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What caused the Ambon violence?
 
Perhaps not religious hatred but a corrupt civil service
sparked the bloodletting
Gerry van Klinken
 
Jefri was in the wrong place at the wrong time on 4 August.
Walking around a shopping area in Ambon city he and his
21-year old friend Dominggus Hiraka were beaten by unknown
men. Jefri later died of brain hemorrhage in a military
hospital, while Dominggus was in a critical condition. At 4am
on 27 July, Christian residents of Lateri near the city
attacked the neighbouring Muslim village of Latta, leaving one
dead. Latta residents sought refuge in Ambon's Al-Fatah
mosque, their story fuelling the anger of thousands of other
refugees there fleeing similar incidents.
 
Ambon is in a state of simmering civil war. The latest
outbreak in mid-July had by early August left dozens dead.
Hundreds died in earlier fighting between Christians and
Muslims from January till April 1999. Similar communal battles
broke out in the remote fishing town of Tual, also in southern
Maluku province, in April, again leaving hundreds dead. Many
tens of thousands of refugees, mostly Muslim, have fled the
conflict for South Sulawesi.
 
How do we explain such brutal violence between neighbours?
Indonesia has seen so much violence lately, but this is the
most difficult kind to understand. When it is committed by the
state against the people, we can sympathise with the people.
When, more rarely, it is committed by the people against the
state, or even against privileged groups such as Chinese
entrepreneurs, we might comfort ourselves with the thought
that at least the people are standing up for their rights. But
when it is neighbour against neighbour simply because they
differ in religion or ethnicity, no such comfort is
permissible. We can only think that this is a sick, bigoted
society.
 
Certainly the view that Ambon shows us a society mysteriously
disintegrating from within is widely shared. But is it
accurate? In every other type of collective violence people
seem to be driven by motives we can understand - to get a
better deal for themselves, or to protect their interests. Why
should religious strife be any different?
 
I'd like to suggest a better explanation than that such
conflicts are triggered by pure bigotry. It is based on the
idea that people often identify with a particular religious
community for quite worldly reasons. In Ambon at least,
joining the Protestant or the Muslim community means being
part of a network that not only worships God in a certain way
but does practical things for its members - provide access to
friends in powerful places for example, or protection when
things get tough. These networks extend up the social ladder
to influential circles in Jakarta. And they extend downward to
street level, where gangs of young men provide the protective
muscle that an inefficient police force cannot provide.
 
Communal violence has been episodic in Indonesia. The previous
largest cluster of events occurred in 1965-66, when a quarter
to a half a million (or more) alleged communists were
slaughtered mostly by their Muslim neighbours in the
countrysides of Java, Bali and some other islands. This
cluster was associated with the fall from power of
long-serving President Sukarno, and the rise of General
Suharto.
 
Anxious
 
During the years of Suharto's ascendancy, communal violence
rarely broke out. However, it flared up again in various
places at the end of 1996, just as metropolitan elites were
beginning to feel serious concern about Suharto's mortality.
Several high profile corruption scandals showed us a picture
of rival elite factions, some identified by religion, growing
anxious about losing privileged access to money and power. For
example Transport Minister Haryanto Dhanutirto, a member of
the Islamic group Icmi, found himself the target of a bitter
corruption allegation in late 1995, apparently launched
against him by cabinet rivals.
 
Such conflict was not just a spat between a few people in
Jakarta. Each faction had its hangers-on down the social
ladder and out into the provinces. These provincial people
were dependent on their patrons in Jakarta to get senior
appointments in the public service, as well as business
opportunities in the form of untendered government contracts.
Call it corruption, it's how things works when the law is
weak.
 
Ambon's urban population is rather heavily dependent on direct
employment in the civil service: over a quarter by my crude
calculations. Compare that with less than 10% in urban Java.
More derive a living from contract work for the government. To
get hold of that government money, you need connections.
That's where the religious networks come in.
 
Maluku's Governor Mohamad Saleh Latuconsina himself said there
were two main reasons for the violence in Ambon. One was local
feeling against 'newcomers' from Sulawesi, who are aggressive
small business entrepreneurs. The other, more important for
our purpose, was a rumour in Ambon that Saleh Latuconsina had
replaced 'all 38' top civil servants in the province with
Muslims.
 
Latuconsina was referring to an anonymous pamphlet that
circulated in Ambon in October 1998. It must have had quite an
impact, for Latuconsina felt called to deny it vehemently and
repeatedly, always affirming his belief in the importance of
'balance' between Protestant Christians and Muslims. The issue
was given a boost when just after the outbreak of the
conflict, and as an explanation for it, Nahdatul Ulama
chairman Abdurrahman Wahid repeated the allegation contained
in the pamphlet. Afterwards Wahid made repeated attacks on
Latuconsina's alleged Islamic nepotism.
 
