INSIDE INDONESIA, No. 70 Apr-Jun 2002
We are all one
How custom overcame religious rivalry in Southeast Maluku
P M Laksono
Southeast Maluku has been neglected not only in the story of the fighting throughout
Maluku from early 1999, but also in that of its end. The district capital Tual is located
in the Kei Islands, just 800 km to the north of Darwin in Australia. Indonesian
newspapers reported hardly any details about the outbreak of fighting on 31 March
1999, except to suggest that hundreds died and tens of thousands became refugees.
Almost nothing has been written about why the fighting stopped and what brought the
community together again.
Like chocolate melting from the edges in, so the Indonesian state in Maluku
experienced structural melt-down after Suharto resigned in 1998. Its ability to bind
groups together vanished. The dominance of Golkar, of money, of the values of
developmentalism, and of the military, which had held Indonesia together, evaporated
and left people disoriented. They lost their trust in the system. When religious fighting
broke out in Ambon in January 1999, it created enormous confusion in Southeast
Maluku. People lost their grip on reality and a kind of anarchy broke out.
Why should the state be so important in a remote place like Tual? We have to
understand that the classic liberal concept of the state - one that doesn't interfere in
the market or in people's lives except to provide security and perhaps welfare - has
never applied in Maluku. There has never been a free, independent economy. Instead,
there is close collaboration between the state, capital, and the values of
modernisation and development. Everything has been a monopoly of the state - from
rice to petrol.
Southeast Maluku is actually not a remote area. In the early 1960s, the district head
(bupati) was a big man. He had to be inventive to fulfil the area's budgetary needs. But
by the mid-1980s, with the New Order at its height, all the money came from Jakarta,
without any effort at all on the part of the district head. The district had gone from
self-sufficiency to an extreme degree of dependency. Human development had
actually regressed - the opposite of what the development program intended.
Instead of eating food made from the local sago and poisonous cassava, the civil
servants in town now ate rice and instant noodles - all imported by the state and by
big capital. Civil servants are the backbone of urban society. By the end of the 1980s
nearly all the rupiah flowing into the district came from civil service salaries. Almost no
rupiah came in outside the government budget. Agriculture is just subsistence. There
is practically no export - just a little copra and marine products. The big fishing
trawlers that frequent Tual harbour are Taiwanese and pay their money to Jakarta. The
whole of society depends on the state - even if only as a labourer at a school building
site.
Segregation
Even now it is not clear who started the conflict in the Kei Islands in 1999. There was
a rumour that Islam had been insulted, and a fight broke out on the border between
Tual town (Islamic) and neighbouring Ta'ar (Protestant). Every village is relatively
homogeneous in religious terms. Even those few villages that are mixed have
exclusively Protestant, Catholic and Islamic neighbourhoods. There is thus very little
social interaction between people of different religions - just a memory that they were
once one.
This kind of social segregation dates back to the introduction of the world religions in
Southeast Maluku at the end of the nineteenth century. This was also the time when
the highly extractive and bureaucratic colonial state of the Netherlands Indies was first
established here. Religion is a state concept. Its introduction and maintenance has
always been a policy of the state. Throughout the New Order, anyone who was not
religious was an enemy of the state - a communist.
Religion invokes political issues. For Kei Islanders it is not just an inspiration for
peace but also a political inspiration. The political institutionalisation of religion takes
on fearful forms - it is the institutionalisation of fear. The communist issue is taken
very seriously.
They do believe in religion, but in practice it becomes too serious and heavy. Religion
is an initial barrier that must be overcome before Kei Islanders can interact more
deeply. Religion is competitive. In colonial times power was distributed according to
religion. Under the New Order the rhetoric was secular, but in reality religion remained
important in determing who became district head or chairperson of the local
assembly.
The moment that central power experienced melt-down was therefore also the
moment when competition spun totally out of control. Everyone knows everyone else
in a small community. But rumours immediately began to circulate of impending
attacks from another community in a neighbouring village or island. As long as the Big
Brother state was in charge, such outside attacks were impossible to imagine,
although they did happen. There are always long-standing problems between
neighbouring villages - whether it is over land or an unpaid bride price. Indonesia
provided a kind of imperial peace that dampened inter-village warfare.
