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Lessons from Indonesia’s “sad years”

There are several valid ways to approach the question of Catholic efforts at peacemaking. One way is to study the church teachings—those of the universal magisterium, of the continental and national bishops’ conferences, and of the local bishops. Peter Phan explores this approach in the previous chapter. One can also examine the operation of peace-making institutions set up by the Church, exploring their theological understanding of peace and peacebuilding, as well as how this comes to be embodied in the structures they put in place for the task and the dialogue with other religious bodies they undertake. I want to follow this latter approach here, by looking at the concrete case of one country, Indonesia, where the Catholic Church, as a religious minority, has sought to contribute to peace in a religiously and ethnically plural society, both through its own initiatives and in its interaction with the government and the majority Muslim population.

Introducing a great and complex nation

The nation of Indonesia is an archipelago made up of 17,508 islands of which 6,000 are inhabited. The country straddles the equator and is strategically located along the major sea lanes between the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Indonesia has 54,716 km of coastline, (compared to the United States with 19,924.) If a map of Indonesia were superimposed on that of Europe, the country would extend from Ireland to the Caspian Sea. Although much of that area is water, the comparison points out the vast distances involved in Indonesian geography.

As the fourth most populous nation in the world with an estimated 240 million inhabitants (July 2009 estimate), Indonesia is the world’s third largest democracy.  According to the most recent national census in 2000, Muslims account for 86% of the Indonesian population, making Indonesia the country with the largest Muslim population in the world.  Presuming that the relative size of religious groups has not changed significantly in the last decade, one could project for 2009 an estimate of 206 million Muslims, 13 million Protestants (5.7%), 7 million Catholics (3%), 4 million Hindus (1.8%), and smaller numbers of Buddhists, Confucians, and followers of other religions.

This does not mean that the religious population is evenly distributed throughout the many islands that make up Indonesia.  Although all parts of Indonesia are marked by the pronounced presence of Islam as the religion of the vast majority of Indonesians, some regions, such as those of Aceh in northern Sumatra, the Minangkabau territory of Western Sumatra, West Java and the north coast of the same island, and the Bugis and Makassar regions of southern Sulawesi, display an especially strong and ancient Islamic identity.

Similarly, Indonesia’s 20 million Christians are not spread evenly throughout the country.  The Batak region of north-central Sumatra, Northern Sulawesi, and the Moluccas all have strong Protestant communities, while Catholics are dominant only on the island of Flores but have eight dioceses on the island of Kalimantan (Borneo), seven dioceses on Java, and six on Sumatra.  The island of Bali has traditionally been almost 100% Hindu, but like the other islands in modern times has seen an influx of immigrants from other islands, with the consequent tensions and challenges that accompany an emerging ethnic and religious pluralism.

The relationship between religion and ethnicity is a factor that continues to influence interreligious relations in Indonesia.  Among some ethnic groups, religion is seen as part of the ethnic identity, so that by changing one’s religion a person is regarded as separating oneself from the ethnic community.  Among Muslim peoples in Indonesia, the Acehnese, Minangkabau, Madurese, Malays, and Bugis are examples of ethnic groups for whom Islam is felt to be an integral part of their identity.  Similarly, Catholicism is considered an element of Florinese identity, as is Protestantism that of the people of Minahassa, and Hinduism that of the Balinese.  In every case there are exceptions; there are Catholic Balinese, Protestant Minangkabau, and Muslim Florinese, for example, people who for reasons of marriage or conviction have adopted a religion other than that of their ethnic group.  These individuals often face varying degrees of rejection and ostracism, although many such Indonesians have taken advantage of the relative anonymity of the modern metropolises such as Jakarta, Bandung, and Medan to follow religious options different from those of their ethnic origins.   Nevertheless, periodic social crises can arise, often having to do with personal matters of marriage, inheritance, and burying the dead.

In religiously-mixed ethnic groups such as the Batak of Sumatra and the Javanese of Central and East Java, religious relations tend to be secondary to the ties of family and region.  Among Bataks and Javanese, one can find Muslims, Christians (Protestant and Catholic), and Buddhists in the same extended family.  Religious harmony would appear to be easier to maintain in religiously plural ethnicities like these, and in such regions one can point to many instances of local Muslims helping their Christian neighbors to build a church, of Christians helping in the construction of a mosque, or of Buddhists and Muslims proudly taking active part on committees for ordinations and installations of new bishops.

It can be seen from these introductory remarks that Indonesia presents a very complex social mix.  The interaction between peoples of distinct languages, cultures, religions, and histories make modern Indonesia more analogous to the European Union than to the USA.  The very size of the country and distances involved, the great number of inhabitants, the cultural and ethnic diversity, the uneven impact of colonial occupation, and the diverse historical, political, and economic contexts that vary from island to island all render generalities even more tenuous and tendentious than is usually the case.

Because of my own studies in Islamic thought and theology, and my position as Head of the Office for Relations with Muslims in the Vatican between 1981-1994, I have had the opportunity to spend time, sometimes longer, sometimes quite brief, periods in almost all Muslim-majority countries.  In this chapter, however, rather than addressing the very broad topic of peace-building within the global context of Muslim-Christian relations, I want to focus on the country that I know best, Indonesia.  The advantage of this more narrow focus is to illustrate how history, religion, culture, economy, and politics all contribute both to conflict and to peace-making in a concrete social situation, and what can be learned from this for other, admittedly different, settings.

The chapter will be in three parts.  The first part will provide the historical and social-religious background of Indonesia as the stage for understanding recent conflicts.  The second part will focus on the national crisis that began in 1997, brought on by economic collapse that led to the downfall of President Suharto.  The crisis led to ethnic and religious conflicts.  The third part will try to draw lessons from the work of the Catholic bishops’ conference during the crisis and thereafter, focusing on interreligious interaction aimed at reducing conflict and averting its escalation, and in the post-conflict period, reconstruction and reconciliation.

