Communal Violence in Poso, Central Sulawesi: Where People Eat Fish and Fish Eat People

Abstract

July 2000, I traveled on a crowded bus south from Central Sulawesi's Muslimmajority capital, Palu, to the Protestant-majority highlands. Protestant and Muslim passengers around me, previously strangers, chatted about the reprehensibility of the violence occurring just two hundred kilometers east in Poso. A Muslim elder on the bus concluded the conversation by saying, In Palu eat fish, but in Poso fish eat people (Di Palu orang makan ikan tapi di Poso ikan makan orang). Afterwards, my Protestant companions discussed the phrase. Palu, things were still good, with eating the best of all foods, fish. Poso, things were reversed and unnatural: the corpses of victims had been tossed in the river, their fate to be a meal for fish. It was said that fisherman, while gutting fish from the Gulf of Tomini, north of Poso, had discovered severed hands wearing golden rings.