Louise Williams, Jakarta – The Indonesian Government has banned all social and political meetings involving large crowds until after the May national elections, and Malaysia has moved to close its land border with Indonesia in the face of continuing social unrest.

The Minister for Home Affairs, Mohammad Yogie, ordered all local officials to postpone until after the elections any public activities that could incite social unrest as a new rampage was reported in West Kalimantan, the Indonesian-controlled territory on the island of Borneo.

Troops have been flown to the province, sources said.

The Soeharto Government has already banned outdoor campaigning. The campaign period runs from April 27 to May 23 and voters go to the polls on May 29 after a five-day cooling off period.

The tension surrounding the run-up to the polls does not reflect political rivalry among the candidates but, rather, the level of frustration of the Indonesian people for whom the election holds no prospect of real political change.

The election process is tightly restricted and following the ban on candidates from the opposition party of Ms Megawati Sukarnoputri the elections offer no real alternative to the ruling Golkar Party, which has fielded a team sprinkled with the wives and children of the ruling political elite.

In the latest Borneo unrest, police said some 5,000 Dayak people, the mainly Christian indigenous tribes of the island, rioted against Muslim immigrants from East Java, continuing a violent conflict which began on Christmas Eve last year.

Malaysia announced it was closing the border between Kalimantan and Sarawak, the Malaysian-controlled territory to the north, in response to the unrest.

Bus operators said thousands of Indonesians who had travelled across the border to shopahead of the major Muslim holiday this weekend were stranded on the Malaysian side.

The Dayak people, formerly the fierce "headhunters" of Borneo, have been marginalised by Government-sponsored "transmigration" of Muslims from densely populated Java to Kalimantan as labour for new rubber, palm oil, and timber plantations.

The Dayaks, who once practised shifting cultivation in the towering rainforests and believed the land was sacred, have lost most of their former territory to clear-cut logging, mining and plantations and are unable to continue their subsistence farming methods.

Since December 24 a series of clashes have been reported between Dayaks and Muslim migrants. At least three people have died and 21 are still reported missing. At the same time in the capital of West Kalimantan, Pontianak, an overnight curfew has been imposed following further arson attacks on Christian and Chinese targets.

Pontianak has the largest Chinese population of any major Indonesian city and aggression against this ethnic minority on the largely Muslim island of Java over the past few months has spilled over into Kalimantan, resulting in a string of attacks on Chinese targets.

As in much of Indonesia the urban Chinese minority control the local economy.

The official Malaysian newsagency, Bernama, reported the land border would remain closed until further notice. Malaysia is also a multi-racial society with a Chinese minority that has dominated the economy and is highly sensitive to any racial unrest which could spill across its borders.

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