Page 172 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

haven of relative tranquility or, as Pak S. pointed out in a follow-up conversa-
tion in July 2001, we are hemmed in by Posso to the south in Central Sulawesi,
the provinces of Maluku and North Maluku to our east, and Kalimantan, an-
16
other site of vicious “ethnic” warfare, to our west. Maluku, by contrast, and
especially the city of Ambon, has, since the outbreak of violence there in Janu-
ary 1999 up through the Malino II Peace Agreement of early 2002, itself been
the scene of chronic warfare. In both Manado and Maluku, stripped-down me-
dia reports such as those produced by my journalist friends operate alongside
other media—both print and electronic, regional, national, and international, as
well as mass media forms versus smaller, more covert, tactical genres produced
and circulated beyond the grid of the country’s conventional media institutions.
In terms of media, Ambon is an especially dense and murky terrain, a swirl
of highly ideologized images, vocabularies, sound bites, slogans, and vectors
introducing during the war a host of mediated and mediatized “elsewheres”
into the mobile, charged scene of urban confrontation (Spyer 2002). If and
when they entered this space, the “objective but not transparent” reports of
Manado Pos’s journalists become part of a much larger arena of con®icting mes-
sages, fragmentary information, representational immediacy, and stark clear-
cut abstraction. They shared the same space with phantom letters that proved
incendiary enough to trigger large-scale violence. One especially infamous in-
cident, mentioned earlier, involved a letter allegedly issued by Ambon’s Protes-
tant Church and calling for Maluku’s Christianization which, once multiplied,
read aloud over megaphones, and spread about, led directly to the dislocation
and deaths of numerous North Moluccas—and indirectly to the demise of the
new province’s newspaper, Radar Kieraha. Such “dark” circuits, also traced by
in®ammatory video CDs produced on both sides, competed for attention with
partisan descriptions of the local press, with village gossip presented as truth
on Christian and Muslim websites, with Christian-inclined state radio vying
with illegal Muslim radio, the latter dominating at one point all the airwaves in
Ambon, crowding out other channels, and even in¤ltrating the handy-talkies of
priests. Add to this the state of civil emergency declared in Maluku and North
Maluku provinces in June 2000, with its severe curtailment of civil liberties, not
the least those of the press, and the lag of two to three days before national
newspapers reach Ambon and their exorbitant prices once they do, and one may
well wonder what, and if, people in this city were actually reading. Once again,
in the summer of 2001, Pak S. insisted that in Manado, with strife on all sides,
“we must direct our discussions as journalists to how we should act, and how to
check the in®uence of provokator from outside,” thereby invoking the proactive
practice of minimal description. Another journalist, a Moluccan who worked
for a year in Ambon following the outbreak of war and subsequently in the
tense, post-con®ict environment of Kei, Southeast Maluku, observed that a
more neutral source, like the pro-peace writing of Pak S. was quickly marginal-
ized once it appeared in Ambon. In the volatile, polarized setting of the war-
torn city, alongside phrases like “Muslim cleansing” and other vivid, slanted ver-
sions of war, such neutrality appeared ludicrous by contrast.

Media and Violence in an Age of Transparency 161