Thousands killed in the fight for political advantage

Thousands killed in the fight for political advantage

By Smith Alhadar

JAKARTA: Fighting in North Maluku since October 1999 has by
now left about 3,000 dead. Over a 100,000 have become refugees.
And it goes on. Yet this ugly conflict has been less reported
than the fighting in Ambon to the south. The conflict reached
Ternate, the largest town in North Maluku and located on an
island just off Halmahera's west coast, early in November.

Dozens died when Muslims went on a rampage after their
religion was insulted. Three days earlier the same had happened
in Tidore, a small island south of Ternate. Between 10,000 and
20,000 Christians and ethnic Chinese fled to Manado in North
Sulawesi. Since then, fighting has spread to villages in north
and south Halmahera.

The conflict was triggered by a pamphlet circulating in
Ternate and Tidore that called on Christians to rise up in holy
war against Muslims. It urged Christians to convert Muslims, who
were described as "ignorant". Little wonder people on Tidore were
provoked.

Very likely the unsigned pamphlet was false. With fighting
still going on in Ambon, no church leader would want another
conflict elsewhere. North Maluku is mostly Muslim, and a move
like that would only make Christians easy targets.

The Ternate and Tidore incident was preceded by another event
on Oct. 24 1999. The largely Christian inhabitants of Kao, a
district on the east coast of North Halmahera, burned down 16
villages belonging to the neighboring (and Muslim) district of
Malifut. The Kao said part of Malifut belonged to them.

Competition for territorial control began after a gold mine
was discovered in Malifut. Many Makian people from Malifut were
doing well as laborers at the mine. This made the Kao envious --
they are the original tribe who have inhabited the area for
thousands of years. The Makian are transmigrants from the Island
of Makian, near Ternate and Tidore.

The government moved them off their island in 1975 when its
volcano Kie Besi threatened to erupt. As a result they became a
highly mobile community, progressive and with a strong work
ethic. When their homes were burned down, all the Makian fled
Malifut for Ternate.

The government does not really understand what caused the
Ternate outbreak, but it is difficult to believe it was
spontaneous. Whoever made the pamphlet must have been a highly
professional agitator who understands North Maluku society well.

President Abdurrahman Wahid himself once said the Ternate riot
was controlled from Jakarta. But by who? Perhaps by Soehartoists
who felt threatened by the new government, working together with
military and New Order ex-generals about to be taken to court for
human rights abuse.

But we should not overlook local factors either, beginning
with the Kao-Malifut incident. The Kao, helped by Christians from
Tobelo, held many meetings before they burned Malifut to the
ground. The Kao attack was a real anomaly in the history of
inter-religious relations in North Maluku.

There has never been a religious riot among the people, let
alone a non-Muslim attack on Muslims, since the Portuguese
missionaries spread their gospel here in the 16th century.
Christians are a minority here and acknowledge the political
dominance of Muslims.

People do feel suspicious of the Ternate elite. The Malifut
gold mine, which is owned by an Australian-Indonesian joint
venture, lies on land traditionally owned by the sultanate of
Ternate. Suspicion grew when the Sultan of Ternate very quickly
brought his customary palace guards, made up from various tribes
including Kao and Tobelo, into the action to stop the rioters in
Ternate. This made the Makian feel the Ternate elite were against
them.

Not only the Makian dislike the Ternate elite, but so do the
people of Tidore. Attacks on Christians by people in Tidore as
well as in southern Ternate should be seen not only as an
expression of solidarity with the Makian, but also as a form of
resistance to the Ternate elite because of the Kao-Malifut
incident, in which the Ternate elite had sided with the Kao.

More generally, Tidore people did not like the recent campaign
by the Ternate elite to go back to "traditional values" in which
the sultan has the decisive role.

Tidore people began to worry that their traditional enemies on
Ternate were preparing to revive the cultural dominance they had
enjoyed in the past in order to justify a resurgence of their
political power. Between the 13th and the 17th centuries, Ternate
was indeed "the first among equals" out of Maluku's four Islamic
kingdoms -- Ternate, Tidore, Bacan and Jailolo. Tidore does not
have pleasant memories of the subordination it experienced in the
past.

