Indonesia's experiment in population control has left a bloody legacy, reports John Aglionby in Pontianak

Sarni Kemal was wearing everything he owns when the headhunters came – a ripped shirt, a pair of grubby jeans and his underpants. When they came, he fled with his wife and eight children into a forest.

He knew what the approach of hundreds of Dayak and Malay headhunters meant for his village in the Sambas district of West Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo. In similar attacks over the previous four days, such mobs had brutally murdered all migrants from the island of Madura.

Sarni – who is Madurese – hid with 200 villagers for five hours until they were rescued by Indonesian soldiers.

"If the soldiers had not come when they did, we would definitely have been killed because the rabble, having stolen our belongings and burnt our houses, were looking for us," he said without emotion.

Timah, his elder brother, was not so lucky. "I heard a couple of days ago he was caught, decapitated and dismembered," Sarni said.

Some 185 people have suffered a similar fate in the past 10 days in Sambas, the most north-westerly district in the Indonesian half of the island, according to official statistics.

Some refugees say the death toll is much higher. "There are so many headless bodies in the jungle where people tried to hide, the real total will never be known," Sarni's neighbour, Marsan, said.

Now, Sarni and his family are facing a new horror: the squalor, filth and disease of a makeshift refugee camp in Pontianak, the provincial capital 120 miles south of Sambas.

When he and 1,100 other refugees arrived in the city last Friday morning, they were dumped on the pitch at the city's main football stadium. With 5,000 refugees already in the stands and 3,000 more overflowing out of the nearby sports hall, they had no protection from the blistering heat.

No one is under any illusion that this will be a short crisis. "The Madurese are hated here," explained one official who asked not to be named. "For decades, the early settlers co-existed with the Dayaks and Malays. But once the transmigrants arrived that all changed."

Transmigration was devised by Indonesia's former dictator, Thojib Suharto, to relieve the pressure on the densely populated islands of Java, Bali and Madura. People were enticed to move to areas such as Kalimantan by offers of land, cattle and homes. "Social jealousy grew rapidly," the official said. "It was exacerbated by the Madurese's short temper, which came over as arrogance and superiority." As a result there have been nine flare-ups since 1979.

In the stadium, Satuki, a volunteer worker, said of Sarni and the 1,100 Madurese who arrived with him: "We shouldn't really have accepted them because we're already over capacity. They arrived at four in the morning so we had no alternative. But they're going to have to find somewhere else to go."

But Dr Haji Torisz, the head of Pontianak's public health office, said: "Our biggest problem is that we just don't have any more large places." Large wall charts at the refugee co-ordination centre show there are 16,700 refugees in ten locations in and around Pontianak and another 11,500 on the way.

Reeling from Indonesia's 20-month economic crisis, the local government has little money to spare for the refugees. "We can only allocate 2,000 rupiah per refugee per day," Torisz said. "That is enough for two meals, of rice, a bit of vegetable and occasionally some dried fish."

The International Committee of the Red Cross is providing food supplements to under-fives and breast-feeding mothers. But people's hunger is all too apparent.

Adults sit around morosely, and there is a constant cacophony of starving babies wailing to their mothers. There is an average of one lavatory per 150 refugees and most people are washing in polluted canals. Sickness is starting to become common.

"We're getting at least 350 new cases a day," Torisz said. "Most are diarrhoea, asthma, respiratory tract infections and stomach complaints." Two babies died last Thursday; they were the first but are not expected to be the last.

"Our problem now is what to do with the refugees," said Abang Djaspari, head of the co-ordination centre. "The choices are very limited."

Some refugees want to return to their homes around Sambas. But they are unlikely to survive long if they do. Their burnt-out homes barely had time to cool before Dayaks and Malays were rooting around in the rubble for whatever was worth salvaging.

"If the Madurese come back, there's no way we can guarantee their safety," said Habid Afandi as he tied up timbers from a destroyed Madurese mosque in Jirak, about 100 miles north of Pontianak. "We're going to use these to build a chicken house and a kennel," he said, pointing to the wood.

Habid said that if the Madurese did not return, he and his friends would harvest their paddy fields and sell the rice. "It would be stupid to let it go to waste," he said.

Sending the refugees back to Madura is also out of the question, Djaspari said. "They would find it very hard to make a living and it would only make things worse for the people already there." Instead, he plans to give them 7,500 acres of state land in a different part of the province and take over their land in Sambas.

However, the scheme is not proving easy to implement. Last week, a local newspaper mentioned one of the sites being considered and within hours 80 locals were demonstrating. "Madurese Out!" and "Madurese are not welcome here" read the placards.

All that Sarni and the many like him can look forward to is months and months in a refugee camp. "In 1997, the refugee crisis lasted four months," Torisz said. "And then we only had 5,000 to deal with. With 26,000 on our hands, there is no knowing how long it will last."