July 23, 2000
President Abdurrahman Wahid on Sunday rejected calls for U.N. peacekeepers to halt a religious war in Indonesia's Moluccas islands as Moslem militants, supported by rogue military units, continued to attack Christian neighbourhoods.
Wahid, who had spoken by telephone last week with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, said Indonesia alone would stop the sectarian conflict, which has killed more than 3,000 people in the past 18 months and created up to 500,000 refugees.
The president's statement came despite the apparent failure of a civil emergency declaration last month to stem the violence, and confirmation by the government that military and police personnel in the Moluccas had taken sides in the conflict based on their religious affilation.
"I politely reject the statement by Kofi Annan who said that there were rising calls to the U.N. to deploy peacekeepers to Ambon," Wahid said during the opening congress of his National Awakening Party in the east Java city of Surabaya.
There is a growing perception that the Jakarta government has once again lost control of its armed forces, as it did in East Timor last year. Several foreign nations, including the U.S., have suggested that international peacekeepers may be required if Wahid was unable to restore order, a scenario that Indonesia has flatly rejected.
Local police in the once-fabled Spice Islands, located some 2,100 kilometers northeast of Jakarta, have largely sided with the region's Christian community, while army units have been supporting the Moslems. In some cases, security forces have been fighting each other.
The conflict has escalated in recent months following the arrival of more than 2,000 fighters belonging to the Laskar Jihad, a radical Moslem group on Java, who have launched a holy war to rid the Moluccas of Christians. While 90 per cent of Indonesia's 210 million people are Moslem, the Moluccas' population is split evenly between Moslems and Christians.
Wahid has blamed military and political extremists linked to former strongman Suharto of instigating the violence in an attempt to topple his government.
On Sunday in Ambon, the capital of Maluku province, Moslem mobs burned scores of Christian-owned houses in the villages of Urimesing and Ponegoro, said Semi Waileruni, an attorney at Ambon's Maranatha Christian Church. "The Laskar Jihad launched today's attack and the military was supporting them," he said. "Soldiers stood by and did nothing while they started burning homes."
The state-run Antara news agency reported Sunday that the navy siezed more than 1,000 sticks of explosives found on a ship bound for the northern Moluccan island of Halmahera. The navy has been searching all vessels going in and out of the region to stop weapons from being smuggled to the warring factions.
The Moluccas conflict, while pitting Moslems against Christians, is considered to be more the result of economic disparity in the region than a religion-based conflict. The Christian faction long enjoyed privileges during the Suharto regime, and Moslem frustration at being second-class citizens erupted after the former leader was forced from office in 1998. The resulting violence has nearly destroyed a region whose residents had peacefully co-existed for centuries.
In Surabaya, Wahid, a Moslem cleric who preaches religious tolerance, urged the country's Moslem population to live peacefully with other groups and abandon calls for a holy war - or jihad.
"Since many, many centuries ago, jihad was meant as a way to keep the nation's integrity and sovereignty," he said. "It means that Jihad was not supposed to defend Moslem groups from non-Moslem groups because since the beginning we have agreed that we have to build the nation together. Therefore it is useless to use Islam for radical reasons."
Wahid, without elaborating, also said that the leaders of radical groups involved in the Moluccas conflict had realized that violence would not solve the deep-seated problems. Separately, the president told party members to be patient about the ongoing political crisis in Jakarta between Wahid and the country's parliament.
