Calls for Holy War in Indonesia

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Registered: 04-16-2003
Calls for Holy War in Indonesia
Tue, 04-27-2004 - 3:54pm
(04-27) 10:38 PDT AMBON, Indonesia (AP) --

Snipers spread terror across this provincial capital Tuesday in a third day of bloodshed that intensified fears the region could plunge back into a Muslim-Christian war that killed 9,000 people three years ago.

Gunmen killed two paramilitary police officers and critically wounded a third and a Muslim man later was incinerated by a bomb explosion, bringing the death toll since Sunday to 24.

The violence underscored the fragility of Malukus province, known as the Spice Islands during Dutch colonial rule and once held up as a model of religious harmony. Communal tensions worsened in recent decades with an influx of Muslims from elsewhere in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation.

Coming in a region where Islamic extremists have been trying to drum up support, the new bloodshed is a further complication for Indonesians heading into a presidential election in July. Six years after protests ended the dictatorship of Gen. Suharto, the main election issue has been stability in this sprawling nation of 210 million people.

Community leaders in Ambon urged calm, hoping to head off a resumption of the 1999-2001 war.

"I'm telling Christians to stay indoors and don't be provoked," Ambon's Roman Catholic bishop, Petur Canis Mandagi, told The Associated Press after talks with Muslim leaders and security chiefs at police headquarters. "The conflict can be stopped, but we must be quick."

Muslim men armed with machetes and sharpened sticks gathered outside the main mosque, chanting "God is great" and calling for holy war against Christian separatists. Mobs put up barricades between the Muslim and Christian parts of Ambon, which is spread across wooded hillsides overlooking a sparkling blue bay.

"We are defending our area," said one man at a checkpoint. "If we are attacked we will respond in kind."

The U.S. State Department advised Americans to leave Ambon or put off travel to the region.

The latest round of violence erupted Sunday after several members of the region's small, largely Christian, separatist movement rallied in the city center. Muslims, who view such public displays as a provocation, assaulted the demonstrators, touching off sectarian clashes in the city.

Islamic radicals have been trying to whip up Muslim fervor in the Malukus in reaction to the global war on terrorist groups.

The earlier conflict here galvanized militant Muslims across Indonesia, and it also attracted Islamic fighters from around Southeast Asia and from the Middle East.

Many members of Jemaah Islamiyah, an al-Qaida-linked extremist group blamed for a series of deadly bombings in Indonesia, have told authorities that they fought in the conflict.

There have been reports of a rift within Jemaah Islamiyah between militants who want to target Westerners and those who wish to limit their holy war to fighting Indonesian Christians in regions like the Malukus.

Many politicians and diplomats said the 1999-2001 fighting in Malukus was encouraged by hardline military commanders loyal to Suharto who wanted to destabilize the administrations that followed his ouster.

The country's security forces were criticized for failing to quell that violence, and many Christians now say they no longer have faith in the Indonesian state to protect them.

The province's 2 million people are evenly divided between Muslims and Christians.

Most of the Muslims in the Malukus are settlers who were moved to the region from other densely populated islands in the 1970s and '80s under Suharto's migration program to dilute secessionist sentiment in non-Muslim areas.

Christians complain that the settlers have come to dominate government work and retail sector, siphoning off jobs and business from Christians.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/04/27/international1338EDT0565.DTL