TAPOL and Down to Earth

[Ed. Note: This analysis of the violence in Central Kalimantan was written on March 2, 2001.]

Violence has again erupted between Dayaks and Madurese — this time in Central Kalimantan. Groups of Dayak men have descended on settlers from Madura, driving them from their homes, killing and burning houses to the ground. The conflict broke out in the town of Sampit on Feb. 17 when a house belonging to a Dayak was burned down, and settlers from Java and Madura were suspected. In retaliation, several hundred indigenous people soon took revenge by burning settlers’ houses and slaying six people. The violence spread rapidly into neighbouring towns and villages and as far as Palangkaraya, the provincial capital, 220 kilometres to the east. Estimates of the human costs vary widely. Local sources state that over a 10-day period there were up to 700 deaths and as many as 57,000 people — mostly Madurese — fled their homes. Countless houses and other property were also burned.

By March 2, the violence had subsided sufficiently for Vice President Megawati to make a 30-minute visit to a refugee camp in Sampit. However, the relative calm was only because most of the Madurese immigrants had sought sanctuary in camps or had been evacuated to the island of Java. Officials in other districts of Central Kalimantan have refused to accept refugees for fear that the violence will follow. The authorities in Barito Utara, the location of the disastrous one-million-hectare swamp rice project, listed the ethnic origin of all settlers and transmigrants and instructed all Madurese to leave the area by March 2. A wave of ethnic cleansing is now under way.

Conditions in the refugee camps in Sampit are dreadful. Supplies of water, food and medicine and sanitation are totally inadequate. There is a high risk of such diseases as dysentery, cholera and tuberculosis. Some people have died already. The governor of Central Kalimantan claims that 24,000 Madurese have left Kalimantan during the past week, mainly by ship to East Java, and he hopes that the rest will have departed by March 11.

Violent confrontations between the indigenous Dayak people and Madurese settlers in Kalimantan occurred under Sukarno, continued through the Suharto era and now are taking place under Wahid’s government. In Central Kalimantan last year, four people died in incidents in Kumai in August and in Ampalit in December; much property, including homes and vehicles, was also burned. Clashes go back to the 1950s in neighbouring West Kalimantan. In late 1996 and early 1997, violence between these two groups caused at least 600 deaths. Three years later there are still an estimated 40,000 Madurese refugees living in wretched conditions in "temporary" camps in West Kalimantan’s provincial capital of Pontianak.

Successive governments have done nothing to address the roots of the problem. Typically, the killings only stop once the migrants have been driven out of one district. A well-publicised peace ceremony of government officials and prominent leaders of the Madurese and Dayak communities is then held. National and international reporters stop filing stories about headhunting and other atrocities and move on to the next war zone while the authorities behave as if the conflict has been resolved, that is, until the next outbreak.

A major cause of the conflict between indigenous Dayaks and Madurese settlers — as well as other ethnic conflicts in Indonesia — has been the "development" that the Suharto regime promoted for more than 30 years. Natural resources, including Kalimantan’s forests and minerals, were parcelled as concessions for a powerful business elite. The customary landowners — the indigenous Dayaks — were systematically denied their land and resource rights. They have had no recourse to legal action to defend their rights since, under Indonesian law, forests belong to the State.

Through this model of "development," tropical rainforest was turned into plywood, veneer and sawn timber for export in the name of "development." Large timber companies made substantial profits and moved on to invest in plantations, banking and real estate, becoming giant conglomerates in the process. The natural wealth of Kalimantan thus flowed through the hands of Suharto’s family and their business associates and helped fuel Indonesia’s economic boom that lasted until the mid-1990s. Much has changed in Indonesia since the Asian economic collapse, the fall of Suharto and a new democratically elected government, but the model of economic wealth driven by the ruthless exploitation of natural resources remains intact. Under new regional autonomy legislation, districts must raise sufficient income from natural resources under their control to pay for public services, support the bureaucracy, make a profit for local elites and send revenues to Jakarta.

The international community has supported this development paradigm. The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) "economic rescue package" has promoted exports of timber, minerals and plantation crops, such as palm oil, to balance Indonesia’s financial books. This has included paying off international creditors who were so keen to lend during the Suharto years. Moreover, the World Bank funded the Indonesian government’s transmigration programme for a number of years and, with the Asian Development Bank (ADB), supported an estate crop system which depends on transmigrant labour.

