Voice of quiet rebellion
January 27, 2001
After two years of civil war in eastern Indonesia's Maluku Islands, also known as the Spice Islands, someone is finally stating the obvious: Jakarta has no solution. A new political group is calling for the southernmost Maluku Islands to leave Indonesia and form their own republic. It has produced a plausible, if optimistic, legal argument based on dimly remembered events from half a century ago.
The motto of the new Maluku Sovereignty Front (FKM), is Alif'Uru, a Malukan word meaning "ancestors". Common ancestry lies behind the only successful story of reconciliation yet to emerge from the seemingly endless cycle of violence between Christians and Muslims in the Maluku Islands. The FKM hopes it can use the same idea in the Mulukan city of Ambon and elsewhere, but first it needs to reassert the islands' long-dormant independence from Indonesia.
Quietly formed a few months ago, the front is demanding "restoration" of the sovereignty of the southern half of the island group (roughly those lying south of the Seram Sea and north of the Arafura Sea). The front's case is shaky, but members are doing their best to pursue it, appointing representatives in Jakarta, Europe and New York. The FKM is lobbying the United Nations; the United States; the former colonial power, the Netherlands; and international human-rights bodies. It also wants talks with Jakarta.
Its leaders are also in loose contact with the Government-in-exile of the former Republic of the South Malukus (RMS), whose brief historical existence in the 1950s is crucial to their case. The front is careful to avoid demanding "independence" or calling itself "separatist", both of which would be deemed subversive under Indonesian law. The FKM is instead arguing that Jakarta illegally annexed the southern Maluku Islands, which are thus technically still independent.
It sounds hopelessly optimistic and could well end up landing its leaders in jail. But they say they have no choice. "The fact is that the Government does not care about Maluku. We have offered several types of solutions to the Government," said Luis Risakotta, the head of the FKM's Jakarta branch, "but resolution never happens."
About 40,000 people have signed their support of the group's political programme, according to the front. Most are Christians, but they include some Muslims. There are also a few Muslims in the front's leadership, along with some prominent Christian leaders.
In public, regional police chief Brigadier-General Firman Gani has written the FKM off as a small group with little support, but his actions suggest he is privately rather concerned. Already struggling to contain rebels in Aceh and Irian Jaya, Indonesia's leaders hardly need a new separatist group right now.
On December 18, the FKM issued a statement calling for restoration of "sovereignty" by April 25, the 51st anniversary of the foundation of the RMS. Chairman Alex Manuputty and secretary-general Hengky Manuhutu have been called in for police questioning over this. Mr Manuputty, a medical doctor and member of the local Red Cross, said he was aware of moves to bring subversion charges against them, as had happened recently to top separatists in Aceh and Irian Jaya.
The short-lived RMS is one of the great lost causes of Indonesian history. Its nominal Government rarely makes public statements and has kept a remarkably low profile in the past two years, despite the civil war in the region it supposedly claims.
At the close of World War II, Indonesia was left divided. The eastern islands, including the Maluku Islands, had been occupied by allied forces as they swept through en route to the Philippines from New Guinea. Ambon was heavily bombed in the process. But when the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Indonesia's western islands, including Java, were still in Japanese hands. Among the Indonesians who had worked with the Japanese was Sukarno, an independence activist whom the Dutch authorities had jailed in the 1930s and who became Indonesia's founding president.
On August 17, 1945, egged on by popular mood and also no doubt fearing the allied forces might view them as "collaborators", Sukarno and his associates declared independence. They adopted a highly centralistic constitution that they were in no position to implement. The allies were committed to restoring the pre-war status quo, which would put Indonesia back in Dutch hands, but they had not yet taken control of Java. As they tried to do so, a new conflict broke out between Sukarno's forces and first the allies, then the Dutch. To win Indonesian support, the Dutch carved off a series of self-governing states, including a massive State of Eastern Indonesia that included the Maluku Islands.
By late 1949, the two sides had fought their way to a virtual stalemate. Roundtable talks were held in the Hague to bash out a compromise. One was reached. Indonesia's independence was recognised but not as a unitary state. Instead it was to become a federation, a United States of Indonesia, with Sukarno as its president. The federation did not last long.
By the next year, with the Dutch armed forces out of the picture, Sukarno and his supporters were pushing through their original vision of a unitary state.