There is a lingering perception outside Ambon that this is a
predominantly Christian society. A strong local elite
certainly define themselves that way. However, figures show
that Muslims now enjoy a slim majority. Maluku has in fact had
a local Muslim governor since 1992, when Jakarta appointed
Akib Latuconsina, another member of the extended Latuconsina
clan, to the peak provincial job.
 
Akib Latuconsina's chief rival in 1992 was Freddy Latumahina,
a Golkar national parliamentarian and senior party
functionary, and a Christian. He had been an anti-Communist
student activist in 1966. In 1997 Latumahina, now even more
senior in the Golkar hierarchy, tried but failed again to win
the governor's post.
 
Saleh Latuconsina, the current governor, is by no means
fanatically religious. He is aristocratic in his demeanour,
and has a technical degree from Germany. But personal
religiosity is of no account in these matters. When he
appointed a non-Protestant deputy governor, and a
non-Protestant provincial secretary, the Protestant elite felt
frozen out of the three most powerful jobs.
 
Underworld
 
In April 1999 the Jakarta news weekly Tajuk published
information from what it said was a top military intelligence
report on the Ambon crisis. It alleged there were links
between Freddy Latumahina, prominent among the frustrated
Protestant Ambon elite, and certain figures within the
criminal underworld. An intermediary for these links, it said,
was retired army colonel Dicky Wattimena, who had been mayor
of Ambon in1983-88, and before that commander of Suharto's
presidential guard.
 
Indeed, other reports confirm that the Ambon conflict was
triggered by rivalry between semi-criminal gangs that operated
both in Ambon and in the nation's capital Jakarta. Each gang
appears to have a more or less religious identity - one
Christian, the other Muslim. The Christian gang was known in
Ambon, bizarrely, as Cowok Keristen, the Christian Boys,
abbreviated Coker. It was known to conduct meetings in the
main Protestant church in Ambon, Maranatha.
 
Coker's Jakarta connection was with a man called Milton
Matuanakota and his colleague Ongky Pieters. Milton and
Ongky's gang of Christian Ambonese thugs 'controlled' the
shopping malls, parking, and gambling dens in northwestern
Jakarta. The trouble in Ambon began when perhaps 200 of its
members retreated to Ambon after they lost a gangland turf war
in Ketapang, Jakarta, in November 1998.
 
The rather unsavoury picture on the Christian side, then, if
we can believe the stories about it, is of a network motivated
by material gain but clothed in the language of religion. Near
its top we have the failed gubernurial aspirant Freddy
Latumahina. Below him an array of local movers and shakers
connected with semi-criminal gangs spanning the archipelago
from Jakarta to Ambon. The gangs run protection rackets in the
national capital, but in Ambon are found in church halls
holding meetings preparing for conflict with local Muslims.
 
The network on the Muslim side is not as clearly delineated.
Certainly there is a similar gang in Ambon on that side. Like
Milton and Ongky's boys they have connections with the
national capital at its highest as well as is lowest level.
But no one has suggested that Maluku's governor, the urbane
technocrat Saleh Latuconsina, is in any way dependent on them.
 
Leader of the Ambonese gang that rivalled Milton and Ongky's
in Jakarta was Ongen Sangaji, Jakarta coordinator of the
Moluccan Muslim Student Movement. They were involved with the
recruitment of the largely Islamic PAM Swakarsa, civilian
guards to 'protect' the November 1998 special session of the
super-parliament MPR from anti-government protesters.
 
The Ambon conflict erupted, as the Human Rights Watch Asia
report so graphically describes, because these rival gangs
were at the heart of two completely separate and increasingly
anxious communication networks. The so-called 'Reds' were
based at the Maranatha church, while the 'Whites' were at the
Al-Fatah mosque. Each had prepared contingency plans for an
attack from the other. When a trivial incident occurred at the
city's bus terminal, the word flew around each side that 'it'
had started. From here on, events escalated as each side
believed only its own version of events. Muslims spoke of
halting the 'christianisation' drive. Christians spoke of
Islamic 'fanaticism' in Jakarta, while some spoke
nostalgically of the Christian-dominated South Maluku Republic
breakaway movement of 1950.
 
It is not a pretty picture. But if it is correct, it suggests
the solution to the Ambon conflict lies not so much in the
inter-religious area (important as that is), as it does in
reforming government. In particular, the pattern by which
government goodies are only available to friends and
connections needs to be replaced with a more accountable and
transparent one.
 
Gerry van Klinken (editor@insideindonesia.org) edits 'Inside
Indonesia'.
 
sumber:http://www.serve.com/inside/index.htm

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