Government efforts to end more than three years of religious and ethnic violence in Indonesia's Maluku province have met only limited success, report Seventh-day Adventist Church leaders in the region.
Government efforts to end more than three years of religious and ethnic violence in Indonesia’s Maluku province have met only limited success, reports a Seventh-day Adventist Church leader in the region. Two days of peace talks between Christians and Muslims held earlier this month in Malino, South Sulawesi, aimed to end the sectarian fighting that has left some 10,000 people dead, thousands of homes and churches destroyed, and tens of thousands of people displaced.
Reinhold Kesaulya, president of the Adventist Church in East Indonesia, calls the reconciliation efforts in Malino “excellent,” but says there is no guarantee that peace agreements will hold in local regions and remote villages. “If the Malino team could visit all the villages and call all the people together, then I am sure that peace would come,” he says. But in the meantime, he adds, the continued danger means that Adventists are being advised to delay their return to their former villages.
Kesaulya, along with a group of local Adventist leaders and a police officer, visited the Poso district in January. “When we entered the district of Poso we saw and videoed many villages left desolated, with no more houses,” he says. “Our church buildings in Saatu and Tangkura villages were burnt to ashes. The road we traveled was so deserted and desolated that for several kilometers we met only one or two vehicles.” In Poso city, the Islamic presence is dominant, says Kesaulya, with women and girls wearing veils in compliance with a regulation recently passed by local authorities.
“We thank the government for the peace talks in Malino between Muslims and Christians of Poso,” says Kesaulya. “We really appreciate their positive effort in uniting the people there.” He says the government is also encouraging those who fled the violence to return to their villages, and is offering to rebuild houses and churches destroyed in the conflict.
But despite these peace efforts, it is probably too soon for a peaceful reintegration of Christians into the villages of Poso, says Kesaulya. He points out that rice fields and cocoa plantations once owned by Adventist Church members are now occupied by others, and that violence against religious minorities continues.
“Early in the morning, before we reached Poso, a person was killed in one of the villages,” says Kesaulya. “This news reached us after we left Poso. And right after the Malino meeting for Poso, a church in Palu was bombed, and one of the Malino [peace talks] delegates was caught by the police as the provocateur.
“Who can predict that there will be no more killings and burnings?” asks Kesaulya. “We cannot guarantee the safety of our people in those remote villages and districts far away from Malino and the Central Government office. I believe that only God the Father, through Jesus Christ, can bring eternal peace in peoples’ hearts.”
As reported earlier in ANN, at least 15 Adventists have been among the thousands killed in the sectarian violence, and 12 Adventist church buildings have been destroyed.
