2000 Walisongo School Massacre

On the night of 28 May 2000, in the Muslim village of Sintuwu Lemba outside the town of Poso in Central Sulawesi, the lights went out in the middle of a heavy downpour.^[1][2]
Villagers later said that as the blackout hit, gunfire began to crack from all directions and attackers moved in.^[1]

By morning, Walisongo, the local Islamic boarding school, lay in ruins.^[1][2]
Men who had fled there for shelter had been slaughtered with guns and machetes.^[2][3]
Families had been bound, marched to the river, and killed.^[1][2]
Almost every house in the village had been burned to the ground.^[1][2]

The massacre around the Walisongo school became one of the most notorious episodes in a years‑long communal war that scarred Poso and turned this corner of Sulawesi into a byword for sectarian violence.^[3]

How many people died that night has never been agreed. Official counts speak of roughly 165 to 200 dead.^[2][4]
Muslim organizations in the region insist the toll from the May attacks reached at least 191 and possibly many more.^[2][3]
One contemporaneous report spoke of roughly 500 Muslims feared dead in the month’s clashes.^[4]
Years later, mass graves were still being unearthed across Poso, keeping the true number of dead unresolved.^[2]

A Town Primed for Bloodshed

Poso is a regency in Central Sulawesi, about 220 kilometers south of the provincial capital, Palu, on an island that sits some 1,300 kilometers east of Jakarta.^[4]
Its population is divided between Muslim communities concentrated along the coast and largely Protestant communities in the highlands.^[2]
By the late 1990s, Muslims had become the majority in the district.^[2]

Those demographics sat on top of older fractures. For decades, Indonesia’s transmigration program had moved millions of people from crowded islands like Java, Bali and Madura into less‑populated regions, including Central Sulawesi.^[4]
Resentment grew between locals and newcomers, increasingly expressed in religious terms.^[4]

By 1998, as the Asian financial crisis hammered Indonesia’s economy and the Suharto regime fell, violence began to plague Sulawesi and surrounding areas.^[4]
In Central Sulawesi, the conflict that took hold from 1998 to 2002 killed at least 1,000 people from both faiths, according to one count, and as many as 2,000 in the Poso conflicts alone, according to another.^[3][5]

Early clashes often looked less like organized religious war than tit‑for‑tat fights between youth gangs that escalated into full‑scale riots.^[6]
But each round of revenge pushed communities further apart. In April 2000 a group of Muslims burned down about 300 Christian homes near Poso.^[4]
Within weeks, Christians launched what one report bluntly called a “bloody revenge attack” in May.^[4]

Police and community leaders on both sides warned that calling it simply a Muslim‑Christian conflict missed the point. They spoke of unnamed local political elites exploiting religious difference to divide neighborhoods and shore up their own influence, even paying thugs to spark gang fights during local elections.^[4]
Human Rights Watch also flagged a bitter dispute over the post of district secretary in April 2000, just weeks before the massacre, as a key piece of the backdrop.^[2]

By mid‑April, the streets were already lethal. On 17 April, a police paramilitary unit from Palu was alleged to have opened fire on rioting Muslim youths in Poso, killing three.^[2]
On 24 May, four days before the Walisongo attack, a gang of Christian militia members led by a man named Fabianus Tibo was reported to have killed a policeman and two civilians in central Poso.^[2]

The stage was set for something much worse.

28 May 2000: When the Lights Went Out in Sintuwu Lemba

Sintuwu Lemba was a Muslim village on the road between Poso and Tentena, known for its Walisongo (Wali Songo) Islamic boarding school.^[2]
As rumors of impending attacks swirled on 28 May, some villagers tried to seek refuge at the district military command in Kawua. According to later accounts, the local police chief insisted the situation was safe and forced them to go home.^[2]

That night, during a heavy downpour, the electricity in the village cut out. Survivors later said the blackout had been caused by the militants who were already moving into position.^[1][2]
Gunshots began to ring out from multiple directions.^[1]

According to a report by local Islamic academics and survivor testimony, masked members of a Christian militia suddenly surrounded Sintuwu Lemba.^[2]
They began capturing women, children, and men who had not yet fled.^[2]
One survivor, Rusdiati Arifin, recalled that the attackers—described in the report as armed Christian militia members—started burning down the houses, including the Wali Songo boarding house. “All of the houses were destroyed,” she said.^[1]

