There may have been a time when the law did matter in Indonesia, but it's hard
to remember that now. Last week, Indonesia's central Kalimantan province
reverted to the law of the jungle when indigenous Dayaks, celebrated in tourism
brochures for their tribal customs and picturesque, dormitory-style long-houses,
went on a coordinated spree of murder against the province's migrant community
from the arid island of Madura. And concepts like rule of law began to seem
completely irrelevant when the Dayaks, following their traditional custom,
began eating the body parts of their victims to gain spiritual strength. More than
500 Madurese were butchered; 30,000 more were shipped from Borneo to Java
by military and civilian boats; 15,000 more, like Syamsudin, are waiting in
Sampit, desperate to get out.
The immediate spark to the slaughter can be identified: a murder in Kereng
Pangi, a small village near Sampit. A group of Madurese allegedly tortured and
then killed a young Dayak in December after a gambling dispute. The murderers,
Dayak community leaders say, bribed police and escaped to Madura.
The gruesome quality of the massacre makes it indelible, but also obscures what it
says about Indonesia as a whole. Yes, the police couldn't, and often didn't even try,
to save the Madurese victims. The center of Sampit is decorated with a plinth
commemorating Indonesia's 1948 independence, guarded by a life-size plaster
statue of a policeman-an apt symbol of their frozen response to the crisis. Two
battalions of soldiers were brought to Sampit a week after the massacres broke out
to restore order, but Madurese houses continued to go up in flames long after their
arrival. "That's not our job," was the bored comment from a soldier watching a
house being torched in the regional capital Palangkaraya. The government of
President Abdurrahman Wahid was characteristically supine. Wahid himself
went on a religious pilgrimage to Mecca three days after the killing began and has
yet to return.
In Wahid's Indonesia, however, that's par for the course. There are bigger, more
troubling imponderables. The country seems to be falling apart in so many
different ways. Was Kalimantan's carnage an anti-migrant pogrom similar to
those in Irian Jaya? Or was it more like the separatist-incited violence in Aceh?
Or was it similar to the bloody religious rivalry between Christians and Muslims
in Ambon? When the Dayaks carved out the hearts and heads of their victims,
was this the kind of tribal blood sport that would have proliferated in Indonesia
had former President Suharto not exerted an iron grip on the nation for most of its
history? Are all sorts of mad and destructive behaviors ready to rise now that
Indonesia's state structures seem to be collapsing? Or how about this for a
troubling prospect: Is Indonesia actually carving out its own heart by giving
autonomy to the provinces and districts under legislation that took effect on Jan.
1-a legal initiative that was intended, in fact, as a last ditch effort to hold the
country together?
Autonomy is Indonesia's big hope these days. In the center of Sampit, it's extolled
on a giant billboard urging locals to support officials who assume power under the
new scheme. With the autonomy program, much of Jakarta's former power over
finance and administration has been passed down to some 360 regencies-what
would be called counties in other countries-and municipalities. It's a radical shift
in the way Indonesia is governed, decided upon in direct response to restive
populations in Aceh, Irian Jaya and Riau. The autonomy program, however, also
encourages resentments and jealousies as it disenfranchises some local
bureaucrats. Soon after the killing began in Kalimantan, police arrested three
men for paying 20 million rupiah ($2,129) to incite violence between Dayaks and
Madurese. Two of the men were civil servants appointed by Jakarta who had lost
their jobs as part of the autonomy scheme.
To further understand the program's dangers on the ground, listen to Baharudin
Isa, the half-Dayak regional secretary for Sampit. Sitting in the relative calm of
his office a few hundred yards from the teeming mass of refugees camped around
the regional administrative building, a visibly exhausted Baharudin describes
what autonomy will mean in Kalimantan.
"There are 80,000 Madurese in our regency," he says in a hushed, almost
quavering voice. "The Madurese are tough, a very tough people, and things that
are sacred to the Dayaks have been violated. The only answer to this problem is
for them all to go. Every single one. That's what the Dayaks want. Please, just go.
Before, because we were one country, they used to come here freely without
identity cards or anything, they could just come and settle. But now with
regional autonomy, we will be our own masters and it will be a different
arrangement."
Rather than preserving Indonesia's unity, the effect of the new laws may be
widespread social splintering of the sort described in Sampit. According to Hans
Vriens, who heads the Jakarta office of the Washington-based consultants Apco,
which has completed a study of the autonomy program, the hastily implemented
new system will leave a few resource-rich areas better off. But much of the rest of
Indonesia will suffer from a precipitous drop in income. The result: economic
chaos that could engender "a widespread breakdown in law and order," as well as
an intensification of existing conflicts.
No need to tell that to Ma'rus, a dazed looking Madurese refugee cradling her
15-day-old baby beneath a stretched tarpaulin in Sampit. Her fellow refugees are
squeezed into every bit of shade they can find within a few hundred meters of the
regional government office building. None dare to stray any farther for fear of
Dayak patrols conducting what they call "sweeping" exercises: they are searching
for Madurese to murder. The hospital around the corner from the refugee camp is
almost empty, a health official says, although hundreds of refugees need medical
help. It isn't considered safe.
