Australian Financial Review, April 29, 2002
Ambon killings threaten peace
Tim Dodd in Jakarta
Twelve people died yesterday in an attack on a Christian neighbourhood in the capital
city of Ambon, threatening the fragile peace deal in Indonesia's province of Maluku.
About 30 homes and a church were set alight. The attackers, who wore military-style
uniforms, were probably from a Muslim militia group.
Six Christians, including a baby, were stabbed to death and six others died in the
fires, said a witness quoted by AP.
The incident is the bloodiest since the peace deal between warring Muslims and
Christians was brokered in February after three years of civil war in Maluku and North
Maluku in which up to 10,000 people have died.
The pact was progressing well until a bombing in Ambon this month. Christians took
revenge by burning down the main government office of the provincial government in
the city.
Since then extremist elements of both sides have raised the tension. Last Thursday,
the mainly Christian supporters of a Maluku separatist movement raised the
separatist flag on the anniversary of their declaration of independence in 1950.
This small group, the Maluku Sovereignty Front, advocates a Republic of the South
Moluccas, an idea that Dutch-backed Ambonese Christians put forward at the time
when the Netherlands withdrew from Indonesia in the late 1940s.
Many Ambonese Christians were supporters of Dutch rule and thousands emigrated
to Holland rather than remain in the new Indonesian Republic. The 50-year-old issue is
one of the problems underlying today's tension.
On Friday, the leader of the Laskar Jihad, the most well-known of the radical Islamic
groups in Indonesia, gave an inflammatory speech at prayers in a mosque in Ambon
in which he urged Muslims to reject the peace deal, AP reported.
"From today we will no longer talk about reconciliation," Jafar Umar Thalib told
thousands of people gathered for prayers.
Two years ago, Mr Jafar's group began sending members to Maluku by the boatload.
Many of them were armed fighters who escalated the warfare which been going on
between Christian and Muslim militias since January 1999.
Yesterday's killings took place even though security forces have been on high alert in
Ambon for the past week, anticipating trouble around the separatist anniversary.
There were a series of bomb blasts around the city on Thursday and the city's main
Protestant church, half-rebuilt after being destroyed in 1999, was again torched.
At least 27 separatist supporters were arrested on Thursday for raising the separatist
flag and security forces wounded one Muslim man on Saturday when trying to control
a demonstration.
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