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The Manifold Meanings Of Displacement: Explaining Inter-Religious Violence, 1999-2001

Over the course of 1999–2001, a pattern of inter-religious violence unfolded in the provinces of Central Sulawesi, Maluku, and Maluku Utara that caused hundreds, indeed thousands, of deaths, and created flows of internally displaced persons (IDPs) numbering well into the hundreds of thousands. As the author has argued elsewhere, these pogroms of 1999–2001 represented a decisive phase in the shifting pattern of religious violence observed in Indonesia, from religious riots in 1995–1997 to religious pogroms in 1998–2001, and what might be glossed as jihad from roughly 2000 to the present. Viewed from this comparative perspective, the inter-religious pogroms in Central Sulawesi, Maluku, and Maluku Utara must be explained in terms of the particular timing, location, perpetrators, targets, forms, and processes of mobilization associated with this phase of religious violence in Indonesia. Viewed through a zoom lens focused on the pogroms themselves, moreover, the very pattern of their unfolding—from initial outbreak, escalation, and spread in 1999 to gradual de-escalation by the end of 2001—also calls for close examination and explanation. This essay will argue that the inter-religious pogroms of 1999–2001 in Central Sulawesi, Maluku, and Maluku Utara are best explained through a focus on displacement, in at least two different senses of the term. First and most obviously, these pogroms were “about” displacement in the sense that they concerned displaced people, as seen in the centrality of forced migration among the objectives and outcomes of the violence. As many observers have noted, the expulsion of thousands of residents from their homes, neighborhoods, and villages in Central Sulawesi, Maluku, and Maluku Utara constituted the primary means by which the violence spread and achieved its broadest consequences. Perhaps the clearest and most well-chronicled example of this process of violent displacement is Maluku