ABSTRACT
On the evening of 20 February 2001, Dayak fighters attacked the riverside timber harbour of Sampit. They sought out Madurese settlers in the town. Those whom they found, they beheaded. By the next evening the fighters were driving around town in trucks, holding up dripping heads in triumph. Thousands of panicked Madurese survivors fled to government offices, from whence they were shipped out of Central Kalimantan to the island of Madura near Java where their ethnic roots lay. On 25 February more Dayak fighters burned down Madurese homes in the provincial capital of Palangkaraya – their occupants having already fled the province. One hundred and eighteen Madurese were killed the same day in the small town of Parenggean north of Sampit. The men, women and children in this group had come out of hiding in the jungle with promises of safe passage. More Madurese were massacred at the port town of Samuda south of Sampit. Within a few weeks, Dayak fighters had pushed their campaign of ethnic cleansing to the extremities of the main trans-Kalimantan road through Central Kalimantan – to Kuala Kapuas in the south-east, and to Pangkalanbun in the west. Nearly 90 per cent of the provincial Madurese population of 120-130,000 had left (International Crisis Group 2001a: 1, 5). Only in Pangkalanbun, with a substantial Madurese population, did most stay. A large proportion of those who left never returned to Central Kalimantan. Credible estimates of the number of dead range from 500 to nearly 1,300, most of them Madurese.1