I. Interreligious relations today, a legacy of the past

The earliest religion of Indonesian people was none of those listed in the most recent official census of the year 2000.  It was a pantheistic nature religion in which the divine was everywhere present and active, both in the world around and in the events of the human and agricultural life cycle.  Planting and harvest, the birth of children and livestock, the timely alternation of rainy and dry seasons, as well as natural disasters like volcanic eruptions, floods, and epidemics were all seen as part of a recurrent cycle of divine-human interaction.  Communitarian rituals and ceremonies were devised to mark every important occasion, both to thank the benevolent forces of nature and to appease and counteract the potentially malevolent.  The preeminent social virtue was harmony, and the human ideal was described as a “triple harmony”: a person should live in harmony with the cosmos, in harmonious relationship with other members of the human family, and in harmonious peace in the microcosm of one’s own person.

This nature religiosity should not be thought of as of interest solely to anthropologists and students of the history of religions, for this ageless approach toward the visible and invisible world still strongly influences people’s attitudes, values, and ideals in Indonesia until today.  One by one, the “great religions” were introduced to the islands from elsewhere – first, Hinduism, then in their turn Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity – each of which interpreted and integrated this indigenous religiosity, to a greater or lesser extent, into its own dogmatic structures, so that the primordial religious impulse of the islands never became extinct.  In rural settings, it is everyday occurrence to see people offering gifts of flowers, rice, fruit, and incense to the spirits who live in cemeteries, banyan trees, caves, mountain tops and seashores.  Harmony is still restored in villages by annual ceremonies that “cleanse” the villages of bad spirits.  Near a Catholic monastery on the island of Java, I have personally witnessed a mixed group of Muslim and Christian villagers inviting the local imam to lead a prayer asking pardon of the spirits living in a large tree which had to be cut down and offering them a young sapling for their residence in place of the one that had to be cut.  The deeply rooted concept of communal harmony is one to which peace activists still appeal in reconciliation seminars and ceremonies after modern conflicts.

To the islanders practicing this indigenous nature spirituality, the teachings of the Hindu Dharma were brought from India as early as the 7th Century A.D.  Hinduism took root on Java and Sumatra and became the state religion of the Srivijaya and Majapahit maritime empires.  In the 9th Century, Buddhism arrived on Java, also from the Indian subcontinent, and left impressive monuments such as the Borobudur temple.  In the 13-15th centuries, as Islam spread very quickly and widely throughout Southeast Asia, the northern Sumatra region of Aceh became one of the focal points for this expansion.  By the start of the 16th century, when the European colonial powers and the Christian missionaries began to arrive, Islam was firmly rooted on most Indonesian islands.

The Muslim missionary-adventurers who introduced their faith were generally inspired by Sufism, an Islamic spiritual tradition that emphasizes love of God and love of neighbor and offers its adherents a series of spiritual exercises oriented toward attaining a union of love and will with God.  The Sufis tended to be non-dogmatic and were willing to integrate elements of the traditional religiosity into the practice of Islam.  They were also characterized by a patient, long-term vision that saw the Islamization of society as a long, slow process of education and pious devotion.            

Christianity was already present in Indonesia in the 8th Century.  An early document mentions four dioceses in Sumatra belonging to the “St. Thomas Christians” of South India.  None of those ancient Christian communities remain; modern Christianity dates to the preaching of St Francis Xavier in the Moluccas, and even more to the work of Protestant missionaries in the Dutch colonial period.

The Dutch colonial masters appear to have mainly regarded the East Indies as the source of raw material for their economic schemes and pragmatically sought to avoid policies that would arouse the sensitivities of Muslims and thereby disrupt the smooth flow of mineral and plantation products to the Netherlands.  Consequently, they did not try to rationalize their colonizing with notions such as that of “the white man’s burden” or a “mission civilisatrice,” nor to promote aggressive proselytizing strategies.  Nevertheless, the colonial administrators did support and encourage the work of missionaries who were sent from the Dutch Reformed state church, and those Christians in the Moluccas and north Sulawesi whose baptisms dated from the preaching of Xavier and the other early Catholic missionaries were forcibly converted to the Protestant tradition.  Controversial figures such as the Orientalist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje and the missiologist Hendrik Kraemer, who advised the colonial authorities on how to “handle” the Muslim majority, are still invoked today as emblematic of the collusion between the missionaries and the colonial administrators and the religious polarization introduced into Indonesian society as a result of the colonial heritage.

The presence of the Catholic Church in modern times also dates back to the colonial period, but since they did not belong to the established church, Catholics had a more distant relationship to the colonial administration.  During the independence struggle of 1945-1949, Bishop Albert Soegiapranata, the Catholic prelate, moved his residence from Semarang to the revolutionary capital of Yogyakarta and remained there throughout the period of blockade and siege.  He is recognized today as one of the “fathers of the nation” and is buried in the cemetery of national heroes.

As the movement for independence grew throughout the first half of the 20th Century, three main political currents emerged, each with its own vision of the independent nation that would succeed colonial rule.  The socialists and communists envisioned a highly centralized state and planned economy based on the Soviet model similar to what Mao and other Asian theorists were proposing.  The nationalists proposed a modern multiparty parliamentarian democracy and looked to the European nations for their political and economic model.  Some Muslim groups sought to establish a state based on Islamic ideals that would be achieved with the application of the shari’a to all aspects of daily life and society.

It should be noted that the leaders of all three currents were Muslims.  At the time of independence, the views of the nationalists, under Soekarno and Hatta, prevailed, although Soekarno continually sought to build cooperation among the three ideological viewpoints with his famous NASAKOM (nationalist-religious-communist) coalition.  The widest possible consensus among Indonesians was sought, so instead of an Islamic state, a pluralistic state was constructed on the basis of the Pancasila as the national philosophy.  Pancasila means “the five principles” on which the nation would be built: belief in the One God, humanity, unity, democracy, and social justice.  The desires of those Muslim organizations that sought the application of the shari’a were frustrated, and many felt that their efforts for an independent Islamically-guided nation were betrayed.

According to the first principle of the Pancasila, the country was founded on belief in the One God, and five monotheist religions were officially recognized: Islam, Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism.   Later on, Confucianism would be added to the list of officially recognized religions.  A Ministry of Religious Affairs was set up to foster positive relations among the religious communities, but has never played a very effective role in resolving communal disagreements and tensions.

Since independence, although people of various religions have coexisted well at the level of day to day relations, “political issues” such as religious education, marriage law and adoption, the construction of places of worship, and especially, conversion to another religion have periodically divided the various communities.  On the one hand, deeply rooted traditions of social harmony and resolution of differences through consultation and consensus encouraged a peaceful way of living together.   On the other hand, people of all religions were living with many unresolved tensions and resentments that went back to the time of independence and before.       

