II. BACKGROUND TO THE CONFLICT

Three explanations have been put forward by local commentators in Indonesia to explain Dayak-Madurese violence: cultural, economic, and political. The cultural explanation focuses on the Madurese penchant for using knives to settle scores, and the Dayak belief that if the blood of a single Dayak is shed, the group as a whole must respond. The economic argument looks at the increasing marginalization of the Dayaks as their land has been lost to timber and mining concessions and commercial plantations, their agricultural practices dismissed as backward and destructive by the government, and their place in the local economy gradually taken by transmigrants and other newcomers, including the Madurese. The political argument looks at the power relations in the area where the conflict occurred and the political interests that might have been served by ethnic violence. None of these arguments by itself is sufficient to explain what happened in late December 1996 and early 1997, but each provides a crucial part of the picture.

Before elaborating on each of the arguments, it is important to understand who the two groups are. In West Kalimantan, the Dayak are an indigenous people who make up between 41 and 43 percent of the population, depending on the sources used, while only 2.75 percent of the population is Madurese.1 The term "Dayak" is a collective and often confusing term for hundreds of groups on the island of Borneo related to one another by language and culture. It is the term that these groups and the government use to define their ethnicity, so they are Dayak as opposed, for example, to Malay, Javanese, or Chinese. But there are sub-groups and sub-sub-groups, each with its own dialect and variation on cultural traditions. It is one of the curious aspects of the most recent conflict that Selakau Dayak from north of Pontianak, the capital of West Kalimantan, found themselves in the same war parties with Dayaks from much further into the interior, and in some cases, they had difficulty understanding each other's dialect.

Most of the Dayak in West Kalimantan are sedentary swidden (slash-and-burn) farmers who produce rice but continue to derive a substantial part of their livelihood from forest products, including tree crops such as durian (a fruit), rubber and resin. They are largely Christian, and the Catholic church in particular provides a strong institutional network in the area, but they retain many indigenous beliefs and practices.

The Madurese first came to West Kalimantan in small numbers around the turn of the century, with their numbers increasing in the 1930s and 1940s when they were brought in as contract or indentured labor to clear forests and start up plantations. They have been arriving in considerably greater numbers from the 1970s onwards. Many Madurese in urban areas work in cheap transport (river crossing ferries, pedicabs) and as coolies, drivers, stevedores, day laborers, or petty traders, with Madurese women selling fruits and vegetables; in the countryside most are wetland rice farmers.2 In the communities hardest hit by the violence, however, the Madurese were generally better off than the norm and included contractors, businessmen, quarry operators, and many others wealthy enough to have made the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Madurese are devoutly Muslim.

They are also stereotyped throughout Indonesia as being coarse, violent, and dishonest; many Dayaks say they do not feel safe living with the Madurese. A tract written by a Dayak in February 1997 is typical of these common perceptions:

For the most part, the Madurese who come to West Kalimantan bring their old traditions and customs, such as carrying sharp weapons, murdering, stealing, robbing, raping, and forcing their will on others. In the cities, for example, if a potential passenger doesn't want to ride one of their pedicabs, water taxis or minivans, he is pulled, shoved, and threatened with a knife. They're all recidivists. Are they coming to Kalimantan because they committed crimes in their own place and need to escape here?

It's the same in the villages, the Dayak farmers can no longer keep their harvested rice in the field. They can't leave their homes without locking them. Rice, fruit, livestock, bicycles frequently disappear. In short, the lives of ordinary people and Dayak people in particular, are no longer safe.3

The dislike of the Madurese as a group seems visceral and near universal among other ethnic groups in West Kalimantan, a phenomenon that has distorted some of the reporting on the violence. There are no Madurese advocacy NGOs in Pontianak as there are Dayak NGOs, and no Madurese scholars analyzing the causes and consequences of the conflict. The lack of sympathy for the Madurese, who constitute the majority of the dead and displaced, is worrisome, because it may mean that if, in fact, any aspects of the violence were manipulated by third parties, few questions are going to be raised.

