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Indonesia
Violence a setback for religion
President decries Muslim militance
President Abdurrahman Wahid told a synod of Indonesia’s Catholic bishops that fighting between Christians and Muslims in the Southeast Asian country is a setback for all religions.
“Religions in the country are undergoing trivialization, a process in which religion is reduced into superficial elements and slogans, especially among the Muslim people,” Wahid, a Muslim, said. “Religion has been seen only as a formality by certain sides, taken as slogans and put it in an inhumane field, destroying our human instinct,” he added.
The president’s statement was clearly referring to the argument between himself and his most acerbic public critic, Amien Rais, the Speaker of the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR). Rais is the former chairman of the Muhammadiyah, the second largest Muslim organization in the country. Wahid was general chairman of the Nahdlatul Ulama, the largest Muslim organization in the country with 35 million followers. Wahid’s organization has resisted calls for greater Islamic influence in Indonesia; members of the group that Rais once headed have been more confrontational in their approach to other religious groups.
Rais recently urged the president to step down because he was considered unable to cope with major problems in the country. Wahid said that the continuing conflict between the country’s two major Muslim groups must be kept under control, “because it has led to the tense situation we are facing at present.”
Indonesia, the most populous Muslim nation in the world, has seen conflicts between rival Muslim groups throughout the nation of several thousand islands and between Muslims and Christians in the Moluccas region. Thousands of people have been killed in fighting in the Moluccas, a majority Christian region in Indonesia, since fighting between rival gangs began in 1998. In recent months, organized militias of Muslim jihad warriors have entered the region with more sophisticated weapons and embarked on a campaign to eradicate Christians.
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