Pope mourns "barbaric" beheadings in Indonesia

VATICAN CITY, Oct 30 (Reuters) - Pope Benedict offered his deepest sympathies on Sunday to the families of three Christian girls beheaded in Indonesia as they walked to school near a Muslim town.

The Vatican called Saturday's killings "barbaric" and said in a statement that the Pope would pray for "the return of peace among the people" of the region, long plagued by sectarian violence.

Six machete-wielding men dressed in black attacked the 16 to 19-year-old students near the Muslim town of Poso on Saturday, leaving the girls' headless bodies, dressed in brown uniforms, at the site of the killings.

Their heads were found at separate locations two hours later by residents.

"The Holy Father entrusted the Bishop of Manado, Mons. Joseph Theodorus Suwatan, to relay to the victims' families and the diocese his deepest condolences," the Vatican said in a statement.

Muslim-Christian clashes in the Poso area killed 2,000 people from 1998 through 2001, when a peace deal was agreed.

While the worst violence abated after the deal, there have been sporadic outbreaks since. Bombings in May in the Christian town of Tentena killed 22 people.

About 85 percent of Indonesia's 220 million people are Muslim.
(Additional reporting by Ade Rina and Tomi Soetjipto in Jakarta)

Christian girls beheaded in grisly Indonesian attack

Editor note: In recent years Christian Indonesian are regularly persecuted but perpetrators are rarely caught and brought to justice.

Three teenage Christian girls were beheaded and a fourth was seriously wounded in a savage attack on Saturday by unidentified assailants in the Indonesian province of Central Sulawesi.

The girls were among a group of students from a private Christian high school who were ambushed while walking through a cocoa plantation in Poso Kota subdistrict on their way to class, police Major Riky Naldo said.

The area is close to the provincial capital of Poso, about 1000 kilometres northeast of Jakarta.
Naldo said the heads of the three dead victims were found several kilometres from their bodies.

In Jakarta, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono ordered the police to begin a hunt for the killers.
"In the holy month of Ramadan, we are again shocked by a sadistic crime in Poso that claimed the lives of three school students," he told reporters at the airport as he prepared to fly to Sumatra island.

"I condemn this barbarous killing, whoever the perpetrators are and whatever their motives." He ordered the security forces to find the killers and maintain order in the region.

Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim nation, but Central Sulawesi has a roughly equal number of Muslims and Christians. The province was the scene of a bloody religious war in 2001-2002 that killed around 1000 people from both communities.

At the time, beheadings, burnings and other atrocities were common.

A government-mediated truce succeeded in ending the conflict in early 2002, but there have since been a series of bomb attacks and assassinations of Christians.

These included a blast at a market in Poso, a predominantly Christian town, that killed 22 people in May.
Christian leaders have repeatedly accused the authorities in Jakarta of not doing enough to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.

The Christian-Muslim conflict in Sulawesi was an extension of a wider sectarian war in the nearby Maluku archipelago in which up to 9000 perished between 1999 and 2002.

The Maluku conflict intensified soon after it began with the arrival of volunteers belonging to Laskar Jihad, a newly created militia from Indonesia's main island of Java that was supported by hardline elements of the security forces.

Analysts and diplomats accused senior army commanders of funding and training the militia, which was hurriedly disbanded following the terrorist attacks on the tourist island of Bali in 2002 which claimed 202 lives, including 88 Australians.

In Indonesia, Songs Against Terrorism

By Kyai Haji Abdurrahman Wahid and C. Holland Taylor
The latest suicide bombings on the resort island of Bali appear to have been carried out by young Indonesian Muslims indoctrinated in an ideology of hatred. Once again the cult of death has proved its ability to recruit misguided fanatics and incite them to violate Islam's most sacred teachings in the very name of God. The only way to break this vicious cycle is by discrediting the perverse ideology that underlies and motivates such brutal acts of terrorism.

Dewa - Ahmad Dhani

One of us, Abdurrahman Wahid, was Indonesia's president when tragic violence inundated the eastern region of Ambon and the Malukus six years ago. A seemingly trivial argument between a Christian bus driver and a Muslim passenger in early 1999 triggered a bloody religious war that eventually claimed 10,000 lives and drove a half-million Christian and Muslim inhabitants from their homes. Radical Muslims from throughout Indonesia flocked to the region to wage jihad on Indonesian Christians, backed by powerful Islamist generals and plenty of money.