As Indonesia approached the final years of the 20th Century, the country was governed by a harsh military dictatorship led by President Suharto.   In 1967, Suharto’s forces took control of the government after a purported communist coup attempt and governed the country uninterruptedly until 1998.  It was a brutal regime, beginning with the massacres of several hundred thousand communist and left-wing sympathizers, and continuing with summary imprisonment of any and all dissident voices.  Independent labor unions and political parties were banned, as were student associations, newsmedia, and popular magazines that had not received a controlling stamp of approval from the government.  In Suharto’s day, according to Amnesty International reports, Indonesia had the highest number of political prisoners in the world.  For the first 15 years of Suharto’s rule, the government’s most repressive policies were reserved for Muslims, but in the mid-1980s the government changed its strategy and began to favor the political causes and viewpoints of the Muslim majority.

Despite – some would say, because of – the brutally repressive nature of the “New Order” government under Suharto, the economic sector flourished.  Although the wealth was very unevenly distributed, with a new entrepreneurial class devoted to conspicuous consumption, even the harshest critics of the regime admit that life was better even for the masses than it had been in Soekarno’s day.   The military played an increasingly ambiguous role, involving itself economically in petroleum, import-export, and tourism and favoring its own position in these industries through connivance with corrupt bureaucrats, beginning with the family of Suharto himself.

II. Anatomy of a conflict: Indonesia in the late 1990s

Then came the “sad years” (tahun-tahun sedih) in Indonesia between 1997 and 2001.  For a country with such a large and mixed population, Indonesia’s history has reflected surprisingly little confessional strife and violence.  As we have seen in the preceding pages, the “norm” throughout Indonesia’s history and colonial pre-history has been generally one of peaceful coexistence.  On his visit to Jakarta in 1989, Pope John Paul II could refer to “the impressive heritage of religious harmony” among the followers of different religions in the country, a model which the Pope felt that other nations could well emulate.

However, at certain moments in Indonesia’s history, when the country was experiencing political or economic crisis and social upheaval, ethnic and religious differences came to the fore and became the pretext for communal violence.  When these internal tensions were exacerbated by geopolitical events and widespread feelings of disillusionment and despair, as occurred in the period 1997-2001, the possibilities for violent conflict multiplied and needed only seemingly trivial incidents to ignite them. As had happened at earlier moments of crisis, this is what occurred once again in the final years of the 20th Century.

When the disastrous economic recession of 1997 led to the fall of the Suharto regime, only to be replaced by the unpopular Habibie, people were angry; they felt that they had been lied to and stolen from for the past 30 years.  There was a breakdown of trust in all official institutions, whether it be in government offices and bureaucracies, who were considered silent collaborators in the fallen regime; in banking institutions and other businesses, many of which had been declaring bankruptcy since the recession; in the military, which was seen as mainly interested in its own self-preservation and enrichment and was implicated in financial scandals and shady deals with Chinese businessmen and members of Suharto’s family.  The rigidly controlled print media and television were considered untrustworthy as sources of information and regarded as docile pawns of the previous regime, serving to disseminate government propaganda rather than to report a credible version of the news.

In addition, because of the severity of the economic crisis in which the value of the rupiah fell to 17% of its pre-crisis value, not only were businesses declaring bankruptcy, but economic growth plans for the future were abandoned, development plans already in progress were scrapped midstream, and hundreds of thousands of employees summarily laid off.  Unemployment trebled and many parents had to take their children out of school because of their inability to pay tuition.  If the crisis affected poorer Indonesians in basic necessities like food, medicine, and schooling, it also created havoc with the life-styles of those who had profited from the earlier economic boom.  Banks reported that they had run out of parking space for all the repossessed BMW and Mercedes automobiles that were clogging their lots.

In reaction to the very authoritarian Suharto military regime, many Indonesians experienced a confidence vacuum: not simply a breakdown of authority, but a dislike for and distrust of all authority.  After three decades of dictatorship, Indonesians felt themselves living at the end of an era, in a time of transition that sadly did not bring with it much hope for a better future.  The vast majority of Indonesians, those under 30 years of age, had never known any other government than the New Order.  At the collapse of Suharto’s regime, it was not yet clear what the new era would be like or whether it offered any more promise for ordinary people than the repressive period that preceded or the frightening stagnation in which they found themselves.

Moreover, the economic meltdown resulted in millions of unemployed, angry people with time on their hands and idle ears ready for the mischief of rumormongers.  Spreading rumors is a common mode of conflict promotion.  In the volatile situation that Indonesians found themselves in the late 1990s, rumors took on a currency possible only in societies where the communications media have lost all measure of credibility and their reports greeted with skepticism and cynicism.  The question people were asking themselves and one another was: “Who can you believe?”  The answer, for many Indonesians, was: “The people you go to church with,” or “the ones you pray with at the mosque.”  In this way, the main sources of information for many people became the confessionally disseminated but unverifiable reports passed by word-of-mouth that circulated outside churches and mosques after times of worship or during emergency meetings.

In this way, believers became especially vulnerable to the wiles of mischief-makers.  There are documented reports concerning the confessional strife in the Moluccas during those years, of unknown persons pulling up in front of a church or mosque on motorbikes shouting, “The Muslims [or Christians, as the case may be] have just burned down the church [mosque] in the next village, what are we going to do about it?”  Long after the congregation had set off and committed incendiary and bloody reprisals, which were in turn countered by the other side with further violence, it would often be learned that the original information was false.

Thus, although in press reports around the world the conflicts were characterized as “Muslim-Christian fighting,” scripture, dogma, and the teaching and practice of either religion had nothing to do with the real reasons behind the conflict.  Even traditional conflict analysis falls short of getting at the human roots of the conflict.  It was all about a transference of the anger and resentment that had built up and been repressed during the Suharto years, which was then directed towards those who were in some way superficially different.

