January 8, 2001

More Christians killed in Indonesia
___JAKARTA, Indonesia (BP) --Christmas Eve bombings targeting Christian churches across Indonesia killed at least 15 people and injured scores of others in Jakarta and eight other cities and towns.
___National Police spokesman Brigadier General Saleh Saaf said the TNT-powered bombs exploded within minutes of each other in what appeared to be a coordinated assault, the Associated Press reported.
___Indonesia has weathered a firestorm of political, religious and ethnic turmoil since the fall of the Suharto regime in May 1998. Since the beginning of 1999, more than 4,000 people have been killed in Christian-Muslim clashes and more than a million left homeless.
___Many thousands have been forcibly converted to Islam, according to Western groups monitoring the situation in a country where Christians comprise less than 5 percent of the 210 million population.
___The Barnabas Fund, a UK-based Christian charity that monitors the Indonesian situation through daily contact with sources in the troubled areas, noted that the Malukus islands now are "almost exclusively in Muslim hands because warriors have either butchered or driven out all Christians."

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