The baby was seven days old when Ma'rus fled into the jungle to escape Dayaks
attacking her village, Serambut Besar. She stayed there for three days before
gaining the courage to board a boat for a day's journey downriver to Sampit. Now
her baby-it is a girl but as yet has no name, a domestic pleasure she can't yet
contemplate-has a fever. Ma'rus doesn't have the strength to fight for a place on
the government trucks bringing refugees to boats leaving for Java. This Tuesday
morning, after five days in Sampit, she didn't even try, ignoring the shouts and
sounds of blows as men fought to get away. It's just as well she didn't: she may not
have survived the short truck ride. When the convoy rolled out, leaving Ma'rus
and her daughter behind, it was escorted by squads from the Mobile Police
Brigade, the national force's paramilitary troops. Despite the matte black M-16s
they carry, the teenagers who make up the rank and file of the Brimob, as
Indonesians call it, have a serious inferiority complex. In their gray and
chocolate-colored uniforms, they resemble private security guards more than
crack troops, something they are painfully conscious of, especially when they
meet up with the real army. And when the trucks finally arrived at the gates of
the port 3 km away, they encountered soldiers from Jakarta's elite Kostrad rapid
deployment unit, recognizable by their smart green berets and camouflage
uniforms.
There is a rivalry between the police and army, a divide deepened when the two
were formally split by President Wahid last year. Last Tuesday in Sampit, in the
midst of communal slaughter, the army and the mobile police renewed their
internecine rivalry. Exactly how the shooting began remains unclear, but after a
six-hour, armed standoff, two people had died and 10 were wounded, including
the directorate head of Sampit's police, who was shot twice in the back and is still
in critical condition. One of those killed was a Madurese refugee. So much for help
from Jakarta.
The bloody confrontation between the police and the army-for 30 years the
country's dominant institution-is depressingly symbolic of the chaos at the
center of the nation. Since Suharto fell in 1998, Indonesia has been governed
under a makeshift political system that is neither parliamentary nor presidential
and in which the two halves are fighting for dominance. On Feb. 1, the
parliament voted overwhelmingly to begin impeachment proceedings, a complex
and untried process that is supposed to culminate some time before August.
Those who know the President say there is little likelihood he will resign-and that
he might not even accept an impeachment. "He's the kind of person who can do no
wrong in his own mind," says Fachry Ali, an old friend of the President and head
of a Jakarta think tank, the Institute for Business Ethics. "He's very stubborn."
The President, who has suffered three strokes and is blind, is getting stranger by
the day, baffling even the likes of Fachry. "Everybody is confused," he says, "his
aides, his ministers, everybody."
That attitude is producing a backlash at home. Students, enraged by Wahid's
absence during the slaughter of the Madurese, have called for him to fly straight
back from Saudi Arabia to Kalimantan. Otherwise, they've taunted, don't come
back at all. Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri made a conspicuous visit to the
site of the massacres at Sampit.
It's a harrowing Indonesian truth that what happened in Sampit could be
repeated tomorrow in scores of other places in the sprawling archipelago. Most
immediately, it could spread to other parts of Kalimantan where the same
communal tensions are simmering, notably in the oil-rich region of Balikpapan in
the eastern part of the state.
For now, the killing appears to have halted and life is gradually returning to
normal in Palangkaraya. Yet fear is still very much in the air. It's almost
impossible to find a car in the city that doesn't fly a red ribbon or piece of cloth
from its antenna or wing mirror, a sign of loyalty to the Dayak cause.
Neighborhoods remain blocked by makeshift barricades of logs and stones.
What lies behind the appalling savagery of the Dayaks? It's a question that Kma
Usop, a Dayak cultural leader and a professor at Palangkaraya University, strains
to answer, his words pouring out in an emotional stream as he lights an unending
series of Pall Mall cigarettes. "The Dayaks are in a panic, they are feeling
marginalized. They have been provoked for many years. The Madurese are
violent. They fight in the markets and in the farms. We don't have similar
problems with the Buginese or Chinese or Javanese."
Economic rivalry is a factor. "The Madurese control all the small businesses, the
trishaw drivers, the markets, the porters at the harbor," notes Baharudin, the
Sampit official. Many of the Madurese competing for these lower rungs of the
economy were recent immigrants, fleeing the poverty of their native Madura,
desperate for work. At the site of the largest massacre, Parenggean, the town's
main industry was controlled by the Madurese loggers. To make matters worse, a
Forestry Department official says, the Madurese had persisted in logging forest
that was sacred to the Dayaks. Now the sawmills in the town are quiet and rows of
huge logs lie abandoned.
These economic tensions, added to the age-old stereotypes of the Madurese as
clannish, threatening and rude, made it easy to roil the Dayaks. Combine that
with the Dayak claim that all Madurese men carry knives which they are all too
willing to use, and the Madurese become in Dayak eyes a perfect scapegoat for
their woes. It is easier, after all, to blame the Madurese next door for Dayak
problems than the central government in Jakarta.
But all the analysis in the world won't explain the ferocity that destroyed her
world to Sunnayah, who sits in the Sampit refugee camp fingering a string of
white plastic pearls around her neck. She is one of the lucky ones. Her husband is
next to her along with her three girls, Kirin, Ati and Fitriani. "I just can't
understand it. Why they would do this? We were neighbors. I was born here. My
parents were born here."
Professor Kma Usop struggles again to explain the beheadings, the cutting out of
victim's hearts, the slaughter of children and babies. "They are in a trance,
possessed by something. Why did it manifest itself in such a form? They saw
something evil and in our culture you must destroy evil, so they take down the
swords and spears hanging on the walls and revert to the ways of our
grandfathers."
To Sunnayah and the other Madurese, that's not enough. Perhaps there's no other
explanation than the simple word mentioned by professor Kma Usop: evil. If
Indonesia continues to unravel, that simple word may become all too familiar.
With reporting by Zamira Loebis/Sampit
