Chris McCall, Mamboro, Central Sulawesi – God told him the riots were about to happen. "Allah sent me a vision," Muhammad Herlambang Badja says at the psychiatric hospital where he is being treated.
His eyes bore into you as he addresses you. He is 25 and schizophrenic, with a thin, wispy beard, typical of Indonesian Muslim men who are performing dakwa – spreading the faith. "I feel I have recovered but the doctors say I am ill," he says. "My faith is ill. Many people do not pray. This is going to ruin Islam. That is the reason the riots happen, because people are not responsible."
Herlambang is part of a largely hidden, unacknowledged and often untreated problem emerging in Indonesia. Apart from death and destruction, its many conflicts are destroying people's minds. These mental disorders are rarely dealt with until they reach crisis proportions.
He is staying, for now, at Central Sulawesi's main mental hospital in Mamboro, just outside the capital, Palu. He has been in and out for several years. But until May last year he was in remission. Now he has joined the other patients from the province's Poso district. The cases have emerged or re-emerged since the area was hit by a wave of violence between Christians and Muslims last year.
According to his doctors, Herlambang's condition deteriorated at the same time as the situation in Poso. Since then, he has been home, but his parents could not cope and he was sent back to Mamboro to face an uncertain future.
Central Sulawesi is one of Indonesia's lesser known conflict areas, but last year at least 300 people were killed, many decapitated or butchered in other sadistic ways. Despite a government-backed peace initiative and a peace agreement witnessed by President Abdurrahman Wahid, Poso district is still primed to explode at any time. Several people have been killed recently.
Psychiatrist Eko Susanto Marsoeki said about 80 serious cases could clearly be linked to the violence. Apart from schizophrenia, there are also cases of paranoia and depression, some with obvious links to the trauma the patients have suffered.
Some arrive with chaotic speech, feelings of suspicion and a fear that crowds were about to attack them. One major feature of the Poso violence was sudden large-scale attacks by mobs of hundreds of people. "They lose their temper. They hit people. They feel suspicious or scared of being killed," says Dr Eko, head of the medical team treating the patients.
Forty-six have required in-patient care. But the trend only began to emerge three to four months after the violence. Dr Eko is not sure why there was a delay, but said it may be because many lost friends or relatives they had previously shared their problems with.
Generally there have been more Muslims than Christians, but Dr Eko says it may simply be because Muslims feel safe in the Palu area. In Poso, some of the worst violence was meted out by Christians. Many victims' bodies, including those of children, were mutilated before being thrown in rivers – all very disturbing to the most healthy of minds.
The problem is definitely not unique to Poso. On Buton Island, to the southeast of Sulawesi, Medecins sans Frontieres-Holland has set up a project to train counsellors for Muslim refugees from nearby Maluku.
Dr Eko would like to do the same in his region. The trouble is the price. To set up a body and train the 60-odd staff needed would cost about US$22,000, money that his health department simply does not have.