04312
July 14, 2004

‘Enduring and inviolable brotherhood’

21st-century violence overwhelms ancient peace-keeping system

by John Filiatreau

AMBON, Indonesia — The Moluccan region of eastern Indonesia, where Christian-Muslim violence has resulted in more than 10,000 deaths in the past five years, was long considered one of Indonesia’s proudest examples of religious tolerance.

       For centuries, the people of the Spice Islands maintained peace through an ancient social system known as pela, whose purpose was to enable the residents of neighboring villages to settle disputes without going to war.

       For more than two centuries, pela was the glue that bound Christians and Muslims together and prevented violence over religious differences.

       The custom usually cited as an illustration of pela is one that obliges Christians to help Muslims build mosques, and Muslims to help Christians build churches.

       According to the Rev. I.W.J. Hendriks, the chairman of the Moluccan Protestant Church (GPM) Synod, the topmost minaret of a mosque must be placed in position by a representative of the Muslims’ (Christian) pela partner. Because of the violence of recent years, he says, “several” places of worship in Ambon “have never really been finished,” and many have been destroyed before they were completed.

       Hendriks, and many other Moluccans, both Christian and Muslim, consider ancient pela relationships between Moluccan villages to be still in effect, although they worry that it may be irretrievably broken.

       According to the International Crisis Group (ICG), a non-profit organization that tries to prevent and resolve deadly conflicts around the world, pela was successful because it “stressed ethnic similarities over religious differences” and “was anchored in mystical beliefs shared by both communities.”

       Pela pacts were concluded through a powerful oath, backed up with a terrible curse on any transgressor. A cocktail of palm wine mixed with blood drawn from the village chiefs was prepared. Weapons were immersed in the potion, with warnings that they would turn against and kill anyone who broke the oath; and then people from both villages drank the mixture. The brotherhood was sealed by this exchange of blood.

       Historically, pela was rooted in head-hunting. Villages and clans made the alliances to protect themselves from raiders and to strengthen themselves for attacks on others. Sometimes such pacts were made to end a prolonged period of feuding.

       Anthropological researcher Dieter Bartels, of Cornell University, wrote in 1977 that pela was “an enduring and inviolable brotherhood between all peoples of the partner villages,” built on four main ideas:

       The villages help each other in times of trouble (wars, natural disaster, etc.); when asked, one village must assist the other in the undertaking of large community projects (like the construction of a church or mosque); any visitor from a partner village cannot be denied food (indeed, a visitor can take any crops or livestock he comes across, without asking permission); and all residents of partner villages are considered to be of one blood, meaning that inter-marriage is considered incestuous.

       The latter point was crucial, Bartels wrote, because “pela eliminated head-hunting between the allies, while marriage ties across village lines did not seem to prevent such attacks.”

       Muslims arrived in the Moluccas in the 12th century. About 400 years later, when Portuguese mariners came to the Moluccas for its precious spices, they found the Muslims and non-Muslims engaged in a deadly struggle. The non-Muslims turned to the Portuguese for aid and were converted en masse to Catholicism. Just after 1600, the Dutch wrested power away from the Portuguese and converted the Catholics en masse to Calvinist Protestantism. Pela was thereafter used, according to Bartels, to join Muslims and Christians in “countless, if futile, uprisings against both colonial powers.”

       According to Bartels, pela was a key element in “a common Ambonese ethnic religion” that transcended Islam and Christianity and formed the basis of a common identity. The core elements of the ethnic religion were these: 1) Islam and Christianity are equally valid and truthful; they are alternative paths to God, who is one and the same; 2) customary law, known as adat, created and still guarded by the ancient Ambonese “ancestors,” is the same for Muslims and Christians and governs interaction between them; and 3) All Ambonese were created at a Christian mountain, Mount Nunusaku, on the island of Seram.

       Many modern adherents of the pela system dismiss its mythical aspects.

       Pela is a system of “mutual insurance” that can be tapped “when one of the partner villages needs a relatively large capital investment,” Bartels wrote, and the ban on inter-marriage “makes it possible to transfer the idiom of kinship to the alliance system and use the strongest possible ties between human beings (those of kinship) as the basis of the pela system.”

       “If marriage were allowed ... (it) would lead to a series of mini-alliances of the intermarrying clans, which would undermine the overall bond between the villages.”

       The strength of pela was illustrated in one notable case in the 1940s, when Christian guerrillas fighting for South Moluccan independence defended the mosque in their partner village against fellow Christian militias that wanted to burn it in retaliation for the Muslims’ alleged support of Indonesian troops.

       One can also see the power of the custom in its treatment of mixed marriages. When a Christian and a Muslim married, one or the other simply converted, and the couple lived in the village of their now common faith, with no social sanction or punishment. But when a man and woman from pela partner villages married, they were ostracized from both villages and could expect punishment from God and the ancestors, who would send barrenness, illness or death to the miscreants and/or their descendants. If they dared to set foot in the home village of either partner, they would be paraded around the village clad only in coconut leaves and made to confess their sin publicly while being mocked and ridiculed by the whole village.

       There is a Moluccan folk song whose title, Satu hati satu gandong, means “one heart, one womb."

Brothers, let me carry you on my back,
I will carry you on my back,
We are both from one root, one heart, one soul.

        The pela system, which depended on relations between village chiefs and councils of elders, was weakened after Indonesia’s 1949 independence from the Dutch, when the government took steps to undermine the authority of village chiefs. It was all but destroyed in the 1990s by transmigration, which brought in hundreds of thousands of people from other parts of Indonesia who had never been part of pela and didn’t understand it.

       “The denial of pela,” Bartels wrote, “is tantamount to a denial of the existence of a separate and unique Ambonese culture and identity.”

       That’s what the Jakarta government had in mind when it launched its campaign of nationalization.

         “Without pela ... Ambonese ethnic religion would lose its foundation, and (its) collapse would be a serious threat to Ambonese unity,” Bartels wrote prophetically 30 years ago. “Islam and Christianity are now subordinated to the goals of ethnic religion, but if the latter crumbles, the buffer between the two will be removed, leading to a direct confrontation. ... Ambonese Moslems and Ambonese Christians would then deal with one another not primarily as Ambonese, but as Moslems and Christians first and as Ambonese second.”