For 10 days in Poso, I stayed with a friend near the Lombogia Urban Village Office. A partially destroyed house with cracked walls, covered with grass and shrubs, stood nearby. There was no roof left. The building had been a witness to communal violence in Poso, a period that has left this coastal city with a reputation for religion conflict.
In December 1998, Lombogia was the site of the flashpoint where a fight between Muslim and Christian men over politics ended brutally, sparking struggles for vengeance. That first phase of violence was described in a Human Rights Watch report as “short and limited to several neighbourhoods in Poso town”, but the violence continued, in separate phases, through to December 2001.
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