Ambon's plight

Ambon's plight

What is going on in Ambon? The answer seems obvious enough: On
Tuesday last week, after months of apparent peace, violence
flared up anew between Christians and Muslims in this eastern
provincial capital of Maluku. By the weekend, 21 people had died,
most of them in an inter-village clash on Thursday involving
thousands of residents of the predominantly Christian village of
Wai and the predominantly Muslim villages of Tulehu and Liang,
east of Ambon city.

Although on Friday the worst appeared to be over and a
semblance of normalcy had returned to the city, Ambon remained
tense over the weekend. Many shops and offices reportedly
remained closed and public transportation was scarce as the
military issued a shoot-on-the-spot order to deter troublemakers
from aggravating the situation. That possibility may not be as
far-fetched as it at first appears. During similar incidents in
Ambon last January, violence was quick to spread from the city to
several villages in surrounding areas. It was apparently to
prevent a repeat of such an escalation of violence that some 450
marines were dispatched from Java to the province during the past
week.

In this most recent flare-up of violence, as in the clashes
that paralyzed the island in January, Christians and Muslims are
pitted against each other in a frenzy of killing and destruction.
Religious strife? Many Indonesians believe so. Only a relative
few, it seems, believe that elements other than religion are at
work to spark the conflict.

Nurcholish Madjid, one of our most highly respected modern
Muslim scholars and a keen observer of social and political
affairs, raised the possibility that the involvement of Muslims
and Christians in many of the inter-community brawls in Ambon and
elsewhere could merely be a "problem of statistics". That is to
say, where Muslims and Christians make up the majority of the
population, it would be natural for adherents of those two faiths
to be involved in conflicts of any kind, religious or otherwise.

Others have a more sinister explanation for much of the
violence that has plagued this nation since the downfall of
Soeharto's New Order regime. One hypothesis is that certain
elements within the military, feeling threatened by reformists'
demands that they leave politics and "return to the barracks",
are staging a covert plot of their own to maintain their present
profitable positions. By stirring up a continuous wave of unrest,
so the theory goes, Indonesians would have no other choice but to
accept the military's continued dominant role in social and
political life as well as in matters of security and defense.

Which of those theories correctly explains the string of
violence that has brought so much suffering to so many
Indonesians over recent months is difficult to determine without
a thorough and open investigation. In the case of Ambon and the
rest of Maluku, it can in the meantime be noted that on those
paradise islands Muslims and Christians have for centuries lived
side by side in perfect peace and harmony with each other. If now
Muslims and Christians are so easily turned against each other,
the sensible inference would be that some powerful new factor is
at work to have brought about such a radical change. What that
factor might be is something for our experts to determine.

In the meantime, it is imperative that the most serious
efforts be undertaken to end the violence -- in Ambon and
elsewhere in this country. The consequences of allowing the
current situation of conflict to drag on indefinitely could be
most serious and far-reaching for this nation.