Some 70 adult and adolescent males who tried to escape took shelter inside the Walisongo school compound. They were set upon there and killed with gunfire and machetes in what later reports would describe as a machete and gun assault on an Islamic school where scores of men had gathered.^[2][3]

Others were not killed immediately. Rusdiati said all the men, women and children in the village were rounded up in a nearby field and had their hands tied.^[1]
The attackers, wearing headbands, confiscated every sharp object they could find, including agricultural tools.^[1]
Bound captives were then forced to walk roughly two kilometers to the Poso River.^[1][2]

At the riverbank, according to survivors, many of the prisoners—including infants and children—were killed.^[1][2]
Rusdiati said her husband, her three children and five other relatives were murdered there “in front of her eyes.”^[1]
Her youngest, a third‑grader named Yudi Arifin, was among the dead.^[1]

Not everyone died that night. A male resident who survived the attack at the school later recounted that he was captured again four days later, taken to the river to be executed, and managed to escape.^[2]

Witnesses described the attackers as part of Christian militias widely known at the time as the “Reds,” who had already gone on an initial rampage against the Muslim population in late May.^[2][4]
They carried small arms, homemade firearms, machetes, bamboo spears, Ambon arrows, and powerful slingshots that fired sharpened metal bars.^[2]
Some appeared to work off prepared lists of names, using trucks to transport those they had come to abduct.^[2]

Bodies in the River, Villages in Ashes

The killing around Walisongo did not stop at the village edge. One report later stated that over the next year and a half, 840 bodies of Muslim residents were recovered from the Poso River and surrounding areas.^[2]
In the days after the May clashes, there were reports that the river was “clogged with bodies.”^[4]

Across several villages, up to 4,000 homes were torched, with militias specifically targeting houses owned by Muslim families.^[2]
One local imam in Margolembo described looking out over the wreckage and seeing that “destroyed houses are owned by Muslims (the newcomers) and the ones who destroyed them are Christians.”^[4]

Thousands of Muslim residents fled or were left homeless, sheltering wherever they could.^[4]
Local Muslim groups set up refugee camps on the football stadium in Palu, the provincial capital.^[2]
Thousands of Christians also left their homes, fearing revenge once the scale of the massacre became known.^[4]

The human toll of that single night has never been firmly pinned down.
Officials initially put the number of dead in the May clashes at 165.^[4]
Muslim organizations cited 191 dead from the school attack and associated violence.^[2][3]
Other accounts gave 200 dead, including women and children, in what they called the Walisongo massacre.^[2][6]
Some Muslim leaders estimated that roughly 500 Muslims were killed in the series of clashes that month.^[4]
Another analysis gave a lower figure, around 100 Muslims killed in the Walisongo attack itself.^[7]
Still another report tied the deaths of “at least 70” people to the leadership of three Christian militants who would later be executed.^[3]

What was clear was that the bodies being officially counted were only a fraction of the dead found later in the ground.

Several months after the massacre, 63 unidentified bodies were discovered at the base of a ravine near Tagolu village.^[2]
In May 2006, police excavated another suspected mass grave near Tambaro village in Poso’s Lage district, after three Christian men on death row pointed them to the site.^[1]
Officers pulled out clothing that Rusdiati Arifin identified as belonging to one of her murdered children; she clutched and kissed the clothes at the grave.^[1]

A separate mass grave near Sintuwu Lemba, said to contain more victims from the village, was also reportedly unearthed based on information linked to those condemned men.^[2]

As late as 2011, reports noted that the total number killed in the 28 May attacks was still unclear, with new mass graves being found across Poso regency.^[2]
The 39 bodies tallied in three early graves turned out to be only a small part of the story.^[2]

In mid‑2008, some of the Sintuwu Lemba villagers who had survived were still living amid the ruins of their burned‑out houses, with little or no sanitation.^[2]
Many refugees said they would only return fully if they could be sure it was safe and if their homes still existed.^[4]

