Seth Mydans, Ambon – The most frightening sound is the wild banging of stones on metal light poles, a ringing crescendo of panic that begins nobody-knows-where and spreads in moments around this violent, broken seaside town.
It is an early warning system that there is trouble again in Ambon – or that once again someone has gone mad with fear, terrified by the wind in the palm trees or by the barking of dogs or simply by the silence of the empty streets.
"It's frightening but also it's crazy," said Umelto Labetubun, 25, an architecture student. "Everyone grabs rocks and starts banging, even old men. Everyone is running from their houses looking for a safer place. You call your friend on the other side of town and he's hearing it too."
In their separate neighborhoods, segregated by fear, Muslims and Christians hear the sound and run for their swords and spears and guns and homemade bombs. By the end of the day, somebody will surely be dead.
In the last 12 months as many as 2,000 people have been killed in what has become an unstoppable surge of religious warfare here in the islands of Maluku Province, the lovely archipelago once known as the Spice Islands.
This is Indonesia's nightmare: freed from the controlling grip of its former dictator, society descends into chaos as religious and social hatreds boil to the surface, beyond the reach of the central government or security forces.
The fear is that the violence in places like Ambon will spread. Already there are copycat clashes in the resort island of Lombok, attacks on churches in Jogjakarta and rallies in the capital, Jakarta, where tens of thousands of people, enraged by exaggerated accounts, shout their readiness to die in a Muslim holy war.
In Indonesia, still reeling from the carnage in East Timor, chaos is a political tool, and most outbreaks of violence seem to have been either set off or fueled by provocateurs.
Most people interviewed here in Ambon are convinced that someone – political schemers, disaffected soldiers, religious extremists, corrupt business interests, perhaps all of these – has provoked their war and is determined to keep it alive.
"This is a political game, to create a conflict in a small area," said a Roman Catholic social worker, the Rev. Jack Manuputty. "Both of us, Muslims and Christians, are in a trap. The question is who set the trap for us." Whenever the violence dies down, he said, there always seems to be a new incident, a new provocation, and more mosques and churches and villages are burned.
As if in a confessional, the general heading a regional command near here, Maj. Gen. Agus Wirahadikusumah, told reporters in January: "All the violence happening in our country is part of a political game being played by our political elite in the central government. And whether we realize it or not, we have been forced to become provocateurs to destroy our national unity."
The future course of the country may be decided by a struggle between the new democratizing impulse of President Abdurrahman Wahid and the forces of chaos that seek an advantage in provoking the religious, social and separatist tensions that have now risen dangerously to the surface across Indonesia.
For 32 years under Suharto, the former president, sheer force was used to repress these differences in a vast nation of 13,000 islands that is still roiled by primitive hatreds. Society lost its ability to confront and resolve its differences in a peaceful way.
"Under Suharto we went too long without a fire," said one Christian resident of Ambon. "If there had been even a little flame we could have put it out and learned from the experience. We don't know how to solve problems now."
In this Indonesian nightmare, the small city of Ambon, once home to 350,000 people, has torn itself apart, with Muslims and Christians retreating into guarded enclaves served by separate hospitals, schools, banks, markets, harbors and government services.
Separating the enclaves are burned-out no man's lands patrolled by soldiers and sometimes also infested by snipers. "If a Muslim crosses to the Christian area and they know he is a Muslim they will kill him," said Renaldo Gultom, a Muslim who distributes food to refugees. "It's the same for Christians crossing. That's why we are all frightened."
People who return to Ambon from trips divide themselves by religion at the airport and head for their different enclaves. They take separate speedboats across the choppy bay into town, avoiding the airport road that passes dangerously through both Muslim and Christian villages.
Reporters for rival newspapers, once close colleagues, now meet only occasionally at events like a recent visit of the president. "When we see them, we tell them, 'Hey, why don't you get some correct information?"' said Grace Pelupessy, a 24-year-old reporter for the Christian newspaper Siwalima. Yes, she said, she once had plenty of Muslim friends. "I don't talk to them any more," she said.
Mr. Suharto's legacy can be seen in the abuses of a brutal, corrupt and poorly trained military that has operated for decades in powerful local fiefs. Many local commanders reported directly to the president, only loosely answering to the chain of command.
Now, in defense of their power and economic interests, and perhaps in the service of destructive political forces in Jakarta, they are seen by people here as a cause rather than a solution of the violence. As in in East Timor last year, some soldiers appear to have taken sides. Firefights have been reported between soldiers who support the Muslims and elements of the police who support the Christians.
