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COMMENTARY
December 5, 2001
Root cause
As I write a large number quite possibly thousands of Christians are being massacred in Indonesia by the Islamic Laskar Jihad ("Holy War Army"). This is happening in the interior of the island of Sulawesi in and around the town of Tentena about 40 kilometres south of the city of Poso. Upwards of 63 000 Christians are trapped there. (That was the original population of the mostly Christian town but it has been augmented by the arrival of more than 20 000 refugees.) Over the last week the nearby Christian villages of Betalemba Patiwunga Tangkura Sanginora and Debua have been attacked and destroyed. In the time since Sept. 11 at least 38 Christian hamlets villages or towns in Sulawesi the Molucca Islands and elsewhere in Indonesia have been attacked by the Laskar Jihad or any one of four associated Muslim paramilitaries. In each case houses and churches were looted then burned Christian women raped and all those unable to flee either butchered or forcibly "converted" to Islam. My information is from both human rights and Christian mission websites and e-mail and my estimate is conservative. From eyewitness reports I learn that the practice of the Laskar Jihad upon capturing a village and after destroying the buildings is to give the Christians they have captured two choices. They may convert to Islam or be beheaded. As witnesses have reported they tend to arrive with a collection of heads from the last village mounted on pikes to make their point the more persuasive. Notwithstanding large numbers of Christians have agreed to be beheaded given this choice. These are actual martyrs incidentally. Persons who kill themselves as a means of killing others are not martyrs but murderer-suicides. The Laskar Jihad like the Taliban in Afghanistan is reinforced by foreign "jihadists" -- who have arrived in Indonesia chiefly from the madrasas of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Others are Muslim "radicals" from as far away as Bosnia and Albania or from as near as the Indonesian province of Aceh on Sumatra which has a powerful Muslim secessionist movement with its own connexions to the international "jihad". Whether or not they are affiliated with Al Qaeda the "soldiers" of the Laskar Jihad post pictures of Osama bin Laden wherever they go. You will not find much about this easily in the Western media; there have indeed been reports on the BBC World Service in the Daily Telegraph and the Washington Post but these are buried. "Political correctness" (even in the Telegraph) and the conventions of "objective journalism" demand that these massacres be described as (I am using the Post's phraseology) "clashes between Muslims and Christians" or still more jejunely as "sectarian violence". Yet in every known encounter the Christians had not attacked had not formed themselves into paramilitary units were mostly unarmed and were outnumbered. Nor could they have been inspired by some Christian doctrine of "jihad" against non-Christians for there is no such thing. The truth as I know it from the inside is that the media and their resources are currently focused on Afghanistan and Israel. There are no Western journalists fool enough at the moment to be on the ground in or near the town of Tentena. Tellingly a Los Angeles Times reporter in Djakarta the Indonesian capital told his Christian mission sources that he could not really get interested in their story unless there was proof that the Laskar Jihad had links to Al Qaeda. Much of the e-mail forwarded to me describes the slaughter and the desperate fleeing village by village day by day. It has that horrible staccato ring of truth. "Sepe has fallen and is being looted destroyed and burned." ... "The village of Silanca is under attack." ... "The villagers state that military units have joined in with the jihad." ... "Villagers who fled to the military barracks in Kawva are being turned away." Then this crisp comment mixed in with the traffic: "Yes it is very bad. I am not surprised that the Indonesian military is alternatively supporting the Jihad fighters (a chance to get in on looting and raping) or running into the forest and hiding (because they are moral and physical cowards)." It is a very plausible comment: we got a good look at the nature of the Indonesian army and at its behaviour in East Timor. The official Indonesian response from President Sukarnoputri Megawati down has been to condemn "religious intolerance" in a vague abstract way and to reiterate that "Islam is a religion of peace". Army units supposedly have been sent but there is no sign of them on location (except where they have joined in with the Laskar Jihad). And the Indonesian army a force that actively excludes non-Muslim minorities is itself increasingly influenced by the ideology of "Islamism". Indonesia has some 18 million Christians (out of a population of 230 million). It is the stated aim of Laskar Jihad and its associated organizations to kill convert or drive into exile every single one of these in order to "purify" Indonesia. I am incidentally unable to find a single Muslim protest against this proposal -- to commit a genocide against 18 million people -- after an hour of looking on the web aided by fairly powerful search engines plus translation tools. In the Muslim Indonesian press itself the slaughter of these Christians is a non-issue. It strikes me as a good day to mention the above because it puts in perspective the impassioned claims now being made in the press and media throughout the Arab world and echoed by left-wing intellectuals in the West that the "root cause" of all anti-Israeli and anti-Western violence is Muslim outrage at the fate of the Palestinian people. It is an extraordinarily selective outrage. Further perspective could be found within the Arab press itself. On Sunday night I did a tour of more than two dozen Arab news and newspaper websites in Egypt Jordan Syria Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. The atrocities that had been committed by Palestinian suicide bombers in Jerusalem and Haifa the day before were headlined in none of them and in fact I could find only two mentions of the suicide bombings. One was tucked into a story about two Palestinians being killed in firefights with Israeli Defence Forces in the West Bank the other within the story of Yasser Arafat declaring a state of emergency. But these references were oblique and made no mention of Israeli civilian casualties. Both were incidentally place-lined Occupied Jerusalem . On the other hand almost all of the sites featured stories about "Israeli terrorism" -- in every case but the one mentioned above a days-old or even months-old story about Palestinian casualties from one or another Israeli anti-terrorist police action. The distinguished Al Ahram site from Cairo for instance highlighted a commentary from Hebron with the summary: "Under what possible moral compass is blowing up schoolchildren justified?" This dwelled on an event of Nov. 22 when five Gaza schoolchildren were killed by the explosion of an Israeli bomb on their way to school. The fact that this bomb buried and designed to be detonated only by remote control had been placed at a location frequently used by snipers firing on the Jewish settlement of Ganei Tal was not mentioned. The full investigation that the Israeli Defence Forces were making into the circumstances was misrepresented. The unambiguous apology from the IDF the fact that the victim's parents would be compensated the very fact it was an accident were suppressed. Instead it was written as if the children had been intentionally targeted as a kind of sport. It is an interesting moral position that an obvious accident is given tremendous moral weight whereas the intentional massacre of innocent civilians -- whether in Jerusalem or Haifa or Tentena Indonesia -- is considered not worth mentioning. We speak of "draining swamps instead of swatting mosquitoes". And we should not be defeatist. But neither should we underestimate the size of the swamp. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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