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fighting residents. Three years later, at least 6,000 people, possible as many as 10,000, had beenkilled. 11 Out of a population of 2.1 million, one-third had been displaced. Ambon City had beenseverely destroyed, numerous small villages wiped out, and a thorough segregation between Moslemsand Christians had taken place.The Maluku Conflict in the LiteratureSeveral books and numerous articles have been published on violence in Indonesia and the Malukuconflict. A few seminal books discuss Indonesia’s regime change and the transformation of nationalpower structures, linking communal violence to these large-scale factors. Jacques Bertrand argues thatthe practices of the authoritarian government, such as the pursuit of exclusionary policies targeted atspecific ethno-religious groups stirred existing animosities and inter-ethnic hatred. 12 Luca Manciniconcludes that in this context it may be no coincidence that violence exploded in 1997 in a climate ofregional instability and economic uncertainty in the wake of the financial crisis, and escalated dramaticallywith the power vacuum left by Suharto’s fall in 1998. 13However, only 14 provinces (out of 30) accounted for 96.4% of all non-secessionist communal conflictdeaths since 1990. 14 More strikingly, in 2000 only a mere fifteen districts whose share of thenational population did not exceed 7% accounted for 85.5% of all deaths in group violence. Withregard to the large-scale factors cited above, it is puzzling why there was for the most part in Indonesiano violence at all. 15John Sidel observed shifting patterns of collective religious violence from riots in provincial townsand cities in 195-97, anti-witchcraft campaigns in Java and interreligious pogroms in Central Sulawesiand Maluku in 1998-2001, to finally paramilitary mobilization and terrorist bombings under the signof “jihad” in 2000-2005 16 . Sidel comments that the origins of the fighting in Maluku were multi-layered, but does not provide a detailed account of the unfolding of violence in the province. RobertHefner links the rise of religious violence in the 1990s to the embrace of Islam and Muslim intellectualsby Suharto in the late 1980s. 17The International Crisis Group commented that many accounts over-emphasized confessional cleavagesas such a description would neglect other differences underpinning the conflict. It pointed out thatmost of the Christians in Maluku had been there for a long time, while a significant minority ofMoslems migrated during the last 30 years. 18 The Muslim immigrants were seen as more aggressiveand commercially more adept than the local Christians and had made enormous economic strides.Similarly, in 2000, then Indonesian Defence Minister Juwono Sudarsono commented that the conflict1112131415161718The International Crisis Group estimated in December 2000 that the conflict has cost more than 5,000 people their lives:ICG (2000) Overcoming Murder and Chaos in Maluku. Asia Report N°10, 19 December 2000. The Indonesian HumanRights Campaign Tapol estimates 9,000 deaths, Kopassus and the Maluku crisis, http://tapol.gn.apc.org/bulletin/2003/|bull169-70.htm#kopassus.Jacques Bertrand (2004) Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Indonesia. Cambridge, Cambrdige University Press.Luca Mancini, “Horizontal Inequality and Communal Violence: Evidence from Indonesian Districts”, Crise WorkingPaper No. 22, November 2005.Varshney et al. (2004) Patterns of Collective Violence in Indonesia (1999-2003). United Nations Support Facility for IndonesianRecovery – UNSFIR, Jakarta, 27.Sidel, Riots, Progroms, Jihad, 7.Sidel, Riots, Progroms, Jihad, xi.Robert W. Hefner (2005) Remaking Muslim Politics: pluralism, contestation, democratization, Princeton, Princeton UniversityPress.ICG, Overcoming Murder and Chaos in Maluku, 4.17