By DON GREENLESS Jakarta correspondent
The Weekend Australian - 20th March 1999
AS a young masters student doing a thesis in Ambon in 1997, Marcus Mietzner remembers being badgered in front of 30 students by a lecturer at Pattimura University over whether he went to church every Sunday. He quickly learnt religion was taken very seriously.
Later, he watched an election rally by the Muslim-oriented United Development Party fill the centre of Ambon city. Leaflets went around that churches would be burnt after the rally.
Christians rushed home to ready for the attack. Muslims, seeing the Christians fleeing, thought they better go back to their neigbourhoods to defend themselves too. It ended in stone-throwing, which was quelled by the armed forces.
The experience reinforced a fact commonly understood but rarely admitted under the rule of former president Suharto.
"The whole image of religious tolerance on Ambon was a myth," says Mietzner, now visiting fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
The success of the Suharto era was not to bring religious harmony to the evenly divided Muslim and Christian communities of the Maluku islands in eastern Indonesia, it was to keep the tension bottled up. With the end of Suharto, it was only a question of time before the lid blew off.
"It has to do with the breakdown in the authority of ABRI (the armed forces)," says Mietzner.
With the official death toll from the fighting that erupted on January 19 climbing above 200, the authority of the armed forces remains weak. The army has alternately been accused of being partisan or allowing the violence to unfold.
The lack of confidence in the military's capacity to restore and maintain order, and the depth of the passions that gave rise to the violence, imbue little confidence in a lasting peace.
The tensions Jakarta is trying to manage are centuries old – going back to when the co-founder of the Jesuit Order, Saint Francis Xavier, entrenched Catholicism in Maluku in the mid-16th century.
Tensions have flared periodically, with terrible results. In the 1950s, Ambonese Christians loyal to the Dutch fought first to maintain a federal State and then create an independent State free from what they saw as Javanese dominance. As many as 5000 might have died in the army's suppression of the uprising.
Fighting between Christians and Muslims was a feature of life under both Portuguese and Dutch colonial rule. The Dutch approach was to keep the two sides apart.
Historian Richard Lerissa says among techniques used was to prohibit Christians from marrying Muslims and to force Christians to seek permission if they wished to stay in Muslim villages.
He says the image projected by the Suharto regime of Christians and Muslims living together, reinforced by the building of churches and mosques side by side, has obscured the true religious and ethnic divide.
During the Suharto years, he says, Muslims increasingly displaced Christians in business and provincial administration. The sense of embattlement was fuelled by the increasingly frequent burning of churches in riots elsewhere in Indonesia.
"The Dutch had a strategy to control the population, called integration and segregation," Professor Lerissa says.
"They integrated the Christians into the system because they are trustworthy, they would protect the interests of the Dutch.
"On the other hand, the Muslims are segregated because they were regarded as troublemakers, they could damage the colonial system.
"Suharto's tactics were like the Dutch, exactly like the Dutch, but in reverse."
Ethnic divisions on Ambon are equally profound. Migrants have been coming for a very long time – the Buton and Makassar, of south Sulawesi, since the 18th century. But resentment among the indigenous people has grown in tandem with the economic and social success of the Muslim outsiders.
Human Rights Commission chairman Marzuki Darusman points to the envy created among the mostly Christian urban population of Ambon. But he rejects it is the beginning of a more profound challenge to national unity.
"The dominant factor would be social disintegration and this is caused by social and economic hardships," he says.
"It is not yet a national disintegration as such but it can easily spill over into that area."
Lerissa is pessimistic about the consequences. His bottom line is that the vacuum left by the fall of Suharto created the conditions for simmering anger to be exploited, something that could happen almost anywhere in the archipelago.
"Jakarta has no power anymore," he says. "I think people understand this. In Ambon, the Christians thought it was the time to take revenge. It was only a matter of the exact time."
In the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan, four days of ethnic violence left 51 dead and thousands evacuated, a news report said yesterday. Police, however, claimed only 14 had been killed and more than 300 evacuated.
The Kompas daily said more than 1000 houses were torched and 3351 Madurese evacuated to Singakawang and Pontianak.
The fighting was sparked by a dispute between members of the Malay and Madurese migrant communities last Sunday, and more than 1900 troops had been sent in, it said.