Rebuilding Out of the Rubble

PosKo Zwolle-Maluku News Portal

February 25, 2005

Last week, a team from Jubilee Campaign traveled to the Maluku Islands of Indonesia to visit the Caleb Chandler House, a residential facility for children orphaned during the religious violence that rocked Maluku Province for nearly three years, from 1999 to 2001. Jubilee Campaign has conducted a sponsorship program for a number of years to provide housing, food, education and spiritual and emotional nurture to the orphans. In the following report, Jubilee Director Ann Buwalda offers her reflections on the history of the place and her hopes for the future of the residents of Caleb House and the Christian village of Waii.

The attacks lasted from January 23, 1999, through August 2001 in the village of Waii, Indonesia. The attackers, members of the Laskar Jihad, wore white, including white turbans. Those attacked were decapitated and mutilated beyond belief, even the elderly and women. One pastor tearfully beseeched us as visitors to help him understand how he could possible counsel his flock in the wake of such horrors.

In January 2002, a Jubilee Campaign team visited Ambon Island, in the Maluku Province of Indonesia. Ambon was one of the pivotal areas in the conflict between Muslim and Christian communities that lasted four pa inful years. We had visited a refugee camp located near Passo Village, to which all the surviving villagers from Waii had fled. Waii villagers in that camp told us that the Islamic militant group Laskar Jihad had attacked Waii forty times, escalating to the use of military weaponry before the villagers finally gave up and fled on foot across a mountain range to the Christian area in Passo.



During a meeting in that area with twenty bupatis, these pastors and Christian village leaders poured out their grief and fears to us as they recounted the horrors of random attacks, butchered bodies of friends and relatives and lack of military or police protection. Both were suspected of taking sides against them, particularly because military weaponry had been used during the attacks and because the attackers were never apprehended, even when there was advance notice of the attack and when military barracks were close by. Thus, at the time of that visit, Laskar Jihad persisted, an estimated 10,000 militants in the Maluku Islands lived within entrenched terrorist training camps and prospects for the Waii villagers appeared bleak.

Muslim Nations Plan to Set Up Islamic Bank - Yahoo! News

Muslim Nations Plan to Set Up Islamic Bank - Yahoo! News

PUTRAJAYA, Malaysia - Muslim bankers and regulators announced plans Wednesday to set up a global Islamic bank by next year that could rival Western lenders and to chart a 10-year blueprint to bolster growth in the Islamic financial sector

The Bahrain-based Albaraka Banking Group will take a 10 percent stake in the $1 billion bank to be known as the Emaar International Group, said Saleh A. Kamal, chairman of the General Council for Islamic Banks and Financial Institutions, which proposed the project.

Other key shareholders are the Islamic Development Bank, which is the financial arm of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Conference, and Malaysia's Islamic Bank, Kamal said.

"We hope by early next year, it will be operational," he told some 400 officials and regulators at a forum in Malaysia to map out a blueprint for the Islamic financial sector.

Malaysia is spearheading efforts to help the OIC focus on economic development among Muslim nations to help lift them out of poverty and boost their financial clout.

Malaysia, Bahrain, Qatar or Dubai could be the host country for the new bank, Kamal said, adding that operational details are expected to be finalized in three months.

Officials have said the bank will operate in keeping with Islamic laws, which means no interest would be paid or charged on deposits and loans.

Kamal said the bank's emergence could be a "vital turning point" for a sector whose growth has been hamstrung because 73 percent of some 285 Islamic banks and financial institutions are undercapitalized at below $25 million.

Membership in the Emaar group is open to private Islamic and conventional banks, pension, insurance and endowment funds, as well as individuals, he said.

Malaysia's central bank also said Wednesday it has no immediate plans to issue more Islamic banking licenses to foreign lenders. Last year, the central bank granted Islamic banking licenses to three foreign companies — Kuwait Finance House, Saudi Arabia-based Ar-Rajhi Bank and a consortium led by Qatar Islamic Bank.

Foreign investors can still enter Malaysia's market by holding a 49 percent stake in subsidiaries of domestic banks that offer Islamic banking.

The Islamic Financial Services Board secretary-general Rifaat Ahmad Abdel Karim told the Associated Press that a 10-year Islamic financial services master plan for OIC nations is expected to be completed by the end of the year and distributed to various regulatory bodies.

Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, whose country currently chairs the OIC, told the forum that the masterplan would promote widespread development to "address the problems of extremism and terrorism" in the world's largest Muslim political grouping.

Twenty-seven OIC members are classified by the World Bank as low-income nations while 21 are severely indebted, he said.