Twenty Years Lived Dangerously

14,000 islands, 250 ethnic groups, a strategic geographic position. The renewal of hostility toward Christians, a small minority in an Islamic country

by riccardo cascioli

On May 6, 2000, the first 200 volunteers arrived in the archipelago of the Moluccas for a “holy war,” determined to expel the Christians from what were once called the “Spice Islands” (in the sixteenth century they were the only source of nutmeg and cloves). The group of fundamentalists was the spearhead of a larger band of volunteers (4,000 in all), determined to put an end to the Christian community, responsible–according to them–for the massacre of Muslims which has been going on for a year and a half. In reality, in the inter-religious incidents which broke out suddenly in January 1999 at Ambon in Indonesia and then spread to the nearby islands, Christians and Muslims have suffered losses in the same measure, both in terms of human life (2,000 total) and of religious buildings. This violence has exploded without apparent reason, in an archipelago that until very recently has been held up as an example of coexistence, with a Christian majority (for the most part Protestant), descendants of the Portuguese and Dutch colonists, and an Islamic minority that seemed satisfied with peaceful coexistence. Evidently, behind the calm facade were festering feelings of rancor and mistrust that burst out in all their virulence as soon as the occasion arose.

Pancasila
It is a situation that reveals (and throws definitively into crisis) all the limits of the “Pancasila,” or “Five Principles,” the Indonesian state philosophy on which is based the reciprocal tolerance of the five officially recognized religions (Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Protestantism, and Catholicism). This ideology was formulated in 1945 by the “father of independence” Sukarno and founded on the five principles which must be respected by the population: faith in one God, fair and civil humanity, unity of the Indonesian nation, democracy, and social justice. It acts, according to some, as a historically necessary glue for holding together a countres made up of 14,000 islands, with 250 ethnic groups, troubled by secessionist impulses and located in a strategic position on the road between the Far East and Europe. It is no coincidence that over the centuries the islands of Indonesia have been utilized and conquered for commercial reasons, first by the Arabs (ninth through fifteenth centuries), then by the European colonial powers: the Portuguese in the sixteenth century in the Moluccas (where St. Frances Xavier preached in 1546), followed by Dutch Calvinists (who in 1596 forbade the Catholic faith, a ban which stood until 1806), and finally the English.

Unusual tolerance
The Pancasila fostered the reign for a number of decades of a climate of tolerance unknown not only to other Islamic countries, but also to a large part of Asia. But in a country with 200 million inhabitants, almost 90% of whom are Muslims (there are 20 million Christians, of whom 5 million are Catholics), a balance of this sort is possible only with the consent of the majority. In the last 20 years, however, during a period of economic development followed by financial crisis, a sort of Islamic rebirth has been occurring that has greatly accelerated in the last 3 years, to the point of putting the existence of the minorities at risk.
The first signs were already being seen in 1978, when the government of Jakarta issued two decrees prohibiting religious propaganda “for attracting conversions” and subjecting every form of foreign aid (material and personnel) to the approval of the Minister for Religious Affairs, who is always a Muslim. At the same time, the entrance of new foreign “missionaries” of any religion was forbidden. In 1983, the Muslim fundamentalist movements launched their first campaign against the presence of the Christian churches which would yield its fruits five years later, when visas were not renewed for the missionaries already resident in Indonesia; in two years at least 700 people had to leave. The religious question in Indonesia is mixed up with ethnic and economic factors, since the Chinese minority is mainly Christian (and in part Buddhist), but holds 80% of the national wealth in its hands. Thus, when in 1997, after more than a decade of promising economic growth, South-east Asia fell into its well-known financial and economic crisis, a witch-hunt broke out in Indonesia against the Chinese (and Christians). The violence reached its height in spring 1998, when the popular uprisings which led to the expulsion of the leader and boss of Indonesia, Suharto, assumed on the islands of Java and Sumatra a precise anti-Chinese and anti-Christian connotation, with about 2,000 dead, hundreds of ethnic rapes, and arson in churches and religious buildings.

The hand of politics
But the violence and intimidation against Christians does not begin or end with the anti-Suharto protests; from 1996 to today, in Indonesia some 500 churches have been burned down or seriously damaged. And in the last two years, more than 1,300 religious buildings have been seriously damaged. The events of spring 1998 clearly showed the hand of the political and military powers behind the violence aimed at Christians; certain sectors of the army, probably still linked to the Suharto clan, have been explicitly accused of fomenting the disorder in Jakarta and the Moluccas and in other parts of Indonesia. In fact, some fundamentalist groups were first seen operating in 1998 as paramilitary bands alongside the army to block the demonstrators (for the most part Muslims) demanding Suharto’s resignation. This January, 10,000 extremists took to the streets of Jakarta to demand the resignation of the new democratic government created after the elections of June 1999 and to invoke a “holy war” against the Christians in the Moluccas, opening a campaign of voluntary recruitment.. This was the Ahlus-Sunnah Wal Jama’ah Forum, a radical organization that takes the Afghan Talibans as their model. Even though the government has tried to downplay the fundamentalist threat, the arrival of “volunteers” at Ambon, with the resumption of the fighting after a period of relative calm, demonstrates instead that a concrete threat exists, not only for minorities but also for the traditional Indonesian Islamic institutions. The Muslims, in fact, are mainly grouped into two large organizations, the Nahdlatul Ulama, with 35,000,000 members, whose leader is the current Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid, and the Muhammadiyah, around 30,000,000 members, guided by Amien Rais. Both organizations, albeit with different nuances, maintain a moderate profile. But the wind of fundamentalism, fed by power groups, can easily condition the “Islamic rebirth,” making it take on anti-minority connotations.