An explosion of violence in Kalimantan in late February shook the entire province of Central Kalimantan. Thousands of Dayaks, armed with machetes and home-made spears, hunted down migrants from the island of Madura, killing at random and destroying entire villages. The violence, prompted by years of unresolved social conflicts, destroyed hundreds of homes and decapitated bodies were strewn along the roadside. Two years earlier, a similar eruption shook West Kalimantan.
This time the violence erupted in Sampit, the largest timber port in Indonesia. Sampit is a typical, red-necked frontier town where relations between the local population and newcomers have long been tense. As with conflicts elsewhere in Indonesia, it started with a rather trivial dispute about the dismissal of two government officials. On the night of 17 February, a Dayak house was reportedly burned down. As word spread that Madurese were responsible, a gang of Dayak youths attacked a Madurese neigbourhood. In less than two weeks, the Dayaks had killed 469 people though observers believe that at least 1,000 Madurese lives were lost and 30,000 were forced to leave Central Kalimantan.
Jakarta's tardy response
When the violence erupted, President Wahid was just about to leave for the Middle East on a tour that would take him to several Arab countries and to Mecca for the haj. He ignored pleas to cancel the trip. As for Vice-President Megawati, it was nearly two weeks before she made a visit to the stricken region, heavily protected by 15 companies of special police and 4,000 troops. By then, the violence had subsided sufficiently for her to make a 30-minute visit to a refugee camp in Sampit. By then, calm had been restored because most of the Madurese had sought sanctuary in camps or left for Java.
Other districts in the province refused to receive the Madurese, fearing that violence would follow. The local authorities in Barito Utara, the location of Suharto's disastrous one-million hectare swamp rice project, started recording the ethnic origin of settlers and transmigrants; all Madurese were instructed to leave by 2 March. The Madurese had become victims of ethnic cleansing.
When he did return home, President Wahid made a brief visit to Central Kalimantan which led to another trail of violence. The moment he left Sampit, an incident happened in which riot police and Dayak protestors were killed and a protest gathering in Palangkaraya was fired on by troops killing at least five people Recent experience has shown that the government takes great pride in organising ceremonies or visits of ministers, but when it comes to resolving conflicts or even maintaining law and order, the security forces have a record of utter failure, combined with deliberate neglect.
Central Kalimantan, a place of extremes
Central Kalimantan is in every sense a place of extremes, where poverty, hardship and the struggle for survival is harsh. The latest bout of violence exemplifies these problems. The local economy depends on timber and plantations. The district of Kotawaringin Timur, of which Sampit is the capital, covers about 5 million hectares, nearly all of which was forest thirty years ago. Now only 2.7 million hectares is designated "forest land". The rest has been turned into agricultural land, plantations, settlements or unproductive scrub and grassland. Only 0.5 million hectares is classified as "protected forest" and local people are prohibited by law from using this to make a living. Over 1 million hectares of the remaining forest is due to be converted to estate crops. Illegal logging is rife and the forests will be commercially logged out within ten years. The Dayaks have little to show for the forests they have lost and most now live below the official poverty line.
A thriving port town, Sampit is the centre of the legal and illegal timber industry and the trading and administrative centre of the province. Almost all these activities are dominated by outsiders. Sampit has the air of a booming frontier town but for all its apparent wealth, its infrastructure is poor; electricity supply is intermittent and there is a lack of clean drinking water. The only asphalt road, running from Palangkaraya to Pangkalanbun, is in a state of disrepair, due to the heavy traffic of logging trucks. Sampit's "get rich quick" atmosphere attracts migrants. Corruption is widespread. The local police who used to levy a 10% tax on tourists are now said to be soliciting levies from refugees desperate to leave Kalimantan.
Ongoing conflict
Violent confrontations between the indigenous Dayak and Madurese settlers in Kalimantan have erupted for decades. They occurred under Sukarno and intensified during the Suharto era, reaching a new level of horror under Wahid's government. Kotawaringin Timur suffered a bout of violence last December, in the village of Kareng Pangi, subdistrict Katingan Hilir, some 200 km from Sampit. A minor dispute about a gambling centre led to a full-scale attack on the Madurese. Many homes and vehicles were destroyed or torched.
