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THE URGENCY OF THE WORLD CONGRESS OF THE MOLUCCAN NATION, THE BURIED HISTORY OF THE RMS, AND THE LAWSUIT AGAINST STRUCTURAL STATE VIOLENCE
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As young intellectuals, we must dare to look at objective facts with clarity. The proclamation of the RMS on 25 April 1950 by Dr. Christiaan Robbert Steven (C.R.S.) Soumokil together with J.H. Manuhutu and Albert Wairisal was in fact the culmination of profound disappointment over the collapse of the federal system of the Republic of the United States of Indonesia (RIS) into the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia (NKRI). The agreement of the Round Table Conference (KMB), which guaranteed the right to self-determination for the constituent states, including the State of East Indonesia (NIT), was deemed to have been unilaterally violated by the political elite in Java.
The South Maluku community, especially former soldiers of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL), was enveloped by existential anxiety over Javanese-centric political and cultural domination and the forced unification of the military into the Armed Forces of the RIS (APRIS).
When peaceful resolution efforts initiated by the central government — by sending a delegation led by Dr. Johannes Leimena — were flatly rejected by the RMS side, which demanded full independence, the state immediately responded with a naval blockade and large-scale military operations. The state’s repressive policies after the conflict not only militarily extinguished the armed RMS movement but also carried out epistemic violence in the form of collective stigmatization of Ambonese identity. The historical stories of the RMS were buried in the collective memory of Maluku society. The history of state intervention in Maluku land is filled with dark records of physical violence, the toleration of conflict, and the systematic abuse of legal instruments. The suppression of the RMS movement was carried out through the Ambon Invasion on 28 September 1950, led by Colonel Alexander Evert Kawilarang. This joint military operation involved massive force, including the use of B-25 Mitchell bombers and artillery fire from corvettes. The fierce urban battle against trained former KNIL soldiers caused massive destruction of the city’s infrastructure and claimed a very large number of civilian lives, estimated at between 5,000 and 8,000 deaths. On the APRIS side, the number of killed and wounded reached around 10,000 personnel, including the death of Lt. Col. Ignatius Slamet Rijadi while attempting to capture Fort Nieuw Victoria in the center of Ambon. The sociological suffering continued when approximately 12,500 Maluku people — consisting of 3,578 former KNIL military personnel and their families — were forcibly relocated to the Netherlands in 1951 aboard transport ships such as the Kota Inten and Castelbianco. Upon arrival in the Netherlands, they experienced a double betrayal: they were immediately and unilaterally discharged from military service and placed in refugee camps under deplorable conditions, including former Nazi concentration camps such as Schattenberg (Westerbork) and Lunetten (Vught). Within the country, the search for the remaining RMS forces continued in the forests of Seram Island until the capture of Dr. Soumokil in December 1963. Soumokil was then brought before the Extraordinary Military Tribunal in Jakarta and sentenced to death. The execution was carried out by firing squad on 12 April 1966 on Ubi Island in the Thousand Islands. To this day, the location of Soumokil’s grave remains a state secret — an act that negates the most fundamental human right of the family, including his wife Josina and son Tommy, to conduct a proper funeral and pilgrimage. This sociological record notes a profound sequence of sorrows. Starting from the 1950 Ambon Invasion that destroyed the city’s infrastructure, the 1951 forced demobilization and exile that isolated tens of thousands of souls in former Nazi camps, to the 1966 execution of Dr. Soumokil whose grave remains hidden to this day. This repression later transformed into the toleration of communal conflict between 1999 and 2004, which killed nearly 5,000 people and triggered sharp social segregation. In the modern era, this violence has taken the form of the contemporary application of the “makar” (rebellion) article that criminalizes peaceful political expression and agrarian protests, as experienced by the late Johan |
Teterissa and the recent case of Antonius Latumutuany.
State violence indeed re-manifested in a different form during the Maluku communal conflict that erupted in January 1999. Instead of acting as a neutral mediator, state security forces were strongly indicated to have experienced sectarian polarization and actively participated in the violence, even receiving payment from the public for factional security protection. 
In the post-conflict era, the state employed an excessive securitization approach through the application of Articles 106 and 110 of the Criminal Code (KUHP) concerning rebellion. Peaceful political expressions, such as the traditional Cakalele dance or the raising of the Benang Raja flag, were met with arbitrary arrests and brutal physical torture. The case of Johan Teterissa, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison simply for leading a Cakalele dance and raising the flag in front of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, demonstrates how paranoid the state is toward local Maluku symbols.
This legal repression has continued until recent years. For example, in October 2023, Antonius Latumutuany (26), a resident of Negeri Piliana, Masohi, was charged under the rebellion article after voicing strong protests against the seizure of his customary land by a government project. The prosecution was accompanied by brutal physical torture during his detention at the police station. This pattern shows that the “makar” label is frequently used opportunistically by state apparatus to silence defenders of customary land rights and to preserve agrarian exploitation in Maluku. For me, Maluku’s economic backwardness is not the result of laziness or the absence of natural resources, but the direct impact of structural development inequality and the real betrayal by the central government of its strategic promises. Historically, this systematic impoverishment can be traced back to the 18th century, when the Dutch colonial government shifted its commodity focus from Maluku spices to new commodities through the forced cultivation system on Java. This shift caused a dramatic decline in the spice trade and positioned Maluku as a neglected peripheral region in the global capitalist division of labor. In the modern context, Maluku consistently ranks among Indonesia’s poorest provinces, despite possessing the largest marine fishery potential, covering nearly one-third of the national fishery potential. This fiscal and corporate injustice is most clearly visible in the unilateral cancellation of the National Strategic Project (PSN) for the National Fish Granary (LIN) and the integrated Ambon New Port (ANP). The promise first made by President Joko Widodo in 2016 was suddenly canceled in 2022. The reason for the cancellation put forward by the Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment, Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan — namely the presence of an active underwater volcano and World War II mines at the Waai construction site in Central Maluku Regency — was strongly opposed by the Indonesian Association of Geologists (IAGI) Maluku because it was deemed not based on comprehensive scientific studies from authoritative institutions such as the Center for Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation (PVMBG). Later, the Minister of Marine Affairs and Fisheries openly acknowledged that the state indeed had no budget allocation to realize the project. This cancellation triggered widespread criticism from regional political elites and civil society, who considered the central government to have engaged in public deception and economic fraud against Maluku. A similar fate befell the development of the Abadi Masela Block in Southwest Maluku, which has been described as a project of endless waiting. While its natural resources continue to be negotiated at the level of international and national corporate elites, local communities remain passive spectators without certainty as to when the project can deliver a multiplier effect for regional welfare. Economic development inequality between regions in Maluku Province is sociologically and statistically assessed as very alarming when |
