HVK Archives: Indonesia's latest uprising
Indonesia's latest uprising - The Economist
Kalimantan
()
15 February 1997
Title : Indonesia's latest uprising
Author : Kalimantan
Publication : The Economist
Date : February 15, 1997
Driving inland from the west coast of Kalimantan, the
Indonesian-controlled part of the island of Borneo, is like
entering a war zone. The road stretches ahead to the forested hills
in the distance without a car in sight. The only visible movement
is from the heavily-armed troops patrolling the road, or speeding
past in trucks or on motorbikes. All the houses have been boarded
up, the ethnic identities of their occupants scribbled hastily on
the walls in an attempts to keep them out of Indonesia's latest
outbreak of ethnic unrest. A makeshift barrier of oil drums and
wooden boards bars the way into the town of Anjungan. There are no
obvious sings of any recent fighting, but a family sitting outside
their house says there has been shooting nearby. They say they were
too frightened to try to find out what happened.
In fact the Indonesian army seems to be embroiled in a full-scale
ethnic war in Kalimantan which, by its own account, has claimed
hundreds of lives over the past six weeks. Thousands of people have
been displaced, some staying with relatives and others in refugee
camps run by the army.
Journalists trying to enter the conflict area are being detained by
the army and thrown out, but other sources have pieced together the
story. Clashes between the Day-asks, the indigenous people of the
area, and Muslim settlers from the island of Madura, broke out at
the end of December. The situation had begun to calm down when a
Catholic school attended by Dayak pupils in the provincial capital,
Pontianak, was attacked and set on fire on January 28th, sparking
off revenge attacks by Dayak youths on Madurese communities.
In one incident early last week a large group of Dayaks armed with
spears and machetes approached the roadblock in Anjungan, which was
manned by soldiers form an elite commando unit. When they tried to
break through the roadblock, the troops opened fire. One soldier
was hacked to death and between 15 and 20 Dayaks were killed.
There is a long history of conflict between the Dayaks and the
Madurese. The Madurese first arrived in West Kalimantan in the
1930s, but their numbers increased sharply during the 1970s under
the impact of the government's transmigration programme, which
encourages people to leave crowded islands such as Java and Madura
for the more remote areas of the republic. Kalimantan, with its low
population density and rich natural resources, was a natural target
of the programme.
Little consideration was given to the indigenous Dayaks, once famed
as the headhunters of the Borneo rainforest. But as the rainforest
was cut down, and replaced by palm oil and coconut plantations, the
Dayaks found themselves at the bottom of a complex hierarchy of
different ethnic groups, unable to continue their traditional
patterns of agriculture and slow to adapt to new forms of
employment. The mainly Christian, pig-raising Dayaks now share
lowest rung of the economic ladder with the fiercely Islamic
Madurese, and often share the same neighbourhoods too. The
authorities are discovering that their dream of mixing Indonesia's
divers peoples together can backfire.
In violent outbreaks that have shaken urban Indonesia over the past
six months, soldiers have been seen standing by doing nothing. This
policy of restraint appears to have ended in Kalimantan, with
potentially disastrous consequences for the army's relations with
the local populations.
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