Louise Williams – In a city littered with the bodies of the dead and mutilated, where the markets have been burnt to the ground, where soldiers hire out their protection services for cash, and where Christians and Muslims live barricaded behind gangs of wild, armed young men, Donny Lufki no longer believes in the law.
Instead, he says, he has promised to seek justice himself and to bring the severed head of his brother's killer and present it to the local police on the riot-torn island of Ambon, capital of the remote Moluccas in eastern Indonesia.
"I marched into the police station and announced I am going to kill to get revenge," he shouts down the telephone, from the outskirts of the city, where his house lies in ruins and his family weeps in mourning for their youngest son, a recent victim of six weeks of religious violence between Muslim and Christian neighbours who once lived in peace.
Donny's 21-year-old brother disappeared two weeks ago. He was, he says, taken by a Muslim gang out into the brilliant blue waters of the harbour of Ambon, once the strategic port of the famed Spice Islands.
There, he says, he was put into a sack with rocks and dumped into the water to drown, never to be seen again. So, Donny is hunting for an old Muslim friend called Simpson, because he believes this terrible story of his brother's fate, and must kill his long-time neighbour to avenge his death.
The city of Ambon is humming with too many stories of such cruelty, on both sides of the religious divide. The line between fact and fiction seems blurred by religious hatred, but the rumours are as important as the reality in fuelling the anger of the armed mobs on the streets. On the ground Christians and Muslims have barricaded themselves behind roadblocks guarded by their own, both accusing the police and military of taking sides, both continuing to lob petrol bombs at the neighbours and slashing with machetes and harvesting knives at those who breach their lines.
"It is very difficult to solve the problem here now because there are too many victims, lots of people have died, lots of houses have been burnt, there is too much pain," says Protestant Rev Apeng Telo, from the Silo Church on the outskirts of the city. "If a member of your family dies it is not easy just to forget the pain, unless you put who is behind the riots on trial."
His own head is being sought as a symbol of Christianity. "Yes, I am worried, of course. We are receiving threats that if we go out on to the streets we will lose our heads." Since the violence was ignited during Idul Fithri, the most holy of Muslim celebrations marking the end of the fasting month in January, more than 150 people have been killed, at least 350 injured and 3,500 houses burnt. Thousands have fled by boat or are huddling in mosques and churches for protection.
Originally, locals said fighting broke out when a Muslim mob attacked a Christian suburb, claiming the Christians had insulted Islam by being drunk during Idul Fithri. But many political analysts believe the violence is being fanned by agent provocateurs to discredit the Habibie Government, or to create chaos to strengthen the hand of the powerful armed forces in national politics.
On the Muslim side the tragedy is just the same. A student volunteer, Safri, who is helping organise some 3,000 displaced people sleeping at one of the city's mosques, says he saw the bodies of five family members himself: the pregnant mother, father, and three young children.
The bodies, he says, were mutilated. Less reliable, though, is his insistence that the Muslim family was held hostage by a Christian gang, forced to convert to Christianity, and then shoved into a pig sty, the ultimate insult to Muslims who consider pigs untouchable.
"Every time you go out into the street you see bodies lying around," he says.
About 1,400 military re-inforcements arrived in Ambon yesterday, to back up 1,000 troops stationed in the city, but scared residents were critical of the security forces, saying the soldiers were "guns for hire".
According to a local price list, armed escorts through the barricades cost from 200,000 rupiah ($A40) to 400,000 rupiah a trip. Another Ambon resident said: "Food supply is a problem because the market has been burnt down, and the food that exists is twice the normal price.
"There are times when we can't get water because the pipes are cut. Even those people who go to the office finish at lunchtime. Officially, the schools are still open but most of the teachers don't turn up, so the children don't go either."