John McBeth in Jakarta and Oren Murphy in Central Sulawesi – Two months ago, Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid ordered authorities to stop Muslim militants from landing in the northern Moluccas. They went anyway, and have since been blamed for some of the worst blood-letting since religious strife began there last year.
With the situation in Ambon, further south, deteriorating yet again, Wahid has now banned outsiders from travelling to the Moluccas and ordered a state of civil emergency. But can it be enforced?
Like everyone else, Wahid publicly admits he doesn't really know what's going on in the islands. But there's a growing sense that the violence there is part of a deliberate campaign to weaken – though probably not to topple – the president and his already fractious administration ahead of the People's Consultative Assembly session in August. Says political analyst Cornelius Luhulima, himself an ethnic Ambonese: "They want to use the Moluccas as a battleground for political change in Jakarta."
Who are "they"? Wahid and those around him blame shadowy members of former President Suharto's regime who are anxious to slow down reforms and apparently to prevent recriminations against those involved in political and human-rights abuses over the past three decades. Grumbles Wahid's younger brother, Hasyim, using the president's nickname: "Every time Gus Dur says 'No,' you notice there's an earthquake somewhere."
But analysts trying to make sense of the Moluccan violence, which has claimed more than 3,000 lives in the past 18 months, believe it represents a confluence of interests. Those range from disaffected retired and serving military officers trying to stir the political pot in far-off Jakarta, to well-funded Muslim extremists seeking to capitalize on a shift in the demographic balance of a region that once had a clear Christian majority in an otherwise overwhelmingly Islamic nation.
Tired of fighting
Caught somewhere in the middle are the people who live there. Ambon is a small island on which individual families are often divided between Christian and Muslim, but Luhulima insists the Ambonese are tired of the fighting and want all outsiders to leave, so they can sort out their problems themselves. In North Maluku, relief workers say local Muslim youths have joined the hardline Laskar Jihad crusade out of a genuine desire to return to the villages in northern Halmahera that they were driven from by Christian mobs earlier this year. By doing so, however, they have been caught up in the mythology of Islam under threat.
Complicating the situation has been the underlying struggle for the control of resources and territory in the wake of Suharto's downfall and, more importantly, the religious divide that has emerged – in Ambon in particular – between the police (mostly Christian) and the army (mostly Muslim). The recent appointment of a Balinese Hindu general as regional commander is clearly designed to bridge that divide. If he fails, military analysts say it may be impossible to enforce the state of emergency, which allows security forces to impose dusk-to-dawn curfews and exercise sweeping powers of arrest.
Whatever happens, the violence has exposed the fragile nature of presidential authority and civil supremacy in what was meant to be a new era of reform. It also raises the likelihood that retribution and animosity will continue to chip away at religious tolerance in Indonesia to an increasingly dangerous degree. After 33 years of Suharto's rule, during which ethnic and religious problems were brushed under the carpet, Indonesia is having to reinvent itself and face the fact that essential elements of nation-building are still not in place.
The immensity of that task was underlined in early June with reports of an outbreak of religious blood-letting in the Central Sulawesi coastal town of Poso – an incident that raises renewed fears that the Moluccan disease may be spreading to other islands in the archipelago.
Oren Murphy, an independent consultant on conflict resolution who went to Poso at the behest of a Western development organization, was the first foreign observer to enter the town after the bloodshed. He spent days piecing together this account:
Budi and Santo (not their real names) sit side by side on a worn brown couch and take turns describing their survival of a massacre in a small cocoa-farming village near Poso, 220 kilometres from where they're now talking in Palu, Central Sulawesi's capital. Santo, a teacher at the Wali Songo Pesantren, a religious boarding school, and Budi, a cocoa farmer, recount how a group of men dressed like "ninjas" and calling themselves "The Red Bats" – some wore bat masks – entered their village on the morning of May 28 and, with home-made guns and machetes, proceeded to attack the school.
As word that an attack was under way spread through Kilo 9, as the village is called, Budi and many other men gathered weapons and ran to the local mosque for refuge. At around 2pm the 70-odd people in the mosque surrendered their machetes and spears. But rather than allow them to leave, the attackers surrounded the mosque and began firing. They then went to work with their machetes. The deep cut that disfigures Budi's hand and a railroad-track scar across his back are testimony to the attack. Budi played dead until the group left, then hid behind the mosque. He counted at least 38 fellow villagers dead.