Ambon, the provincial capital 600 kilometres to the west, had always been the model
of statecraft. No village head could be appointed without the approval of the governor in
Ambon. The social segregation in Tual was very like that in Ambon too. So when
Ambon descended into chaos, so did Tual. Suddenly people lost confidence in the
'guarantees of security' provided by the village head to protect those belonging to a
minority faith. If someone heard a rumour that the village would be attacked, they just
fled.
Everyone was suddenly on the stage, acting out a script of Christian-Muslim warfare
that had been written in Ambon. Of course they all knew what inter-religious tension
was, but they never imagined it could come to war. There was a kind of stage fever
driven by extreme fear, as well as by a sense of exhiliration, that turned into real
violence.
Kinship
However, the conflict did not sever all social relationships. It did not make a complete
break in history. There were still some relationships across the religious divide, and
especially within local communities. In that sense the conflict was a superficial one,
although it had a big local impact.
It really wasn't 'themselves' up there on the stage. After a time they came to their
senses, and got down to become spectators again. It became a kind of game once
more - even if things were not the same because of the refugees and the dead. I don't
believe there were hundreds of dead. In 'my' village of Ohoitel there were just eight
dead. Talking numbers was part of the escalation of war. Even one is too many. There
were also many stories of people helping one another across religious barriers. They
said 'we are all one' - 'Ain Ni Ain'.
When Kei Islanders remember their golden age of enlightenment they do not mean
the coming of religion, but the creation of their customary law, the larvul ngabal. The
historical watershed for them was not the coming of the Dutch, or of the Republic of
Indonesia, or of religion, but much longer ago than that.
They have long regarded Tanimbar Kei, a small island in the south, as the last
stronghold of Kei custom and beliefs. During the conflict, this island became a
sanctuary for refugees of all religions.
The resurgent belief in the efficacy of custom led to a revived interest in the remaining
customary leaders who had not been coopted by the New Order. The key role in
turning back to a history of customary kinship was played by Bapak Raja J P Rahail,
the customary king of Watlar. Raja Rahail began by preventing any rioting in his own
kampung. In the hierarchy of local raja he was the most junior of the twelve in the Kei
Islands, but he was able to approach the others and start a movement of customary
reconciliation.
Throughout the New Order, Raja Rahail had always been outside the system. He was
something of a symbol of opposition to it. He revived the customary community known
as the ratskap (from the Dutch 'raadschap'). Raja Rahail was close to the NGO
community - being one of the chairpersons of the archipelago-wide customary
association Aman (Asosiasi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara), as well as of an Asia-wide
association since the early 1990s.
The 1979 law on village government (no 5/1979) had totally destroyed village
autonomy. But Raja Rahail had succeeded in retaining custom in his ratskap of Maur
Ohoiwut, and this was an inspiration for the community that lived there. The ratskap
consisted of several villages, with different religions.
So there were two models of community in Southeast Maluku. One shaped by
Indonesia, which bound together religions through the distribution of patronage in the
form of official appointments. This experienced melt-down and violence in 1999. As a
consequence, people once more began to look to another model, one based on
custom and local autonomy.
Even though Raja Rahail was only relatively junior - not in age, he was about seventy
years old and in fact died in November 2001 - but his statecraft became a model for
the others when they saw how he was able to manage conflict.
Raja Rahail had only his authority and his prestige to offer. He was an expert in
creating consultative mechanisms. Every year he held a great debate, a musyawarah,
in his ratskap. This had been running since the early 1990s assisted by various
non-government organisations (NGOs). He inspired Kei Islanders with the idea that
they belonged to one community, and that peace depended on the people's initiative.
This played a significant role in ending the conflict in Southeast Maluku.
P M Laksono (laksono@ugm.ac.id) teaches anthropology at Gadjah Mada University.
His book 'The common ground in the Kei Islands' (Yogyakarta: Galang Press)
appeared in March 2002 (see Bookshop page).
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