Novi Rehata is trying to fold himself into a rattan chair in an Ambonese warlord's living room, squirming with each new question.
When he's finished staring at the four large Winnie the Pooh bears gathering dust on an electric piano, the 16-year-old disappears into his oversized blue T-shirt covered with a pattern of tiny white snowflakes, pulling it down over his folded knees, and tucking his hands inside the sleeves. Only his smooth brown face and bare feet are visible.
"My job is to burn the buildings," he says quietly, a shy smile playing across his lips, as the room full of tattooed, hard men mercilessly tease him in Bahasa Indonesian.
"Sometimes the Whites [Mus-lims] shoot at me but they never hit. I go very fast behind the walls, running. It is hard to shoot the agas because we are so small, so I am not afraid."
There's no English word for an agas, a tiny biting insect found across the province of Maluku, the large cluster of islands also known as the Spice Islands. The bug is virtually impossible to see, let alone kill, and its bite is painful.
Here in Maluku, however, agas has a far more sinister connotation. These are the units of boys, some as young as 12, who serve as front-line Christian soldiers in the year-long battle with the province's slim Muslim majority.
"They are very valuable in our fights with the Whites [Muslims] because they are young and small," said Agus Wattimena, the beaming Christian "General" in Maluku. In addition to the tens of thousands of soldiers he claims to control, he plays a long-haired Fagan to a troop of 35 agas in Ambon.
"They can sneak into the area and burn everything. No one is suspicious. Even the Indonesian troops who shoot at the Reds [Christians] will hesitate to shoot a very young person, although now they might start," he said.
He claims only one agas has died in the past year, 18-year-old Mecky Wattimena (no relation), killed by a grenade in August. A dozen others have been injured. Mecky's family could not be contacted for an interview.
The boy's cousin, however, 17-year-old Sosi Wattimena, sitting quietly nearby, suddenly explodes out of his chair.
"It makes me so angry, all I want to do is kill TNI [Indonesian Armed Forces]," said Sosi, an agas since the older teen's death. "Every time I see them I think about revenge."
Ambon is a natural magnet for unemployed and disaffected youths. For a few brief moments during each of the three riots that tore the city apart last year, they had a role to play, brandishing home-made guns known as rakitan and hurling Molotov cock-tails.
Six weeks after the last eruption, older teens and men in their early twenties, Muslim and Christian alike, can be found picking through the rows of burned-out buildings on their respective sides of Ambon's dividing line, an area known locally as "the Gaza Strip," searching for anything of value. They loll and smoke and pose for each other amid the gutted businesses and apartments, waiting, it seems, for something to happen.
These fellows are too old and too uncontrollable to become agas, says Wattimena, caging another cigarette from a visitor. But for a bushy moustache, the wizen, sharp-featured 53-year-old former school board employee in combat pants and golf shirt could pass for the Spanish painter Salvador Dali's Malukan twin.
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