# "They're taking our kids."



## Pergamum (May 4, 2013)

They're taking our kids


West Papua's youth are being removed to Islamic religious schools in Java for "re-education."



> A six-month Good Weekend investigation has confirmed that children, possibly in their thousands, have been enticed away over the past decade or more with the promise of a free education. In a province where the schools are poor and the families poorer still, no-cost schooling can be an irresistible offer.
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> But for some of these children, who may be as young as five, it's only when they arrive that they find out they have been recruited by "pesantren", Islamic boarding schools, where time to study maths, science or language is dwarfed by the hours spent in the mosque. There, in the words of one pesantren leader, "They learn to honour God, which is the main thing." These schools have one aim: to send their graduates back to Christian-majority Papua to spread their muscular form of Islam.
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> ...




and more [underlines mine for emphasis]:



> Internal transportation of children has a long and dishonourable history in Indonesia. Around 4500 children were removed from East Timor over the 24-year Indonesian occupation to serve, in the words of author Helene Van Klinken in her book Making Them Indonesians, a "proselytising Islamic faith", and to bind the region closer to Jakarta. Children, she wrote, were chosen because they were "impressionable and easily manipulated to serve political, racial, ideological and religious aims".
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> Papua has been a target in the past, too. In 1969, former president Suharto proposed transferring 200,000 children of the "backward and primitive Papuans, still living in the stone age" to Java for education. Another Saudi-backed group, DDII, used to bring children from both East Timor and Papua. And today, AFKN, which is linked to the thuggish, hardline Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), is actively seeking children to recruit.
> Daarur Rasul is half pesantren, half building site in a satellite city of Jakarta called Cibinong. Here, 100 boys from the lowlands in Papua's western half crowd up to the heavy bars of a gate to greet us. The gate is locked because, according to one member of staff, "they like to escape". Forty or so girls live downstairs with more freedom of movement. School principal Ahmad Baihaqi insists he teaches moderate Islam, and the children are at least seven, but some look younger. He doesn't deny they are locked up, but says it is only during study hours "to put discipline on them".
> ...




Pray for this situation.

We are looking for teachers now to help provide local education for local peoples. Message me if you know a teacher or yourself are interested.


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## ClayPot (May 4, 2013)

In many ways that's similar to the public school system's approach to immersing kids in secular humanism.


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