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| Southeast Asia |
| Indonesia Bomb Blast Injures 53 |
| 2002-07-27 |
| A bomb exploded in a crowded marketplace in Indonesia's Maluku province Saturday, injuring 53 people. The 9 a.m. blast ripped through a market packed with shoppers in a Christian neighborhood of Ambon. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the blast, and no one has been arrested. Christian neighborhood... 53 injured... No one arrested... Got it. The explosion is the latest in a series of violent incidents that is testing the strength of a peace deal signed in February between the two communities. The truce had succeeded in stemming much of the fighting, but there have been occasional outbreaks of violence since then. ''The situation was very much improving and mutual trust between Muslims and Christians was building up,'' said Cornelius Bohm, a Christian pastor in Ambon. ''This is a terrible setback.'' That's why it occurred... The attack came two days after Jafar Umar Thalib - the leader of Laskar Jihad, which has been blamed for fueling much of the fighting - was released from a Jakarta jail. He faces charges of inciting violence in the province by delivering a speech to thousands of his followers in March 26 calling for war. He also has called for them to reject a February peace deal meant to end the fighting between Muslims and Christians in Maluku. An attack on a Christian village took place soon after that speech. No one has been arrested in the April attack, and Christian leaders suspect that Muslim hardliners were behind it. "Those Christians, with their Cause and Effect! Obviously influenced by western thinking. We should kill them." As a result of the April attack, the provincial government has declared an emergency and banned all foreigners - including reporters - from the island. Yep. That'll make the problem go away, won't it? Best way to deal with it... |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |
| #1 These last two articles should be regarded together rather than separately. The Acef revolt implies that not all Indonesian Moslems are created equal, and that there are strong regional divergences which undermine the concept of Moslem solidarity, along with Indonesian unity. The second article shows how tenuous the Indonesian polity actually remains after a nominal 2 years of political peace and continuity. Practically speaking, as the distance from Java increases, the control of Jakarta decreases. How the East Timorese precedent weighs in these other Indonesian situations is hard to say. Neither the Acef nor any other separatist movement in Indonesia has the political history of the Timorese occupation by the Indonesian military. But the entire edifice of the Indonesian polity on the nominal foundation of Dutch East Indies colonial rule is shaky at best, like most of the rest of the decolonialization nation states in Africa whose national statuses were conceived of in similar manners to the way Sukarno took advantage of Dutch incompetence and the advent of WW II. |
| Posted by: Tom Roberts 2002-07-28 08:54:30 |