A Local Political Fight or a Religious War: Two Readings of Poso

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

Historians disagree about what the Poso conflict was fundamentally about. Van Klinken's central argument is that it originated substantially in a local political struggle, chiefly over district administrative splitting and access to civil service and elected office between Muslim and Christian elites, that hardened into religiously defined militias only once fighting began. Other accounts, and much of local memory in Poso itself, read the fighting more directly as a religious war between the regency's Muslim and Christian communities, particularly once mosques and churches became organizing points for militia recruitment.

From 2001 the Muslim side was reinforced by outside fighters, including members of the jihadist paramilitary group Laskar Jihad, whose arrival scholars including van Klinken treat as a significant escalation and who framed their own involvement explicitly in religious terms. This atlas states both readings without adjudicating between them, since neither the political nor the religious account is settled as the single cause; both agree that by the May to June 2000 episode, religious identity was the operative line along which villages were attacked and defended, whatever role the earlier political dispute played in bringing the fighting about.