Peace elusive as ever in Kalimantan

Kanis Dursin The Jakarta Post Jakarta

Peace remained elusive as ever in the land of headhunters in 2001 as a fresh bout of ethnic violence pitting native Dayaks against migrant Madurese broke out in Central Kalimantan last February, wearing down a fragile "truce" between the two hostile communities.

The clashes between Dayaks and Madurese shocked the world and were further exacerbated by the fact that the government was incredibly slow in responding, highlighting its insensitivity to the images of bodies with heads severed and others with entrails spilling out.

Police and military personnel stationed in Kalimantan provinces were obviously not only outnumbered by members of warring parties, but were also unprepared to handle mass conflict of such a large scale. And police and military personnel sent from Jakarta as reinforcement proved to be either powerless or too late to contain the savagery. Worse still, police and military personnel differed on how to handle the violence and fleeing refugees, which resulted in a shootout that killed one soldier and wounded a number of policemen.

Other than a long history of hostility and deep-seated hatred, nobody knows exactly what triggered the carnage, which began when a group of armed Dayaks suddenly attacked Madurese migrants in the Pelalang resettlement area in Sampit in the wee hours of Feb. 18, 2001, killing at least five Madurese.

The attack unnerved Madurese, who are well known for their toughness and solidarity with fellow Madurese, to launch large- scale retaliation operations against native Dayaks.

Being the majority in Sampit, the Madurese, who are also associated with clurit (a traditional sharp weapon), the karapan sapi (traditional cow racing) and violence, easily took control of Sampit, a bustling town located 214 kilometers northwest of provincial capital Palangkaraya, killing at least 24 Dayaks in the process. The Madurese marched down the town's streets, flying banners with "Sampit is a Madurese town" and "Sampit is the second Sampang" (a major town in Madura).

The "fall" of Sampit into Madurese control forced residents of other ethnic groups, including Malays and Bugis, to flee Sampit and the Dayaks to evacuate, spreading the news to other parts of Central Kalimantan. Soon, the violence spread to other villages, subdistricts and districts in Central Kalimantan, eventually reaching the provincial capital of Palangkaraya.

But the Dayaks, who had a well-preserved reputation as head- hunters until Dutch colonialists outlawed the practice in the late 19th century, were far from defeated. According to the head of the Association of East Kalimantan Dayaks, Julianus Sulaiman, the word "Dayak" comes from the Dutch word dayaker, meaning a wild community.

What happened next was a full-blown, unbridled ethnic war, with each warring party on the offensive and defensive alternately.

In early March, the Dayaks, firmly believing that all of Kalimantan rightfully belonged to them because it was their ancestral land, launched a bloody revenge against the Madurese that culminated in the Dayaks taking over Sampit, killing thousands of innocent people. In some cases, the victims' bodies were mutilated beyond recognition.

Dayak mobs hunted down and killed Madurese, including women, children and the elderly. They also attacked and burned houses and businesses belonging to Madurese.

With the Dayaks taking control of Sampit, tens of thousands of Madurese migrants fled their houses and left their belongings in Sampit and returned to the land of their ancestors, Madura, a small barren island off Surabaya, the capital of East Java province. The Sampit refugees, as the Madurese returnees are called, are now housed in squalid refugee camps on Madura. Government officials have repeatedly promised to send back the refugees to Central Kalimantan, but have given no date for their repatriation.

The February-April ethnic conflict was not the first between the Dayaks and Madurese. In 1999, the Madurese clashed with the Dayaks and other ethnic groups in Sambas and Singkawang in West Kalimantan, killing thousands of people from both sides. It also forced tens of thousands Madurese to flee to provincial capital Pontianak and some return to Madura. In 1997, ethnic conflict between the Dayaks and Madurese also broke out in Sanggau Ledo, West Kalimantan, killing hundreds of innocent people, including children.

One intriguing question that perhaps only the Dayaks, the majority of whom are Christian, and Madurese, generally Muslim, can answer is why the two communities harbor such a deep-seated hatred against the other that full-blown ethnic conflicts can erupt at any time, with any insignificant occurrence as the trigger?

The hatred is so intense that it appears to even conquer the holy bond of religion. In 2001, for example, angry Madurese mercilessly beat to death a Dayak Muslim man who had accompanied his Madurese wife to Madura after the ethnic conflict in Sampit. In 1999, some Madurese men, who had converted to Christianity and had Christian wives, had to take sanctuary in churches in Pontianak to avoid angry Dayak Christians.

The usual explanation offered by experts and government officials has been economic jealousy. Madurese, who first set foot on the country's biggest territory in the 1960s through government-sponsored transmigration programs, are said to control economic life in Kalimantan, while their Dayak counterparts are poor and largely marginalized.

Such an explanation, however, contradicts reality in the field. Just as on the national level, Chinese-Indonesians and, to a certain extent, traders from Sumatra who are locally referred to as Malays, control the economy in Kalimantan. So, if the trigger was economic jealousy, the ethnic Chinese and Malay traders should have been the main targets of the Dayak people's wrath.

But so far, there have been no reports of conflicts between Dayaks and Malay traders or Chinese-Indonesians in Kalimantan. In fact, in the 1999 ethnic conflict in Singkawang and Sambas, ethnic groups like the Malays, Bugis and Chinese as well as Javanese migrants sided with the Dayaks in driving Madurese out of the two towns. These ethnic groups have also been unanimous in their rejection of the return of Madurese who are now living in a number of temporary resettlements in and around Pontianak. Their future remains uncertain, as local authorities appear reluctant to relocate them to other parts of West Kalimantan province.

The Dayaks, Malays, Javanese and ethnic Chinese as well Bugis in West Kalimantan are particularly affronted by the perceived arrogance of the Madurese, who, in the words of the other ethnic groups "were not planting but were harvesting, were not raising cows but were selling them". Some Madurese leaders in Pontianak acknowledge the wayward attitudes of some Madurese migrants in West Kalimantan, but assert that there are more good Madurese than there are bad Madurese. Other ethnic groups agree with the assessment, but became irritated that Madurese elders did nothing to punish the wayward Madurese.

The conflict revealed that after more than 50 years of independence, Indonesia is still very much compartmentalized by religion or ethnicity or both. Under such a condition, the country remains prone to disintegration. And the fear becomes real if one looks at the country's police and military, which have proven to be ill-equipped to deal with full-scale social conflict.

Needless to say the continued, earth-shaking Dayak-Madurese conflict has raised concerns over the future of Indonesia, which has been plagued by social unrest triggered by the prolonged economic crisis beleaguering the country since 1997. With the specter of ethnic and religious conflicts, plus "rebellions" in two provinces, there is indeed a clear reason to worry about the very existence of this country.