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A dramatic break
Prayer precedes the inauguration

In a stunning and eloquent break from the anti-clerical tradition that has characterized the Mexican government for most of a century, incoming President Vicente Fox Quesada visited the basilica of Our Lady of Gaudalupe on December 1, his inauguration day. Before taking the oath of office Fox knelt in private prayer before the famous image of the Virgin Mary, then attended Mass and received Communion.

“I have come as Vicente Fox, a citizen and a father,” the president told a crowd outside the basilica as he left. But he had come as much more than that. By winning the presidency, Fox, who heads the National Action Party (PAN), had broken the 71-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Now his visit to the Guadalupe shrine put a punctuation mark at the end of the PRI’s long history of hostility toward the Catholic Church.

Msgr. Antonio Macedo, the rector of the basilica, put the presidential visit in perspective: “Mexico’s first citizen came to kneel at the feet of the Mother of all Mexicans, to put his hands and his heart at the service of the country, and to pray for her help.”

President Fox did not mention his faith, nor offer any new plans involving Church-state relations, during the inaugural ceremonies. Instead he promised to work for an alleviation of suffering among the nation’s poor. And his first official act was to offer an Indian-rights bill, which had been drafted in consultation with Zapatista rebels in the country’s southern Chiapas province.

PRI supporters clearly saw the new leader as a threat to their old policies. As he arrived to take his inaugural oath, PRI protestors chanted, “Juarez! Juarez!” Benito Juarez, the country’s president from 1857 to 1872, opened the era of Mexican governmental anti-clericalism when he revoked the legal status of the Catholic Church. The new president’s PAN party traces its roots to a reaction against the anti-Catholic tradition that began with Juarez and became firmly rooted in the PRI. n

Death toll mounts...
. . . and peace prospects dim

Dozens of Christians were killed, and thousands fled from the Moluccan Islands, as Muslim warriors renewed their jihad campaign, ending several weeks of comparative quiet. By early in December, the overall death toll in the Moluccas had surpassed 8,000, after two years of violence in the bloodiest of the many conflicts that have troubled Indonesia since the fall of the Suharto government in 1998.

At least 10 people were killed as fighting broke out late in November. The first new round of violence came in the wake of rumors that Christians were responsible for the disappearance of a boat carrying 16 Muslims. Police said army deserters joined in attacks on Christians, leaving 10 dead and 13 injured. A week later, at least 50 people died in a Muslim attack on a nearby village.

“There are some soldiers who ran away . . . from their regiments and later backed some of the fighting groups,” said Martin Luther Djari, police spokesman in the provincial capital of Ambon. “But they definitely do not represent the army or police.” But Christian community leaders had a different perspective. Semmy Waileruny said the jihad warriors had the support of the Indonesian military. “The attacks are done by the jihad troops and backed by the army,” he charged.

Archbishop Renzo Fratini, the papal nuncio to Indonesia, visited the Moluccas during the last week in November, hoping to bring some encouragement to the local Christians—as well as to press for vigorous action by the Indonesian government to stem the violence. And on November 29 the United Nations office in Jakarta announced its plan to make a $12 million contribution toward security efforts in the Moluccas, explaining that efforts to maintain the peace would be the best possible humanitarian gesture.

While Archbishop Fratini was in the Moluccas on November 27 there were new clashes north of Ambon, and on December 1 the fighting broke out on a new front: the island of Kasiui, east of Ambon, where several Protestants died at the hands of Muslim extremists—reportedly because they refused to convert to Islam.

The papal nuncio, however, insisted that most of the Muslims in the region were opposed to the tactics of the extremists. “The local Muslims are against the jihad fighters,” he maintained. The archbishop added—in an echo of other Christian leaders’ complaints—that the jihad troops were “sent from the outside and supported by extremist groups.”

As the violence continued to flare on Kasiui, the Fides new service reported that 700 Protestants were being held hostage. A crisis center staffed by the Ambon diocese confirmed that the Christians were being held in local mosques, and threatened with death if they did not renounce their faith.

During a visit to Rome early in December, Ambon’s Bishop Petrus Canisius Mandagi told Fides that he estimated there were about 7,000 jihad soldiers in the Moluccas. (The bishop also warned that many reports from the region have been sensationalized, and numbers exaggerated. For example, the first reports from Kasiui had alleged that 90 people had been killed rather than 9.) Among these Islamic militants, he said, “many are foreigners from Malaysia, South Philippines, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Libya. This would seem to be proof of international Muslim support for the violence.”

Bishop Mandagi went on to charge that the jihad campaign was instigated by the Indonesian military establishment. “In Ambon the army’s presence is obvious,” he said. “Half the jihad forces are army men, using the fundamentalists for their own ends.” The ultimate goal of the campaign, he suggested, is twofold: to help the army regain the dominant status it enjoyed under the Suharto regime and to impose Islamic Sharia law on all of Indonesia.

The violence on Kasiui soon spread to a string of small neighboring islands (Teor, Geser, Gorong, Kurmangur, and Tayaondo), with the heaviest casualties occurring in the predominantly Christian villages of Teor. Dozens of homes were destroyed, and Christian residents took to the sea in small boats to escape the jihad. Father Fred Sarkol, who serves in the nearby Kei islands, said that the flow of refugees from Teor was “unending.”

Meanwhile, a fact-finding team dispatched by the Indonesian government to investigate the reports of forced religious conversions in Kasiui found little hard evidence to support the claims. Most Christians refused to speak to the investigators. They reported that they were afraid their complaints would be passed along to Muslim zealots, and they would become the special targets of new terror attacks.

In effect, by maintaining their silence, the Christians in the Moluccas were hinting that the investigators from Jakarta would be sympathetic toward the Muslim extremists. Having lost their confidence in the Indonesian government’s ability (or willingness) to stop the violence, where could Christians turn for help? Bishop Mandagi told Fides that the time may have come for UN intervention in the Moluccas.