Hundreds Dead in Borneo's Ethnic Conflict

Feb. 27 -- In one area of Indonesia, groups of men armed with machetes are parading through the streets with the severed heads of their victims.

The bodies of men, women, and children lie in bloody heaps. Some have even had their hearts cut out.

They are casualties of Indonesia's latest spate of ethnic violence — this time on the island of Borneo, between the island's indigenous population of Dayaks and immigrants from the island of Madura.

Hundreds of people, nearly all Madurese, have been killed, reports say, as groups of Dayak men armed with homemade weapons set up roadblocks and stalk those who have not fled.

Tens of thousands are on the move. Thousands of others have already fled by ship to neighboring islands.

A parliament speaker has urged the government to declare a civil emergency, one step away from martial law, which would allow security forces to search houses, detain suspects and impose a curfew.

Jakarta says it has sent in three battalions of infantry and one of paramilitary police. Reports say a unit of the army's feared special forces, the Kopassus, may also be on its way.

Modernity's Advance

The conflict between the Madurese and the Dayaks began in the 1960s, when the government initiated a transmigration program that brought as many as 100,000 Madurese to the island of Borneo, shared by Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei.

Most of the Madurese settled in Kalimantan, the area of Borneo that belongs to Indonesia, and an area that is dominated by the Dayaks, a nomadic people living in the hinterlands and often characterized as "primitive."

The Madurese, on the other hand, brought with them all the trappings of modernity.

"The Madurese have a reputation of being very hard traders, being very tough," said Andrew MacIntyre, a specialist in Indonesia and a professor at the University of California-San Diego.

The Dayaks say the Madurese stole their traditional lands and their jobs in the local mines. They were angry that "people were coming in and taking over their area," MacIntyre said.