Tolerance Perishes in Islands’ War

The war ravaging the Maluku islands is one without heroes, only victims. It is a war in which neither side, Christian or Muslim, has political demands. Ideology is not an issue. Even the young men who fight are hard pressed to explain how or why it started, much less what they hope to accomplish besides revenge and survival.

But what they do know is that this island chain long noted for its religious tolerance has changed, perhaps forever. For Indonesia, the implications are serious.

Villagers who lived peacefully side by side for years attack one another with crossbows and homemade mortars propelled by large rubber bands. Churches and mosques lie in smoldering ruins. Muslims rally in Jakarta, the nation’s capital, to chant “Jihad, jihad,” a call for holy war.

Laughing Christian teenagers parade a headless Muslim corpse through Ambon, a once pleasantly uneventful harbor city of 150,000 people that has been reborn in the image of divided Beirut. These days, only foolhardy Christians and Muslims cross what locals call the “Gaza Line” that divides the provincial capital of Maluku into religious enclaves.

“I still feel safer here than I would in Jakarta,” said Alto Titabun, an architecture student. “You get in crowded places in Jakarta, like a shopping mall, and you get the feeling someone is always watching you. You never know who might want to kill you. But here you know the conditions. This side is Christian. That side is Muslim. You know where you belong.”

Travelers who ask the Matura Hotel to provide airport pickup service are met by two armed soldiers, one Christian, one Muslim, to escort them into the city, whose telephone access code is, appropriately enough, 911. The city is patrolled by about 8,000 Indonesian soldiers, the waterways by 14 warships, the roads by 21 mini-tanks. Life still is lived on the edge, and the fear and festering hatred run deep.

The government places the death toll in a year of violence, sparked originally by an argument between a Christian bus driver and a Muslim passenger, at about 2,000. Human rights groups believe that the toll is several times higher. As many as 200,000 people--or one of every 10 residents of the Malukus--have fled for the safety of other islands, and a modest tourism industry has evaporated.

“I suppose wounds can heal, but there is so much bitterness, so much division, I’m afraid it will take a long, long time,” said sociologist Hera Mikarsa, who is helping train 30 counselors from among displaced persons huddled in a naval base, hoping that they eventually will return to their villages to work with trauma victims and plant the seeds of reconciliation.

But without reconciliation, Maluku raises questions about the cohesion of the world’s most populous Muslim country, as well as the Indonesian military’s commitment and ability to end religious strife and prevent it from spreading to other islands. How, the people of the Malukus and others ask, could this happen in a nation long known for religious tolerance and moderation, and on islands where coexistence is part of local lore?

“Maybe,” retired army Gen. Samsudin, a member of the National Commission on Human Rights, said in Ambon recently, “we have been living a myth.”

Both factions are quick to blame security forces for fomenting strife, saying soldiers tend to side with Muslims, local police officers with Christians.

Western diplomats say there are indications that rogue army officers are linked to violence in Indonesia, from Aceh province in the west to Lombok Island and on to Ambon. The officers’ apparent aim: to discredit President Abdurrahman Wahid, who has curtailed the armed forces’ power, and divert attention from investigations into the military’s human rights abuses.

Few Ambon residents believe that it is part of official army policy to turn Muslims and Christians against each other--soldiers have conducted house-to-house searches for weapons on both sides and on several occasions have prevented attacks. But all too often, security forces let riots and massacres run their course before showing up.

Where, then, are the roots of Ambon’s division? Perhaps in history. This remote chain of about 1,000 islands, also called the Moluccas, once was the source of almost all the world’s nutmeg and cloves, commodities that centuries ago were worth more than gold. The spices brought Dutch, English and Portuguese explorers, traders, soldiers and missionaries to Asia and led to the birth of Indonesia. Their influence turned the Malukus into Indonesia’s only Christian region.

The Dutch, the eventual colonial rulers, favored the Christians, giving them elite status and government jobs. Japanese invaders, who captured Ambon from Australian defenders in 1942, viewed the Christians with suspicion and reversed the policy. They promoted Islamic influence and encouraged Muslims to support the independence of Indonesia, which Japan intended to rule. That dream ended in 1944 when Allied bombers leveled Ambon.

But the Christians remained so loyal to the Netherlands that, in the late 1940s, they fought alongside Dutch colonialists against Indonesian nationalists. On April 25, 1950, the Christians declared the independent Republic of South Moluccas. They later set up a government-in-exile in the Netherlands, with which the Dutch maintained contact until 1978.

Under independence, Indonesia settled thousands of non-Maluku migrants--Burginese, Butonese, Makassarese, most of them devout Muslims--on the island chain. Over the years they became the prosperous merchant class, while the Christians for the most part were transformed into poor farmers. Village chieftains were replaced by Jakarta loyalists. Today the Malukus’ population is 54% Muslim and 44% Christian, while Indonesia as a whole is 90% Muslim.

During his 32 years in power, President Suharto responded to any disturbances with brutality. But when his dictatorship fell in May 1998, simmering economic tensions, a widespread distrust of the military, jealousies between the haves and the have-nots, and the absence of central authority proved a combustible mix. Now the conflict creates its own fuel, with each new atrocity opening scars to be avenged.

And, slowly, Ambon is bleeding to death, a victim of collective suicide. A swath of burned-out homes and shops cuts through the heart of a city where luxurious ocean liners used to call. Across the city, the muezzin’s call to Muslim prayer and the peeling bells of the Protestant church roll. Once symbols of coexistence, they are now the reminder of the lines of division.

“I look around at all we’ve lost, all we’ve destroyed,” said Titabun, the student, “and sometimes I ask myself, ‘Why Ambon? Why us?’ So far, I haven’t come up with an answer.”