The black Land Cruiser was waiting outside the Intim at daybreak. Cheyenne was clearly anxious to begin. His associates sat in the front beside him, and Robyn and I piled into the back seat. We had arranged to stop at the Salopa waterfalls, a diversion that would take valuable time, but we didn’t want to miss it. There were white sandy beaches and butterflies, and then a long walk through rice fields and winding lanes, to a crystal clear series of pools, cascades, and falls, in a beautifully serene and unspoilt forest. We had paradise to ourselves.
Cheyenne turned the Toyota north, towards Poso. There were far too frequent roadblocks, and conversations with paramilitary officers checking documents, that seemed longer than necessary, for a simple chartered vehicle hire.
As we passed through one small town, there was a kind of street commotion we hadn’t seen before. Shirtless men, wide-eyed with anger, carried machetes in threatening poses, and shouted even more incoherently than they should have been, if we could have understood the language. Some appeared to be drunk. The smell of fear and blood and diesel was in the air. Cheyenne put his right foot down. I looked back to see a dark ridge of mountains, towering palm trees, and burning houses. Two bamboo tubes of sweet glutinous Burassa black rice came over the front seat, from the flip-flop friends.
“Very dangerous.” Said Cheyenne. He was driving us through the opening salvos of the Poso War, and Robyn and I had no idea what that even was. We knew about Muslim-Christian violence in the Moluccas, but not what had just roared into flames behind and ahead of us, on the Trans-Sulawesi. Tentena was red zone Christian; down on the coast was the enemy. The white zone Muslims controlled coastal Poso town and much of the lowlands. The substrate for the conflict began, as in Tanatoraja, when the Dutch established colonial control of Tentena’s Pamona headhunters in 1892, and offered them free lifetime membership in the Central Sulawesi Christian Church. But this also opened the door to nearby coastal settlement by Muslim fishermen from other parts of Sulawesi. After independence, the Indonesian government compounded the problem by transmigrating Balinese Hindus, and granting tracts of local farmland to Muslims from Java. The demographic tectonic plates began to grind against each other in the corrupt competition for local administrative control and employment, with the Muslims outflanking the Christians for all the choice positions. The flashpoint ignited by an argument about Christian youths drinking alcohol near the mosque in Poso. And Robyn and I hadn’t even got there yet.
The Christian retaliation would come behind us, five months later. A group that claimed to be defending its ancestral home, would launch itself in Tentena. They called themselves the Black Bats, because ‘the black bats move at night, black is the color of war, and bat soup is a local delicacy.’ Dressed in black masks and capes, they terrorized Muslim cocoa and coconut plantations, kidnapped and executed hundreds of young Muslim boys, and left their bodies in local rivers and creeks. Many were missing their heads. Poso's Muslims would not eat fish for months.
The two sides fought with spears and bows and arrows, and homemade guns welded together from bits of spare piping, deadly to a range of over 250 feet. Paramilitary police weighed in on the Muslim side, with more automatic weapons. Over 1,000 people were killed in the violence, riots, and ethnic cleansing. And they were only warming up. In August of 2001, a branch of the Laskar Jihad ‘Warriors of Jihad’ declared open warfare, and dispatched fighters to Poso, equipped with AK-47s, grenade and rocket launchers, bulldozers and tanker trucks. The resultant scorched-earth campaign destroyed dozens of Christian villages, and pushed fifty thousand refugees into Tentena. In a supreme contest of eelimination, they would become a vigilante mini-state fortress, hemmed in by Muslims from the north, and from the south.
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