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South China Morning Post
September 9, 2001
Red, white and black
By Chris McCall (kenema@a...) is a Jakarta-based journalist
WITH HOMEMADE guns at the ready, dozens of Christian men guard truckloads of refugees as they make for safety. It is a pitch-black night, and the Muslims are only a few kilometres away. A few hours later, this band of self-made warriors will launch an attack on the Muslims, around dawn, just when the other side will be saying morning prayers. To get to the battle site, they will walk along the mountain paths their headhunter ancestors once followed. They will use bows and arrows like those their ancestors used in their tribal wars. Some are tipped with poison, drawn from Sulawesi's strange and unique plant life, and recognised through skills handed down the generations.
They also use secret powers. Among the "red forces", as the Christian side is known, are the "Black Bats", men who can walk along a trail at night and render their enemies motionless through magical powers. Red and black are colours of tradition in Central Sulawesi, and black is the colour of war.
Welcome to Sulawesi's Poso district, right at the heart of Indonesia's most bizarrely shaped island. Largely isolated by mountains, peninsulas and distance, this war has rumbled on since 1998, claiming hundreds of victims.
This year it has flared again, after controversial death sentences were handed down to three Christian men amid a series of harsh sentences by Muslim -dominated courts. For the Christian side, this is bias. For the Muslim side, it is just desserts.
Confirmed figures put the number of dead since 1998 at well over 300, but it is probably far higher than that. Some even talk of thousands of dead. No one, not even the Government, knows the full truth.
This night, these people are trying to stop a Muslim advance. The refugees are coming from the next village, Sepe, and their homes have been burned. A few days earlier, Christians lost another battle in nearby Malei. Rakibu Reabonto, 63, was captured by the Muslim side and killed. He died trying to defend the church and prevent it being burned while the rest of his side were in general retreat. The Muslims, many of whom are fishermen, attacked Malei by land and sea.
"I am ready if it happens again," said one armed fighter. "In truth, Christians are not taught to kill, but personally, clearly it has to happen."
The Pamona people of Central Sulawesi and their allies no longer fight one another. They are united against their common enemy, Islam.
These peoples have been Christian for barely a century. Nearly all the former headhunters of Central Sulawesi accepted baptism during the late-19th and early-20th centuries, during a hard evangelical push by Dutch Protestant missionaries. The Muslims are mostly migrants or descendants of migrants from other parts of Sulawesi or from other islands of Indonesia, including Java and Lombok.
Christians say they have abused their welcome in someone else's land, trying to take control of the local administration and siphoning off billions of rupiah in government aid.
But many of the migrants were sent there by the Indonesian Government under its own transmigration scheme, and the two sides' numbers are now almost equal.
Hundreds of Christian fighters mill around Silanca, watching the truckloads of refugees go up to Tentena, the Christian headquarters in the highlands, on the shores of the giant Lake Poso. Along the road there is a series of security posts, all armed by men with crude homemade guns, deadly to a range of some 80 metres. On the road, people from the crisis centre of the Central Sulawesi Christian Church warn everyone to be on their guard. They are still at "alert one". It would be a brave Muslim indeed that tried to make it up here. Many of the men are wearing black masks, usually a simple piece of black cloth tied over their faces. Many Muslim survivors of past massacres describe their attackers as wearing masks just like these.
The bloodiest phase of the conflict was in May and June last year. Most of the victims were Muslims, many of them beheaded in time- honoured tradition. Many of the survivors are now living as refugees in the provincial capital Palu, but they still have lands in Poso, and some come back to collect the coconuts and the cocoa, which are now mostly going wild. It is dangerous to come back. The mountainous lie of the land, with Christians controlling the highlands, favours the Christian side.
In Tentena, the churches are intact, but the town's mosque has been burned to a cinder, along with many former Muslim homes. The citizens put crosses on their walls so no one makes any mistake about their faith. They thought they had won last year, despite the death in battle of their leader Advent Lindo Lateka, the scion of a former royal house. But now the Muslims are fighting back.
Laskar Jihad, the hardline Muslim militia accused of re-igniting the war in Maluku last year, is now taking an interest in Poso.
Sources in the local government confirm "jihad forces" are at work in Poso town on the Muslim -controlled coast. And the Christians accuse the paramilitary-police mobile brigade, Brimob, of joining in attacks by the Muslim "white forces".
Brimob officers are mostly Muslims, the general rule in Indonesia's police and armed forces. It is places like Silanca and Sepe which are now the frontlines of this war.
Even Christians now in jail claim they were forced to fight last year under threat of death from their fellow Christians.
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