Just as the administrative wheels began to turn in mid-1999 to
split off North Maluku as a province of its own, the conflict
began to escalate. Tidore demanded that its main town Soasiu
become the provisional capital of the new province, and that the
permanent capital should be the village of Sofifi, part of its
customary territory on Halmahera Island.

Ternate on the other hand wanted Ternate town as provisional
capital, with the permanent capital to be Sidangoli, a Halmahera
village located in Ternate's territory.

The Tidore claim only made Ternate laugh with scorn. Ternate
is an old town full of history. It is the busiest town in Maluku
after Ambon (before the riot). Soasiu is like a small Javanese
village. They also said Sidangoli was much more suitable than
Sofifi. It had a plywood factory for example.

In any case, the final result as laid down in the law on the
new province of North Maluku stipulated that Ternate would be the
provisional capital, and Sofifi the permanent one -- not a
compromise either side found satisfactory.

The riots must be seen in the context of a government plan at
the time to hold local elections for a new provincial parliament
in June 2000. (The subsequent violence forced the government to
cancel election plans and announce that a parliament would be
selected on the basis of the June 1999 election results.)

The Tidore and Makian elite, supported even by some
people on Ternate, seemed anxious to prevent the Ternate elite
from rising to the pinnacle of provincial power. The silence of
the Ternate elite on the Kao-Malifut incident, conversely, was
probably motivated by Ternate's desire not to alienate its
traditional support base among the Kao. The Ternate
elite were already in enough trouble as it was.

Ternate's community is divided in two. In the north live the
original inhabitants of Ternate. They are extremely loyal to the
culture of the sultanate, and they provide the core of the
Ternate customary guards.

There are a lot of these guards -- 7,000. They played an
important role in achieving the sultan's political goals in the
past. During the Ternate riot no fewer than 4,000 of them were
deployed to secure the town.

In the south live migrants from surrounding islands such as
Tidore and Makian, but also Arabs and Chinese. This is a plural,
modern, critical and open society, and they naturally oppose the
conservative ideology of the Ternate sultanate, closed and
oriented to the past as it is.

In response to Muslim attacks on Christians in Ternate, a
coalition of Christian tribes in northern Halmahera around Tobelo
and Galela on Dec. 26 attacked Muslims living there, eventually
resulting in the loss of probably thousands of innocent lives,
many of them women and children.

On Dec. 27 people from south Ternate in turn attacked a
Catholic school housing customary guards loyal to the Sultan of
Ternate. The guards responded by burning a suburb in southern
Ternate. This was a fatal mistake because it led the recently
installed Sultan of Tidore, Djafar Danoyunus, to mobilize his own
forces for battle with those of the Sultan of Ternate.

As a result, Tidore fighters managed to penetrate the palace
of the Sultan of Ternate. They forced him to sign an agreement to
back off with his "yellow guards". This means the Sultan of
Ternate, Mudaffar Syah, is now practically finished as a
political force.

North Maluku now needs to move towards a new paradigm based on
humanitarianism, rationality, democracy, human rights and the
rule of law.

Muslim groups, some from outside North Maluku, who are still
killing Christians in various places around North Maluku should
stop. Violence only begets violence. The future of North Maluku
looks grim. No one has benefited from the fighting. However,
provided all the North Maluku elites wake up to the seriousness
of the problem and decide they will do something to stop it,
it is not too late to build a true civil society in North Maluku
-- a tolerant society, democratic, modern and oriented to the
future.

Worshiping the past, or fighting for fleeting political and
economic advantage or for the superiority of this or that tribe
or religion, can only undermine North Maluku society as a whole.

The writer was born in Ternate and is a member of the
Indonesian Institute for Democracy Education in Jakarta. This
article is published courtesy of the Melbourne-based Inside
Indonesia magazine in which it first appeared in the latest
edition.