Chris Mccall, Halmahera, North Maluku – More than a year after their final stand, the Christians of Duma still lie in shallow graves dotted around the village.
When defeat finally came after 21 attacks, there was too little time for proper funerals. The dead were lucky if their bodies were moved to makeshift graves before survivors were trucked to safety by security forces. Now they live an hour's drive to the south – many of them widows – in rough wooden shelters they built themselves.
"It was not the Christians who attacked, we were just defending," said Damaris Meyer, 52, in the ruined shell of the village church that was their final refuge. "That evening there were rumours to be ready but we did not want to leave. First we prayed here," she said.
She points to what was once a pond in front of the church. "Five people are buried there," she said calmly. One of them was her husband, Yande Selong, who was shot dead.
Regarded as the Christian headquarters at the time, the village held a special significance as the place where Calvinist missionary Hendrik Van Dijken first brought the Gospel to Halmahera, the biggest island of North Maluku province. It was a place Christians would defend at all costs and one Muslim fundamentalists would eradicate.
As fighting raged around them from late 1999 on, the priest of the neo-Calvinist Evangelical Church of Halmahera told his congregation they should gather in the church and die there together if necessary. A native of the Sangir islands to the north of Sulawesi, he had just left for there before the final attack in late June 2000, on the grounds that his wife was ill.
The attack came in the morning, a wave of Muslim warriors yelling "Allahu akbar" with flowing white clothes and headbands with Arabic writing. The Christian forces held off for about an hour, Ms Meyer recalls, using spears, knives and other hunting weapons. They fled to the church after they were overpowered and when the victorious Muslims entered, they tried to force the women sheltering there to wear headbands and say "Allahu akbar". Ms Meyer said she refused point blank.
Christian leaders say the final attack succeeded where others had failed because members of the security forces joined the Muslim side.
There are few reliable statistics about how many people died on Halmahera in 1999 and 2000, but most estimates put the number on both sides in the thousands and the number of dead in Duma in the hundreds. Despite Christian claims they did not start the fighting, the rights and wrongs of the early stages of the conflict are less than clear.
Muslims accuse the Christians of atrocities and claim some of them were planned in Duma. In its later stages, however, the war turned into a major Muslim drive to wipe out the few remaining Christian centres on Halmahera, with volunteers pouring in from across Indonesia.
Although Christians and Muslim refugees have nervously started to return, no Christians have yet gone back to Duma. Even a visit is a tense experience, requiring passage through Muslim territory populated by their former battlefield enemies.
Ms Meyer says she feels nervous about going back but bows to the will of God. "If God wills it we have to come back because we have our village," she said.