Religion, Migration and the Roots of the Maluku 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.

The International Crisis Group's own February 2002 assessment, published days before the Malino II Accord, put the Maluku conflict's toll at a minimum of five thousand and as many as ten thousand deaths across the three years of fighting, a range Gerry van Klinken's academic study of Indonesia's communal violence during the same period treats as the best available estimate rather than narrowing it further. No single reconciled count has superseded that range, so this atlas records it as the Crisis Group itself gave it rather than adopting either bound as final.

Van Klinken's study reads the conflict's roots as substantially local and political rather than doctrinal: competition over civil service positions, migration policy and control of local government, tensions that predated the fighting and outlasted the religious language later layered onto it. The fighting nonetheless divided combatants and, increasingly as it continued, entire neighborhoods and towns along Christian and Muslim lines, and the arrival of the explicitly jihadist Laskar Jihad militia from 2000 gave the conflict's later phase an overtly religious framing it had not fully carried at the outset. The Indonesian military and police were present throughout and were repeatedly accused by both sides of favoritism, a further complication no single account of the conflict's causes fully resolves.