Jakarta – A Christian crisis group in the beleaguered eastern Indonesian city of Ambon said Friday that troops were withdrawn from a Christian village in the city before it was attacked by thousands of Muslims.
Troops in the village of Waai in Ambon, the capital of the Maluku islands, on Thursday were withdrawn despite a protest by Maluku governor Saleh Latuconsina, the group said in a fax received here.
"The governor protested, but in vain. At the very start of the attack the villagers called in the help of the military at Suli – to the south – but they said they had not been ordered to go to Waai, so they could not help," the fax said.
It added that at the time of the attack a promotion ceremony for Maluku military commander Brigadier General I Made Yasa, was underway. "The number of casualties in Waai is unknown," the report said. But it said at least 100,000 Christians in Ambon now needed "immediate evacuation" because they were in grave danger, and that more refugees were starving due to a lack of food.
Reports from Ambon Thursday said that troops were sighted among the thousands of attackers who descended on Waai from three sides, forcing the villagers to flee into the woods to the west and to the seaside, where some swam and others managed to take speedboats to safety. The report said that the sending of two fresh battalions of troops would be fruitless, unless they were properly positioned.
The crisis center report was received as the Roman Catholic bishop of Ambon, Monseigneur Petrus Canissius Mandagi arrived in Jakarta en route to Geneva to appeal to the UN Human Rights Commission for intervention in the bloody Muslim-Christian conflict in the Malukus.
Some 4,000 people – both Muslim and Christian – have died in the 18 months of fighting there since the violence first erupted in January of 1999, and more than half a million refugees have been driven from their homes.
Accompanied by the chairman of the Protestant church in the Malukus, Mandagi told AFP he was set to leave this weekend for Switzerland, and expected to be joined by a Muslim representative from the islands.
But Indonesian Foreign Minister Alwi Shihab on Friday summoned the Jakarta diplomatic corps and told them that Jakarta was "strongly opposed" to any outside intervention in the islands, otherwise known as the Spice Islands, despite the continued bloodshed there.
Instead, Shihab said, foreign governments should support Jakarta's own efforts to solve the problem. Shihab's summons to the diplomats came after the European parliament called in a resolution in Strasbourg Thursday for intervention.