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.