Holy warriors seek deadly miracles

THERE WAS a miracle on the island of Ambon last week, on the black Monday morning when the police opened fire on the worshippers in Ahuru.

Haji Muhammed Jusuf Ely, secretary of the Muslim emergency task force, was not there, but he has no doubts about what happened. "I heard it myself from the imam, Haji Hussein," he says, in his office in Al Fatah, the great green mosque in the centre of Ambon town. "We have eyewitnesses."

As in all matters connected to this conflict, Muslim and Christian bystanders bear witness to different stories, but what is certain is that a terrible battle between Christians and Muslims took place at Ahuru in which three worshippers at the mosque died. "The imam was in the middle of it," says Haji Jusuf Ely, "and there were Christian police on either side. Captain L.S" - he names the man - "had a Colt 45 and he fired it directly at Haji Hussein.

"The chamber revolved - click,click, click - and the bullets came out. But the bullets did not strike him. God helped him, because God protects his people." Whatever the truth about the bullet-proof imam, it was an entirely appropriate moment for divine intervention. For it was then, at Ahuru, that the situation in Ambon changed irrevocably from a bitter local outbreak of communal violence into a fledgling holy war.

Fourteen hundred miles away in Jakarta, hundreds of Muslims marched yesterday, as they had the previous morning, chanting for an Islamic jihad in defence of the Muslims of Ambon. "If Abri [the Indonesian armed forces] cannot act properly most Islamic people are ready to go to war in Ambon", read one placard. On the island itself, Muslim clerics have stopped short of formally declaring a jihad, which remains "the last straw", according to Haji Jusuf Ely. "But when we have no other choices, that is what we must do.

"It would be the end of peace talks and the end of compromise," he says. "Everyone who can carry weapons must go to fight. Kill or be killed. We do not yet call for a jihad, but there is jihad in our hearts." What began six weeks ago as a fight between a minibus driver and his passenger, and spread into street battles involving young Ambonese, has transformed itself into an intractable religious conflict, in which loyalties are determined by religion alone and murder and destruction have divine sanction.

In the past two days an appearance of calm has returned to Ambon, but few believe that it will hold for long. "However many troops come," says Jusuf Ely, "they will not be enough if between the two communities there is not peace."

It is not only Muslims who speak of holy war. Jonas Pessireiron, a plump, moustached civil servant in his fifties, should be the kind of person with everything to lose from the conflict. On the wall of his house are family photographs and a framed poster bearing a pious Christian verse. But nestling in the umbrella stand is a parang - a machete-like sword - and in the back are home-made spears, home-made slings and even a home- made gun. Mr Pessireiron (not his real name) talks not of a jihad, but of a crusade. "It is in the nature of religion that sacrifices are made," he says. "If you die in this holy war, you die in the name of Christ, and if you kill, you kill also in the name of Christ."

To the visiting outsider, it is impossible to judge who started all this, and who is most at fault. Maluku province, the modern name for what was once called the Spice Islands, has the largest Christian population in Indonesia - 800,000 out of 2 million in the province as a whole, and a 58 per cent majority in the town of Ambon. Christians complain that, despite their numbers, they are deprived of political power and discriminated against by the civil service and central government. Muslims insist that the Christians are trying to drive them out: without doubt, vicious acts of murder and destruction have been committed by both sides.

In Nania, a village on the airport road, local Christians point to a whitewashed wall that still bears a splatter of fading bloodstains from the 61-year-old priest, Paulus Thiyessen, who was cut down by Muslims as he tried to prevent them from burning his church. That was on 20 January, the day after the end of the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, when many Muslims swept down from their villages, burning Christian settlements on the way.

Thirty-five Christian houses were burnt in the neighbouring village of Negeri Lama - but a far greater number of Muslim households were put to the torch in retaliation. "We have always lived so peacefully with our Muslim brothers," says Herman Siwalette, a local fisherman, who now sleeps with his family in a refugee camp, and returns by day to rebuild his house. But Haji Jusuf Ely insists the Muslims were returning to their homes, and that they were provoked and attacked by the Christians as they passed.

Compared with other outbreaks of unrest, in other corners of Indonesia, there has been little conventional crime.

In Jakarta last May, hundreds of people died when they were trapped in multi-storey shopping centres that were looted then put to the torch. But, apart from a few broken windows, the giant Ambon Plaza in the centre of town is untouched. There is a strange, twisted purity about the troubles here that is almost fearful.

"I order my people not to kill women and old men and not to shoot first," says Jusuf Ely. "Never kill somebody who has surrendered, but protect your religion. If somebody burnt your house, killed your wife and children and grandchildren - can you forget it? Can you? You can never forget it - you are human. You can never forget."