Word: darul
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Dates: during 1953-1953
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...nation. They are mostly docile peasants, content to harvest their rubber, rice, sugar, tea and coffee, but on one subject the Indonesians are as explosive as their island volcanoes: religion. Islam provided both the force and the fervor that ousted the Dutch in 1949; today, a fanatic guerrilla organization, Darul Islam (the Abode of Islam) threatens the unsteady republic with chaos and civil...
...Darul Islam's leader is Kartosuwirjo, a 46-year-old mystic, who holds court in the rugged mountain fastnesses of western Java. Against the Dutch, Kartosuwirjo's tactics were simple and effective: kill, rape, loot and burn. His religious concept is medieval: death to unbelievers; his politics uncompromising: Darul Islam wants a Moslem theocracy. When Kartosuwirjo discovered that the leaders of the newly independent Indonesia planned a secular state without him, he turned his 10,000 well-armed fanatics against the republic...
...fertile West Java, Darul Islam set up a rival government, collected taxes, recruited a large army and successfully defied the flabby, frightened Indonesian cabinets that regularly succeeded one another. At first the Jakarta governments laughed off the rebels as "high-spirited young men still excited by events." When Kartosuwirjo's raiders cut railroad lines, ambushed convoys, even looted the suburbs of the capital city of Jakarta, the government finally sent an army to stamp out the revolt. It soon learned that religion is stronger than politics in Moslem Indonesia. The government's Moslem troops balked at fighting their...
Last week a collection of cold government statistics showed how hot is a civil war the rest of the world has known little and cared less about. Darul Islam's toll during 1952: 1,836 murders (average: five a day), 461 kidnapings, 1,201 tortured, 6,934 houses burned, 14,075 robberies. Commenting on the figures, Indonesian Communications Minister Dr. Raden Djuanda gingerly surmised: "It might be well to study the situation...