Bird’s Eye View to Indonesian Mass Conflict Revisiting the Fact of Self-Organized Criticality



1. On Mass Conflict

By the years after the fall of the New Order regime in the period of social
transformation to the politically reformed era, Indonesia has witnessed many civil wars
among its people respect to various issues driven them (religious or ethnic ones) and broad
impacts to the national strength; apparently with distinctive numbers of casualties and
severances must be paid (Sihbudi,
et. al., 2001). Nonetheless, practically speaking, the
events of social conflict or civil violence are never too easy to analyze since any social
movements at the occurrences of the conflicts were comprised by great deal of mixed and
twisted issues and relevancies. Social mobilizations could be brought in to its highest
escalation - turning out to be bloody and disruptive massive violence - not by solely one
issue. The motives can be derived from a great deal of aspects, e.g.: social and economic
hardships, social clusters and gaps, the lack of widely accepted sovereign government or
political regime, and a lot more roots of the social conflict (
cf. Epstein, et. al., 2001). Thus,
the complexity of its nature makes the conflict resolution is never an easy task (
cf. Woods,
2003).

However, generally speaking, civil violence is mostly related to the mass mobility
regarding to certain collective identities among social actors (
cf. Lustick, 2000 & Srbljinovic,
et. al, 2003). This fact is quite obvious in some cases of mass violence in Indonesia and some
other countries prone to conflict. This brings to the most conventional, yet powerful conflict
resolution is by bridging the communications and continuously interactions between the
conflicting sides and the role of legitimate each side’s leaders is somehow important in
order to maintain peace. Previously, we have tried to see the possible structure of the
massive conflict by analytically laid the model in the occasions of mass mobility (Situngkir,
2003). Here, we would like to present a general approach that could possibly offer
alternative explanations and understandings to the social conflict by observing some
statistical properties of the empirical data we collected on Indonesian massive civil violence.

One of the biggest and severe massive civil violence was occurred in Ambon,
Maluku1. At this particular case, the social mobilizations were basically recognized to be
driven by the religious issue between those who were Christians and Muslims. This was one
of the longest and most sophisticated civil conflict occurred in the country while in return
sacrificed most human souls as it appeared to be one of the broadest social conflict and
massive violence geographically.

A map regarding to the conflict in Ambon pointing the place of the mass
mobilizations along with respective casualties are shown in figure [1]. From the figure we

1 The data we use in this report is collected from many sources in the period of conflict in Ambon since 1999 to
2004. In fact, there is no exact numbers of the total casualties in Ambon Social Conflict. The long time conflict
actually might have taken more than ten thousand of people (Crisis Centre Keuskupan Ambonia) or could also
about 1900s people as reported by Tadjoeddin (2002). The data we used in the paper is compiled from the
records of some different reliable sources. All used data is available upon request.



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