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Heart and Soul: Crossing Divides: The Sacred Legitimisation to Fight

Factual: Health & Wellbeing

Ronal Regan

20/04/2018 GMT

Crossing Divides: The Sacred Legitimisation to Fight

BBC World Service - Heart and Soul, Crossing Divides: The Sacred Legitimisation to Fight

Indonesia’s former child soldiers who have become agents of peace

Meeting a Christian and a Muslim in Indonesia who both used to kill members of the opposite faith, but who now work together.

Warning: The following programme tells the stories of the child soldiers who took part in Indonesia’s religious conflict that erupted in the Moluccas in 1999.  It is ultimately about peace and reconciliation, but a warning, there are graphic and potentially upsetting references to violence committed during that period

Hundreds of child militants are believed to have taken part in Indonesia’s bloodiest religious conflict.

On the island of Ambon there were roughly the same number of Christians and Muslims but in the 1970s, under a state sponsored programme, thousands of Muslims were moved there, In the chaotic years after the fall of President Soeharto, religious tension boiled over into deadly violence.

When the worst of the killings ended three years later, the children who had taken part in almost unimaginable atrocities were left living in deeply divided communities along religious lines.

Rebecca Henschke travels to Ambon, to meet two former child soldiers, Iskandar and Ronal, one Christian, one Muslim, who have been transformed from being killing machines to agents of peace, actively working to bring together the communities they once helped divide.

Photo: Ronal Reagan/BBC

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