The Cultural Argument

The main cultural difference between the two groups cited as responsible for the violence was the attitude toward drawing blood. There are grave consequences in Dayak tradition for drawing blood in fights. Disputes between individuals can be settled with fists or by other means, but as soon as the blood of a Dayak is shed, the entire clan is duty-bound to declare war on the attacker and the group to which he belongs. This is done by passing the mangkok merah or "red bowl," an ordinary bowl filled with four ritual elements: the blood of a chicken to signify war; and feathers, a match stick, and a piece of roof thatch to signify that word of the war must fly from one village to another, even in darkness (the match) or bad weather (the thatch).

The Madurese, by contrast, are quick to turn to knives and sickles (carok) in fights. Indeed, the term "carok violence" among Madurese has come to mean "the premeditated settling of scores that targets a perceived wrongdoer or, in the case of a feud, his family."4 The most common motivation for carok attacks is a dispute over a woman, although disputes over money and access to land and water resources are also frequent. The Madurese have few compunctions about ensuring what other groups would consider a fair fight: many attacks are made from behind or against unarmed men. "As long as the motive is honorable, there is no reason to regard the attack as cowardly, although a public attack preceded by a verbal challenge will be recounted with additional relish throughout the area."5 Given these diametrically opposed approaches to conflict, the cultural argument goes, the potential for Dayak-Madurese violence is always high.

The problem is exacerbated by the tendency of the Madurese to live together, separate from Dayak communities, a tendency interpreted by some Dayak observers as proof of their inability to adapt and unwillingness to integrate into or respect Dayak society.

Those who favor a cultural explanation of events point to the long history of Madurese-Dayak conflict in West Kalimantan. Violence between the two groups has occurred at least ten times in the last three decades. Each clash, according to Dayak sources, was triggered by a Madurese shedding a Dayak's blood.6 They make no distinction between a single murder that was settled without erupting into communal violence, and attacks that led to ethnic riots. Each attack adds to the cumulative grievance. Among the more significant clashes in the collective memory are the following:

· 1968: Sani, a Dayak who was the head (camat) of Toho subdistrict was stabbed by a Madurese in Anjungan, near Pontianak.

· 1976: Cangkeh, a Dayak, was killed by a Madurese in Sei Pinyuh, north of Pontianak.

· 1977: a Madurese named Maskot stabbed a Dayak policeman named Robert Lonjeng to death in Singkawang, Sambas district. His death led to riots in Samalantan subdistrict, about 180 kilometers north of Pontianak, in which more than five died and seventy-two houses were destroyed.

· 1979: a dispute over a debt led to an attack by three Madurese named Misrun, Maruwi and Buto' on a Dayak named Sakep in Sempang Bodok in the village of Bagak, Sambas district. Two other Dayaks, Norani and Toke, were almost killed by a Madurese named Hamsin. The attacks led to a large communal clash in Samalantan, in which fifteen Madurese and five Dayaks lost their lives, and twenty-nine houses were burned down, half of them Madurese, half Dayak. The unofficial death toll ran into the hundreds.7 The clash led to a government-sponsoredpeace treaty between Dayaks and Madurese, and to the erection of a monument to commemorate it in Samalantan which stands to this day. No one we spoke with was able to provide the text of this treaty, but it was reported to include a provision banning Madurese from reinhabiting the Monterado kampung (hamlet) where major communal battles had taken place. Some Dayak leaders also understood it to include a provision that if its terms were violated, the violators would be expelled from the province.

· 1982: a Dayak named Sidik, an ex-policeman, was killed by a Madurese in Pakucing, Samalantan subdistrict, after he complained about the Madurese cutting his rice which just about ready for harvesting.

· 1983: Djaelani, a Dayak, was killed by a Madurese in Sungai Ambawang, near Pontianak. The murder led to a wider clash with an official death toll of twelve, the unofficial over fifty, and one hundred houses destroyed.

· 1992: the daughter of Sidik, killed in 1982, was raped by a Madurese. The rape led to a minor clash between Dayak and Madurese youths. A similar fight between youths of the two groups broke out in 1993 in Pontianak.

