Chris McCall in Tentena, Central Sulawesi – With guns that look like cut-out toys, a Christian army is fighting a war to hold on to its ancestral lands. It is based in Tentena, a beautiful lakeside town that visitors to Indonesia once flocked to.
This is Sulawesi's troubled Poso district. The Muslims who live down on the coast consider a trip to Tentena a one-way ticket to death. "Don't go to Tentena," they urge you, their voices trembling with fear.
They have good reason. Last year, more than 300 people were killed in savage bloodletting in Poso, most of them Muslims, many beheaded. At that time, the Christians thought they had won. Now the war is back and plenty have been killed again on both sides, more than a dozen in the last month.
In Tentena, boys as young as 16 walk around town with weapons welded together from bits of piping and spare wood. No one stops them. Jakarta's writ barely runs here. At night, dozens armed with these crude but deadly weapons man roadblocks almost to the coast, to the outskirts of Poso town, where Christian territory ends and Muslim territory begins. Only a very brave Muslim would dare cross these lines.
Near the coast, the Christian "red" forces gather at night to await the next attack from the Muslim "whites". Or to prepare their own counter-attack, trekking for hours through the hills and preparing arrows laced with poison, skills passed down from their ancestors.
When the battle is over, the Christian wounded are rushed back to Tentena for treatment. If any Muslims are taken with them, Muslims in Poso conclude they have been "taken hostage", even if they have only been taken to Tentena's hospital for treatment.
Almost every home still standing has a cross on the wall so no one makes a deadly mistake. The few police keep close to their little police station, in the shadow of the Central Sulawesi Christian Church, the real authority on the shores of Lake Poso.
The "reds" do not trust the police, particularly the paramilitary "mobile brigade". They accuse these neo-soldiers of siding with their enemies and helping them in attacks on Christian communities. Tentena gets little help from the local Government, medical or otherwise. It is dominated by Muslims.
For the Christians, Poso's problems are the fault of Muslims who manipulated the local Government for personal gain, channelling funds to Muslim organisations and keeping the lucrative key posts for Muslims. Yet the indigenous people are nearly all Christians, descendants of headhunters and scalpers whose conversion to Christianity began just a century ago. Through migration, they have come close to becoming a minority in their own land.
Letters for Tentena are opened and read in Poso, they say. And they accuse the provincial legal system of bias. More than 100 Christians have been prosecuted over last year's violence against a handful of Muslims, virtually the only "rioters" to have been charged with anything in Indonesia in the last three years. In the most serious case, three Christians were sentenced to death for planning the violence. Their case is under appeal in the Supreme Court.
Down on the coast, the cocoa and coconut groves once tended by Muslims are growing wild. The Muslims still left there have increasingly adopted the peci cap and the headscarf so their neighbours make no mistake either. But Tentena is their fear. They have set up their own roadblocks and it is a brave Christian who dares to pass them. Christians accuse the "whites" of receiving help from outside. Top local officials in the police and military have confirmed there are jihad forces at work in Poso, they claim.
But Tentena is surrounded. High ground is its advantage but isolation is its weakness. The main road to the provincial capital Palu runs right through Poso town. To the south the road heads to Makassar, Sulawesi's main city. Most of south Sulawesi is Muslim. Perhaps it is no coincidence that much of the latest fighting has been around the southern end of Lake Poso, where a group of Muslim migrants lives. Cut the road and you cut off Tentena's only supply line.