This was no laughing matter in the Christian-majority southern Malukus. Ambon had provided generations of fighting men to the Dutch colonial forces. They had died fighting for the Dutch in nearly 70 years of war in Aceh, and many had fought against Sukarno's forces. They were now to have their fates dictated by a Muslim-dominated government thousands of kilometres away in Jakarta, which distrusted them. On April 25, 1950, they seceded and declared their own republic under the leadership of former soldiers in the Dutch colonial forces.
But they were on their own, and the world was preoccupied with the Korean War. After Indonesia's armed forces retook Ambon, the RMS leaders and their families were forced into exile in the Netherlands. Peace returned to the Malukus, and the RMS was all but forgotten.
Two years ago, the peace was shattered in a series of tit-for-tat blood feuds between Christians and Muslims, which began in Ambon and gradually moved right around the archipelago. This unofficial civil war remains unsolved despite a series of government-brokered attempts at mediation, a state of civil emergency and thousands of casualties on both sides.
Despite the deep hatred and distrust that was building up, the RMS remained little more than a memory for months after the civil war started. Muslim groups routinely referred to Christian militia as "RMS rebels", but there was little hard evidence of any concrete links. But from early on in the conflict, Christian leaders have been quietly warning that separatism could reemerge if the Government did not handle the problem properly. The final straw appears to have been the arrival in the Maluku Islands of thousands of extremist Laskar Jihad militia last May, with an organised campaign to remove or forcibly convert Christians to Islam. The FKM was formed within weeks of the militia's arrival.
The FKM would never have happened without the bloodshed of the past two years. By beefing up the police and armed forces, the Government has fuelled the conflict, the front's leaders say. Links between the police and armed forces and the militias on both the Christian and Muslim sides are quite clear. There is a regular black market in military-issue weaponry in Ambon these days.
Some ordinary Malukans, on both sides, believe that Islamic hardliners in the Government or in parliament are quite happy to let the conflict run, that they are using it to further their own political agendas at the national level. They see in the Maluku Islands a microcosm of their own campaign to do away with Indonesia's secular form of government and turn it into an Islamic state. This is an old issue and one of the main fears that led Christian soldiers to declare the RMS back in the 1950s.
"The country is only a social contract. If the Government cannot give protection to its people, the people have the right to find an alternative," said Mr Risakotta of the FKM's Jakarta branch, pointing out that Indonesia's own constitution says sovereignty is in the hands of the people. But the FKM stresses it is not a "Christian" movement. It wants to use the common bond of ancestry to end the cycle of violence, which it believes is instigated by outsiders, including the military and Laskar Jihad's Java-based leaders.
There is a precedent. In 1999, the Kai Islands, the southeasternmost of the Maluku Islands, were ravaged by religious clashes that left more than 100 dead. Entire villages were destroyed up and down the coasts, and the capital Tual was split into Christian and Muslim sectors. But as the civil war has moved from island to island elsewhere in the archipelago, the Kais are now a haven of peace again. In a peace process that stressed their common ancestry as Malukans, the people of the Kais found enough common ground to forget the blood both sides had spilt.
As a historical footnote, Sukarno's daughter Megawati Sukarnoputri has been a particular disappointment for certain FKM leaders. In 1996, some of the people now in the FKM risked their lives for her, holding out at the headquarters of the Indonesian Democratic Party in Jakarta, after former president Suharto's government engineered her dismissal from the party leadership. When she was elected vice-president, Ms Megawati was given special responsibility for solving the Malukan conflict. In more than a year, her meagre efforts have produced no tangible results at all. Instead, she spends her time showing solidarity with the armed forces and preserving her father's legacy, in particular Indonesian unity.
But her erstwhile supporters have found a new campaign, which might well put them at odds with Ms Megawati. They accept jail as the "risk of political struggle".
Unfortunately, their plan also has potentially devastating flaws. Their historical argument would only allow them to claim the Christian-dominated southern half of the Maluku Islands, while much of the worst violence has been in the Muslim-dominated north. In the huge northern island of Halmahera, Christian communities are virtually cut off from the outside world, in constant fear of Muslim attacks.
Meanwhile, Christians have been totally expelled from the Malukus' southern Banda Islands, and the Muslims left behind there might be extremely dubious about joining a Christian-dominated republic. FKM admits these problems exist but sees no other choice.
"A long-running conflict makes people bored," said one FKM supporter. "The Muslims lose. The Christians lose. The only winners are the military. They had to pull out of East Timor. Now they have found a new battlefield."
Chris McCall