This history of clashes is clearly a factor in the hostility of the Dayak toward the Madurese, and there is an utter lack of faith in peace pacts. "If one more Dayak gets stabbed, we're ready," one local leader said who had sent forty-seven men from his village to join the attacks on Madurese. But it is important to note that none of these earlier incidents produced more than twenty casualties, and all were contained within a fairly narrow geographic radius.

The Marginalization Argument

The most common explanation for the violence and the one favored by Dayak scholars and the Indonesian press, is that the gradual dispossession and marginalization of the Dayak people has led to accumulated frustrations that finally erupted in the attacks on a familiar target - the Madurese. Over the last two decades in particular, the Indonesian government has granted permits to logging and plywood companies and commercial plantations to make use of land that the Dayak consider theirs. The region's commercial development has brought with it government-sponsored transmigration, or movement of people from the more crowded islands of Java, Bali, and to a lesser extent, Madura, to work on the plantations. It has also brought more government administrators, a better infrastructure permitting greater penetration of the interior, including by migrants from elsewhere in Indonesia, and increasing competition for resources.

The Dayak grow many of their most important crops in community forest reserves and garden plots.8 The government has never recognized traditional Dayak land tenure and its system of land registration, however, and considers both the reserves and garden plots to be state land, available for commercial uses such as logging. Since the Indonesian parliament passed Forestry Law No. 5 in 1967 (Undang-Undang Pokok Kehutanan No.5), more timber concessions have been granted in East and West Kalimantan than in any other provinces. In Ketapang district, south of Pontianak, the provincial capital, a full 94 percent of the available forest area had been parcelled out in concessions by mid-1994.9 Whether a timber company with logging rights, a state palm-oil plantation, or a paper plant with a permit to plant fast-growing trees for pulp comes into the area, the pattern is often the same. The company will find a corrupt local official or gullible group of villagers to sign away claims to large chunks of land (even if no formal title exists); signs will go up banning local farmers from trying to harvest fruit or tap rubber in the area, and often the trees in question will be cut down; the farmers will protest, and the local government will accuse them of "obstructing development." The profits from the companies are for the most part channeled back to the owners in Jakarta or to local officials. Not only do the Dayak lose income, but they often find that the rivers on which they depend for transport and drinking water are either blocked by logs floating downstream to sawmills run by the timber companies or polluted by chemical run-off from the agroforestry operations.

The systematic dispossession of the Dayak has generated both a new sense of ethnic solidarity of the Dayak in relation to other ethnic groups in the area and an anger that has increasingly erupted in acts of violence against intruders. The sense of being "Dayak" and having common interests with other Dayak tribes has grown dramatically in the last decade, especially in opposition to Melayu (local Malays who dominate local government positions); Indonesian-born Chinese, who dominate the local economy, or Taiwanese employed as managers by Taiwanese-Indonesian joint ventures in the timber industry; Javanese, who represent much of the workforce of the companies as well as senior officials, civilian and military, in the local government; and the Madurese.

Transmigration, both government-sponsored and spontaneous, has greatly altered the population balance in the province. In 1980, about 1.4 percent of the province's population consisted of transmigrants; by 1985, the proportion was up to 6 percent, unevenly distributed. In Sanggau Ledo, where the 1996-97 violence broke out, settlers made up a full 15 percent of the population by 1980 and the proportion is likely to have risen since.10 By 1984, 60 percent of the entire road network in the province had been constructed as part of the transmigration program, and the percentage of all Indonesian transmigrants going to West Kalimantan as opposed to other provinces had risen from 14.6 to over 25 percent.11 In 1994 alone, an estimated 6,000 families, or about 25,000 persons, migrated to West Kalimantan.12

As the Dayaks have been increasingly marginalized economically, they have also lost political ground. In the period that Indonesia enjoyed parliamentary democracy, there were several Dayak parties in Kalimantan, and both the governor and four out of six district heads (bupati) were Dayak. Many Dayaks were eliminated from government administration for their alleged leftism after Soeharto's "New Order" came to power in early 1966, and one result of the New Order's 1973 decision to reduce political parties to three was that the ability of Dayaks to compete against others for political posts was virtually eliminated. Especially given their demographic dominance, Dayaks today are poorly represented in the government, civil service, police and army. Only one of the province's six districts, Kapuas Hulu, the most remote, is headed by a Dayak.