Violent clashes erupted in various parts of Indonesia.  In 1997, 1999, and 2001, on the island of Kalimantan (Borneo), over a thousand Madurese, “newcomers” to the island, were massacred by indigenous Dayaks.  An equal number died in the anti-Chinese massacres that swept Jakarta and other cities in May, 1998.  The bloodiest conflict occurred in the Moluccas (Maluku) in eastern Indonesia, where perhaps 6000 persons died, a half-million were internally displaced, and hundreds of churches, mosques, schools, and civil buildings were destroyed.  Although some of the worst violence was ethnic, such as the massacres of Madurese in west Kalimantan and the anti-Chinese riots in Jakarta, Surakarta, and other cities much of the violence, as in the Moluccas, focused on Muslim-Christian conflict.  This is not surprising since religion provides one of the most easily observable identity markers, touches deep emotional chords, and can produce reactions which bear with them their own self-justification.

Moreover, geopolitical factors had national repercussions and exacerbated already existing tensions.  Many Muslims in Indonesia were furious with the U.S.A. and its allies for the bombing of Iraqi cities in the 1991 Gulf War, as they were later on for the events that transpired in America’s War on Terror – the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the treatment, much publicized in Indonesia, of Guantanamo detainees and the inmates of Abu Ghrayb prison.  Muslim outrage at these events was expressed not only in mass demonstrations in front of the American Embassy in Jakarta, but was also directed at local Christians, the Americans’ perceived co-religionists in Indonesia.  Fiery sermons in mosques inveighed against “the Crusaders” and the diffuse indignation at the actions of distant “Christian nations” frequently became directed at Indonesian Christians, who were referred to as “collaborators,” “friends,” “agents” etc. of the American aggressors.

In the highly charged climate of the time, other factors and old accusations came into play.  In a country undergoing painful economic crisis, Christians were held to be rich.  Chinese businessmen were accused of transferring funds to Singapore and Hong Kong, thus further impoverishing the Indonesian economy.  Claims resurfaced that Christians were taking advantage of the crisis by using their European-funded schools, hospitals, and relief programs to evangelize and strengthen their power base in the country.

It should come as no surprise that in a situation of widespread anger, disillusionment, economic setback, and international clashes, trivial incidents could flare overnight into bloody clashes.  In West Kalimantan, rioting began when a Dayak ticket conductor accused a Madurese passenger of not paying his bus fare.  Their fellow ethnics defended the Dayak and the Madurese respectively.  In the ensuing melee, someone drew a knife, another was stabbed, and as the story passed from mouth to mouth and grew in magnitude and horrific detail, the communal conflict was born.  As it happened, the Dayak conductor and his supporters were Christian, and the Madurese passenger and his fellows were Muslim, but it would miss the point of the conflict to describe it, as often happened in international press reports, as Christian-Muslim fighting in Indonesia.

In Poso on the island of Sulawesi, the conflict, which began with a similarly trivial incident, displays the importance of local dynamics in aggravating the current national tensions.  On a Saturday evening in the town of Poso, two groups of youths with time to waste – one group made up of Christians and the other of Muslims - began taunting one another.  In Poso, the vast majority of “locals are Protestant Christians, but there are two sizeable minority communities, one of Catholic workers from the island of Flores, the other Muslim workers from southern Sulawesi.  As is the case in many parts of Indonesia, there was considerable resentment on the part of the local people toward the newcomers (pendatang), who were seen as taking jobs, dominating the economy, disrespecting local customs, and the like.  In short, they were seen as introducing an unwelcome element of pluralism into what had been a monocultural social situation.  As name-calling escalated to street fights and when the Muslim kampong was torched, the Muslims pursued the mainly Protestant culprits to the Catholic kampong, and all communities were drawn into the three-way violence.

In January, 2000, a massacre took place of Muslim villagers in the Moluccas by Christian forces.  At a time when tensions were high throughout the country, the televised reports of the massacre entered the living rooms of every Indonesian family.  Within 24 hours, reprisals took place, not only in the Moluccas, but also in widely separated regions throughout the country.  On the island of Lombok, for example, in the days following the massacre, every Christian church on the island was burnt, although there previously had been no violence on the island.

Once conflicts turned violent, local factors either aided or hindered the process.  The fighting in the Moluccas, which broke down on religious lines, was exacerbated by the fact that two well-armed institutions, both with access to sophisticated weapons, were supporting opposite sides.  The local police were clearly pro-Christian, while the national army supported the Muslims.  The Laskar Jihad, a very violent Muslim paramilitary group, mainly of Javanese origin, traveled to the Moluccas and was responsible for some of the worst atrocities.  The conflict in Poso was even more complex and involved three-way violence, with local Protestant Christians, Muslims originating elsewhere on the island, and Catholic newcomers from the island of Flores pitted against one another.  In some cases, as in west Kalimantan, the bloodiest events involving the  massacres of Madurese crossed religious lines and were carried out by a coalition of Christian and animist Dayaks, supported by Malay Muslims, against the Madurese, who were also Muslims.

Finally, one must not assume that the conflicts in Indonesia were nothing but spontaneous flare-ups of angry, frustrated people.  Many Indonesians, as well as outside observers and researchers, are convinced that there were more sinister forces at work.  While one must be careful not to spin conspiracy theories without hard evidence, the extensive interviews carried out by the Crisis Center, to be described in the next section of this chapter, indicate that many of the violent incidents that initiated and perpetuated the conflicts were not spontaneous, but rather organized, planned, and funded.

Specifically, it has been often alleged that certain elements within the army used communal conflict as a tool, in the army’s ongoing struggle with Presidents Abdurrahman Wahid and Megawati Soekarnoputri.  By keeping Indonesian society bubbling with local flare-ups of communal conflict, elements within the armed forces sought to prove the inadequacy of the civilian presidents and the need for a stronger-handed military rule.  This was the case particularly during the presidency of Abdurrahman Wahid (1999-2001) who tried, unsuccessfully, to break the power of the army.  Interviews carried out after the violence in Jakarta and Maluku contain sworn statements from unemployed individuals who claim to have received sums of money to engage in various acts of mayhem, specifically the burning, looting, and rape that occurred in Chinese neighborhoods of Jakarta in May, 1998.

III. The bishops’ role in peace-making in time of conflict: The Crisis Center

I have gone into such detail on the situation of Indonesia in the late 1990s because it underlines the complex realities that religious leaders and communities must confront in trying to make peace and contain violence by preventing local tensions from turning into national conflicts.  The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Indonesia responded to the crises of 1997-1998, first of all, by establishing, in 1999, a Crisis Center within the body of the Kantor Waligereja Indonesia (Office of the Indonesian Bishops’ Conference). It was directed by a Catholic priest but employed on its staff, both full-time and part-time, Muslims and Protestant Christians.

