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first became aware of central Indonesia eleven years ago, when I
bought a map in an airport shop in Cebu, in the middle of the Philippines.
A portion of this 17,000-mile archipelago was taken up by a huge
island shaped like a pinwheel: Sulawesi. In 1999, horrific stories
about Christian persecution in that part of the world started to
leak out. A radical Islamic group called Laskar Jihad was terrorizing
Christians in a group of islands called the Moluccas, just east
of Sulawesi. Christians who refused to convert to Islam were killed;
those who did convert were then separated from their families, given
Muslim names, and forcibly circumcised — without anaesthetic,
and with dirty instruments. Scissors were used on the adults. They
were then told to wash in the sea to disinfect their wounds. The
women underwent female genital circumcision.
Why, I wondered,
weren't journalists reporting on this tragedy? It turns out that
getting a journalist's visa to enter that part of the country is
next to impossible. One has to first go to Jakarta to state the
purpose of one's trip, and then wait for approval. But there are
planes or ferryboats to these islands daily, so a truly dedicated
reporter could slip in. One gets the impression that, when it's
Christians being murdered or tortured, the international press isn't
really interested. That's how Joanna Milosz — a member of the
London-based Christian Solidarity Worldwide who recently traveled
around the Moluccas — sees it: "The whole Moluccas conflict
has been fraught with misinformation from the beginning," she
says. "The Western press goes overboard in being sensitive
to the Muslim community. They do not want to be Islamophobic, so
they ignore the realities of the situation. What has been so astounding
is how few other Indonesians know what the actual situation is.
The Bacan-Seram islands are where people have faced forced conversions
and circumcisions. Christians are subject to especially severe circumcisions.
I've heard reports of them doing it to girls as young as 2."
I e-mailed
a journalist in Jakarta who works for a respected international
magazine, asking her about the refugee camps that ring the area.
At least 5,000 people have died in the fighting between Muslims
and Christians, and nearly half a million have been driven from
their homes. Many of them are in refugee camps; the camp in Manado,
a mainly Christian city on the northeastern tip of Sulawesi, alone
numbers 50,000.
"I've
been to many refugee camps in Manado and surrounding areas,"
she wrote me back. "The government does as little as they can.
It's a diabolical situation that does not get much attention."
I kept on reading
horror stories — mostly from Christian mission organizations
monitoring the area, as they seemed to be the only ones brave enough
to venture into the region. One Washington, D.C.-based group, International
Christian Concern, interviewed a woman with a horribly disfigured
face who had been attacked in Duma, a Moluccan village on the island
of Halmahera.
"When
I saw the jihad warriors approaching," the woman told the interviewer,
"I cried out, 'Lord help me.' Then a jihad warrior came up
to me and said, 'I'll show you how God helps you,' and then placed
the pistol in my mouth and pulled the trigger."
The same interviewer
met a twelve-year-old boy named Noledy on the same island. The boy
had seen his parents hacked with machetes, then buried alive by
jihadists. He managed to escape into the jungles, where he wandered
for about a week before encountering other Christian refugees. Indonesian
Christians on other islands have made cloak-and-dagger missions
to these islands by boat to rescue such people; to date, about 2,700
have benefited from the boat rescues. Another 6,000 still need help.
Why have journalists
ignored a group that equals the Taliban in cruelty? Laskar Jihad
even have their own website, where they blame "Christian priests"
for carrying out mission activities against their Muslim brethren.
Their propaganda tells of Muslims who have been attacked and tortured
by Christians. The Islamist group is involved in importing warriors
into various trouble spots around the Indonesian islands. They had
already made Ambon, an island in the southern Moluccas, a living
hell for Christians, and starting a few months ago, they aimed their
sights farther north. Their goal: Sulawesi.
Sulawesi is
1,000 miles east of Jakarta, Indonesia's capital. As for the government
sending in its own military to keep the peace, the Indonesian military
is not known for its fairness and impartiality — as the world
saw in East Timor's fight for independence. The navy and air force
are trustworthy, but the army — which leans heavily to the
side of the Muslims — is fearsome to Christians.
Eighty-seven
percent (174 million) of Indonesia's 201 million people are Muslim
— the largest Muslim population of any country in the world.
The goal of Laskar Jihad and like-minded radicals is to make Islam
the country's official religion, and to impose sharia law.
It already exists in Ternate, a small island-city just off of Halmahera.