In late 1996/early 1997, violence between these two communities caused at least 600 deaths. The conflict, now referred to as the Sanggau Ledo (a Madurese settlement) Tragedy, was widely reported in the national and international press. The Economist of 15 February 1997 reported that "driving inland from the west coast of Kalimantan is like entering a war zone". Three years later, 40,000 Madurese refugees were still living in wretched conditions in "temporary" camps in West Kalimantan's provincial capital, Pontianak.
In March 1999, while waves of violence were rippling across Maluku and West Java, West Kalimantan also had its share of trouble in Sambas. On that occasion, Malays joined forces with the Dayaks to target the Madurese. The district of Sambas has a population of 800,000, of which about eight per cent were Madurese. The official death toll was 200 but observers believe that many more people died.
In all the conflicts up until 1999, Madurese vigilante groups fought fierce battles against the locals but in the latest bloodbath, the Madurese were defenceless victims and entire families were butchered by rampaging indigenous Dayaks.
The worst incident occurred when several hundred Madurese who had taken refuge in the forest were persuaded by local officials to be trucked down to the harbour, under police protection. A Dayak mob got wind of the evacuation, diverted the trucks to a field and persuaded the police and officials to hand over the human cargo. The police fled, and in less than an hour, 118 Madurese had been slain.
Resolving conflicts, military style
The social, political, cultural and economic roots of the conflict have remained unresolved. Typically, the killings stop once the newcomers have been driven out. A well-publicised peace ceremony of government officials and prominent leaders of the two communities is held. Military chiefs recruit a few elders to sign a peace accord, accompanied by some photogenic rituals and everyone goes home, satisfied with a good day's work. A peace monument erected after the 1979 conflict was symbolically demolished in the 1997 violence. Impunity has been total, and none of the killers have been brought to justice.
One new factor that has become very evident in the post-Suharto period is the shameful inability of the security forces to deal with unrest. During the New Order, the military relied on the prevailing fear among the population to keep the lid on discontent. But nowadays the discredited image of both TNI (the armed forces) and POLRI (the police force) and the absence of the rule of law has meant that there are no law enforcement agencies capable of protecting citizens.
The ineptitude of the security apparatus in dealing with the unrest in Central Kalimantan is a measure of the sheer scale of the problems Indonesia is facing. Thirty thousand troops are now stationed in Aceh, about fourteen battalions are tied up controlling the security situation in Maluku, an unknown number of troops are stationed in West Papua and tens of thousands of troops are being kept ready to cope with street demonstrations across Java.
Moreover, the decision to shift responsibility for law and order from the army to POLRI has created its own problems. The police lack the capacity to deal with emergency situations like the violence in Central Kalimantan. Harrowing stories from Madurese survivors confirmed the ineffectiveness of the police. The Madurese were told to discard their weapons but when a huge force of Dayak vigilantes arrived, the police stood by and did nothing to halt the atrocities. Corruption is rife within the army and the police and is often a source of conflict between the two forces. Police officers profiteered from the fleeing Madurese by buying up their household goods cheaply. Another racket, demanding transport money from fleeing Madurese as they boarded marine ships created a conflict between TNI and POLRI.
The failure of policing during the Central Kalimantan tragedy has been used by army top brass to press for the army to resume responsibility for internal security; they have even asked parliament to introduce "transitional" legislation to formalise this shift.
Dayaks and Madurese, both marginalised
Central Kalimantan is the poorest of the three provinces into which Indonesia's part of Borneo is divided. In all parts of Kalimantan, the Dayaks and Madurese are competing for scarce economic resources, so much of which has been plundered by Jakarta.