The task given the Crisis Center was to monitor and collect information on every ethnic or religious conflict that occurred in the country.  This was done by dispatching religiously and ethnically mixed teams to each local conflict.  Through interviews with victims of violence, government and military officials; middle-level leaders like local imams, priests, and schoolteachers; and ordinary believers in villages, parishes, and mosques, the teams sought to determine what really occurred and why.  Often the apparent grievances were not the real issues, and the word-of-mouth reports were not accurate accounts of what was happening.  The actual perpetrators of violence were often nothing more than dupes manipulated and utilized – and sometimes hired and paid - by more shadowy interests.

As a result of their on-the-scene investigations, the Bishops’ Conference Crisis Center has today some of the most accurate information in the country on local conflicts: nearly-exact numbers of those killed, lists of churches and mosques burned, gruesome photographic evidence of carnage and destruction, and thousands of pages of testimony of witnesses and victims of the violence.          

The accurate documentation of conflicts is important for countering the exaggerated and inflammatory claims made on all sides.  Particularly in a situation like that of Indonesia in the 1990s, where the communications media were not trusted, irresponsible rumor mongering became an intentional or inadvertent obstacle to peace.  Even when accurate information was conveyed, it was often done in a selective or one-sided manner.  Christians would thus be painfully aware of the number and location of churches that had been burned or desecrated, but would not be equally knowledgeable of what had occurred to mosques and Islamic institutions.  The same, of course, held for Muslims.

One of the essential contributions to peace made by the bishops’ conference was that of providing detailed, accurate, non-partisan information on the local conflicts.  This was a key factor in countering provocative misinformation and thereby preventing the conflicts from spreading from separated region to region.

Related to this was the decision of the bishops to staff the Crisis Center not only with Catholics, or more generally with Christians, but also with Muslims.  This was essential for the credibility of the fact-finding missions to those involved in communal violence.  A “Christian delegation” to a conflict area would very likely be warmly welcomed by the Christians in the conflict, who would offer the visitors an impassioned apologetic for their side of the story, but the same delegation would be rejected by Muslims, or else received with hostility and suspicion.  The idea of sending religiously mixed fact-finding delegations not only had the advantage of facilitating the assembling of a more balanced, well-rounded picture of the local situation and its underlying grievances, but also served to remind all those locked in violent conflict that Muslims and Christians in other parts of Indonesia were still able to live together in peace and to work together for peace.  Thus, the mixed delegations served as a silent witness to harmony that contradicted the local tendency to polarize the situation and demonize the “other” as evil opponents with whom no compromise could be made.

Educating for peace

The work of the Crisis Center was by necessity quite limited.  The broader task of the Bishops was to educate the Catholic people in regard to peacemaking as an essential element of the Gospel message.  One effective instrument used by the bishops was their pastoral letters.  During the “bad years” of the late 1990s and the first years of the new millennium, in their annual “Pastoral Letter” the bishops sought to analyze the factors leading to the conflicts and urged all to recognize their common citizenship as Indonesians and their common creaturehood before God.  The fact that the pastoral letters, although written from the viewpoint of Christian faith, did not take a partisan stance in the various conflicts, but proposed peace with justice for all, earned the respect of Indonesians of various religions and ethnic groups.  The letters were widely discussed in the media and commented upon, usually with positive appreciation, by Muslim scholars and leaders.

The letters condemned every form of religious extremism, as well as the use of violence in the name of religion.  As such, the pastoral letters did not prevent Catholics from engaging in sectarian violence, but they did make it difficult for promoters of revenge and payback to defend, in the face of its condemnation by the national bishops’ conference, violence as a defense of the Christian community and its ideals and values.

The clear and unequivocal rejection of violence to resolve societal problems proved to be one of the main contributions of the Indonesian bishops to peace.  Catholics were naturally tempted to take a short cut to approaching the complex economic and political reasons for tensions and multiple societal factors involved in the local and national conflicts by simply blaming the trouble on Muslims.  Clichés, generalizations, and stereotypes were facilely repeated: Muslims are prone to violence, they do not know how to live with others, they want an Islamic state for themselves, they are obliged to wage holy war, etc.

Responsible leaders in Indonesia who made a point of rejecting such stereotypical judgments thereby made a clear contribution to peace.  By denouncing the kinds of prejudices and hatreds that dehumanize others and reduce them to the nameless enemy, the bishops and religious leaders were able to keep the focus on the real issues, rather than allowing people to distract themselves with superficial irrelevancies.

Working together for peace

While accepting that the burden of making peace does not rest solely on their shoulders, religious communities must be ready to cooperate with other religious groups as well as other components of civil society to support all serious efforts at peace.  In this regard, the role played by religious communities in the Malino Accords in Indonesia, which brought an end in 2002 to the most serious fighting in the confessional conflicts in Maluku and Poso, is instructive.  When it became apparent that the conflict in Maluku, and later that in Poso, would not be resolved without outside intervention, the Indonesian government brought together in the resort town of Malino in southern Sulawesi 35 Christians and 35 Muslims from the conflicted areas to discuss the conflict.  The deliberations were consultative and led to the Malino Accords (Malino I and Malino II) that laid down the “ground rules” for cessation of hostilities and reconstruction of the areas destroyed by the civil strife.  

During the period of the most intense fighting in Maluku (1999-2001), the local religious leaders and the religiously-connected communications media had tended to take a partisan stance, with Muslim leaders and media decrying crimes and massacres committed by Christians against Muslims, with the Christian leadership and press emphasizing atrocities suffered by Christians at the hands of Muslims.

However, when the Muslim and Christian representatives met in Malino with those of Indonesian government and military officials, prayers for peace were enunciated from the mosques and churches throughout Maluku.  The worship communities were asked to support the accords and engage in post-conflict efforts at reconstruction and reconciliation.  The Catholic bishops committed their personal prestige to the Malino processes by leading the Catholic delegation and by publishing the Peace Accords from the parish pulpits.  They undertook the more difficult task of following up on the Malino proposals for establishing peace.  Parish meetings were held to study the stipulations in the Accords.  Joint seminars were organized by members of the religiously affiliated press in an effort to arrive at more objective, less partisan reporting of religious strife.  In the following years, it can be said that the local Muslim and Christian communities in Indonesia’s troubled regions have done much, particularly in the area of reconciliation, to move their localities onto surer footing of peace.

