Jakarta – A tense calm descended on the riot-torn city of Pontianak on Borneo island Saturday after three days of bloody ethnic clashes that killed at least 10 people, reports and the military said.

"Minibuses and cars are starting to fill up the city's main streets, things are starting to return to normal today," Major Sarjono of Pontianak's regional military command headquarters told AFP by phone.

As of Saturday, the fourth day since the first clashes between local Malays and Madurese settlers first erupted on Wednesday, a total of 10 people had died, according to the state Antara news agency, citing its own sources.

The clashes, in which the two sides used primitive weapons, erupted after a minor traffic accident which involved a local Malay motorcyclist and a Madurese bus driver.

The SCTV private television station said police had collected 40 Molotov cocktails, 23 home-made weapons and arrested 10 people in a sweep through the troubled areas of the city Saturday.

Sarjono said inter-island ferries at the Kapuas port – which faces the military headquarters – started to run on Saturday. He added that residents had also begun clearing up debris from torched homes and street stalls in most parts of Pontianak.

"People here are beginning to breathe easier," an ethnic Chinese photo studio owner who lives on the main Pattimura street in the city said, attributing the easing of tensions to the arrival of one reinforced mobile police battalion on Friday.

"I have opened my shop today, my neighbors are also doing the same thing. We are glad that the soldiers have arrived," she told AFP. She added that leaders of the feuding Malay and Madurese communities had reached an overnight agreement to end the violence.

The Madurese, an ethnic group from off Java, were the target of violent attacks by Malays, backed up by indigenous Dayak tribesmen, in West Kalimantan in 1999. Some 3,000 people perished in the months of violence there last year and tens of thousands of migrants were displaced. Borneo island is divided between Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei.