof, Wahid's penchant for name games and other verbal antics is bringing his credibility into question. Kivlan, a rightist Muslim officer with links to Sudjana, the militant unionist, and other radical Islamic groups, recently confronted Wahid at his South Jakarta home, later dismissing him as a "verbal terrorist." And while police summoned Yorrys for questioning in the early days of the Ambon riots, they don't appear to have taken their investigation any further.
Some of the finger-pointing is understandable. Police sources say many of the thugs deported after the Ketapang riots came from three Ambonese gangs – two Christian and one mostly Muslim – operating in northern and western Jakarta.
Significantly, the gang members also serve as foot soldiers for Pemuda Pancasila, which has close ties to the police and special forces. Indeed, three ex-special forces soldiers were among the 180 people arrested at the time of the Ketapang riots. Two other figures are said by police sources to be prominent in Jakarta's crime-infested northern suburbs: Yapto Soelistyo Soeryosoemarno, another leading Pemuda Pancasila figure, and Hercules, an East Timorese who's described as having "one arm, one eye and no heart." Both are said to have long-established military connections.
Allegations that Suharto's supporters are behind the Ambon bloodshed and other outbreaks of unrest stem largely from the fact that Yorrys and Yapto, in particular, have been close to the former president's family. Pemuda Pancasila, a rag-tag militia who often sport orange and black fatigues, was frequently used by Suharto's regime when strong-arm tactics were called for – as in a 1996 attack on offices of the Indonesian Democratic Party, aimed at dislodging supporters of opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri. Jones of Human Rights Watch also draws ties between the leaders of the Ambonese gangs and Suharto family members.
Western intelligence specialists say many so-called black operations require surprisingly little planning if the right ingredients are in place. But the lack of any solid evidence so far makes it difficult to prove there's a conspiracy aimed at, for example, disrupting the June parliamentary elections.
But whether the violence in Ambon was premeditated or spontaneous, it reached the proportions it did only because the situation there was already explosive, says Jones. She writes in a lengthy mid-March report: "More than any other communal incident that has taken place around Indonesia, the civil war in Ambon has ripped apart the notion of Indonesia as a society tolerant of all faiths."