Making Peace In Maluku

Mercy Corps' Dayna Brown consults with villagers in Maluku, Indonesia. Mercy Corps' programs are helping to reduce tensions in the province. Photo: Mercy Corps Indonesia

For over two years, Mercy Corps has been working in Maluku province in eastern Indonesia, where communal conflict has been ongoing since early 1999.

Mercy Corps funds two types of projects: emergency (e.g. shelter, water and sanitation, non-food item distributions) and economic empowerment (e.g. micro credit, fisheries, agricultural activities). Mercy Corps also promotes capacity building and peacebuilding activities through local organizations.

Recognizing that many people have been affected by the conflict, Mercy Corps funds projects that support those who are vulnerable and most in need, including host communities and enclaves, not just internally displaced persons (IDPs).

This policy reduces the likelihood of fostering jealousy or increasing tensions, and prevents future conflicts over scarce resources such as water and access to capital.

This is especially so in the context of an ongoing conflict in which the communities involved are often divided over the issues surrounding the conflict and how to define and make peace.

It is important to consider the messages which are sent by what we do and how we do it. Attitudes towards peace in Maluku differ across and within the Muslim and Christian communities, and pressure is often exerted on groups and individuals to avoid people from the other side, putting them at risk when they do intermingle.

While Mercy Corps wants to support efforts to end the violent conflict and build peace, we focus on indirect support for those who are working towards peace, rather than get extensively involved in direct peace building. In other words, Mercy Corps engages in peacebuilding through programming.

This approach helps us maintain our impartiality in providing humanitarian assistance and livelihood support. Perceptions are very important in contexts like this, so we try to avoid giving the impression that we are making political statements that might compromise our work as a humanitarian agency.

Consequently, Mercy Corps in Maluku has integrated peacebuilding components into its program in a number of ways, most of which are implicit rather than explicit, but which nevertheless demonstrate our commitment to peaceful change.

We have set an example by being the first international organization to have a mixed team of Muslims and Christians working out of one office in a neutral area of Ambon (the capital), which is especially difficult in a city which is almost completely segregated.

For many local NGO staff who come to our office, it is the first time they see people from the other community since conflict began. All of our capacity building and peacebuilding activities, such as training workshops and coordination meetings, are held only if people from both communities can attend.

All proposals are reviewed by Mercy Corps staff from both communities to prevent bias and promote transparency. And when possible, mixed teams of Christians and Muslims monitor projects cooperatively on other islands where there is more freedom of association.

Mercy Corps’ approach to peacebuilding in Maluku is also practical rather than theoretical. For instance, it attempts to create space for interaction and facilitate dialogue between people from different communities to share common concerns and ideas.

To provide much-needed neutral meeting space for Christians and Muslims from local organization to gather, Mercy Corps opened an NGO Community Center in Ambon. Here local NGO staff hold workshops and meetings, and have access to computers, a photocopier, fax/phone, and a library of humanitarian assistance, development and peacebuilding materials. Activities such as coordination meetings and workshops that are held at the local NGO Community Center always bring Muslims and Christians together to work on problems their communities both face.

When Mercy Corps began its program here two years ago, there was very little coordination and a lot of competition and suspicion between local NGOs. As a result of our efforts to bring people from different communities together, we have seen a number of partnerships develop between NGOs working in different communities, not to mention the sharing of ideas and experiences.

All this has helped to improve programming and build confidence in the possibility of living and working together again in the future—a key goal of peacebuilding.
Mercy Corps has also provided technical assistance to its staff and local organizations in Maluku.

Peacebuilding topics have included conflict analysis, negotiation, mediation, and communication skills training. One project in 2001 brought together facilitators through Mercy Corps’ partnership with the Conflict Management Group (CMG) with Indonesian facilitators from the Center for Security and Peace Studies (CSPS) at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, and the Baku Bae Joint Committee in Ambon.

In 2002, Mercy Corps also hosted workshops facilitated by CSPS for its staff and local NGOs in Maluku to improve basic communication and facilitation skills, conflict analysis, and cooperation between local NGOs wanting to play a greater role in peace building.

In January 2002, Mercy Corps hosted a “Reflecting on Peace Practice (RPP) Feedback Workshop” conducted by the Collaborative for Development Action (CDA, Inc.) in Ambon. At this event, over 20 local organizations and Mercy Corps staff discussed such issues as criteria for effectiveness of peacebuilding activities, conflict mapping, context analysis and strategy development, and how to deal with deliberate disruption of peace processes.

Mercy Corps jointly hosted a similar workshop in cooperation with World Vision and Catholic Relief Services in Jakarta, which primarily involved staff from the three agencies. Feedback from these workshops will be incorporated into the results of the RPP Project, which should be published later this year.

Mercy Corps has also directly funded several peacebuilding grants to local NGOs for different activities, all of which have brought together Muslims and Christians. In Wayame, Ambon’s only remaining mixed village, Mercy Corps supported a week of activities for children from surrounding Muslim and Christian villages to help normalize contact and build confidence and trust.

Mercy Corps has also funded community dialogues between Christian and Muslim villages to discuss reconciliation and the return of IDPs. In selecting which projects to fund, Mercy Corps looks at how the activities will bring people together, the numbers of people represented from the different communities and the likelihood of these activities promoting peaceful change in the long run.

Mercy Corps’ more indirect approach to peacebuilding through programming has enabled us to support people working for peace who are often taking great personal risks. One of the challenges we face is how to measure the impact of our peacebuilding approach in the short-term.

Ultimately, the success of peacebuilding activities in Maluku and other places in Indonesia is dependent on the local people deciding to break the cycle of violence and to make peace with each other—often one person, one family, one village, and one community at a time.

Mercy Corps will continue to support this peaceful change in attitudes and behavior by bringing together Christians and Muslims and providing them with the opportunities to meet and engage in productive activities and to find ways to manage conflict in a non-violent way.

Our staff and the communities they come from have lived, worked and laughed together in the past, and Mercy Corps believes that they will be able to do so again in the future.