This is not to say that they have been successful in putting an end to confessionally based violence.  In the first year after the signing of Malino I in December, 2001, there were over 30 violations, mostly small.  On the other hand, the low-level warfare that featured the firing of rockets, sniping, and the torching of several villages and many houses of worship, as well as the violent involvement of private militias such as Laskar Jihad from other parts of Indonesia, was halted.  Roadblocks and checkpoints that had isolated Muslim villages from those of Christians were removed, refugees could gradually return to their homes, and the reconstruction of destroyed villages could be undertaken with financial assistance from the government.

The importance of trust

A clear obstacle to the establishment of a genuine peace is the lack of trust engendered by violent conflict.  This has continued to plague efforts at post-conflict peacebuilding in Indonesia (Maluku and Poso) as elsewhere.  During the period of conflict, the “enemy” was demonized and pictured as being untrustworthy.  Their words and actions, even when positively oriented toward compromise and reconciliation, would not be believed by those on the opposing side.  As people began thinking defensively, the circle of trust narrowed to a limited number of those who were considered dependable.

The challenge facing the Church in Indonesia after the conflict was to find ways to rebuild people’s trust in their neighbors and to place trust in the wisdom of their leaders.  If people’s attitudes are to be influenced in the direction of peaceful resolution and reconciliation, this can only be done by those in whom people place their trust.  Here the circles of relationship, acquaintance, and association gain paramount importance.  Certainly the family, extended to include the clan, is the narrowest and strongest circle of trust.  At the next circle are fellow worshipers at the church, mosque, or temple, who are can become the source of assistance and reliable information.  In Indonesia, as in other regions where religious leaders and associations have been able to maintain a high level of integrity and are deemed worthy of trust, they were able to play a key role in reconstruction and reconciliation.

To achieve the goal of reconciliation, the dioceses had to work together with other partners in civil society.  Neighborhood groups, women’s organizations, schools, parent-teacher associations, indigenous NGOs, labor unions, community developers, local health officers, tribal councils, businessmen’s associations, and refugee camp leaders were all able to maintain some level of trust, even through the most dire periods.  It was important for the religious leaders to be able to identify these trustworthy individuals and associations, for it is through such groups that the process of reconstruction and reconciliation had to be carried out.

Those who were viewed with mistrust and suspicion, such as unpopular political authorities, military officials, police, and local bureaucrats in government agencies also had to be approached and brought into the peace process.  In many cases, they had been identified with one or another side of the conflict or had, through corruption or profiteering, used the conflict for their own gain.

In both Maluku and Poso, it became clear that peacemaking had to be multifaceted.  Peace cannot be imposed from above, nor can it be expected to grow exclusively from the grassroots; all sectors in society have their role to play in bringing about a lasting peace.  A good example of the across-the-board approach to peacemaking from nearby Mindanao in the southern Philippines is the Mindanao Week of Peace, in which all sectors of society – religious, political, military, business, cultural, educational – are mobilized to produce a collective voice calling for peace. 

At the same time that the top leadership, both military and political, had to be motivated to engage in negotiations and search for a ceasefire, as well as to ensure that all armed factions act within the bounds of international law and war crimes conventions, the middle leadership of society, composed of religious and ethnic leaders, intellectuals and academics, were encouraged to take part in peace commissions and to initiate or support training programs aimed at conflict resolution and transformation.  In Indonesia, the behavior of armed groups was meant to be regulated by the Malino Accords, while it was the responsibility of the Catholic bishops, the Protestant synods, and the Muslim leaders to mobilize their communities to build the peace.

This grass-roots leadership undertook its responsibility by working to reduce prejudice, organize grass-roots training programs, make up local peace commissions, and carry out the necessary psychosocial work to confront the widespread phenomenon of postwar trauma.  Small teams composed mainly of young people and university students, wherever possible religiously mixed, went from village to village, town to town, island to island conducting “reconciliation seminars.”  The idea was to give people the opportunity to express their grievances, share what they had suffered during the fighting, and articulate the feelings of anger, fear, and loss that often left them deeply traumatized.  They also had the opportunity to hear their neighbors “on the other side” tell their stories and relate their view of the conflict.  When possible, the local bishops and clergy took part in the seminars.

Although this chapter is about the efforts of peacemaking of the Catholic Church in Indonesia, it would be unfair to fail to note that the Muslim leaders were just as influential as the Christian leadership in promoting peace.  One could argue that given the fact of the huge majority of Muslims in the country and consequently the much greater potential for the escalation of the local conflicts into full-fledged civil war, the repeated calls for peace by the Muslim leadership were a key factor in the containment of the violence.

Both of the main Muslim organizations in the country, the 40-million strong Nahdatul Ulama and the 25-million strong Muhammadiyah were consistent in their condemnation of confessional violence and strife.  In some cases, when there were bomb threats against churches, the youth wing of these organizations volunteered to form cordons of protection around the churches and to sweep the churches for suspicious articles.  In at least one instance, in East Java, a young Muslim stock clerk named Riyanto was among the volunteers.  It happened that he found a bomb in church and removed it.  When he deposited the bomb in a drainage ditch, safely distant from all the Christian worshipers, it went off and he was killed instantly.  Prayers to commend Riyanto’s soul to God were carried out in all the Catholic churches in Java he is still remembered until today as one of the heroes of communal harmony in the country.

The challenge to forgive

Pope John Paul II has taught that peace stands on two pillars: justice and forgiveness.  One of these two pillars is not enough; both are necessary for true peace.  Road maps and peace plans that ignore the demands of justice for the oppressed have no real chance of success in laying the groundwork for peace.  The weaker party in the conflict may be forced to agree to imposed terms, but they will never accept them inwardly, and the anger and bitterness will fester until something sets off the next outburst of violence.  Injustice is like an open, infected wound, which cannot be healed until true justice is established.

