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"Statement" by Paul Michael Taylor. Testimonial presented to: United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), Hearing on Religious-Freedom Violations in the Moluccas, Indonesia. February 13, 2001.
Mr. Chairman, and Distinguished Commissioners:
As an anthropologist who has been studying the Moluccas since 1976, I have been asked to provide a brief "Situation Analysis," to assist the very important work of your Commission. I speak here entirely as a private citizen, on leave today from the Smithsonian Institution and not representing that organization in any way with these comments.
Between 1977 and 1981, I lived for three years in all-Christian, all-Islamic, and mixed Christian-Islamic villages on Halmahera Island (North Maluku Province) – villages now either destroyed or religiously "cleansed," whose populations have fled or been murdered, their houses and their churches or mosques burned, in the Moluccan wars of 1999-2001. In the 1980s and 1990s, as a Smithsonian anthropologist, my work involved collaboration with counterpart museums and institutions in the Moluccas, including Pattimura University (now largely in ruins) and the Siwa Lima Museum and the Sultan’s Palace Museums on Ternate and Tidore, thankfully spared from destruction but whose activities have largely ground to a halt, like those of so many other institutions in these war-ravaged islands.
All of us who are friends of Indonesia want to help that country’s people, and especially the Moluccan people themselves, overcome this conflict. It is a serious internal Indonesian crisis. Attempts at an objective "situation analysis," however, must admit that this situation has spawned many analyses that are at odds with one another. Here I hope to briefly summarize some of the background to, and characteristics of, the Moluccan crisis, for your consideration.
First, this conflict has caused a massive amount of humanitarian tragedy as well as economic and social disruptions. Estimates of those killed range from a low of about 3,000 to a high of about 8,000 and some higher published estimates. An estimated 400,000 to 600,000 people have been displaced from their homes, the largest recorded population displacement in Indonesia’s history. Industry, services, fishing, agriculture, transport, educational and medical facilities have all suffered drastic declines.
Second, since the start of the conflict in January 1999, the situation in the Moluccas has been characterized by a growing, and now extreme, polarization of the Islamic and Christian communities in both provinces (Maluku and Maluku Utara), and by the viciousness of violent incidents on both sides of the conflict. There is much vengefulness, anger, and bitterness. The polarization and violence have led to an unprecedented rearrangement of populations on the land, and a de facto partitioning or religious "cleansing" throughout most of the region. Many children growing up in this environment, including those now living in refugee camps, have been strongly affected by traumatic experiences. Furthermore, books, photographs, videos, and video CDs depicting traumatic scenes of violence by Muslims against Christians or vice-versa are widely circulated and commonly sold on the streets of major Indonesian cities, or available on partisan web-sites.
Third, this conflict has come to have a high symbolic content for many people within and outside the Moluccas. Though such words as "balkanasisi" (balkanization) exist in the Indonesian language, the fear that incidents of religious violence (such as church-bombings in Padang) might incite the spread of religious warfare is expressed by a new verb, a fear that those places would be "diAmbonkan" – made like Ambon.
Within the Moluccas, scholars have noted that in some places this conflict, which began in 1999, even took on a millenarian aspect, in which some Christian and Muslim Moluccan Islanders came to believe that they were part of a cosmic battle between their forces. This may help explain some of the pre-emptive expulsion of Islamic populations from majority-Christian areas, and vice-versa. Other overarching local conceptualizations of this conflict involve various conspiracy theories. Though separatist sentiment has always been negligible within the Moluccas, many Islamic groups claim that there is an international conspiracy to declare a Christian Republic in the Moluccas. In the desperate situation of both Christian and Moslem refugee camps, where there is serious distrust of the mass media or claims of complicity by media, rumors and conspiracy theories abound. Otherwise sane displaced Halmaherans have described to me in detail the secret letters they’d heard about from the American President or the "head of the American church" (whoever that is), about military intervention to save the embattled Christians of the Moluccas. American naval exercises near Indonesia, or joint military activities, can come to be interpreted in this skewed light. I have no role in or opinion about such joint activities. My only purpose here is to call attention to how they may be interpreted by people involved in the conflict. Inaccurate local interpretations of the Moluccan conflict are not harmless; they may delay a resolution. Moluccans who misinterpret international efforts to help them solve this internal Indonesian conflict may prolong their own suffering, awaiting international intervention that will not come.
