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Refugee Convoy Massacre As Indonesian Forces Fire At One Another
PALANGKARAYA, Indonesia, Feb 27 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Hundreds of crazed Dayak tribesmen attacked a police-protected convoy of 300 refugees in Indonesian Borneo and butchered and beheaded 118 of them, police said Tuesday.
The decapitated and mutilated bodies of massacre victims were recovered and buried on Monday, they said.
National police spokesman Dede Widayadi said in Jakarta that the slaughtered Madurese had been in a convoy of refugees being escorted by 10 to 15 police to safety from remote villages to the city of Sampit, about 750 kilometers (465 miles) northeast of Jakarta, on Sunday night.
But 600 "crazed" Dayaks armed with swords and axes fell on the convoy.
"It was total panic," he said. The outnumbered police fled to Sampit - four hours drive away - for help, breaking up the convoy.
Almost 200 of the frantic refugees managed to flee with the police, but the others were cut off and slaughtered, he said.
"They were beheaded, they were butchered, they were chopped up," Commander Tato Suharto, chief of the Central Kalimantan Control Unit, said angrily by phone from Sampit.
"We were assisting the evacuation of a Madurese group when a Dayak mob attacked," said Col. Timbul Sianturi, a police spokesman in Jakarta to MSNBC. "We were outnumbered."
Meanwhile police in the provincial capital of Palangkaraya, some 220 kilometers (137 miles) north of Sampit started disarming Dayak tribesmen rampaging through the city looting and burning.
Police shot looters on sight, two in Palangkaraya and three in Sampit, killing one and wounding four, Widayadi said.
Police arrested 84 Dayaks from a Sampit hotel they had commandeered as a headquarters, Widayadi added, bringing the total arrests in the week of violence to 184.
Widayadi also said police had organized rituals with Dayak leaders in accordance with their native kaharingan (life) beliefs in an effort to calm them.
"They've held rituals in Palangkaraya and Sampit to exorcise the spirits, according to local beliefs, which are possessing the Dayaks and sending them into frenzies," he said.
A gunfight also broke out on Tuesday between Indonesian police and soldiers charged with restoring peace. An unknown number of people were injured in the clash at the river port in the town of Sampit, a national police spokesman said.
"It was a misunderstanding between police and soldiers . . . there were some shooting casualties but at this stage I can't confirm the number," he said.
MSNBC reports that reasons for the skirmishes were not immediately clear, but that in the chaos evacuations, many refugees have complained that both troops and police officers were demanding payment for allowing people to board naval escape vessels.
The massacre victims, and another seven beheaded bodies seen by a journalist in Palangkaraya, lifted to more than 400 the confirmed death toll from a week of savage ethnic violence that has forced tens of thousands of terrified refugees to flee.
Andi Selvi, a police spokeswoman in Palangkaraya, said that 50 badly decomposed bodies had been recovered from a river in the Parenggean subdistrict. It was not clear if the 50 were among the 118.
Dayaks, armed with spears, swords and blowguns have for the past week erected roadblocks on the 220-kilometer (137 mile) Sampit-Palangkaraya highway, barring passage to any Madurese trying to flee.
But on Tuesday, a reporter said troops controlled the road.
Refugees have recounted horror stories of mass beheadings by the Dayaks and journalists have seen countless headless bodies strewn on roadsides.
CNN reports that Parliament Speaker Akbar Tandjung, who also heads the ruling Golkar Party, urged President Abdurrahman Wahid on Tuesday to mend his ways and criticized him for going on a foreign tour as the Kalimantan crisis intensified. His comments followed U.S. condemnation of Indonesia's efforts to curb the violence.
A defiant Wahid, speaking from Cairo, though, rejected intensifying calls to cut short a two-week overseas trip and return home because of the ethnic violence. He said reports of the violence were exaggerated and believes the situation is "fully under control."
A Dayak man leading one attack in Palangkaraya said they were determined to rid Borneo island of all Madurese by force.
"If the provincial government doesn't support our campaign by expelling Madurese peacefully, we will drive them out of the entire Kalimantan [Borneo] by force within three months," he said.
On Monday, heavily-armed Dayaks took control of the provincial capital and systematically smashed, burned and looted hundreds of homes abandoned by terrified Madurese.
In Sampit, district medical officer Qomaruddin Sukhami said thousands of traumatized Madurese continued to pour out of their jungle hiding places, swelling the number of refugees there from 25,000 on Monday to 30,000 by Tuesday.
"I received a report that one refugee killed herself last night out of depression," Sukhami said. "This is savage - like nowhere else in the world," he said, as another ship crammed with 5,000 refugees left by river for Java island.
Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo island, has seen repeated outbreaks of ethnic violence.
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