South China Morning Post, Wednesday, January 30, 2002
INDONESIA
The day Duma's Christians died defending their most sacred site
CHRIS McCALL in Halmahera, North Maluku
More than a year after their final stand, the Christians of Duma still lie in shallow
graves dotted around the village.
When defeat finally came after 21 attacks, there was too little time for proper funerals.
The dead were lucky if their bodies were moved to makeshift graves before survivors
were trucked to safety by security forces. Now they live an hour's drive to the south -
many of them widows - in rough wooden shelters they built themselves.
"It was not the Christians who attacked, we were just defending," said Damaris
Meyer, 52, in the ruined shell of the village church that was their final refuge. "That
evening there were rumours to be ready but we did not want to leave. First we prayed
here," she said.
She points to what was once a pond in front of the church. "Five people are buried
there," she said calmly. One of them was her husband, Yande Selong, who was shot
dead.
Regarded as the Christian headquarters at the time, the village held a special
significance as the place where Calvinist missionary Hendrik Van Dijken first brought
the Gospel to Halmahera, the biggest island of North Maluku province. It was a place
Christians would defend at all costs and one Muslim fundamentalists would eradicate.
As fighting raged around them from late 1999 on, the priest of the neo-Calvinist
Evangelical Church of Halmahera told his congregation they should gather in the
church and die there together if necessary. A native of the Sangir islands to the north
of Sulawesi, he had just left for there before the final attack in late June 2000, on the
grounds that his wife was ill.
The attack came in the morning, a wave of Muslim warriors yelling "Allahu akbar" with
flowing white clothes and headbands with Arabic writing. The Christian forces held off
for about an hour, Ms Meyer recalls, using spears, knives and other hunting weapons.
They fled to the church after they were overpowered and when the victorious Muslims
entered, they tried to force the women sheltering there to wear headbands and say
"Allahu akbar". Ms Meyer said she refused point blank.
Christian leaders say the final attack succeeded where others had failed because
members of the security forces joined the Muslim side.
There are few reliable statistics about how many people died on Halmahera in 1999
and 2000, but most estimates put the number on both sides in the thousands and the
number of dead in Duma in the hundreds. Despite Christian claims they did not start
the fighting, the rights and wrongs of the early stages of the conflict are less than
clear.
Muslims accuse the Christians of atrocities and claim some of them were planned in
Duma. In its later stages, however, the war turned into a major Muslim drive to wipe
out the few remaining Christian centres on Halmahera, with volunteers pouring in from
across Indonesia.
Although Christians and Muslim refugees have nervously started to return, no
Christians have yet gone back to Duma. Even a visit is a tense experience, requiring
passage through Muslim territory populated by their former battlefield enemies.
Ms Meyer says she feels nervous about going back but bows to the will of God. "If
God wills it we have to come back because we have our village," she said.
Copyright © 2001. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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