Week of violence in Borneo blamed on Dayak resentment towards more successful migrants

The evacuation of thousands of terrified Madurese settlers from the Indonesian province of Central Kalimantan began yesterday after a week of blood-letting by indigenous Dayaks claimed more than 200 lives.

Corpses floated past the dock in Sampit, the town at the centre of the violence, as 2,000 Madurese boarded the navy ship Teluk Sampit. Two more navy ships and a passenger vessel are on their way to collect an estimated 20,000 more Madurese trying to escape the marauding Dayak mobs.

The refugees are fleeing to other parts of the province on Borneo island or heading to Sampit's river port crammed on trucks, saying their homes have been burned, their menfolk murdered and their lives in Kalimantan destroyed.

'I love Sampit. I have lived here almost all my life, but I will never feel safe here again,' said Fanimo, 35, a settler from the island of Madura.

More than one million Indonesians have been displaced in similar communal conflicts across the country, and the weak central Government has little money and few ideas about where and how to give them homes.

The bodies of about 30 adults and children lay in a bloody heap outside the hospital in Sampit. Some had been decapitated. Dayaks armed with machetes and daggers have paraded the severed heads of their Madurese victims around the town.