Christian pastors unfortunate enough to be discovered in the area
simply get beheaded.
Steven Snyder
of International Christian Concern and Dr. David Harding, a Maryland
physician, recently visited Sulawesi to examine the situation there.
They came back nine days later with a horror story: 7,000 jihad
warriors were amassing to attack Christians in central Sulawesi,
specifically Tentena, a lakeside city of 63,000 — about 28,000
of them refugees from around the island. Like the Israelites defending
Jerusalem's walls during the time of the prophet Nehemiah, the men
of the city were posted about city limits with whatever weapons
they could scrounge up, while the women and children had gathered
their belongings for a possible flight into the jungle. The 35 policemen
in town had a total of three rifles.
The two men,
plus an Australian translator who knows the island intimately, got
through to Tentena with the help of an eight-man military escort.
The worst part was the 70-mile drive from Poso, a larger city on
the coast, south into Tentena. Along the way they saw burned-out
Christian villages, and roadblocks with signs that read "jihad
post." The men lounging by them carried AK-47s.
"Our police
escorts were petrified," Mr. Snyder says. "We stopped
at one jihad post and offered them coffee if we could take photos.
They didn't know what to make of us; all these white guys emerging
from behind a car with tinted windows." Somehow they got through,
only to discover legions of sick and homeless in Tentena.
"Dr. Harding
saw a seven-month-old baby that looked about three weeks old. She
had only been fed with sugar water," Mr. Snyder says. "The
pharmacy there was pretty pathetic, too."
They stayed
for several days, interviewing residents and police, who told them
that a boatload of 1,000 Laskar Jihad had arrived on the island
just before they came — and that another was due the following
week. The Indonesian Islamists have direct links to international
Islamic extremists, including those in Afghanistan and in Osama
bin Laden's network. Six Afghani and Pakistani "visitors"
had been seen in the area when Harding and Snyder were there. Indonesian
mujahedeen had fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s, and
the jihad posts had bin Laden's picture on them. An Australian magazine,
Tempo, reported in October that trainers from Bosnia as well
as Afghanistan were working with Laskar Jihad.
In addition,
Baroness Carolyn Cox, Deputy Speaker of the British House of Lords,
who heads up Christian Solidarity Worldwide, met up with some Afghan
jihadists when she visited Ambon two months ago.
"They
weren't there for a picnic," she said. The head of Laskar Jihad,
Jafar Umar Thalib, is said to be a disciple of bin Laden's.
Now back in
the United States, Mr. Snyder is pressing for some response from
the American government in the matter of Tentena's beleaguered Christians.
Megawati Sukarnoputri was one of the first foreign leaders to visit
the United States after the terrorist attacks, and she was rewarded
with a $130 million aid package. An additional $10 million was given
to her by President Bush for assisting refugees, particularly in
the Moluccas. And, with congressional approval, another $10 million
will go for police training.
But to what
end? The police almost always take the side of the Muslim majority
in these conflicts, and have apparently helped arm groups like Laskar
Jihad. Furthermore, they have stood by while Russian arms shipments
purchased through Philippine channels have arrived at various island
depots.
Not all Indonesian
Muslims embrace Laskar Jihad. In Tentena, 31 Muslim families live
in peace with their neighbors. But Indonesia's radical Muslims elicit
little more than a yawn from most quarters. At a reception for journalists,
held in December at the vice president's mansion, I asked Dick Cheney
if he was aware of the problem. No, he was not. "Forgive me
for being cynical," my journalist contact in Jakarta wrote
me, "but stories on Muslim radicals in Indonesia are a dime
a dozen."
But the tortured
and persecuted are not a dime a dozen. By mid-December, some government
forces, ranging from 2,000-4,000 troops, had flooded the Poso-Tentena
reason, making it impossible for Laskar Jihad to achieve their goal
of domination of central Sulawesi by the end of Ramadan on Dec.
16. So Laskar Jihad will simply wait. They've been at this for several
years now, and their supreme commander, Jafar Umar Thalib, remains
at large. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of refugees are sick and
homeless because evil will happen, as the saying goes, if good men
are content to do nothing.
"We were
able to board our plane and depart in safety," Mr. Snyder says,
"but our hearts cried out for our dear brothers and sisters
trapped in the district of Poso. Many are simple peasants, farmers,
fishermen and villagers. They are defenseless, weaponless and confused.
They know nothing of all the political, religious or financial manipulations
going on. Their only hope is that God will intervene."
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