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Foreign Affairs
Indonesia Unraveling?
By David Rohde
David Rohde is an Open Society Institute Individual Project Fellow and a reporter for The New York Times.
Searching for an Answer
At first glance, the Tagolu village community hall has the look of an American Grange hall. Rough wooden planks line the floor. A worn but sturdy podium sits at the end of a room that can hold 50 farmers. The roof is tin and rusting.
But hanging from a beam in the center of a room typically reserved for celebrations and weddings is a crude, handmade noose fashioned out of three electrical wires. Its maker clearly took pride in his craft: he painstakingly twisted a fourth wire around the main coils to ensure the noose would be strong enough to choke the life out of a human body.
A small section of the floor beneath the noose is stained black. A few feet away, much larger smears cover the floorboards. A soldier guarding the site points out shapes: a bloody handprint near the center, a bloody footprint a few inches away. "They probably tried to run away," he says. Spread across the room in disparate patterns, the stains form a map. Spattered drops mark where a victim was first slashed. A larger stain signals where life seeped out of the body. A long smear traces how the corpse was dragged away for disposal..
The remains of ten people were buried in pits in a schoolteacher's backyard a few hundred yards away. Several had been decapitated. One body was that of a pregnant woman. "I'm sure whoever killed them was really drunk," the soldier offers, trying to explain what happened here. "If not, they wouldn't have had the heart to do it."
The victims were among more than 250 people killed last year during street clashes between Christians and Muslims in the town of Poso in eastern Indonesia. Bordered by turquoise sea, verdant mountains, and emerald rain forests, the bustling harbor town appears an unlikely axis of religious hatred. But over the course of 18 months, what began as a fight between two drunken teenagers — one Christian, one Muslim — mutated into open communal warfare. Street battles ravaged 20 towns and villages surrounding Poso, destroyed 3,500 homes, and created 70,000 refugees.
In a once rapidly modernizing nation, groups of Christians used machetes to behead dozens of Muslims. Residents of towns equipped with automatic teller machines and satellite television breathlessly told tales of warriors using black magic to fly through the air and deflect bullets.
Last summer, I went to Poso to try to understand what had happened there. I had covered the war in Bosnia, and the same virus that had ravaged the Balkans — ethnic and religious conflict — had now seemingly spread to Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous nation. The stories from Poso and other troubled areas were familiar. Rumor, fear, and extremist propaganda warped average people's perceptions. Neighbor slowly turned on neighbor. The state gradually dissolved.
No one knew the exact course of events in Poso. A petty dispute had somehow sparked savagery. In the single worst incident, Christian attackers descended on the village of Sintuwu Lemba on May . . .