Official registers were incomplete for a conflict fought partly in remote villages across a large rural regency over three separate episodes; Human Rights Watch's field investigation and van Klinken's comparative study both work from local reporting and testimony rather than from a single comprehensive census, and their figures have not been formally reconciled against each other or against each community's own, generally higher, local counts.
What would resolve this A study working systematically from Poso Regency hospital, police and village-level records surviving from 1998 to 2001, cross-checked against Muslim and Christian community-held counts, to build one reconciled casualty estimate across all three episodes of the conflict.
OpenSoutheast Asian history; Indonesian regional studiesGerry van Klinken, Communal Violence and Democratization in Indonesia: Small Town Wars