Daniel Cooney, Kualakuayan – Deep in the heartland of Borneo Island, a civil servant named Manarung explains why his tribe is perfectly justified in massacring hundreds of people and driving out tens of thousands of others.
"They did not respect our culture. The Madurese are all thieves and murderers," he said, sitting in his wooden hut on the banks of the Mentaya River, which snakes through dense rain forest.
His fellow Dayak tribespeople went on a rampage last month, killing more than 450 settlers from the island of Madura, beheading or ripping the hearts out of many.
Manarung – who represents the government in the village of Kualakuayan and who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name – said he personally didn't kill anyone. But it was Dayaks from his small village who are alleged to have massacred 118 settlers on a soccer field in the neighboring village of Parenggean on February 25 in the worst incident in two weeks of bloodshed that began in mid-February.
Thrust into modernity after centuries of isolation, many Dayaks feel disenfranchised in their own land. Traditional bonds to the rain forest have been largely severed by government and business interests eager to exploit the vast resource-rich region.
Dayaks have moved out of the forest and into cities and towns and languish at the bottom of the economic ladder.
As the economy has nosedived in recent years, they have found someone to blame: the Madurese. The Madurese were first brought to the Indonesian half of Borneo in large numbers as part of government effort to relieve overcrowding in other parts of the country. The ethnic tensions caused by those migrations were largely suppressed during the 32-year dictatorship of former President Suharto – but started to boil after Suharto's 1998 ouster.
Carmel Budiardjo, the head of the London-based Indonesian Human Rights Campaign, said the Dayaks are using the Madurese as scapegoats.
"The Dayaks' whole livelihood has been destroyed over the past three decades due to development and they have been marginalized by it," she said.
They have lost much of their forest and land to logging, legal and illegal, and to vast palm-oil plantations.
Once logging companies take the most valuable timber, the Dayaks can't make a living from agro-forestry and small-scale logging, said a joint statement by the Indonesia Human Rights Campaign and Down to Earth, a Britain-based environmental group specializing in Indonesian issues.
"The commercial loggers and the oil-palm estates which replace them prefer to use migrant labor rather than employ Dayaks," the groups said.
In cities and towns, the Madurese dominate small-scale trade and transport businesses such as minibuses and pedicabs. Dayaks have difficulty competing with Madurese for jobs in gold, tin and copper mines, and in palm-oil plantations.
"They see the Madurese as the outward manifestation of all these problems," Budiardjo said.
The Dayaks' rampage has sent thousands of Madurese fleeing, evacuated by ship to Indonesia's main island, Java.
"I would like to return but I am afraid they [the Dayaks] will cut my head off," said Marsari, a 52-old coconut farmer with 10 children and 7 grandchildren, who hid in the jungle for 10 days before being evacuated. "Even though they burnt my house down my farm still has a promising crop. I don't know what to do. I don't know where I will work or what food we will eat today or tomorrow," he said in the Java port of Surabaya.
Budiardjo said the outside world shares the blame. The World Bank helped finance the Madurese resettlement for a decade before pulling out in 1989 amid criticism that the Dayaks' culture was being ignored. Foreign companies import timber from Borneo, much of it harvested illegally.
Religion also comes into it. The Dayaks blend Christianity and animism, and many Muslim Madurese are offended by some Dayak practices, such as eating pork.
The government in Jakarta has largely ignored the Dayaks' grievances, focusing on financial profit from the region, Budiardjo said.
President Abdurrahman Wahid left Indonesia on a two-week overseas trip four days after the massacres began on February 18, and rejected calls to return home and deal with the crisis.
Indonesia specialist John Taylor, a professor at South Bank University in London, said the Dayaks have become confused about their identity, with a sharp contrast between their daily lives and perceptions of their ancestors.
Even though most Dayaks wear Western clothes, ride motorbikes and watch TV, they suddenly decided to reprise ancient tribal war practices such as eating their victims' hearts, believing it would strengthen them.