Fox News, Monday, December 26, 2005
Violence Creates Island of Terror in Indonesia
Associated Press
POSO, Indonesia — Masked, black-clad and brandishing machetes, the attackers
sprang from behind a screen of tall grass and pounced on the four Christian girls as
they walked to school. Within seconds, three of the teenagers were beheaded —!
fresh victims of violence that has turned this Indonesian island into yet another front in
the terrorist wars.
"All I could do was pray to Jesus for his help," said 16-year-old Noviana Malewa, who
fled with a gaping head wound. "I was streaming with blood." A thick scar runs from
the back of her neck to just under her right eye.
Muslim militants are blamed for the October killings, the most gruesome yet in a
campaign of terror against Christians on the island of Sulawesi.
Muslim-Christian violence from 2000 to 2002 killed some 1,000 people in Sulawesi
and attracted Muslim militants from across Indonesia, including from Jemaah
Islamiyah, a homegrown network linked to Al Qaeda, and even from the distant Middle
East.
Despite a peace deal, bombings, shootings and other attacks on Christians have
continued, especially around the small town of Poso in the ! heart of the
octopus-shaped, Massachusetts-sized island.
Behind the attacks are Muslim islanders avenging their dead in that conflict, and
terrorists bent on fomenting a new war, former fighters and security officials say.
"They want to see Poso become alive with the spirit of jihad again," said Fahirin Ibnu
Achmad, an Afghan-trained militant who took part in the 2000-2002 war.
"It is easy to recruit people who have seen their relatives slaughtered," said Achmad,
who claims to have renounced violence after spells in prison for gunrunning and taking
part in an attack on a Christian village.
Sulawesi is one of several islands in what some call Southeast Asia's "triangle of
terror" — a porous region encompassing the insurgency-wracked southern Philippines
in the north and the Maluku archipelago, itself the scene of sectarian conflict, to the
west.
Also close by is heavily Muslim southern Thailand, where a two-year insurgency has
left more than 1,100 dead.
The United States is closely watching Indonesia, where Jemaah Islamiyah militants
are accused of carrying out a string of suicide bombings on Western targets since
2002, including attacks on the island of Bali that killed more than 220 people, most of
them foreign tourists.
Along with the Philippines, the "Sulawesi scene ... is perhaps the major issue right
now in Southeast Asia, because there the enemy have the opportunity to gather and
train and build cohesive groups and from there deploy outward," said Henry Crumpton,
the U.S. State Department's counterterrorism coordinator.
Despite an Indonesian crackdown, militants are still able to move within the region
and there is evidence that extremists are honing their bomb making skills at terror
training c! amps, said Maj. Gen. Ansyaad Mbai, Indonesia's anti-terror chief.
The Sulawesi war has never been credibly investigated, and only a few perpetrators
have stood trial. The island's Muslim and Christian communities, each numbering
about half the population of 12.5 million, nurture their own histories of the conflict,
casting themselves as victims. Burned out buildings and abandoned shops, many
housing refugees, still dot the region, and aid money for reconstruction is stolen by
corrupt officials and soldiers, human rights activists say.
Christian-Muslim relations were generally harmonious until 2000, when fighting spread
from the Malukus and quickly took hold. Each side killed hundreds and burned down
scores of villages, among them the hilltop hamlet where Noviana and her schoolmates
grew up.
Noviana's family, which fled the hamlet overlooking Poso, had recently returned,
confident that tensi! ons were subsiding.
Still recovering from the attack, the girl now lives under police guard in the Christian
town of Tentena.
In her only interview since the killings, Noviana described how the girls in their school
uniforms were taking a shortcut to school through jungle and plantations when they
ran into at least five masked, black-clad men.
As she fled bleeding, the assailants collected her friends' heads, put them into black
plastic bags and then dumped in Christian parts of Poso, one on a porch, the other
two on the street.
"They were killed as if they were chickens," said Hernius Morangki, showing a
reporter the spot where his daughter was decapitated. "I keep asking myself, what
were my daughter's sins?"
Christians, who represent just 5 percent of the country's overall population of 220
million, have refrained from loudl! y demanding justice.
"I tell people: Do not retaliate; only God can do that," said Rev. Stephen Dayoh,
taking a break from pitching a large tent outside his church for Christmas services. "If
we do, it means we are the same as them."
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