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US. COMMISSION ON INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
HEARING ON THE MALUKU ISLANDS
February 13, 2001
Prepared Remarks:
MUSLIM-CHRISTIAN VIOLENCE IN MALUKU:
THE ROLE OF NATIONAL POLITICS
Robert W. Hefner
For over a year now, the eastern Indonesian islands of Maluku or the Maluccas have been plagued by severe religious violence; 5000 people have died and more than 300,000 people have been displaced. In one of the worst early incidents, on December 28, 1999, Christian militias are alleged to have massacred hundreds of Muslims in several villages in north Maluku, including 200 women and children taking refuge in a mosque. These and other killings of Muslims had a galvanizing effect on the small, ultraconservative wing of Indonesia's diverse Muslim community. Despite the virulent opposition of the country's Muslim President, Abdurrahman Wahid, and despite opposition from most mainstream Muslim leaders, in early 2000 hardline Muslims mobilized several thousand jihad paramilitaries (laskar jihad) from around the country to do battle against Christians in Maluku.
President Wahid and his Minister of Defense expressly forbade the Muslim paramilitaries from traveling to Maluku. Nonetheless, during March and April 2000, some two thousand fighters made their way across Java and boarded state-owned boats for Maluku without encountering as much a single police roadblock. Once established in Maluku, the jihad paramilitaries were implicated in several violent attacks on Christians. As the December 28, 1999 incident indicates, Christians have not hesitated to respond in kind; both sides in the conflict have killed non-combatants, including women and children. Interestingly, in October and November 2000, the jihad fighters also clashed with local Muslim fighters after some of the latter expressed an interest in negotiating a truce with Christians.
Is the Maluku violence primarily a local conflict? Alternately, did national players play a role in the violence? Before addressing these two questions let me begin by emphasizing that hardline, anti-pluralist Muslims are a tiny minority in Indonesia relative to their moderate and democratic Muslim counterparts. This fact has been proved in social research, but was also was decisively demonstrated during the free and fair elections of June 1999, when hardline Muslim parties won less than 5% of the vote, versus more than 50% for parties of democratic reform. The jihad fighters are no more representative of the majority of Indonesian Muslims than Maluku Christian fighters are of Indonesia's minority (9%) Christian community.
Other speakers at today's hearing have appropriately emphasized that local developments converged to exacerbate tensions between Christians and Muslims in Maluku prior to 1998-1999. It is also important, however, to understand the violence from a national perspective. Evidence from Maluku and elsewhere indicates that the Maluku violence has been abetted by hardline factions in the political elite opposed to the democratic reformation process initiated following President Suharto's resignation in May 1998. Maluku is but the most tragic illustration of this pattern of elite-provoked violence. Beginning in the final months of the Suharto regime, a hardline faction in the military and bureaucracy used anti-Christian, anti-Chinese, and anti-Western sentiments to divide and conquer the growing democracy movement. Rather than "Islamic" extremism or primordial passion, then, the proximate cause of Indonesia's plague of religious violence has been elements of the old regime seeking to destabilize the country so as to block political reform.
For a brief period in the early 1990s, it was widely believed that President Suharto was moderating, and Indonesia was about to experience a democratic spring. However, by the mid-1990s, the movement for democratic reform had stalled in the face of fierce state repression. A key element in that repression was the Suharto regime's appeal to Indonesia's tiny, hardline Muslim community for support in attacking the democracy movement (many of whose supporters are Muslim). From 1995 on, propaganda documents created in think-tanks financed by Suharto supporters portrayed democratic reformers as opposed to Suharto because he is a Muslim and Indonesia is a majority-Muslim country. Prior to 1995 the Suharto regime had never invoked this theme of Christian and Western conspiracies against Islam.
A secret study leaked to me by democratic Muslim friends in 1995 and commissioned by the so-called "green" (Islamist) faction of the military was the first to propose utilizing religious tensions to weaken the democracy movement. The report cautioned that if the democratic opposition succeeded in forging an alliance between Muslims and secular democrats it would represent the biggest threat ever to Suharto's rule. The report advised government supporters to exploit religious divides in the democratic opposition by attacking it as "Christian" and anti-Muslim. In the aftermath of the government's attack on Megawati's Democratic Party headquarters in July 1996, this theme was prominently featured in regime propaganda. At this same time, Suharto supporters ratcheted up pressure on hesitant Muslim groups, demanding that they join with the government in condemning the democracy movement. Elements in the regime also began to funnel resources to heretofore minor ultraconservative Muslim groups, most notably the Indonesian Committee for Solidarity with the Muslim World, or KISDI. These hardline groups responded by escalating their propaganda against the democracy movement and Muslim leaders like Abdurrahman Wahid, known to be among its supporters. Not coincidentally, it was around this time too that ultraconservative Muslims began to attack Western and human rights reports on East Timor as Christian, Jewish, and "Vatican" attempts to discredit Muslim Indonesia.
From late 1996 to 1997, the largest Muslim organization linked to the democracy movement, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), became the target of fierce regime propaganda and dirty tricks. On October 10, 1996, anti-Chinese riots swept through the East Javanese town of Situbondo, a NU stronghold. Evidence that I and others have collected demonstrates that this riot was not a spontaneous outbreak, but skillfully coordinated by black-clad "ninja fighters" trucked in from outside town. The purpose was to show that Wahid could not control his rank-and-file, and to spread fear of NU Muslims in the Christian and Chinese community. Wahid's organization was again targeted in late 1997 at a time when his organization joined forces once more with the democratic opposition. Around this time of prodemocracy revival, eastern Java (the heartland of NU support) witnessed the reappearance of the black-clad "ninjas" seen a year earlier in nearby Situbondo. This time, however, the ninja fighters moved around the countryside in trucks carrying thirty to fifty men. The fighters moved into villages late at night to torture, execute, and dismember individuals from one of two groups: Muslim clerics linked to Wahid's NU, and mystics and nominal Muslims identified as likely supporters of Megawati's Democratic Party. In an effort to provoke communal violence, the killers often left leaflets at the sites of their crime. This propaganda explained that the murders were an act of revenge against the rival religious communities for atrocities it was alleged to have carried out. Clearly, an effort was being made to divide and conquer the democracy movement by inflaming passions between Wahid's NU and nominal Muslims linked to Megawati's democratic party. The provocation failed to ignite mass violence as a result of the quick and courageous efforts of the NU leadership.
