Everyone concerned about the crisis in Asia should look beyond exchange rates and austerity measures to the political steps needed to prevent a human rights catastrophe. As the financial crisis continues to unfold, economic grievances may increasingly take on an ethnic or religious cast. In Indonesia, most reports on the crisis have sounded alarms about possible attacks on the economically dominant ethnic Chinese. Many of these Chinese are also Christian. In the past 18 months, churches have become as much a target of the Moslem poor as Chinese-owned shops.
Persecution can go the other way, too.
In eastern Indonesia, which is heavily Christian, Moslem traders from the Bugis ethnic group have become the focus of resentment. Violence linked to land disputes may also increase, as hundreds of thousands of construction workers, food vendors and petty traders return from depressed urban areas to their homes in the countryside. The chief of Thailand's irrigation department announced on January 2 that the irrigation system would not be able to cope with the expected number of people returning to farming as a way of survival. In Indonesia, drought has devastated rural Java, making a mass influx of sacked workers even more insupportable. When decreasing availability of money, land and water is combined with an increasing demand, the prospect for violence is high.