The Maluku Sectarian Conflict and Indonesia's Post-Suharto Instability

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Communal fighting between Christian and Muslim militias swept across the Maluku islands of eastern Indonesia beginning with a street clash in Ambon on 19 January 1999, escalating over the following three years into organized sectarian warfare. Each side raised armed militias, most prominently the Java-based Laskar Jihad, which arrived by the thousands from 2000 to fight on the Muslim side. The violence broke out amid the political instability that followed the 1998 fall of President Suharto's government, in a province where decades of state sponsored migration and civil service and military patronage had already strained the earlier rough parity between the islands' Christian and Muslim populations.

Fighting displaced hundreds of thousands of people and divided towns and neighborhoods along religious lines before the Indonesian government brokered the Malino II Accord, signed by representatives of both communities on 12 February 2002. The accord formally ended the organized fighting, though sporadic violence continued for several years afterward, and it left Ambon and other Maluku towns religiously resegregated in ways that persisted long after the peace agreement. Several militia figures were later prosecuted for their role in the violence, though Indonesia's courts reached only a small number of the participants on either side.