Sonya Hepinstallm, Washington – The human rights picture in Indonesia has steadily deteriorated as Jakarta loses control over ethnic, social and religious strife in its most unstable provinces, the State Department said on Monday.

Despite the efforts of the government of President Abdurrahman Wahid to build on Indonesia's democratic transition of 1999 and expand basic freedoms, violence by security forces as well as by separatist groups and others in 2000 resulted in widespread human rights abuses, it said.

"The government was ineffective in deterring social, interethnic and interreligious violence that accounted for the majority of deaths by violence during the year," the department said in its annual human rights report.

That ineffectiveness could be a factor again in the latest ethnic violence in Borneo in which 400 people have already been killed, said Michael Parmly, acting assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor.

"I think you'll see two phenomena ... that are most troubling, and I don't know to what extent one is seeing that in the events in Borneo over the past several days," Parmly said at a briefing on the report.

"One is impunity ... The other is simple weakening of control and of the elements of control by the central government over events like this. It's an absence of government more than a misbehaving of government," he said.

The killings in Borneo erupted over a week ago when indigenous Dayaks, once feared headhunters, began attacking immigrants from the island of Madura in some of the most savage bloodshed to hit the archipelago, racked by three years of violence.

Chief security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said Jakarta would send extra troops and support a state of civil emergency in the state if local officials deemed it necessary.

Report is a bloody portrait of 2000

The State Department report, issued every year to assess human rights in aid recipients and UN member states, painted a violent picture of 2000.

"Security forces were responsible for numerous instances of, at times indiscriminate, shooting of civilians, torture, rape, beatings and other abuse, and arbitrary detention in Aceh, West Timor, Irian Jaya [also known as Papua or West Papua], the Moluccas, Sulawesi and elsewhere in the country," it said.

For example, East Timorese pro-integration militias in West Timor, armed and largely supported by the army, were responsible for many acts of violence in West Timor and in cross-border raids into East Timor, the report said.

However, the Jakarta government has not prosecuted anyone in connection with the militia-related crimes, it said.

East Timor's 800,000 residents voted overwhelmingly in August 1999 to break with Indonesia, which invaded the former Portuguese colony in 1975 and subsequently annexed it.

At the same time, the report said most of the killings in 2000 were caused by citizens' attacks on other citizens.

In resource-rich Aceh, one of Indonesia's most rebellious provinces, dozens of low-level civil servants, police, and military personnel were murdered and abducted during the year, the report said.

"It generally is believed that separatists carried out many of these, and other, killings," it said.

The government enacted a series of human rights protections during the year, including an amendment to the 1945 constitution modeled on the UN

Universal Declaration of Human Rights and ratification of an International Labor Organization convention on the worst forms of child labor.

Enforcement of such laws, however, remained the greatest problem, the report said. It is available on the State Department's www.state.gov Web site.