Jakarta – Indonesian President B.J. Habibie has issued a ruling ordering officials and government institutions to avoid discriminating between Indonesians based on their origins, a report said here Thursday.

The Jakarta Post daily said Habibie had issued a presidential instruction on September 16 that required officials to dispense with the use of the discriminatory terms "indigenous" and "non-indigenous."

The move was "to give equal treatment and services to all Indonesian citizens ...and to remove any discrimination in any form, nature or level, for all Indonesian citizens, be it based on tribal, religious, racial affiliations or origins," the document was cited as saying. In his instruction, the president also said he had decided to review any laws or government regulations deemed unfair in business and service sectors, education, health, job opportunity and salary or income for workers.

Calls for the scrapping of regulations discriminating against minorities, including ethnic-Chinese, have been mounting following violent riots here and in several other cities earlier this year which mostly targetted properties and members of the ethnic-Chinese community.

Although numbering about six million of Indonesia's 202 million people, the ethnic Chinese community dominates the country's economy and is believed to hold a vast part of the country's assets.

Critics have cited as discriminatory policies, the provision of special signs on identification papers marking those of ethnic Chinese origin as well as regulations which closed off positions in the government and the military to ethnic Chinese.

Experts were also quoted by the Jakarta Post as citing several other regulations including one banning the public use of Chinese characters and publications, restricting Chinese religions, beliefs and traditions as some of the discriminatory regulations still in force. They also cited regulations on arrangements for Chinese temples and an obligation for ethnic Chinese to take Indonesian-styled names.