On the other hand, justice without forgiveness cannot bring about peace between peoples.  Justice cannot change attitudes and heal broken relationships.  This can only be done when one person or community pardons another.  There is probably no human attitude more difficult than true forgiveness, which demands a level of spiritual and emotional generosity that people are not often otherwise called upon to display.  Several factors can make forgiveness easier as, for example, when the one who has done wrong admits the wrongdoing.  In those cases when the wrongdoer has not admitted or repented of the wrongness of what he has done or, even worse, when he is pleased with his misdeeds and celebrates them, forgiveness becomes almost impossible.

In violent conflicts, misdeeds have usually been committed on all sides.   It is rare that one side is the heartless oppressor and the other is the wholly innocent victim.  Moreover, the human reality is that everyone is more likely to be more aware of and sensitive to the wrongs that they have experienced and suffered than they are to those which they have inflicted on others.  Thus, the process of reconciliation must deal with the very complex and difficult issue of mutually admitting guilt and together asking and granting pardon.

Here the faith communities can play an important role in fostering reconciliation.  Both Islam and Christianity, to mention only two of Indonesia’s official religions, consistently teach that “it is better to forgive” (Qur’an 24:22 et al; Gospel of Matthew 18:21-22 et al).  Both Muslims and Christians know that God does not desire perpetual estrangement between those who have been separated by a quarrel, but rather God desires that those who believe in Him act like God acts, who readily forgives those who have repented of the wrong they have done.  Just as God desires to be reconciled with the repentant sinner, so do both religions teach that those who forgive others will be rewarded by God.  Moreover, both religions teach the importance of repentance (tawba, metanoia) which means, in practical terms, that no one is prisoner of the past, and that no crime is ultimately unforgivable.  Thus, religious commitment, when it is internalized and practiced conscientiously, can be a motivating factor to bring about this most difficult human attitude of forgiveness.

Peace-makers must be realistic; there is no human deed more difficult than forgiveness.  If people find it hard to forgive everyday slights, how much greater is the challenge to forgive when one has lost loved ones, home and property, health, wholeness, and livelihood at the hands of another.  To one in that kind of post-conflict situation, religious teaching can seem like an empty platitude, and one is almost inevitably tempted to indulge instead in nursing resentment and desire for revenge.  However, as inadequate as a religious attitude of forgiveness would appear to be at such times and as difficult as it would seem to achieve, experience shows that there is no other alternative possible to an endlessly recurrent cycle of injury-resentment-reprisal.

IV. Lessons to be learned

No single case where different religious traditions are operative in the same conflict will yield all the things we need to know about peacebuilding.  Yet it is the lessons that can be derived from concrete cases that help build the repertory of responses that religions together can play in peacebuilding processes.  Even after gleaning these lessons one should be hesitant about generalizations and the premature building of theory.  It is, however, only in collecting what can be learned that we can move toward principles that will equip peacebuilders to respond more effectively in situation where religions play into the arena of conflict.

In this concluding section, I want to gather what can be learned from looking at the recent difficult years in Indonesia and, in doing so, contribute to the understanding of how interreligious interaction affects, both positively and negatively, conflict situation.  All conflicts are located within a longer history.  Moreover, the causes of conflict are not all internal to the setting itself; globalization and patterns of international communication cause local conflicts to be played out in a broad worldwide context.  Because of the ubiquitous presence of media coverage, geopolitical events impact on the relations between national confessional communities to an extent that could not have occurred even thirty years ago.

1. Religious leaders have a privileged opportunity to provide leadership in peacemaking.  In Indonesia, religious leaders have a social mobility that is lacking to others in society.  They can meet with state ministers, governors, and commanding officers on the same day that they meet with farmers, factory workers, and armed militias.  Religious leaders command a level of trust that is often withheld from politicians, bureaucracies, and military officers; they are felt to be better listeners to people’s grievances, to identify with the plight of victims of discrimination and violence, and to have the people’s best interests to heart.  Consequently, people tend to be more honest in what they confide and reveal to “their own” leaders than what they might tell to “others,” those in positions of power or authority of whose good will they are unsure.  People are also more ready to consider seriously proposals for peace and suggestions of compromise from their trusted leaders than from those toward whom they feel estranged, envious, or resentful.  Moreover, at the local level, the appeals to peace by respected leaders had often had direct results; for example, during the worst of the violence in May, 1998, when Sultan Hamengkubuwono X of the Central Javanese city of Yogyakarta broadcast a direct appeal to the residents “to stay in their homes and off the streets,” the people obeyed almost to a person and Yogyakarta was one of the very few cities on Java that experienced no violence whatsoever.

2. When religious leaders already know one another personally, in time of conflict they can accomplish much in the way of peacemaking.  This is one of the societal rewards of interreligious dialogue.  Decried by cynics as a waste of time and a watering-down of religious conviction, dialogue has produced concrete results by establishing lines of communication between leaders of various religions that in times of crisis have proved valuable.  In Indonesia, the role of the religious leaders in Maluku – Muslim, Protestant, and Catholic – who for years had known one another through their jointly participating on committees and in dialogue activities, in getting the communities to the negotiating table in Malino was indispensable.  At the national level, it was the consistent appeals for calm and non-violence by the religious leaders, often made in joint declarations, that were a key factor in preventing the local confessional conflicts from escalating into a full-fledged civil war.  In every case, after the worst instances of killing, the Indonesian religious leaders appealed anew for people not to respond to violence emotionally with further violence but to rely on negotiation and the proper processes of law.  This could not bring about a total cessation of hostilities, but it was generally successful in preventing “sympathetic reactions” from being made by geographically distant co-religionists or fellow ethnics.               

3. Ideological instruments devised to bring together various groups are by their nature ambiguous and can utilized by individuals and groups for their own ends.  In Indonesia, the Pancasila is a case in point.  Originally created to bring together various religious communities (ketuhanan, belief in the One God), ethnic groups, regions, languages, and social classes (persatuan, one nation), the Pancasila philosophy was manipulated and utilized by the Suharto regime to control the population, recruit docile collaborators, and suppress dissent.  By the time of the fall of Suharto, the Pancasila was so discredited that it could no longer be used as a unifying philosophy for peacemaking.

