Christian children in Indonesia’s most easterly province are bearing the brunt of a multi-faceted Islamisation programme that is changing the character of the formerly Christian-majority region, it was reported in mid-December.
Papuan children are being trafficked to Islamic boarding schools in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, forming part of a growing trend of Islamisation in this politically-disputed region. Government-sponsored transmigration has also diluted the indigenous Christian population, so that census figures now reveal they no longer constitute a majority.
Education and transmigration
Impoverished children are enticed away from their families with the promise of a good education, impossible to refuse. Unaware that the educational institutions in which they are placed focus mainly on learning from the Qu’ran, children (possibly thousands) have left Papua over the past decade or so.
