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Headless Bodies Strewn On Streets As Borneo Violence Spreads
SAMPIT, Indonesia, Feb 23 (News Agencies) - The death toll from six days of brutal ethnic clashes in Indonesia's Borneo island rose to more than 200 Friday as the violence spread and Dayak tribesmen marauded in armed bands through the town.
"More than 200 dead bodies have been recorded," a staff member at Sampit General Hospital in Indonesia's Central Kalimantan province said from the city of Sampit on condition of anonymity.
"There are still many more bodies lying in the streets, many without heads," doctor Qomaruddin Sukhami, the East Waringin district health officer, said earlier Friday.
Police and residents said Dayak tribesmen armed with swords, bows and arrows and deadly blowguns, were hunting the corpse-strewn streets of Sampit for Madurese settlers.
Sukhami said many of the bodies had been slashed by traditional Dayak swords called mandau, and shot with poison arrows from blowguns.
They cut off their heads "like chickens" and the carnage was "like the French revolution," he said.
"A lot of heads are missing."
Thick smoke rose from the homes of the Madurese, most of whom had fled, a news photographer said. He said troops were patrolling approach roads to the city, and that dozens of houses in outlying villages had been burned to the ground.
Dayaks, armed with arrows, sickles and other traditional weapons, set up roadblocks in and around the city.
They identified themselves with red headbands and red or yellow cloths tied to their wrists, and motorists draped red cloth on their vehicles.
Meanwhile, two navy landing crafts, the Teluk Sampit and Teluk Ende, were steaming up the Mentayan River towards Sampit, to transport hundreds of the estimated 11,000 of Madurese refugees sheltering in government offices to safety.
The ships were due to arrive later in the night and leave for Surabaya on Java island early Saturday, the photographer said.
An soldier named Corporal Rahman of the local military said earlier that "fighting stopped this morning but, "we're still on alert."
"Burnings of Madurese homes still continues today.
"Hundreds of Dayaks are still roaming around the city ... they are in small groups of four to five people. Their techniques are like Ninjas.
"On my way to work this morning, I saw two headless bodies lying on the street still untouched." He said all but few Madurese "younger men" had sought refuge.
Sukhami said the killings were spreading in a "triangle of violence" beyond Sampit, the district capital and main trading town, and that 65 of the bodies had been found outside the town.
"Another 26 bodies have been found in the Kuala Kuayan district [75 kilometers, or 47 miles] north of Sampit, since yesterday, and seven in Cempaga," 30 kilometers to the northeast.
On Thursday, Sukhami said 28 bodies had been recovered in Parenggean, 40 kilometers to the north, and four in Kasongan, 80 kilometers northeast.
More than 600 additional police and soldiers have been deployed to Sampit and chief security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said Thursday another battalion of 650 soldiers was on its way.
Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo island, has seen repeated outbreaks of ethnic violence.
Dayaks resent the commercial dominance of ethnic Madurese, relocated to Kalimantan largely through a government-sponsored transmigration program designed to move residents from crowded areas to thinly populated regions.
Last December, at least four people died in several days of fighting between Dayaks and Madurese in Central Kalimantan, while 11 people were killed in the West Kalimantan capital of Pontianak in similar clashes in October.
Violent attacks on Madurese by Malays, backed by Dayak tribesmen, in West Kalimantan in 1999, left some 3,000 people dead and tens of thousands of migrants displaced.
Borneo island is divided between Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei.
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