The May 28 attack, according to local accounts, was the culmination of days of harassment by the Red Bats, during which they pressured Kilo 9 villagers, under threat of violence, to hand over the radio system they used to communicate with Poso. A police intermediary facilitated the handover. Furthermore, evidence suggests the attack itself was organized: For example, Red Bats entered the village from different directions at once, separated men from women and tied up prisoners in groups of five.
After Budi's escape, he spent four days hiding in burned-out homes and cocoa plantations. After he was stitched up by a Christian neighbour, he was captured again, with Santo, in the cocoa plantation. Budi, Santo and 26 other men were then bound and beaten before being driven by truck to the edge of the Poso River.
There the "Red Bats" began to execute the men by cutting their throats with machetes. Budi and Santo jumped in the river to flee their attackers. Budi and Santo escaped capture, despite their machete and gunshot wounds, after swimming down the river for over 12 hours. The bodies of the less fortunate, however, flowed down the Poso River for the next two weeks.
The attacks on Kilo 9 are part of a larger pattern of rioting in the once-sleepy city of Poso, rioting which was triggered, locals say, by drunken brawls between neighbourhood toughs who, with some leadership, later began identifying themselves by ethnicity and religion.
And while sporadic fighting in the city threatens to spiral into full-blown communal strife, no one knows the exact number of people killed in the attack, or why security forces have failed to quell the violence.
Poso police chief Jasman B. Opu says his officers have retrieved 98 bodies, mostly from the Poso River or washed up on nearby beaches in early June. But, he says: "We really don't know the exact numbers. More are missing and at night we can't see the bodies floating by to retrieve them. They float out to sea."
In an area of the sprawling island of Sulawesi where people describe gun attacks and black magic in the same breath, the roots of the conflict are elusive. The violence in Poso district, which has a population of about 300,000, is usually described as having three chapters: December 1998 marked the beginning of the drunken brawls; April this year saw Muslims burn down 300 Christian homes; in May, the Christians retaliated.
Political and religious leaders in the area agree that a combination of forces were at work in creating the unrest, and that local political elites have used the communal strife as a means of galvanizing support drawn on religious lines.
Yayah Al' Amri, an Islamic cleric in Central Sulawesi's largest Muslim organization, Alkhairaat, denies that the conflict is rooted in religion. "Since when has a fight between a couple of drunks been a religious war?" He says that local politicians and their supporters, fighting for the mayoralty of Poso, are largely responsible for prolonging the conflict. "If local politicians want to help the situation, they should all go out to an open field and slit their wrists."
Whatever its roots, the conflict has become increasingly polarized on religious lines. Following the massacre at Kilo 9, the chances that the region will fall into an all-out cycle of communal conflict like that in the Moluccas has dramatically increased. Government responses to the crisis on both local and national levels have been slow.
Thirty-five of the 40 members of the local legislature have fled Poso. Akram Kamaruddin, chairman of the legislature, is one who has remained. He speaks of the staggering destruction in the district: Four thousand houses burned or destroyed, 30,000 displaced persons spread across the region, and no notion of how to stop the fighting.
No word from Jakarta
Ruined homes line the road for 50 kilometres out of Poso. For the time being, the local government is waiting for security to be restored before it begins the process of rebuilding. According to Akram, a Japanese relief agency has pledged 3.5 billion rupiah ($400,000), which when it comes will be enough for the construction of only 400 simple homes.
Akram has yet to receive word that any support from the Jakarta central government is coming. He is stunned that President Wahid has publicly called for the people of Poso to settle the conflict themselves. "If a patient is sick, and local doctors aren't capable of healing him, are we really supposed to just leave him there suffering?"
Police have yet to arrest those accused by many in the area of organizing the attacks. That angers Palu-based lawyer Karman Karim, legal counsel for the survivors of Kilo 9. "If the police had arrested those responsible for the riots in December 1998, we wouldn't have had the riots in April 2000. If they had arrested the provocateurs in April we wouldn't have had the riots in May. They need to arrest everyone involved, and then weed out the planners from the followers." The police fear that mass arrests may incite further violence.
When asked how they would like to see things handled, Santo sits quietly for a moment, and then in a low voice says: "Blood must be repaid with blood." But Budi smiles and says: "I have had enough trauma. I would like my attackers processed through the rule of law."