Borneo Backwater's Clashes Draw Little Notice
By CALVIN SIMS
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Feb. 27 - The ethnic violence that erupted 10 days ago in the Indonesian section of Borneo, where hundreds of people have been decapitated and thousands more left destitute, might seem a likely candidate for a major deployment of government troops or international peacekeepers.
But this part of Borneo, a backwater region of lush jungles and indigenous tribes, carries little clout in Indonesia, a country so plagued by religious, ethnic and separatist conflicts that the government has come to prioritize its many crises based on their political and economic worth.
Human rights groups estimate that between 3,000 and 4,000 people died in separatist, religious and ethnic violence last year in Indonesia and that more than one million people are now homeless because of those conflicts and natural disasters.
In the province of Aceh, for example, where there are daily gun battles between security forces and guerrilla separatists, rights activists said that at least 200 people are killed each month, despite a cease-fire agreement. But the government placed a higher priority on resolving conflicts in provinces like Aceh and Irian Jaya, which are rich in natural resources.
While there were widespread reports that the conflict in the Kalimantan section of Borneo was out of control, it took the central government a week before it sent additional troops there, and once they arrived, most did little to stop the violence.
Behind the government's lethargy was a strong feeling that the ethnic clashes in Borneo were longstanding and not of its making. Kalimantan has been the scene of recurring ethnic violence in recent years. At least 3,000 people are believed to have died in 1997 clashes in the Sambas district of West Kalimantan that also pitted Madurese migrants against local Dayaks. Last year, similar fighting claimed dozens of lives in Central Kalimantan in December and in the West Kalimantan capital of Pontianak in October.
So far, there has been little or no reaction by foreign governments to the killing of at least 300 people, mainly Madurese settlers.
Although there were no new reports of killings today, the police in Central Kalimantan Province said they had discovered about 100 new bodies, many headless, which could push the death toll to more than 400. Caravans of machete-wielding Dayaks were still searching villages for fleeing Madurese and burning their abandoned houses and businesses, the police said.
Human rights activists and opposition politicians have sharply criticized President Abdurrahman Wahid, who departed on a two-week overseas trip as the conflict unfolded, and the Indonesian military and police, which witnesses said stood by and watched as Dayak mobs unleashed a campaign of terror against their longtime rivals, the Madurese.
Rejecting calls for him to return to Indonesia and take charge of the crisis, President Wahid, who was traveling in Egypt, said reports of the violence were greatly exaggerated, despite widely televised scenes of headless bodies in the streets of Kalimantan and widespread burning and looting.
Mr. Wahid, a Muslim cleric, said that government security officials had assured him the worst was now over in Borneo and that he would continue his tour of the Middle East and North Africa, which is scheduled to conclude with a pilgrimage to Mecca on March 7.
"How can we expect the international community to care about the tragedy in Borneo when our own national leader would rather go sightseeing than stop this bloodshed," said Munir, director of the Committee on Missing Persons and Victims of Violence, a human rights group known as Kontras. "The two warring parties, the Dayaks and Madurese, don't matter to most Indonesians because they have nothing that would benefit anyone politically," said Mr. Munir, who like many Indonesians uses only one name.
The political opposition and the Indonesian military are seen as using the situation in Borneo to their advantage.
While far more ghastly than many other conflicts currently in Indonesia, the ethnic fighting in Kalimantan seemed to cause little concern at first, mainly because there had been similar outbreaks of violence in Borneo in recent years and the number of fatalities was initially low.
But when Mr. Wahid announced that he would embark on his overseas tour, despite the rising death toll in Borneo, the political opposition seized the moment and publicly denounced the trip, focusing unprecedented attention on Borneo. Opposition leaders have vowed to impeach Mr. Wahid, who was censured by Parliament last month over corruption charges.
Ikrar Nussa Bhakti, a political scientist for the National Institute of Sciences, said that the Kalimantan violence was "tailor made" for the opposition leaders and that Mr. Wahid played right into their hand. "Borneo was a completely preventable and solvable conflict, but there was simply no political will by anyone, the government, the military, or the participants, to resolve it," Mr. Bhakti said.
The military has become disillusioned by the government's highly publicized plans to prosecute soldiers for past human rights abuses.
Increasingly, Indonesia's armed forces are allowing ethnic, religious, and separatist conflicts to escalate as a way of justifying their return to power.
"When people think of Borneo, they envision primitive people running around chopping off each other's heads, and there's a disconnect," said an official of a prominent nongovernmental agency operating in Indonesia. "The world is viewing this as the war of the headhunters, and people are not requiring the same level accountability that they would if this were taking place in a more developed land."
The ethnic conflict dates back half a century to the government of Indonesia's first president, Sukarno, who instituted a program of transmigration to relieve overcrowding in the country's most populated provinces. Settlers from densely populated islands like Java, Bali, Lombok and Madura were offered incentives to relocate to empty, largely undeveloped provinces in West Papua, Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Kalimantan. Thousands of Madurese moved to Kalimantan, where they gained control of local markets, transport and government jobs.
Deep cultural differences between the Madurese and native Dayaks, who resented the economic success of their new neighbors, led to frequent clashes. Both groups are known to be fierce fighters, although the Dayaks are perhaps more feared because of their ancient tradition of headhunting.
Exactly what set off the latest round of violence on Feb. 18 remains unclear. The police have detained three suspects who they said incited the violence because they were angry at being passed over for lucrative administrative jobs in a provincial restructuring. The police said the suspects, who they identified only by their initials, paid six local men about $2,000 to provoke the clashes in an effort to retain their civil service jobs.
But some political analysts and foreign diplomats said there was a strong likelihood that other parties had a hand in fanning the flames. The clashes began shortly after prosecutors announced that former President Suharto's daughter was a suspect in a major corruption case. Moreover, the fighting started only days before Mr. Suharto himself was scheduled to undergo a medical test to determine if he was medically fit to stand trial on corruption charges.
Government prosecutors have accused Mr. Suharto, his family and friends of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the country during his administration. But efforts to bring the Suharto clan to justice in recent years have resulted in incidents of violence and public disorder, underscoring the difficulty of this impoverished country to forge a democracy.
Security officials said last night that the conflict, while not over, had begun to subside, mainly because no more Madurese are available for the Dayaks to hunt. The police estimate that about 20,000 Madurese have taken refuge in government buildings and jungle areas, while another 6,000 are being evacuated by Navy ships. But the exact death toll will not be known for some time and could reach as many as 500 people, the officials said.