Louise Williams – At the turn of the century a convention of tribal head hunters gathered beneath the towering canopy of the rainforests of Borneo and reluctantly agreed to end their practice of resolving territorial disputes by snatching each others heads.
For as long as anyone could remember the competing tribes had maintained "head houses" beside the communal long houses where families lived side by side. There they displayed the trophies of their forest skirmishes, the evidence of the strength of their young men in wars fought with poison darts and arrows in jungles so dense the Dutch colonial rulers of the time had failed to effectively govern.
The head hunters descendants, called Dayaks by the Indonesian Government which now controls much of the island of Borneo, still retain the terms in their local languages for the severing of heads.
"It means that if you can bring back a head then you are a strong man, that you can still disperse the enemy from the village," said Bangun, a tribal chief from the remote district of Kelam, deep in the interior.
"The young men had to look for a head – a man, a woman or a child – because after you took it the spirit of that person came to you and gave you courage," said a local Catholic priest.
Dutch colonial records show that head hunting continued, despite the treaty, until the 1930s, and then disappeared altogether as missionaries persuaded the tribes to embrace Catholicism.
But, this weekend the pile of corpses stacked behind the hospital in Sampit, in central Kalimantan, and the bodies strewn through the streets told another story. The practice of head hunting has been well and truly revived in this latest gruesome outbreak of ethnic violence sweeping the province.
The story of Kalimantan is part of the tragic story of modern Indonesia, which is being played out in violent clashes across the archipelago and is arguably one consequence of a massive social engineering policy of the former Soeharto regime.
The Dayaks are the indigenous people of these sparsely populated tropical jungles. Traditionally they live in communal long houses with each family allotted the same amount of space and decisions being made democratically within the community. Visitors to a long house must always leave their weapons outside to ensure harmony.
The Dayaks survived as shifting cultivators, carefully moving in a large circle through the jungle in a 10-year pattern which allowed the rainforests to regenerate and protected the delicate soil from erosion. But in the 1950s the Indonesian Government began to ship in Muslim Madurese from the hot, dry island of Madura, off eastern Java, to begin building the roads which would open up the rainforests. Huge logging operations followed which have devastated the environment, caused massive soil erosion and displaced the tribespeople.
The Soeharto government, which came to power in the mid 1960s, adopted a policy of "dragging the Dayaks out of the stone age", ending shifting cultivations and taking control of the land. The Dayaks believed the land belonged to all, and most importantly that the spirits lived within the rainforest.
But, as the Soeharto administration saw it, the resource-rich tracts of Borneo forest were a bonanza for logging companies linked to the ruling political elite. Beyond that planners saw the potential to ease population pressure on the main island of Java by moving millions of people under a program known as transmigration. Since 1950, nine million people have been moved under the transmigration program, and with their descendants make up 8 per cent of Indonesia's population.
In Kalimantan, as in other regions, the indigenous tribespeople were reduced to living in poverty on the edge of towns, their traditional lifestyle destroyed but their communities unable to compete in commerce or for government jobs with the Muslim migrants. In Kalimantan the Madurese controlled local markets and transport and animosity was compounded by deep differences in cultural practices between the animist and Catholic Dayaks and the staunchly Muslim Madurese. The current war is, says one Dayak priest, "a matter of culture".
"The Dayaks believe that an offence against an individual is an offence against the tribe and must be paid back. What I really worry about is that the Dayaks believe they must destroy everything of their enemy – their people, their home and even their trees.
"For Dayaks, killing is something unusual, but if you insist on bringing your weapons into their homes you must be punished under their laws."
[Louise Williams is a former Herald Indonesia correspondent, and has travelled extensively in Kalimantan.]