The largest such group was Laskar Jihad ("Warriors of Jihad"), led by an Indonesian of Arab descent whose ancestors came from the same province in Yemen as those of Osama bin Laden. Jafar Umar Thalib is a veteran of the Afghan jihad and knows bin Laden personally. Backed by spiteful generals close to the disgraced Suharto regime, Thalib sounded the call to jihad, and thousands of young Muslims flocked to his green banner to slaughter Indonesian Christians in the name of God.

Enjoying powerful clandestine support, Laskar Jihad had actually established a military training camp less than 60 miles from the capital, Jakarta. When national police broke up the camp, Thalib promptly announced that Laskar Jihad would sail for Ambon and wage jihad there. I (Wahid) ordered the army generals in East Java to prevent them from sailing and ordered the navy to intercept them if they did. I also ordered the governor of East Java to guard the docks and prevent Laskar Jihad from boarding. But these presidential orders were ignored by a military that refused to accept civilian control in the newly democratic Indonesia. An unholy alliance of fundamentalist jihadists, Islamist generals and people close to the Suharto family ensured that thousands of Laskar Jihadists poured into Ambon and the Malukus.

Once there, they spread out in the Muslim communities and launched devastating raids on neighboring Christian enclaves, burning and desecrating churches; destroying homes; and slaughtering thousands of men, women and children.

All of Indonesia knew what was happening. It was in the news day and night. Laskar Jihad became a symbol and a byword for the suffering inflicted upon that region. The goal of its clandestine backers -- and those in parliament itself -- was to create chaos and block the reform that desperately needed to occur in the Indonesian government. They succeeded; the process of reform ground to a halt.

Then came the first Bali bombing in 2002, with jihadists incinerating a popular club and more than 200 people, mostly foreign tourists. Although that attack was the work of a different jihadist group, Jemaah Islamiah, it was obvious that the military -- by then in the hands of "red," or nationalist, generals allied to my successor, Megawati Sukarnoputri -- would crack down on all active jihadist groups. Immediately afterward, Thalib announced that Laskar Jihad had served its purpose, and he recalled its warriors to Java. Thousands of battle-hardened jihadists returned to Java's towns and villages to await his further call.

One of the people watching this tragedy unfold was a brilliant young musician named Ahmad Dhani. Leader of the immensely popular rock band Dewa, Dhani began to use his musical platform to influence millions of fans in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia to resist the tide of religious extremism.

In response to Laskar Jihad's atrocities, and to discredit the appeal of fundamentalist ideology, Dhani composed the best-selling album "Laskar Cinta" ("Warriors of Love"). Released in November 2004, it quickly rose to the top of the charts as millions of young Indonesians embraced its message of love, peace and tolerance.

Dhani and the other members of Dewa have presented Indonesia's youth with a stark choice, and one easy for the vast majority to answer: Do they want to join the army of jihad, or the army of love? In response, numerous radical Muslim groups have accused Dhani -- who is a devout Sufi, or mystically inclined Muslim -- of being an infidel, an apostate (code words inciting violence) and a Zionist agent. They have hauled him into court on charges of defaming Islam and seek to ban his use of rock music to promote a spiritual and progressive interpretation of Islam that threatens the appeal of their own Wahhabi-inspired extremism.

Yet rather than be intimidated, Dhani recently announced to the Indonesian press his plan to launch another "ideological smart bomb" -- in the form of a song that uses the revelatory tone of the Koran to declare: "Truth dwells in the hearts of those who love and are free of hatred; the hearts of those who hate . . . are possessed by Satan."

Dhani and his group are on the front lines of a global conflict, defending Islam from its fanatical hijackers. In a world all too often marred by hatred and violence committed in the name of religion, they seek to rescue an entire generation from Wahhabi-financed extremists whose goal is to transform Muslim youth into holy warriors and suicide bombers. For every young Indonesian seduced by the ideology of hatred and fanaticism -- including those responsible for the recent, awful attacks in Bali -- countless others see through the extremists' web of lies and hatred, in no small part thanks to the visionary courage of people like Ahmad Dhani. For as they listen to Dewa's music, the hearts of millions of young Indonesians have been inspired to declare: "No to the warriors of jihad! Yes to the warriors of love!"

Kyai Haji Abdurrahman Wahid is a former president of Indonesia. From 1984 to 1999 he headed Nadhlatul Ulama, the world's largest Muslim organization, with nearly 40 million members. C. Holland Taylor is chairman and chief executive of Libforall Foundation, a nonprofit that works to reduce religious extremism and discredit the use of terrorism. Dhani serves on the foundation's board. The authors can be reached at media@libforall.org.