The killings in East Java were part of a broader escalation in the regime's use of ethnoreligious violence. In November and December 1997, thousands of copies of a document entitled, The Conspiracy to Overthrow Suharto (Konspirasi Menggoyang Suharto) were released in conservative Muslim circles in Jakarta, Bandung, Medan, and Bogor. Written by a hardline Muslim intellectual with ties to "green" (i.e. hardline Islamist) members of the military, the document charged that the economic crisis shaking Indonesia was product of an international conspiracy uniting Jews, the American CIA, the Vatican, and Chinese-Indonesians against Suharto because he is a Muslim and Indonesia is a majority Muslim country. In late January 1998, the regime unleashed a blistering propaganda campaign against Chinese Indonesians, accusing several prominent Chinese businessmen of providing funds to a small leftwing group for a bombing campaign to bring Suharto down. Shortly after this time, as if on cue, hardline ministers in the Suharto cabinet began to threaten Chinese shop owners, blaming them for the rising food prices the country was experiencing. Promilitary conservatives in the Muslim community followed suit, calling openly for a campaign against all "rats" and "traitors" to the nation. A short time later riots erupted in several Indonesian towns in which Chinese and Christians were targeted. This campaign came to its tragic climax on May 14-15, 1998, when urban riots broke out across Indonesia, killing two thousand people, destroying thousands of Chinese stores, and resulting in the organized rape of more than one hundred Chinese women.
For all of its brutality, the effort to save the Suharto regime backfired. Muslims and non-Muslims alike rejected these appeals to ethnoreligious hatred. Muslim leaders, in particular, mobilized all the more vigorously against Suharto because they recognized he was willing to abuse their religion for the purpose of maintaining power. On May 21, 1998, under pressure from the prodemocracy movement, segments of the military, and most of the Muslim leadership, President Suharto stepped down.
Unfortunately, Indonesia's troubles did not end with Suharto's departure. Although Suharto was gone, most of his regime was not. During late 1998 and early 1999, hardline Muslims staged rallies denouncing those calling for investigations of the May violence and the rapes of Chinese women, claiming that the NGOs and others investigating the violence were intent on discrediting Muslims, the military, and Indonesia. There were additional incidents of violence at this time, the majority of which showed this same pattern of ancien regime manipulation of conservative Islamist sensibilities. Although the violence diminished prior to the elections of June 1999 and the presidential elections of November 1999, the killing of NU-linked Muslims in East Java began again shortly after Abdurrahman Wahid took office.
This then was the broader, national background against which the escalation of violence in Maluku occurred in late 1999. As with the "ninja" killings in eastern Java a year earlier, those responsible for catalyzing the Maluku violence in 1999 and 2000 intended to pit different religious groups against each other. From interviews I conducted with jihad activists, it is clear that some young idealistic Muslims have rallied to the cause out of genuine concern for what they saw as the one-sided slaughter of Muslims by Christians in Maluku. No one must forget that, at the local level at least, Christians have been as guilty as Muslims of reprehensible acts of violence. Indeed, as I indicated above, some of the earliest incidents of violence involved Christian attacks on Muslims; however, there are reasons to believe some of these attacks were manipulated by Jakarkta-based controllers.
My interviews with jihad leaders indicate that the upper-echelons of the movement, however, had more complex political motives than simple concern for the plight of Maluku Muslims. One prominent advisor to the movement told me in July 2000 that a central aim of the effort is to drive Abdurrahman Wahid from power and restore a "green" (i.e. pro-Islamic) leadership to power. In light of this fact, it should come as no surprise that the bulk of the funding for the jihad campaign has been provided by businessmen linked to the former President Suharto. Military coordination has been spearheaded by the retired brigadier general and Malukan native, Rustam Kastor. In Yogyakarta in March 2000, when many people thought the Wahid government could easily prevent the jihad fighters from traveling to Maluku, Rustam boasted to friends that the fighters would succeed in making the trek because he could intimidate every military commander along the route. Even hardened observers of Indonesian parapolitics were astonished to see that Rustam's boast proved true.
The Maluku violence has been far worse than that earlier in East Java because the absence of civic organizations made this deeply plural society especially vulnerable to provocation. As President Wahid suggested in conversation with me in November 1999, he believes the authors of the Maluku violence are old regime hardliners intent on creating tensions in society so as to prevent human rights investigations and democratic reforms. The chronology of events before and after his election indicate he is right.
In conclusion, it must be emphasized that the violence has not been masterminded by one man, nor is it without complex local influences. Sadly, it is all too clear that the Maluku violence has now acquired a momentum all its own. However, as in eastern Java a few years earlier, or as in the bombing of Christian Churches across Indonesia on Christmas eve 2000, it is equally clear that the course of the violence has been cynically and systematically manipulated by well-connected outsiders. The most important of these actors have been civilian elites and military retirees linked to the former President Suharto. They have unleashed awful violence and done great damage to Indonesia so as to eliminate any possibility of national political reform.
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