Those who believe that marginalization can explain the violence see the precedents for the 1996-97 outbreak not only in the previous clashes of Dayak and Madurese but in more recent non-communal incidents. For example, in November 1995 in Ledo, exactly the same subdistrict where the 1996-1997 violence exploded, Dayaks from the village of Belimbing attacked and burned a base camp on land the government had allotted as an agroforestry project (Hutan Tanaman Industri or HTI) to the P.T. Nityasa Idola company, which raises fast-growing trees for pulp. The attack took place after the company acquired Dayak land under dubious circumstances and then prevented the farmers who traditionally worked it from having access to it.

More directly relevant to the Dayak-Madurese violence was an incident in Ngabang, to the east of Pontianak. On April 5, 1996, Jining, a Dayak resident of Ngabang, was riding with a relative on a motorcycle when they passed an army post belonging to Company 105 of the Medan Artillery Battery. A soldier named Jimmi stopped them and accused them of speeding. When Jining protested, he was beaten. Jimmi later came to Jining's house with a group of other men, dragged Jining away, and brought him to the post where he was beaten until he lost consciousness. He was taken to a hospital in Pontianak where he remained for the next twenty-five days. Because many Dayak in the area had been rudely treated by this particular company, the treatment of Jining caused a major protest and as the news spread, people began gathering from many different subdistricts.

On April 7, they approached the post en masse and were met by gunfire. In retaliation, they burned down a guardpost, set fire to a truck, and vandalized a minivan, a satellite dish, and a nearby house. On April 8, Dayak demonstrators coming from the area of Serimbu were again fired on, causing the death of a man named Taku, aged fifty-eight, from thevillage of Nyanyun. On May 14, the National Human Rights Commission (KOMNAS), promised NGOs that it would investigate the incident, and the KOMNAS findings led to the prosecution of fourteen soldiers in July.

It also led to serious ill will between the Dayak and the army, leading to suspicions on the part of some Dayaks that the army, after Ngabang, was determined to go after the Dayaks just as the Madurese suspected the police of encouraging violence against them. The fact that police and military relations in West Kalimantan appear to be seriously strained did not help the general atmosphere.

The Political Manipulation Argument

The manipulation argument holds that while cultural and socioeconomic factors are important, the scale of the violence, far greater than any previous Dayak-Madurese clash, can only be explained by the intervention of a third party. Innumerable people and organizations have been accused of inciting different phases of the violence, including government officials, Dayak and Madurese leaders, journalists, intellectuals, and political parties.

But even given the penchant of many Indonesia observers to turn to conspiracy theories to explain the inexplicable, the fact remains, as noted above, that there are disturbing questions about the conflict that have not been publicly raised, let alone investigated.

Those who think in terms of a third party remember the events of 1967, when the army reportedly incited a Dayak war on ethnic Chinese in West Kalimantan. As one Pontianak scholar noted with regard to that war, "The government said it was spontaneous, but in fact, it wasn't."13

That war took place in the aftermath of an apparent coup attempt in Indonesia on September 30, 1965, that the Indonesian government has always blamed on the powerful Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia or PKI) and which led to massive killings of suspected PKI supporters. In West Kalimantan, all ethnic Chinese became suspect. This was in part because during a campaign by President Sukarno against Malaysia, known as "Konfrontasi" or Confrontation, the Indonesian government had given support and refuge to a left-wing and largely Chinese guerrilla group fighting the Malaysia government known as the Sarawak People's Guerrilla Force (Pasukan Gerilyawan Rakyat Sarawak or PGRS).14 But the Indonesian army maintained that core support for the PKI in West Kalimantan came not from guerrillas of Malaysian origin but from long-term Chinese residents of West Kalimantan itself.

