A Few Poorly Organized Men: Interreligious Violence in Poso, Indonesia by Dave McRae (review)

The result of a decade of research, Dave McRae’s A Few Poorly Organized Men offers vivid accounts of and interesting insights about the Poso violence in post-New Order Indonesia.

By analyzing the organization of violence, the book is a valuable contribution to answering the fundamental question of how interreligious violence took place in Poso, a remote and relatively unknown town during the New Order era. McRae’s analysis is built on the notion that behind the violent event was Poso’s economic disparity as a result of the religious division between Muslims and Christians in the local government. However, after close examination of Poso’s violent events, the book finds that focusing on the leaders’ “goals, motivations, and actions” (p. 10) is more revealing than economic inequality to trace the contour of violence in Poso. The leaders of both rival religious groups were main actors behind the violence, which became an end in itself to preserve one’s religious identity. The conflict in Poso had become spiritual in nature, a holy war.

What can be inferred from this book is McRae’s effort to shape the body of knowledge regarding the Poso conflict. He seems neither to agree nor disagree with existing literature on Poso, although he claims that A Few Poorly Organized Men is “the first comprehensive history of the years of violent conflict in Poso” (p. 11). However, I believe A Few Poorly Organized Men is not the first of its kind, and I wonder why McRae didn’t mention the other studies, albeit there are differences in the time frames of the studies, particularly the research reports published by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia, LIPI).¹ In general, McRae applies a comparative approach eclectically to use relevant information and theoretical elaboration from other studies, as well as data triangulation with news-media accounts and in-depth interviews with key informants. Both McRae and researchers from LIPI treat the Poso violence as interreligious in nature and share similar details regarding the same violent episodes.

A Few Poorly Organized Men adds to the current—and immense—discussion on conflict in post-New Order Indonesia by taking into account the specificity of local conditions and local elites’ ability to generate violence. It also considers the role of rising militant Islamist groups—which, after Suharto’s resignation in May 1998, began openly to enter national politics—in accelerating the scope and pace of violence.

The Poso conflict, marked by horrendous violence, occured over a period of nine years. Nonetheless, a majority of the Indonesian population were only made aware of the conflict through the news. In general, Indonesians regard it as one of the “typical” conflicts that occurred during the early Reformasi period, a conflict with no distinctive feature whatsoever, compared to some other violence that occurred in Ambon and Sambas. Indeed, violence has marked many episodes of Indonesian history since 1945.² In that sense, the Poso conflict, regretfully, seems to be seen as just another episode of Indonesia’s violence historiography. However, through McRae’s study, we see the Poso conflict in a different way. Though Poso shared similar features with other violent conflict areas in Indonesia, e.g., religious strife and the rise of local elites, McRae argues that the Poso conflict should be seen as the manifestations of an “evolving ‘division of labor’ in perpetrating violence between leaders and core combatants on the one hand, and ordinary community members on the other” (p. 9). This stance, however, criticizes the view that socio-cultural anomie in societies as a result of disputes based on ethnic or religious identity, and over old territorial disputes, is the basic tool of analysis for explaining the dynamics of violence.

If there is such a socio-cultural factor inherently embedded within Poso that contributes to violence there, then we might want to ask why conflict only began to mount when...