Poso Conflict

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

Fighting between Muslim and Christian, chiefly Protestant, militias first broke out in Poso town, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, in December 1998 over a local dispute that escalated along religious lines in a regency whose Muslim and Christian populations were roughly balanced. It recurred in April 2000 and then widened into regency-wide fighting from May to June 2000, its worst single episode the killing of more than one hundred Muslim residents at Walisongo pesantren and nearby villages by Christian militia forces on 28 May 2000.

Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla brokered the Malino I Declaration, signed by representatives of both communities on 20 December 2001, ending large-scale fighting and establishing local reconciliation mechanisms, though tens of thousands of displaced Muslim and Christian residents took years to return, if they returned at all. Sporadic violence, including bombings later linked to the regional jihadist network Jemaah Islamiyah, continued in the region for roughly a decade afterward; scholars including van Klinken treat this later terrorism as a distinct successor phase rather than a continuation of the original communal war between local militias.

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.