The crackdown came in 1967. Konfrontasi had ended a year earlier, in 1966, and the PGRS guerrillas, now the target of the Indonesian army, launched a series of attacks on army bases. On July 16, 1967, they attacked an arms depot at an air force base in Sanggau Ledo, killing three officers and a civilian. The Indonesian military sent reinforcements and over the next two months several incidents took place in which Dayak village leaders were killed. In one incident, a Dayak leader was killed and his genitals cut off and put in his mouth. The army spread the rumor that Chinese guerrillas were responsible, and the Dayak were ready to declare war on the Chinese. But the Chinese community made a ritual compensation payment, despite the fact they were not responsible, and the Dayaks accepted it. In October 1967, however, after another such murder, the "red bowl" was passed and a major attack on the Chinese ensued, with no distinction made as to the political affiliations of those attacked. The army passed out Garand rifles to Dayak families to facilitate what the military called a "clean-up" operation, and by November, the death toll was at least 300, with 55,000 ethnic Chinese displaced from the interior to coastal towns where shortage of food and medical supplies caused more deaths .15

At the end of the year - after the army had achieved its objectives - a peace pact between the two groups was signed and a ceremony called tolak bala conducted according to Dayak tradition to restore the balance with nature. (In March 1997, a huge tolak bala ceremony was conducted in Sanggau district that was said to be the first time since 1967 that such a ceremony was held.)16

The death toll, the use of rifles, and the geographic scope of the Dayak attacks on the Chinese are similar to the 1996-97 attacks on the Madurese. In discussing some of the unanswered questions about the recent clashes, one Dayak said, "We were used then, and it took decades before we found out. Maybe in five years, there will be answers to this one."17

1 The balance is made up of Malays (Melayu), 39 percent, and ethnic Chinese, 13 percent, although the Chinese are also made up of two distinct linguistic groups.

2 Hendro Suroyo Sudagung, Migrasi swakarsa orang Madura di Kalimantan Barat, unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Gadjah Mada University, 1984, p. 150.

3 "Sengketa Dayak dan Madura" [the Dayak-Madurese Conflict], anonymous paper, February 10, 1997.

4 Glenn Smith, "Carok Violence in Madura," paper presented at the American Anthropological Association meeting, San Francisco, November 20-24, 1996, p. 1.

5 Ibid., p. 11.

6 P. Florus, "Kesenjangan Budaya Dayak-Madura," D & R, March 1, 1997.

7 Human Rights Watch interview, Asmara Nababan, January 16, 1997.

8 Nancy Lee Peluso and Christine Paddoch, "Changing Resource Rights in Managed Forests of West Kalimantan," in Peluso and Paddoch, eds., Borneo in Transition (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1996) pp. 121-124.

9 "Konflik Antara Masyarakat Adat Dengan Perusahaan HPH dan HTI di Kapubaten Ketapang Kalbar," Kalimantan Review, Vol. 3, No. 9, October-December 1994, p. 23.

10 Karl Fasbender and Susanne Erbe, Towards a New Home: Indonesia's Managed Mass Migration, (Hamburg: Verlag Weltarchiv GmbH, 1990), p. 137.

11 Ibid., p. 91.

12 "Antara Sanggau Ledo dan Singkawang," Kompas, January 12, 1997.

13 Hendro Suroyo Sudagung, "Etnosentrisme Dayak-Madura Bisa Positif, Bisa Negatip," D&R, XXVII, No. 28, March 1, 1997.

14 J.A.C. Mackie, The Chinese in Indonesia (Melbourne: Nelson, 1976), p. 126-27.

15 The information on the killing of the Dayak leader and the passing out of rifles comes from a Dayak source in Singkawang who remembers as a fourteen-year-old boy how his father was given a rifle and how he learned to load it. The death toll of 300 is in Mackie, The Chinese in Indonesia, p. 127, and the figure on the displaced comes from Machrus Effendy, Penghancuran PGRS-PARAKU dan PKI di Kalimantan Barat (Jakarta: PT Dian Kemilau, 1995).

16 "Tolak Bala, Awali Rukun di Sanggau," Akcaya, March 4, 1997.

17 Human Rights Watch interview, Pontianak, July 28, 1997.