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[sangkancil] Age: Borneo: A Descent Into Darkness (fwd)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 04 Mar 2001 23:04:16 -0800
From: Paul Barber <plovers@gn.apc.org>
To: indonesia-act@igc.topica.com, u.braun@xcc.de, slliem@xs4all.nl,
jonathan.head@bbc.co.uk, tapol@gn.apc.org
Subject: Age: Borneo: A Descent Into Darkness
Received from Joyo Indonesian News
The Age (Melbourne)
Saturday 3 March 2001
Borneo: a descent into darkness
By LINDSAY MURDOCH
INDONESIA CORRESPONDENT
JAKARTA
It wasn't enough to parade the heads of their victims on
sticks, as television footage showed this week. "I have
eaten a bit of a person's heart," boasted Fabian Charles,
one the killers.
Gruesome scenes from days of bloodletting in the Indonesian
part of Borneo shocked the world. Headless corpses littered
roadsides. Bodies floated down muddy rivers. The body of a
girl, not yet five, lay in a pile of discarded corpses, her
neck cut almost ear to ear. But the callousness of it seemed
lost on Indonesia, the vast, multi-ethnic country on
Australia's doorstep that is slipping towards anarchy.
>From Nigeria, where he was making one of his many overseas
visits of little consequence, President Abdurrahman Wahid
played down the atrocities. "There is an attempt to blow the
violence out of proportion," he said dismissively, prompting
new calls for his resignation.
In Jakarta, vice-president Megawati Sukarnoputri, who was
left in charge of the country, complained that it takes time
to respond to outbreaks of ethnic strife. Not until
Thursday, 11 days after the murder of a family that
triggered a series of events leading to the mass killings,
did Megawati travel briefly to the worst hit areas.
By then the violence was well over. She wept when she met
thousands of terrified refugees jammed into squalid camps
alongside a river as bodies floated past. But Megawati said
only: "God willing everything can be restored." She offered
no help. Inexplicably, she was not asking why the security
forces under her command had stood by and watched as gangs
of indigenous Dayak headhunters armed with spears, machetes
and blowguns chased and slaughtered hundreds, perhaps
thousands of people.
By the time Megawati's entourage arrived, tens of thousands
of settlers from the island of Madura, off Java, had fled
their homes and businesses and were consigned to a life of
deprivation among one million Indonesians already made
homeless in their own country by past conflicts. Media
reports of the violence portrayed the killings as the rival
of ritual headhunting by the Dayaks, who were once known as
fierce warriors. But what quickly turned into a campaign of
"ethnic cleansing" had more to do with decades of misguided
government policies, race-based economic competition and a
collapsed justice and law enforcement system.
The seeds of conflict were planted 30 years ago when then
the former dictator Suharto started transporting poor
farmers from overcrowded Java, Madura and Bali to the
much-less populated outer islands such as Borneo. Ethnically
and religiously distinct groups suddenly had to compete for
limited economic opportunities.
Tensions that had simmered for decades, only occasionally
erupting into violence, exploded as a political crisis in
Jakarta about Wahid's erratic leadership paralysed the
government. Jakarta now appears powerless to head off the
eruption of more regional conflicts that some observers fear
could bring the country to the brink of disintegration. The
Borneo violence also
shows the impotence of the demoralised and fragmented armed
forces as the Wahid regime attempts to push them away from
their domination of domestic affairs, back to the barracks.
"We have lots of potential communal conflicts ready to come
to the surface and explode," says Dr Tamrin Amal Tomagola, a
sociologist at the University of Indonesia. "The roots of
conflict are already there ... it only needs a trigger," he
says. Tamrin says threats to the country's future such in
Aceh, Irian Jaya (West Papua) and the former Spice Islands,
now called Maluku, stem from people's bitterness about being
treated unfairly by Jakarta over decades.
"They feel the government has treated them as nothing more
than milking cows," he says. "They feel marginalised because
of the government's flawed policies." As Wahid, the frail,
clinically blind Muslim cleric, stubbornly ignores calls for
his resignation from most of Jakarta's political elite,
fears of the break-up of the world's fourth most populous
nation are growing.
Referring to the Borneo bloodshed, Malaysia's Defence
Minister, Najib Tun Razak, said this week: "The mind is
boggled with the kinds of scenarios that could soon engulf
the region, following this.
"Since the economic crisis, the country has been
experiencing severe instability, with the possibility of the
break-up of the state - the Balkanisation of Indonesia,"
Najib said. "The solution is not to have too radical a
change but managed reforms. Otherwise, it's like opening a
Pandora's box which will unleash forces you cannot control."
