Vaudine England, Jakarta – Troops in the Maluku Islands are to be replaced because they are taking sides in the sectarian strife there, military spokesmen said yesterday as a night curfew was imposed. The action came a day after the declaration of a state of civil emergency in Maluku – one step short of martial law.
Some 1,200 of the 10,200 troops there will be replaced. Air Vice-Marshal Graito Usodo said they "have been there too long [and] may have become involved emotionally". Brigadier-General Tono Suratman said: "There are some rogue elements ... that are not acting professionally. They are taking sides."
The state of emergency allows the imposition of curfews, the setting up of blockades and indefinite detention. But gunfire and bomb blasts echoed across the Maluku provincial capital, Ambon, yesterday despite Monday's declaration. At least one more person was killed.
More than 100 died in a Muslim attack on a Christian village in Halmahera nine days ago. At least 3,000 people of both faiths have been killed since the fighting started in January last year.
Maluku's new military chief, Colonel Made Yassa, a Hindu, whose religious neutrality might help, has given all combatants until Saturday to surrender their weapons "or else they will be forced to hand them in". Missing soldiers must also report to barracks by then.
On Monday the United States urged the Indonesian Government to stop the violence in the Malukus, saying the security forces were either unable or unwilling to act. But Foreign Minister Alwi Shihab said: "We are still able to handle the ongoing communal bloodshed in Maluku. We will not ask for military help from foreign countries."
In Ambon, in the south of the Malukus, aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said there was "complete chaos and breakdown of law and order", which was causing a serious shortage of medical supplies to treat the hundreds of wounded, most of them young men hit by gunfire. It wants humanitarian corridors to be opened so that food and medicine can reach encircled victims.
On Halmahera, in the north, where far fewer observers have been able to witness events, church sources say the situation is much worse than in Ambon. The hospital in Halmahera's capital, Tobelo, cannot cope with the number of wounded and the Indonesian navy is now evacuating patients to Manado, the capital of the neighbouring North Sulawesi province.
The recent arrival in strength of groups of Muslim Laskar Jihad (holy war) fighters has altered the balance of forces, perhaps irrevocably, church workers say. Reports from Ternate, just south of Halmahera, said that jihad fighters there were able to move freely around town.
A succession of Christian areas have been overrun across Halmahera. "The pressure on Tobelo is now intense," a Manado-based church source said. "Thousands of Chrstians with nowhere to go."
In Ambon, 34,000 people in 81 camps have now been cut off by the fighting and have been without relief supplies for several days. An MSF office in Ambon, which had served both the warring communities there, has been torched. The agency said medical supplies would be exhausted "within days" unless the main drug warehouse in the city could be reached.
A Christian crisis centre in Ambon has listed several villages under immediate threat of attack from jihad fighters and where a lack of troops means resistance depends on "voluntary Christian fighters". "It is crucial for them to hold out," the centre said. It said a ship on which Christians hope to be evacuated was waiting in Tual in the Kei Islands to the south but "doesn't dare to set sail for Ambon" at this stage.