From Chaos to Crackdown

The Walisongo massacre jolted Jakarta. Within days, the Indonesian military sent 1,500 additional soldiers, ten tanks, and a combat unit into the Poso area.^[2]
The buildup eventually brought the troop presence to three infantry battalions—about 2,200 uniformed troops—in a regency that had once been a provincial backwater.^[2]

The situation on the ground remained volatile. On 2 June 2000, Governor Advent L. Lateka, who one report identified as a mastermind of the massacre and broader violence, was killed when hundreds of people clashed in the Poso neighborhood of Kayamanya.^[2]
On 6 June, Christian militias fought pitched battles with security forces east of Poso and reportedly suffered heavy casualties.^[2]

In mid‑July 2000, police moved in on suspected militants.
Southeast of Poso in Kolonedale, 124 Protestants were arrested for carrying weapons, mainly machetes.^[2]
Around the same time, three militants from East Nusa Tenggara—Fabianus Tibo, Dominggus (Da) Silva and Don Marinus Riwu—were apprehended on suspicion of organizing the May massacre.^[2][4]

Christian fighters in the region were generally described as members of armed groups known as the Reds or Red Group, who had been implicated in the late‑May attacks and were accused of using small arms and improvised weapons to attack predominantly Muslim communities around Poso.^[2][4]

Three Men, One Death Row

In 2001, a three‑judge panel in Palu tried Tibo, Da Silva and Marinus together.^[2][7]
The panel, made up of two Muslim judges and one Christian, heard testimony from 28 witnesses.^[2][7]

A Trial Full of Gaps

From the start, the legal case against Tibo, Da Silva and Marinus was troubled.

A later analysis of the trial noted that prosecutors did not produce a single witness who had seen any of the three men actually commit murder.^[7]
When the judges did cite specific testimony, they leaned heavily on a young Muslim man named Anton.^[7]
Anton delivered an elaborate story about the three men instructing Christian fighters and receiving 727 factory‑standard firearms.^[7]

The judges tacitly acknowledged that his claims about the hundreds of guns were false, but decided this did not undermine the rest of his evidence.^[7]
They still accepted his description of the men as trainers and leaders.

The strength of the evidence varied sharply for each defendant.
Both Tibo and Dominggus appeared, in the eyes of one observer, to have been more than rank‑and‑file combatants, though neither seemed to be the highest‑level leader of Christian forces.^[7]
Each acknowledged the truth of his interrogation deposition, and Tibo’s deposition in particular contained incriminating—if sometimes inconsistent—details.^[7]

The case against Marinus, by contrast, was described as “very weak.”^[7]
Aside from Anton’s claim that Marinus had taught other Christians how to use arrows, his name barely appeared in the courtroom record.^[7]

Yet the judges did little to treat the three men individually.^[7]
Tried together, they were sentenced together, and all three received the same penalty: death.^[2][7]

That sentence stood out starkly against the broader record of prosecutions in Poso.
By one count, at least 150 people had stood trial for violence linked to the conflict.^[7]
Most sentences, for both Muslims and Christians, were five years or less—even in some cases of murder or equivalent terrorist offenses.^[7]
No one else received more than 15 years in prison.^[3][7]

Against that backdrop, one analyst described the death sentence for Tibo and Dominggus as “excessive and highly unusual.”^[7]

Appeals, Clemency, and a Political Death Penalty

The three men were sent to death row in 2001 and remained there for five years.^[2][7]
Their appeals crawled up the judicial ladder.

The Supreme Court rejected their second appeal with a unanimous verdict by five justices—Djoko Sarwoko, Marianna Sutadi, Timur P. Manurung, Arifin A. Tumpa and Paulus Effendi Lotulung—after considering the case for less than a month.^[1]
Lawyers for the men called the ruling “an insult to the people’s sense of justice” and vowed to take their cause to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.^[1]

With judicial avenues exhausted, only a presidential pardon could save them.
They submitted a plea for clemency to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in April 2005, but it was rejected later that year.^[1][7]
From that point, the timing of the executions lay entirely in the hands of state prosecutors.^[1]

As the date drew near, the Central Sulawesi High Court quietly isolated the three men in prison, allowing relatives only brief final visits.^[1]
After seeing their condemned family members, the relatives refused to speak to journalists.^[1]