The new military commander here, an outsider to the region, conceded in January that some of his men had been involved in raids on Christian villages. But he said nothing about taking any action against them.
If Ambon is a template for possible chaos in Indonesia, the actions of the central government are not encouraging. Both President Wahid and Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri have paid recent visits to Ambon. They pleaded for peace, then left to attend to other matters. Their visits seem to have had absolutely no effect on the violence.
The president's supporters offer a curious defense: helplessness. The problems in Ambon, they say, are too complex and deep-rooted to be addressed in the short term in any effective way.
The complex roots of Ambon's warfare – like the roots of many of Indonesia's conflicts – go back to precolonial times, more than 400 years ago, when the Dutch, the British and the Portuguese competed for the region's rich trade in nutmeg and cloves.
They brought Christianity where Arab traders earlier brought Islam. The Spice Islands became the most Christian of Indonesia's regions, about equally divided between the faiths. In the 1970's, an influx of Muslim traders began to tip the balance of the religious communities here, bringing new frictions that were easy to exploit.
The violence that has spread through the islands in the last year, driving 100,000 or more people from their homes, had a strangely specific origin: a traffic dispute on January 19, 1999, in which a Muslim minibus driver argued with a Christian passenger.
Seemingly within moments, according to one witness, a Dutch linguist, columns of smoke rose from at least three widely separated places as people began to burn buildings. "All these fires and smoke started at the same time, so it was clearly orchestrated," said the linguist, Albert C. Remijsen. "Now a year has passed and the logic of fighting is accepted by everyone: men guarding at night, people making weapons, everybody being determined to stick it out. Religion is not just religion here. It is a thing of social identity. The Christians do not want to give in and the Muslims do not want to give in."
Ambon today is hostage to rumors and false reports. Unverified and exaggerated accounts are repeated in the national press, fueling passions around this nation of 210 million, where nearly 90 percent of the people are Muslim.
Few people here have any understanding of healthy political or social competition. For some, democracy means chaos and killing. "You have to be careful in Ambon because there is so much democracy here," said Ali Bintubaso, a Muslim construction worker. "People say they want justice for everything. It is all the problem of democracy." In Ambon, both sides insist that they fight only in self-defense.
Asked about well-documented Christian attacks on Muslim villages, Ambon's most prominent Protestant leader, the Rev. Sammy P. Titaley, said: "Nah, that's just people reacting. People are very, very angry and so they burn Muslim houses."
When a government official asked him what could be done to end the violence, he said, "I told him, 'Better you ask the Muslims.'" Even if the fighting were to stop today, the hatreds and brutality that have taken root over the last year may take generations to heal.
"Everyone has become hard," said Mr. Labetubun, the architecture student. "Even girls don't play with dolls any more; they play with guns. In the future, when we have disputes, we will solve them with guns. All of us in Ambon have experience now in defending ourselves in a hard way. Even me, I am sorry to say, I can tell you now, that's the sound of an M-16, that's the sound of an AK-47."
Not long ago, aid groups tried to foster peace by paying for a television commercial that showed two boys, a Christian named Robert and a Muslim named Hassan. "Why are the grown-ups doing this?" the boys ask each other. "Why can't we be friends again?" But instead of taking the message to heart, fighters on both sides have adopted the names as symbols of hatred. Muslims now arm themselves against the Roberts and Christians go hunting for Hassans to kill.
In a city flooded with hate, the Rev. Agus Ulahayanan, a leading Roman Catholic priest, said he now struggled with the most difficult of questions: "Is God still there?" "People have become hopeless and they don't want to listen to any kind of preaching any more," he said. "What does it mean to tell them to love their enemies when people are trying to kill them and burn down their homes? They say, 'Ah, all of that is just lies.' Even my own sister demonstrates against me. They say, 'Lies! It is not relevant!' My sister says the same thing. After her house was burned down she joined a demonstration in front of my church."
Sitting in a dim hotel lobby, with the 10pm curfew approaching, Father Agus spoke of the despair that seems to have driven so many people into religious warfare, beyond the reach of any real religion. "No one can stop them any more," he said. "A boy goes and burns down a house and he comes to me and says proudly, 'I burned down a house.' And already for him the burden is lifted from the frustration and depression. There is nothing left for me to say to him."