Fourth, much has been made of the alleged involvement of outside, high-level political agitators, including the bugbear of contemporary Indonesian politics, those "shadowy forces close to Suharto," along with their allies in parts of the military. In fact, circumstantial evidence for such involvement and incitement abounds. Such evidence, especially for military involvement, deserves careful examination. I shall not expand on these points here because others at this hearing will undoubtedly address them in more detail. Yet I want to emphasize that explanations for this conflict which depend on high-level political incitement and military complicity simply are not adequate to explain the speed and ferocity with which local conflicts have spread to ravage the entire Moluccas in such a short period of time. Furthermore, given the scale of death, destruction, and displacement suffered in the past two years, it is impossible to imagine that if all such "shadowy outside forces" terminated their involvement immediately, the situation at this point could return to the status quo ante, or even any form of "normalcy," without efforts to resolve some of the severe internal, local tensions that have flared up and irreparably divided the population as this conflict has spread.
Before looking at some of these tensions, let me hasten to add that, though I seem to downplay the real significance of high-level Indonesian political figures and outside forces in explaining the Moluccan wars, I suspect that in the long run a "mythology" of external causation may be very important for Moluccans themselves to adopt as a means of achieving reconciliation. This model displaces blame and guilt outside the region and beyond the people who will need to overcome vengeance and learn to live together again. I use "mythology" here in an anthropological sense, meaning "explanatory model." It is very likely that local discussions of reconciliation will loudly (and, one hopes, successfully) invoke this factually inaccurate mode of explanation, employing the rhetoric of joint action to overcome outside evils. You, distinguished members of the Commission, are undoubtedly more expert than I am about the history of America’s own civil war. But let me suggest a possible parallel: we seem to have evolved a "mythology" in our own country that our civil war was fought over slavery. Thus, in a way, both sides won because we as a nation came together and overcame the evil of slavery, emerging together stronger. I suspect that in 1863, fighters on both sides would have been surprised to hear they were fighting over slavery (which was legal in both Northern slave states and in the South); yet the factually inadequate explanatory model with which this war later became remembered has helped us in our national reconciliation.
This leads to my fifth point, coming closest to offering better tentative explanations for the Moluccan conflagration. This conflict did not fundamentally begin as, and should not have been allowed to become, a religious war. This conflict is the out-of-control escalation of numerous local conflicts, which became increasingly identified as, then definitively became, a religious war.
Indonesians in the past often referred to the Moluccas as a model for their nationwide pursuit of religious tolerance. The pela alliance system in the central Moluccas formalized relations of mutual assistance between Christian and Islamic villages. In Halmaheran villages where I lived (the same ones whose displaced people have now divided themselves between armed Christian and Islamic camps), the help of Christian villagers in building their neighbors’ mosques, and Muslim villagers in building their neighbor’s churches, was absolutely accepted and expected. I do not mean to present an idyllic picture, certainly conflicts among individuals or groups arose and sometimes groups split along religious lines, but no more so than other social divisions such as profession, village, or family. Recently, some have argued that the Moluccan conflagration is due to the fact that the Indonesian military has become less powerful, thus unable to suppress the internal tensions within Moluccan society. This argument is not entirely consistent with the fact that in the 1970s, police and army presence was minimal or non-existent in these Halmaheran villages, but ample internal means existed to resolve most intra- and inter-village conflicts, and most insistently to discourage any religious conflict. Still, political opposition to the large-scale New Order government-associated projects, including transmigration or resettlement programs and logging concessions, was severely suppressed, allowing tensions to build.
Partly because other speakers will focus on Maluku province, let us briefly examine the local conflict that escalated in North Maluku (or Maluku Utara) province, which had generally been quiet from the time the Moluccan Wars began in Ambon (in January, 1999) up until August 1999. The new elements that had been introduced into the North Moluccan "mix" since the 1970s included: large-scale government-sponsored migrations and resettlement projects; environmental destruction and opening up of new forest areas through logging and mining with concomitant road-building (including pioneer settlement along roads); and the devolution of political authority as part of nation-wide changes that began with the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998. Furthermore, the former sub-provincial government of the North Moluccas was elevated to the province level.
