http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/MJ05Ae02.html Oct 5, 2011
Religious powder keg sizzles in Indonesia By Jacob Zenn JAKARTA - More than a decade after Christian-Muslim clashes killed thousands and displaced as many as half a million people across Indonesia's Maluku Islands, a new wave of sectarian violence threatens renewed instability in the remote, religiously mixed two provinces. The violence erupted on September 11 after a fatal traffic accident involving a ojek (motorcycle-taxi) driven by a Muslim teenager and an automobile driven by a Christian. The ojek driver died from his injuries while he was being rushed to a local hospital. After the accident, a text message from an unknown source spread false claims that the ojek driver had been tortured to death by a group of Christians. The text message was then sent on from the Maluku island of Ambon to Surabaya, Solo, and other metropolitan areas in Java, Indonesia's most populated island and center of political power. When the funeral of the ojek driver concluded the next day, groups of Muslims, including the victim's family, approached a group of Christians in Ambon. The groups first traded insults and slurs, then began throwing rocks, and finally drew machetes and began fighting, according to news reports. Rioters set fire to houses, cars and motorcycles despite warning shots fired by local police. Seven people were killed, 65 were injured and over 200 buildings were destroyed in the orgy of violence, according to news reports. While the unrest subsided the following day, rumors that Islamic jihadists in Java planned to instigate further attacks put government authorities on alert. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono dispatched more than 400 Special Forces personnel to beef up security in Ambon, the main island in the Maluku archipelago. In East Java, security officials in Surabaya's main Tanjung Perak port inspected all travelers bound for Ambon. Metal detectors were set up to detect any smuggled weapons bound for the Malukus and many seizures of small weapons were made. The same procedures were carried out in several traditional fishing ports in Ponorogo, Pasuruan, Banyuwangi, Gresik, which are all in East Java province. The Indonesian Council of Ulema, meanwhile, issued a public message to discourage Muslim organizations from sending their supporters to Ambon in the name of jihad. The head of the organization's East Java branch said, "We guarantee no Muslim organizations will be provoked to go to Ambon. We have to sit down together and discuss the situation." It's unclear, however, whether Ulema's vows of non-violence will carry over to Indonesia's radical Islamist organizations, including the Islamic Defenders Front, known for violence and intolerance. The previous jihad in Ambon, which lasted from 1999 to 2002 and led to the permanent segregation of previously integrated Christian-Muslim communities, was launched mainly from Java. Thousands of Javanese jihadists funded and organized by the militant group Laskar Jihad traveled from Java to Ambon to fight what they viewed as Christian persecution of Muslims. Laskar Jihad's raison d'etre, like the terror organization Jemaah Islameeyah, was to convert secular Indonesia into an Islamic state in the wake of authoritarian leader Suharto's fall from power in 1998. However, the jihadists of the late 1990s and those of today come from distinctly different backgrounds, despite their shared goal of imposing sharia law and creating an Islamic state. The jihadists of the 1990s were radicalized by their experiences supporting and fighting in Afghanistan against occupying Soviet Union forces. In Indonesia, their local jihad was fueled by repression under the secular, autocratic Suharto regime that collapsed after 32 years in the wake of pro-democracy protests. In comparison, the current generation of jihadists have risen in a democratic era and have been radicalized by the US-led "war on global terror". Their sympathies are with international and regional jihadi movements, such as al-Qaeda and the homegrown Jemaah Islameeyah, which stands accused of staging several terror attacks against Western targets in Indonesia. They are known to be influenced by the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but are particularly motivated by the Indonesian government's Western-backed counter-terrorism efforts. The government upended a terrorist training camp in the province of Aceh were recruits were reportedly being trained to stage an assassination attempt against Yudhoyono. Historical roots However, the roots of Ambon's Christian-Muslim conflict runs much deeper than the 1980s or 1990s. In the 1950s, Ambon was the center of an uprising against Indonesian rule instigated by the breakaway Republic of South Maluku, which continues to exist in exile in the Netherlands and sporadically supports demonstrations in the Malukus. During the colonial era, the Dutch created social schisms out of what was then a diverse but largely harmonious population. More than 350 years ago, when the Dutch arrived in the Malukus, then known as the Spice Islands, the colonialists encountered a mix of local animistic traditions, Muslim communities along the major trade routes, and Catholic communities that had been converted by the Portuguese prior to the Dutch's arrival. The Dutch converted the Catholics to Protestantism and then favored them in the spice trade by hiring them as administrators in their colonial civil service. They also rewarded them with parcels of the most fertile lands. The Ambon Protestants even fought on the side of the Dutch in the Indonesian war for independence (1945-1949) and they later evolved into the Maluku independence movement. Significantly, Laskar Jihad exploited for nationalistic purposes the Protestants' history of promoting separatism in their call for fighters to take up arms against Christians in the late 1990s. Based on the recent violent events in Ambon, there are fears that history could be repeated under a new generation of jihadists. On September 28, a group known as the Indonesian Mujahideen posted a message on the radical website Forum Islam al-Busyro that not only vented anger over the Ambon riots but also claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a Protestant church in Solo city in revenge for the killings of Muslims in Ambon. The message hailed "our noble brother Yosepa Ahmad Hayat who has sacrificed himself for the mission. May Allah accept it as one of His Martyrs." Yosepa Ahmad Hayat was the suicide bomber who blew himself up at the church in Solo days after the Ambon riots. The message also said, "We came up with a little explosion to shake the throne of your [the Indonesian government] apostasy... To defend our brothers who were massacred in Ambon, our brothers who you killed in the ambushes by Detachment 88 [an elite counter-terrorism unit], and the brothers that you put behind bars simply because they deny you, the apostate government..." What was initially an ordinary traffic accident between a Muslim and a Christian in Ambon risks morphing into a rallying call for Indonesia's jihadists to take up arms against the government. The incident has provided extremists an excuse to reinvigorate their jihad despite widespread signs they have little support among the moderate masses. Indonesian counter-terrorism forces have in recent years made significant gains in disrupting and dismantling extremist organizations prone to violence. The exploitation of the recent traffic accident in Ambon is thus more clearly a sign of jihadists' growing desperation than rising strength. While some are still motivated to stir violence on religious lines, it's clear most Indonesians remain faithful to a secular, democratic republic. Jacob Zenn is a graduate of Georgetown Law's Global Law Scholars program and was a State Department Critical Language Scholar in East Java in summer 2011. He writes about security issues in Southeast Asia and works as an international affairs consultant for companies based in Washington DC. (Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.) [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ Post message: [email protected] Subscribe : [email protected] Unsubscribe : [email protected] List owner : [email protected] Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/Yahoo! 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