Debate over the looming executions reflected the unresolved nature of justice in Poso. Some argued that carrying out the death sentences was the only way to show respect to the victims and their families.^[7]
Others said it set a dangerous precedent—that death would come to be seen as the only appropriate response to communal violence, fueling cycles of revenge.^[7]

Within national politics, some members of parliament framed the choice starkly: either the men were executed, or they would effectively go unpunished.^[7]
Outside the capital, protests in Poso for and against the executions broke sharply along religious lines.^[7]

Analysts also noted another, colder calculation: that executing these three Christians might make it easier, politically, to carry out the death sentences against three Muslims convicted in the 2002 Bali bombings.^[3]
According to some, the government was unwilling to trigger public anger by killing the Islamic militants before it executed Christians.^[3]

September 2006: Firing Squad at Dawn

In September 2006, the long‑postponed executions finally came.
On Friday, 22 September, in the pre‑dawn hours near Palu, three Roman Catholic militants—Fabianus Tibo, aged 60; Marinus Riwu, 48; and Dominggus Da Silva, 42—were executed by firing squad.^[3][7]

Palu, the provincial capital and site of the executions, was quiet the next day under heavy security, with hundreds of policemen patrolling the main roads.^[3]
Across Central Sulawesi and beyond, the reaction was anything but calm.

On the same Friday that the executions took place, Christian mobs rampaged in the Sulawesi towns of Tentena and Lage, torching cars and police posts after hearing the news.^[3]
At least five people were injured in the resulting violence.^[3]
On the island of Flores, youths armed with machetes terrorized residents, stormed the local parliament building, smashed doors and windows, and overturned benches.^[3]

The government deployed thousands of security personnel to guard churches and markets across parts of Indonesia in anticipation of further unrest.^[3]
Vice President Jusuf Kalla appealed publicly for calm and insisted that the executions “had nothing to do with religion.”^[3]

Even in death, the three men remained the focus of tension.
After Dominggus Da Silva’s body was buried by the government, family members and friends exhumed it, saying they wanted to rebury him in their own coffin and in his own clothes.^[3]
The bodies of Tibo and Marinus were returned to their hometowns in Beteleme, where relatives planned funerals for 24 September.^[3]

The Massacre’s Long Shadow

The Walisongo school massacre did not only shatter one night in May 2000. It helped shape the trajectory of violence in Poso for years afterward.

According to one account, Christian militiamen’s attack that month on an Islamic boarding school and mosque along the Poso–Tentena road, killing some 200 Muslims including women and children, became a turning point in the conflict.^[6]
After the massacre, trainers and fighters from the jihadi network Jemaah Islamiyah began arriving in Poso at the request of a local hardline cleric, Adnan Arsal.^[6]
They set up religious study groups (ta’lim) in local mosques and within the Tanah Runtuh community he led.^[6]

Over the following months, some of these study‑circle attendees were selected for paramilitary training at a camp outside Ampana, where they were taught firearms and military tactics.^[6]
For young men from Poso who had watched Walisongo burn, the massacre became a recruitment story: a call to take revenge.

Peace efforts eventually tried to catch up. Muslim and Christian leaders, under the mediation of Coordinating Minister for People’s Welfare Jusuf Kalla, signed a peace accord in December 2001.^[5]
The Malino Peace Accords in 2001 and related agreements in 2002 largely halted the open communal warfare in Central Sulawesi, even though isolated bombings, beheadings and attacks on villages continued.^[3][6]

But the sense of unfinished business never quite left Poso.
At least 500 people were estimated to have been killed in the broader conflict, and hundreds of thousands were displaced at the height of the violence in Poso and in Maluku.^[5][7]
A “striking number” of cases of violence against both religious communities were never satisfactorily investigated.^[7]

For many Muslims in Poso, the Walisongo massacre and the Buyung Katedo killings remained the key symbols of that injustice.^[7]
Analysts argued that honoring victims would require systematically investigating unsolved cases and prosecuting those responsible—whoever they were—rather than using a handful of executions as a stand‑in for justice.^[7]

Years after the guns fell silent, the question lingered over Central Sulawesi:
For all the graves opened and all the trials held, who, in the end, had truly been held to account for what happened at Walisongo?