These transformations, however well-intentioned and worthwhile, have locally been the source of great tensions. The government-sponsored resettlement of Moslem Makian Islanders into the mostly-Christian Kao district of Halmahera began in 1975, allegedly because the volcanic island of Makian was about to erupt. Makianese were given land and resettlement subsidies on Halmahera, yet also maintained their land on Makian which is still productive today. In my visits to Makian and to the indigenous (Modole and Kao ethnic group) and to the new Makianese communities in the Kao area between 1977 and 1979, it was already clear that severe tensions were building. With the 1999 devolution of the North Moluccas to provincial status, a new Makianese-dominated sub-provincial unit was proposed, named "Malifut," which would include some ethnically Modole (Christian) villages. The proximate cause of the spread of the Moluccan war to the North Moluccas dates from the August 1999 conflict over the creation of this political unit, which Modole people did not accept. Some Makianese were driven into refugee status on Ternate, leading to a cycle in which the help of fellow-Moslems was sought to overcome a "Christian attack," and Christian-Moslem violence escalated as attacks and revenge attacks continued. This has been a very effective strategy on the part of displaced migrant or government-resettled populations, to seek external support for their cause by characterizing the battle as a Christian-Moslem battle. In effect, as attacks and counter-attacks grew, that did become the nature of the conflict, as all parties increasingly had to take sides. But look more closely and we see that the underlying conflicts were not religious. In fact, the indigenous Kao people, who are Islamic, joined with the Modole to support the expulsion of the Makianese rather than accept the proposed new Malifut boundaries. And when the first Makianese refugees fled to Ternate, they sought the support of the (Islamic) sultan of Ternate who turned them away, supporting instead his traditional allies the indigenous Christian (and Islamic) villagers on Halmahera. So displaced Makianese turned instead for support from leaders of the neighboring island of Tidore. This soon led to so-called "white" Islamic forces allied with Tidore opposing (and eventually defeating) the so-called "yellow" Islamic forces of the sultan of Ternate, Moslem battling Moslem in the streets of Ternate. These few examples will illustrate that the original situation was far more complex than might be implied by the stark opposition we find today between Islamic and Christian forces. Effectively, the simplistic depiction of the fundamental conflicts as being primarily anti-religious in nature, along with the false depiction of Christian forces as being separatist, have encouraged the involvement of outside forces. Among these, laskar jihad members who have been arriving in the Moluccas since April, 2000, have been very influential, tipping the balance in favor of Islamic forces and causing much destruction in Christian communities.
In the Malifut/Kao example above, we also see that the rather sudden empowerment of the North Moluccas as a new province, along with the devolution of political and monetary authority to the provinces, had some negative effects. First, the historic opposition between forces associated with Ternate and those associated with Tidore now came to relate directly to competition for the governorship of the new province. Second, the proximate cause of the battle over Malifut was a battle over the new province’s sub-provincial boundaries. These had now become all the more significant (and worth fighting over) since, under devolution, more of the profits from the multinational mining operations in the region would be kept locally. Because local control has now increased over local resources, communities have a greater stake in arguing over boundaries and governance, feeding tensions that have built up in the massive economic, social, and environmental transformations of the last decades.
Finally, Indonesia’s legal system, or rather systems, are ambiguous in the face of many issues that will need to be resolved, in the context of devolution of power, internal migrations, and traditional land-rights. These are not new issues. In fact – as a private citizen here – I want to thank the Smithsonian for supporting research on these issues, including the web publication of our English translation of F.S.A. de Clercq’s 1890 study of governance in the historic sultanate of Ternate, with an essay in which I explore more fully some of the historical background for these points.
In my Kao / Malifut example, indigenous populations would like a re-assessment of whether traditional land rights were properly honored in the resettlement and transmigration projects; migrant populations however quite correctly feel that their expulsion was also unfair. This is not a dispute caused by lack of communication, it is a zero-sum dispute over resources, involving conflicting attitudes and legal systems, by ethnic groups who happen to be of different religions. These are difficult issues for any nation. Any attempt to resolve the Moluccan crisis by enforcing a peaceful return to the status quo ante circa 1998 will not address any of these underlying sources of the conflict. Yet they do need to be addressed, as many Indonesian sociologists and scholars are proposing; just as efforts to resolve the breakdown of security and address the region’s on-going humanitarian suffering also need support. Otherwise we shall only face long-term maintenance of refugees in camps, or the tensions associated with enforcing an impossible and locally unwanted right of return to the status quo as of a certain date.
I have not focused here on specific examples of atrocities, which have occurred on both sides, nor on examples of violations of religious freedom, but rather on some of the underlying sources of a complex, multilayered, historic conflict. I am sure my Moluccan friends as well as all Indonesian scholars will welcome your attention to these issues as we try to find ways to work with Indonesia to better understand and resolve this humanitarian and political crisis.
© Paul Michael Taylor, 2001
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