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In a new report on the communal violence that has wracked Ambon and surrounding islands for the last two months, Human Rights Watch calls on the Indonesian government to make public any hard evidence of provocation, investigate allegations of bias in the behavior of security forces called in to quell the violence, and acknowledge the terrible losses that both Christians and Muslims have suffered. It also calls on the government to examine and address the underlying communal tensions.

Whether or not the violence in Ambon was provoked, communal tensions there were explosive," said Sidney Jones, Asia director of Human Rights Watch and the report's author. "This was never the paradise of interfaith harmony that has sometimes been portrayed." She said each eruption of violence that has taken place since January has added to the accumulated grievances of both sides, making any early resolution of the conflict much more difficult.

The thirty-page report, based in part on a visit to Ambon in February, presents differing accounts of the same incident from Christian and Muslim sources, showing the vast discrepancies between the two and the danger of relying only on one side. "Neither community has a monopoly on truth or suffering," said Jones. "The death toll is appallingly high for both, and both sides have seen entire neighborhoods burned down, and houses of worship destroyed." The report notes that Christian sources as of March 9 were reporting eighty-three Christian deaths, and Muslim sources said over one hundred Muslims had been killed.

Some 30,000 people have been displaced and are living in temporary shelters in and around Ambon, not counting the tens of thousands of migrants, mostly from Sulawesi, who have left Ambon since January. As of early March, the government had not permitted international aid and humanitarian agencies regular access to the displaced.

The report examines four questions: Who started the violence? Why did it escalate so fast? What, if anything, could the government have done to halt it? And what should the government be doing now?

The Indonesian press, many senior officials in the Indonesian government and opposition, and many Jakarta-based diplomats believe the violence was provoked as part of a nationwide strategy of rogue military officers linked to the Soeharto family to disrupt the forthcoming parliamentary elections in June and create the conditions for a return to military rule. The June.elections, which promise to be Indonesia's freest Indonesia since 1955, would, if fairly conducted, almost certainly lead to a further diminution of the military's power, which has been on the wane since President Soeharto resigned in May 1998. In contrast, local leaders in Ambon tend to see the violence as locally instigated for narrow communal goals. In either case, the report says, government of Soeharto's successor, Habibie, seems to have been half-hearted about investigating allegations of provocation at either the national or local level.

Why did the violence spread so quickly? Ambon was portrayed in the Indonesian media as a land where relations between Christians and Muslims had always been harmonious, the tranquility of interfaith relations protected by an alliance system called pela, where for centuries, a village of one faith had been twinned with a village of the other, where Christians helped build mosques, and Muslims helped build churches. The reality was very different. Tension between the two communities, Ambonese Christians on the one hand, and Ambonese Muslims and Muslims from various migrant groups on the other, was so high that it would have taken very little provocation to ignite an explosion. Once the violence began, it quickly fed on itself, dragging out historical grievances, creating new injuries, and generating new, deeply felt communal suspicions.

What might the government have done differently? A key question revolves around the use of lethal force. The conflict in Ambon separates into two distinct phases, demarcated by a decision to fire on demonstrators. From January 19 to about February 14, most of the deaths on both sides were caused by traditional or homemade weapons — machetes, long knives, spears, arrows shot from slingshots, molotov cocktails, and fishing bombs (illegal devices exploded under water to capture large quantities of fish). Many people also burned to death when houses or vehicles were set on fire. From February 14 onwards, most of the deaths took place when security forces, whose numbers by March had risen to 5,000 on an island with a population of about 350,000, began implementing orders to fire on rioters. There is no question that an extremely grave security threat existed, and the security forces were initially accused by both sides of standing by and doing nothing as the different sides were attacking each other. When they finally did intervene, they shot bullets rather than attempting to use any methods of non-lethal crowd control.

A second question relates to the composition of the security forces used. Both sides have made allegations of bias, with the Muslims tending to accuse the police of favoring the Christians, and the Christians tending to accuse the army of siding with the Muslims. The accusations of bias were based in part on non-military attributes of the soldiers and police involved (geographic origin, religion, ethnicity) but also on their behavior in the field. Muslims accused Christian police in one case of opening fire near a mosque; Christians accused Muslim soldiers in another of helping Muslims attack a Christian village. Those accusations need to be thoroughly examined by an impartial body. Moreover, the government should deploy security forces with a view toward minimizing perceptions of bias, a point we elaborate on below.

The first two questions are directly related to the protection of human rights in a situation of civil strife. There is a third question of the government's response, however, which has arisen in other outbreaks of communal violence, such as a serious ethnic conflict that erupted in West Kalimantan in late 1996 and early 1997. This is the Indonesian government's belief in top-down conflict resolution: that if the local government brings religious or customary leaders together and has them sign a peace pact or participate in a traditional ceremony, the conflict can be solved. This approach can have unfortunate consequences, because when the pact inevitably breaks down, the participants often believe that the bad faith of one of the parties must have been responsible — and mutual distrust and suspicion grow deeper.

The report makes the following recommendations to the Indonesian government:

1. Ensure that its security forces respect the Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officers and that troops assigned to Ambon are fully equipped with non-lethal methods of crowd control. Of particular importance to Ambon is the principle that "Law enforcement officials, in carrying out their duty, shall, as far as possible, apply non-violent means before resorting to the use of force and firearms. They may use force and firearms only if other means remain ineffective or without any promise of achieving the intended result."

2. Investigate accusations of bias in the behavior of security forces. In many outbreaks of violence thus far, notably the shooting on March 1 of four people outside a mosque and the conflict on the island of Haruku on February 14, Muslims have accused Christian Ambonese police personnel of taking part in attacks against them. Likewise, the Christians have accused troop reinforcements sent from the Wirabuana command of the Indonesian army, based in Ujung Pandang, Sulawesi, of siding with Muslim villagers in several clashes. The fact that the Wirabuana command is led by a Muslim Ambonese, and that some of the Muslims involved in the conflict in Ambon are ethnic Bugis and native to the area around Ujung Pandang, does little to allay suspicions of bias. An impartial independent investigation, not necessarily of every outbreak of violence that has taken place, but at least of three or four major clashes where bias has been alleged, would be useful.

At the same time, independent investigators should work with local village heads (raja) and community leaders to examine reports that have been produced by both sides to identify points of convergence and divergence and use these findings to understand how perceptions have fed the conflict.

3. Avoid at all costs the imposition of a state of "civil emergency" in Ambon and surrounding islands. This option is currently being weighed by Cabinet ministers in Jakarta and has been recommended by some local leaders in Ambon. With the very clear exacerbation of the situation caused by the presence of security forces with orders to fire on rioters, additional measures that allow the military to bypass normal civil rights safeguards are likely to make things even worse.

4. Make absolutely clear in all public pronouncements and interviews that both Christians and Muslims are victims. There has been a distressing tendency in both the Indonesian and international media to quote sources from only one side of the conflict. That reporting feeds back into the communal tensions in Ambon, helping fuel one side's anger against the other.

5. Find and prosecute any provocateurs. If General Wiranto and other senior government leaders have enough information to acknowledge, as they have, that provocateurs played a role in the initial outbreak of violence, they have an obligation to make public the nature of their evidence and make every effort to ensure that those individuals are found and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

6. Ensure that international, non-religious-based humanitarian organizations are allowed full access to Ambon and surrounding islands to assist the wounded and displaced. The need is not so much for supplies of food and medicine but rather to find a way to distribute existing supplies safely and impartially.

7. Ensure that the rights of internally displaced people in Ambon are fully protected in accordance with "Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement" prepared by the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs of the United Nations.

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