Since taking office 16 months ago, Wahid's unconventional,
often bewildering and arrogant management style has
alienated almost all the politicians who backed his election
to guide the country from three decades of autocratic rule
towards democracy. He is clinging to office with threats
that if an unconstitutional attempt is made to unseat him,
tens of thousands of his supporters would take to the
streets in a show of force that would probably turn bloody.
Wahid and parliament are locked in an internecine struggle
for power that has created an alarming insecurity across the
country. A just-released report by the Brussels-based
International Crisis Group, headed by former foreign
minister Gareth Evans, says that as long as the political
stand-off continues, the government will not be able to
focus fully on the policies and reforms necessary for
political stability and economic recovery.
"The struggle between the factions of the political elite
are spilling over into the society at large," the groups
warns. While the focus has been on Wahid's leadership, his
government's botched introduction of a landmark policy to
devolve wide powers to the provinces threatens to ignite a
tinderbox of communal tensions.
"Virtually every community across Indonesia with communal or
ethnic differences is potentially a flashpoint now as
subdistrict, district, and provincial boundaries are
re-drawn or contested," says the New York-based Human Rights
Watch.
The government's policy, designed to placate deep animosity
about Jakarta's draconian centralisation, will intensify
competition over regional resources
and posts. It will also create new opportunities for
corruption in societies where it is already endemic. New
autonomy laws that came into force on 1 January are vague
and complex and are not backed by necessary presidential
decrees. Police say that two civil servants, afraid of
losing their forestry office jobs in changes linked to the
laws, paid $4000 to local hoodlums to provoke the Borneo
bloodshed. "There should probably be a complete moratorium
on any administrative boundary changes or local
administration restructuring until a credible law and order
presence is in place and the situation in Jakarta becomes
credible," Human Rights Watch says.
The Borneo violence is just one of many potential
flashpoints across the 13,000-island archipelago that could
trigger widespread violence the security forces would be
hard pressed to control. There are only 450,000 police and
soldiers in the country of 210 million people. In the past
year alone between 3000 and 4000 people were killed in
separatist, religious and ethnic violence across the country
in daily gun battles. For example scores have died each week
in the staunchly Islamic province of Aceh, at the northern
tip of Sumatra, despite a cease-fire agreement. Many of the
police and soldiers are poorly trained and equipped. As they
showed in Borneo, they are usually slow to react to
outbreaks of violence, or fail to act altogether, arguing
that using force could impinge on human rights.
Even when hundreds of combat-ready troops arrived on Borneo
last Monday, with orders to quell the violence, rioters
continued to loot and burn the houses of Madurese in full
sight of them. The state-funded Human Rights Commission
accuses the troops of downright unprofessionalism.
"They say they lack personnel and equipment. In my opinion
they simply have no professionalism," says the commission's
secretary-general, Asmara Nababan. Human rights lawyer,
Johnson Panjaitan, says he believes the military's failure
to stop the violence was deliberate. "By letting this
descend to the level of blatant "ethnic cleansing", they
become extremely needed," he says. "They need to prove that
they are needed. Their aim is to stay in power."
A report by the US State Department, released this week,
gives a devastating assessment of human rights under Wahid's
rule. It accuses the police and soldiers of serious abuses,
noting their prominent role in areas where violence
threatens national unity. "Both the TNI (military) and the
police committed numerous serious human rights abuses
throughout the year," the report says.
It says the government was ineffective in deterring social,
inter-ethnic and inter-religious violence that accounted for
most of the year's violent deaths. "Enforcement of the law
against criminal violence deteriorated, resulting in
religious groups purporting to uphold public morality and
mobs dispensing street justice operated with impunity," the
report says.
Military analyst Salim Said says that while the root causes
of communal problems like those that erupted in Borneo date
back three decades, Suharto used the military, intelligence
and government apparatuses to keep them below
the surface. "Suharto was quite exceptional in handling
communal conflicts," Salim says. "So exceptional that he
would know if a needle had fallen on the floor."
Tamrin, the sociologist at the University of Indonesia, says
he fears the country is heading towards disintegration,
taking into account "the current condition, including the
messy political stage". He believes that more conflicts will
break out in what he calls the "ring of fire": Indonesian
Timor; Maluku; Irian Jaya; Sulawesi and other parts of
Borneo. "Dissatisfaction towards the government's unfair
treatment and antipathy towards the migrants are already
there," he says. Tamrin predicts Indonesia will eventually
face either the strong growth of fundamentalist Islam or a
return to power of the military.
- with AGENCIES
Lindsay Murdoch is The Age's Indonesia correspondent.
**************************************************
Paul Barber
TAPOL, the Indonesia Human Rights Campaign,
25 Plovers Way, Alton Hampshire GU34 2JJ
Tel/Fax: 01420 80153
Email: plovers@gn.apc.org
Internet: www.gn.apc.org/tapol
Defending victims of oppression in Indonesia and
East Timor, 1973-2000
**************************************************
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