CNN, Thursday, April 29, 2004 Posted: 1:42 AM EDT (0542 GMT)
Police vow to get tough in Ambon
[PHOTO: Ambon citizens pass a burnt-out church as they relocate to safer territory.]
AMBON, Indonesia -- Indonesia's police chief has pledged to disarm Christian
separatist fighters in the troubled Maluku province amid claims soldiers took part in an
attack on a church.
Speaking after a visit to the regional capital Ambon, National Police Chief General
Da`i Bachtiar said the government would send more forces to the city to restore
security.
He said members of the separatist Republic of South Maluku (RMS) movement, in
particular, must be disarmed.
The latest violence was initially triggered by an RMS pro-independence march on
Sunday which local authorities labeled "provocative."
Jakarta has so far deployed one military batallion and four Police Mobile Brigade
companies to help local security forces control the situation in which 24 people have
died in the sectarian violence.
Da`i did not mention the exact number of additional security forces, according to a
report on the offical Indonesian wire service Antara.
A former commander of the Laskar Jihad (Holy War Legion), Ja`far Umar Thalib, said
he was ready to send men to Ambon to "defend the integrity of the unitary state of
Indonesia" if security forces were unable to quell the riots.
"If police and military forces are unable (to quell it) while people in Ambon are
helpless, we are ready to come there to help the government defend the country,"
Antara quotes Ja`far saying.
Indonesia's military, meanwhile, has denied allegations that soldiers took part in an
attack on a church in Ambon.
Several witnesses told The Associated Press that uniformed infantrymen fired into the
air before ordering seven families living close to the city's Nazeret Protestant church
to leave their houses early Wednesday.
Minutes later, unidentified men torched their homes and the church.
The local newspaper, Ambon Ekspress, repeated the accusations on its front page on
Thursday.
Sporadic gunfire rang out across the seaside city early Thursday but there were no
reports of large-scale clashes, The Associated Press says.
Fears are growing that the sectarian clashes will dog the region until the republic's
presidential elections, scheduled for July.
The clashes are the worst since Christians and Muslims -- who live in separate
communities --signed a government sponsored peace pact in 2002.
The Malukus are 2,600 kilometers (1,600 miles) east of Jakarta.
Known as the Spice Islands during Dutch colonial days, the islands were once held
up as a model of religious harmony.
But nearly 10,000 people have died in Muslim-Christian conflict there since 1999.
The conflict intensified after 1999 with the arrival of volunteers belonging to Laskar
Jihad -- a newly created militia from Indonesia's main island of Java.
Indonesia is predominantly Muslim, but the Malukus' two million people are evenly
divided between Muslims and Christians.
Most of the Muslims are settlers who were moved to the Malukus from other densely
populated islands in the 1970s and 80s under the Suharto dictatorship's migration
program to dilute the secessionist movement.
© 2004 Cable News Network LP, LLLP.
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