ABSTRACT
Of all the communal conflicts to erupt in Indonesia after 1998, the religious wars in Maluku were the most appalling. The fighting in Kalimantan involved relatively minor ethnic groups but this caught up religious communities to which nearly every Indonesian belonged. Unlike fighting in the small town of Poso, which was also a religious war, this consumed the largest town in eastern Indonesia. The death toll ran to at least 2,000 (Varshney, Panggabean and Tadjoeddin 2004: 30) and the internally displaced to over a quarter of a million (Norwegian Refugee Council 2002). Aside from the savage military onslaughts in East Timor in 1975 and 1999, the eruption of fighting in January 1999 made Ambon the theatre of the most shocking violence seen in Indonesia since the anti-communist pogroms of 1965/66. And where other disasters came and went in the worst post-New Order year of 1999, Ambon kept coming back to the headlines for more than 5 years.