4. Truth-telling is an essential tool of peace-making.  In Indonesia, just as the creation and spreading of false rumors and accusations was a successful technique in fomenting communal conflict, so also the meticulous compilation of accurate information was fundamental for preventing the spread of violence and for the work of reconciliation.  Nothing breaks down trust between ethnic or religious groups more than malicious rumors.  Suspicion and resentment incline people to believe the worst about “the enemy,” and exaggerated and one-sided accounts of crimes and atrocities are effective means to gain support for militant causes and to mobilize and recruit volunteers for prolonging the violence.  The only way to combat half-truths, lies, exaggerations, and innuendos is by a careful compilation and presentation of the truth, to the extent that it is attainable by human efforts; this was perhaps the greatest contribution to peace making by the Indonesian bishops’ Crisis Center.  The commitment to the truth includes the strenuous effort to be fair-minded in the presentation of the perspective and grievances of each side in the conflict and a willingness to self-critically acknowledge the errors and wrongs committed by one’s own community.

5. In many parts of the world, such as Indonesia, religion is more than a set of beliefs and practices.  It is an distinguishing element that marks one’s identity and sets someone apart from others who do not share that communal identity.  One’s religion often indicates where one lives, where one’s children go to school, the kind of work one does, what feasts one celebrates, who one’s friends are, and even the language or dialect one speaks.  This is a point often missed by observers in Western Europe and North America.  When conflicts between religious groups break out, the causes are rarely theological but are rather tied to conflicts of identity.  Factors such as competition for limited goods or property may be sometimes involved, but one must look into human emotions such as anger, resentment, envy, and apprehension to find the real motivations that underlie the conflict.  Religious leaders and other peacemakers must also address these underlying motivations if they hope to resolve the conflict and offer realistic alternatives.

6. Education for peace is one of the key tasks of peacemaking that religious groups can make.  The teaching of all the great religions is oriented toward peace, yet it is difficult for people to apply this teaching to their own situations in times of crisis.  The religious leaders must, on the one hand, draw from the wisdom found in their respective Scriptures, while on the other help people to analyze what is really going on in times of conflict.  In Indonesia, during the difficult years, the Catholic bishops were able to command respect from Catholics and others through pastoral letters that helped people understanding the tensions that Indonesian society was facing, and helped people see ways of confronting those tensions in ways that fostered harmony and justice rather than violent destruction.

7. Preparing agents of peace is an indispensable task in Asia today.  If religious leaders themselves are not trained in conflict analysis and in the techniques of conflict transformation, they must be able to call upon the expertise and experience of those who have had such training.  Certainly one of the most urgent tasks in any pluralistic society today is the preparation of an adequate number of those prepared with peacemaking skills who can be called to help in moments of crisis.  To this end, peacemaking programs such as the Bangkok-based peace studies courses offered annually by the Asian Muslim Action Network (A.M.A.N.) are fulfilling a serious need; the courses, both international and interreligious, are aimed at building a “fund” of peacemakers in each Asian country who are well equipped with an ability to analyze and help transform conflicts in positive ways.  In Indonesia today, there are over 300 NGOs, both Indonesia-based and international, oriented toward preparing peacebuilding agents.

8. My final point is that peacemaking must not be simply reactive.  Once tensions and unresolved problems in society have erupted into violence, it is, in a sense, already too late for optimal peacemaking.  The real, hard work should have been done long before; in violent times, peacemaking tasks become those of damage control, violence containment, and the almost superhuman work of forgiveness and reconciliation.  When communities and individuals have experienced killing, burning, looting, and rape, their responses are determined by deeply rooted emotions.  Those with whom they are in conflict become the enemy whom they regard as fanatic killers, looters and rapists with whom no reasonable settlement can be made; they are no longer their neighbors with whom they lived side-by-side for generations.

The sad lesson learned by all peacemakers in the field is that it is far more effective to prevent violence from occurring than to deal with that which has already erupted.  To this end, it should be noted that the Indonesian bishops’ Crisis Center has not disbanded since the sad years, but it has changed its name and mission.  Reflecting upon the work they had carried out during the years of conflict, those involved in the Crisis Center realized that the continuing work to which they must committed themselves is that of preventing future conflicts.  This they do by proactively addressing the tensions and injustices in society, by recognizing potential identity conflicts before they erupt into violence, and by working to build a true pluralism based on common values and ideals that will be the basis for true peace.

After most of the violence died down after 2002-2003, the Crisis Center at first involved itself in projects of organizing and carrying out reconciliation seminars. However, in 2004 Indonesia faced another type of serious crisis, that caused by the tsunami in Aceh.  With over 130,000 dead and more thn a half million left homeless in Aceh, the network of peace activists recruited and trained by the Crisis Center went to work, once again on a multi-religious, multi-ethnic basis, to help the tsunami victims by sending food and volunteers to rebuild homes and schools.  The following year the same network was available to be called upon during the destructive earthquakes in Yogyakarta in Central Java and Pangandaran in West Java.

Out of these experiences a new association was formed with the name “Sahabat Insan,” which means “Friends of Humanity” (website: http://sahabatinsan.multiply.com).  Their purpose is to try to address those problems in Indonesian society that cause suffering or divide people from one another.  This broadly enunciated mission is aimed at providing flexibility so that the structure and outlook of the organization does not get fossilized, as can so easily happen to organizations, by continuing to view Indonesian society in terms of the conflicts of 1997-2001 after the society has already moved on.  In this way the Crisis Center continues to live on as the Friends of Humanity in trying to prevent preemptively a recurrence of the earlier violence by working for peace in Indonesian society of today.

Final reflection

Peacemaking and interreligious dialogue should not be seen as two separate activities of the Church, as though some people engaged in one and others in the other.  Rather dialogue should be seen as a characteristic of peacemaking.  In other words, in religiously plural situations, peacemaking, to be effective, must have an interreligious character.  There is much that religious groups can and must do on their own, but there are certain ways that religious groups can be effective only if they operate interreligiously.

In all of this, we work in hope.  We cannot measure whether or not a conflict would have escalated had it not been for the efforts of peacemakers, nor whether violence would have broken out anew had it not been for efforts at reconciliation.  Similarly, we cannot measure conflicts of the future that have not occurred because of the effective action taken today to build justice and peace and to redirect the tensions inevitable in every society in directions that contribute to more just and human relations.  As Charles Peguy has said: “Hope is like a child, who is not interested in getting to its destination, but is interested in the way itself.”  The reason why we work for peace is the same reason why we engage in interreligious dialogue, not because we need to see results, but because we have no choice, if we want to be faithful to the example of our Master.