As a result of this "development" process, the various Dayak tribes have been subjected to enormous, rapid change. Traditional lifestyles have been almost exterminated within one or two generations in many areas. The Dayaks cannot make a living from agro-forestry and small-scale logging once the logging companies have stripped the most valuable timber from the forests, especially after plantation companies move in to clear what remains. As well as take their land, this extraction model of development offers few, if any, jobs for the indigenous people, for the commercial loggers and the oil palm estates which replace them prefer to use migrant labour rather than employ Dayaks. Many are "spontaneous" migrants — people from other islands seeking new opportunities to acquire land or establish a small business or trade.

Central Kalimantan where the latest bout of violence erupted exemplifies these problems. The local economy depends on timber and plantations. The district of Kotawaringin Timur, of which Sampit is the capital, covers about 5 million hectares, nearly all of which was forest 30 years ago. Now only 2.7 million hectares is designated "forest land." The rest has become agricultural land, plantations, settlements or unproductive scrub and grassland. Only 500,000 hectares is classified as "protected forest" in which local people are prohibited by law from using to make a living. In addition, more than one million hectares of the remaining forest is to be "converted" to estate crops. Illegal logging is rife, and the forests will be commercially logged out within 10 years. Local people have little to show in return for the forests they have lost; most live below the official poverty line.

Sampit, a thriving port town, is the centre of the legal and illegal timber industry and the trading and administrative centre for the area. Almost all of these activities are dominated by outsiders. Sampit has the air of a booming frontier town; but for all its apparent wealth, its infrastructure is poor: the electricity supply is intermittent, and there is a lack of clean drinking water. There is just one asphalt road which cuts across the district from Palangkaraya to Pangkalanbun, and this is in very poor condition because of the heavy traffic of logging trucks. Sampit’s "get-rich-quick" atmosphere though attracts migrants. Corruption is everywhere. The local police, who used to levy a 10 percent tax on tourists, are now said to be soliciting extra income from refugees desperate to leave Kalimantan.

The mobs of angry local youth who appear in photographs bearing severed heads on spears are being portrayed as Dayak warriors, headhunters or savages. While they are carrying out ethnic cleansing, they are, in effect, the victims of the destruction of their ethnic identity. "Development" has eroded traditional lifestyles and undermined the authority of community leaders. It has offered young indigenous people little in return. The majority have only had a few years of primary education due to a lack of schools and the money to pay fees. They are, in short, ill-equipped to compete with migrants. Most rely on poorly paid manual work and casual employment. A whole generation has been promised a brighter future: first through Suharto’s Pancasila, then through reformasi and now demokrasi. Yet most people have remained poor and powerless. As in other areas where "horizontal conflicts" have broken out, people in Central Kalimantan without power are turning on other groups because they are frustrated and do not know who else to blame for their day-to-day misery.

There is little doubt that certain individuals and factions benefit from such conflict and lawlessness both locally and nationally. The military is foremost among these. It was not helpful of President Wahid to order several battalions of special troops to be dispatched to Central Kalimantan while on yet another international trip. Nothing has been learned from the tragedy of the Maluku Islands where the intervention of the military has intensified the conflict between two communities. Military solutions, such as a state of emergency or orders to shoot on sight, will not solve anything.

We condemn the local police for colluding in ethnic cleansing. They have stood by while Dayak youths terrorise and murder. We also condemn the local authorities who consider that helping the Madurese to leave is the only solution. Indonesia is a multiethnic society, and communities must find ways of living together peacefully. More effort needs to be made by schools as well as religious, youth and community leaders and local authorities to break down the long-standing hostile perceptions which the Dayaks and Madurese have of each other. We commend such initiatives as those in Yogya where Madurese and Dayak students have jointly expressed solidarity, understanding and mutual support during the current violence and have urged their communities back home to find peaceful solutions.

In response, we at TAPOL and Down to Earth call on:

• All parties to immediately stop the violence;
• The local police to fulfil their responsibilities to enforce the law and prevent further violence;
• Grassroots community leaders from both sides of the conflict to meet and find ways of preventing further conflict;
• The governor of Central Kalimantan and district heads not to attempt to resolve the problem through the mass eviction of the Madurese but to promote genuine reconciliation between the two groups;
• A proper investigation into the causes of the conflict by an independent body, such as the National Commission for Human Rights, and for those responsible for the killings to be brought to justice.

The following measures need urgent attention to address the underlying causes:

• Recognition of indigenous peoples’ customary rights over their land and resources;
• Reform of Indonesian land laws and forest and other sectoral laws which violate indigenous rights;
• A stop to all permits for the conversion of natural forests to large-scale plantations; and
• An immediate two-year moratorium on all logging as proposed by Indonesian civil society groups.