Dayak is the generic name for at least 50 linguistically-related groups all over the island of Borneo, including the northern part which belongs to Malaysia. The Dayaks have widely divergent social structures and value systems and are the most marginalised group on the island. Exploitation of Kalimantan's rich natural resources, its forests and minerals, has sidelined the Dayaks. Mining companies, logging companies, state and private plantations, have all joined the scramble. The labour force has been brought in from elsewhere, often Madurese, while the informal business sector, including public transport companies, are all in the hands of non-Dayaks. The Dayaks are not able to make a living from agro-forestry or small-scale logging once the logging companies have stripped all the valuable timber, especially once plantation companies move in to clear up the mess. The commercial loggers and oil palm estates which replace them prefer to use migrant labour rather than employ Dayaks.
The Madurese migrants originate from the small island of Madura off the north-east coast of Java. A shortage of arable land has forced Madurese to migrate and many have gone to Kalimantan. This has been going on since the sixties so they are now into the third generation. They were born in Kalimantan and have never lived, or perhaps even visited, their island of origin. Strictly speaking, the Madurese are not the mercantile class because most of the lucrative business enterprises are in the hands of Chinese or Malay traders. Some Madurese have emerged as small traders in the cities but their role is marginal.
As is often the case elsewhere in the world, marginalised communities have a lot in common with each other but their conflicting positions on the lowest rung of the ladder all too often set them on a collision course. The Dayaks have an animist tradition but many have been converted to Christianity while Madurese cling to their Muslim beliefs. The transmigration programmes and subsequent waves of migrants which brought many Madurese to Kalimantan have created pockets of Madurese settlements, making it virtually impossible to create a multi-ethnic community enjoying social interaction.
Development Suharto-style
The Dayaks, the customary landowners, became the victim of pembangunan, Suharto-style development schemes. Powerful business interests in Jakarta and the West were showered with lucrative concessions. The Dayaks were systematically robbed of their land and resource rights and had no recourse to legal action to defend their rights since, under Indonesian law, forests belong to the state.
Tropical rainforest was turned into plywood, veneers and sawn timber for export in the name of development. Large timber companies made substantial profits and moved on to invest in plantations, banking and real estate, becoming giant conglomerates. The natural wealth of Kalimantan flowed through the hands of Suharto's family and their business cronies and helped to fuel Indonesia's economic boom which lasted until the mid 1990s.
Much has changed in Indonesia since the Asian economic collapse, the fall of Suharto and a new democratically elected government, but the model of economic wealth driven by the ruthless exploitation of natural resources remains intact. Under new regional autonomy legislation, districts must raise sufficient income from their natural resources to finance public services, support the bureaucracy, cream off some profit for the local elite and send revenues to Jakarta.
The international community has supported this. The IMF's "economic rescue package" promotes exports of timber, minerals and plantation crops such as palm oil to balance Indonesia's financial books. This includes paying off international creditors who were so keen to lend during the Suharto years. The World Bank funded Indonesia's transmigration programme for years and, with the Asian Development Bank, supported an estate crop system which depends on transmigrant labour.
Headhunters or a culture of violence
The mobs of angry local youths who can be seen in widely distributed photographs bearing severed heads on spears are being portrayed as Dayak warriors, head hunters or savages. While they are the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing, they are themselves victims of the destruction of their ethnic identity.
"Development" has eroded traditional lifestyles and undermined the authority of community leaders and offered young indigenous people little in return. The majority have had only a few years of primary education, due to the lack of schools and inability to pay school fees. They are ill-equipped to compete with migrants and can only expect poorly-paid manual work and casual employment.
Barbaric methods like severing heads on a mass scale are alien to Dayak traditions. These are methods frequently used in war situations as a tool to spread fear and terror among the population. The mass raping of women falls under the same category. Severing heads became part of the political scene in Indonesia in 1965, with the birth of the New Order. The severed heads of alleged communists in East Java in 1965 were often impaled as a warning to others. The Indonesian military employed this headhunting method frequently in East Timor. In 1999 an attack against alleged sorcerers in East Java, a Middle Age witch hunt, also engaged in headhunting. Decapitation is part of the culture of violence, nothing else.