Religious cooperation pacifies Ambon

IS THERE A PROPER FORMULA to resist violent provocateurs?  And have the residents of a once-troubled corner of Indonesia found it? 

Ambon, the capital of Maluku Province in Indonesia, is a place that has endured sectarian violence in the past and now desires peace.  Ambon's citizens proved this month that cooperation can be established in order to calm new clashes that broke out Sunday, 11 September, 2011. Though the death toll from the riots is now 8, the violence was contained due to the preventative actions of the community.

Indonesia is the largest archipelago in the world, and its 17,000 islands host a population of 235 million.  85 percent are Muslim. Ten percent are Christian, and 5 percent belong to other religions.  In some sections of the archipelago, there are majority-Christian enclaves, one of which is Ambon.

In 1999, the city of Ambon was the epicenter of a communal conflict between Christian and Muslims.  The clashes went on for one year and claimed more than 9,000 lives.  The wounds from that conflict are still felt to this day in both communities. 

On 11 September, 2001, from afternoon until midnight, I watched developments in the field minute by minute through a Blackberry messenger group where some friends who live in Ambon were posting live reports.  The 30 people in the Blackberry group include NGO staff, scholars, activists, and journalists who cooperate regardless of their religious background.

Last week's clashes started after a report circulated through the Muslim society in Ambon that a motorcycle-taxi driver (a resident of Waihong, a Muslim enclave) was killed by people in the area of the Christian enclave Gunung Nona. But the truth was that the taxi driver died on his way to the hospital after he collided with a wall on his motorcycle the night before.

After the taxi driver's burial, the incorrect rumors spread in earnest. The hundreds of people who came to the burial became incensed and started destroying and burning some property in the area. At the beginning, the clash just happened around the Trikora Monument, which has separated the Muslim and Christian communities since the 1999 conflict, as well as the Waringin and Pohon Puleh areas.
   
The Secretary General for the Maluku branch of Indonesian Assembly of Clerics (or Majelis Ulama Indonesia/MUI), Wakano Abidin, who is also an activist in the interfaith community, wrote in a message that the situation was similar to the conditions in Ambon before the 1999 conflict erupted. It began with the spread of misleading rumors.  Then tension arose between the two communities, and at the same time security apparatus was very slow to react. Then there were some people riding motorcycles at high speed, calling on residents to be ready.  They hit the electricity pole as an alarm to their community.

But this time the outcome was different. The conflict was successfully contained so that it did not spread to other parts of Ambon, or Maluku islands.  This time, people from the two communities tried instead to protect one another.  The residents were aware there were provocations and deception, and they did not want to repeat the 1999 conflict with its massive loss of life, destruction of properties, and thousands of internally displaced people in shelters.