Published in Earth Times
July 2001

HEADHUNTERS FIGHT FOR CONTROL OF FORESTS
Massacre is one more bloody battle in history of eco-conflicts

by Paul Spencer Sochaczewski and Jeffrey A. McNeely
© 2001

SAMPIT, Central Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo

A friend just sent a horrifying photo of an Asian girl, maybe six years old, lying on the ground, her arms splayed at impossible angles. Her dress is hiked up and her head is tilted from her body, like a broken puppet's. On closer examination you can see that her head has been sliced off, and not too carefully placed near her neck.

This nameless girl was beheaded during the recent massacre of some 500 settlers from the arid island of Madura by gangs of the indigenous residents of Indonesian Borneo, collectively called Dayaks.

The killings were ethnic-specific -- all of the victims were Madurese; the Dayak marauders, who had the support of their community leaders, left their Javanese and Balinese immigrant neighbors untouched.

What could spark such hostility?

One of the oft-ignored underlying triggers behind communal violence such as this is the fight for control of a people's natural resources.
John Walker, a lecturer in politics at University College, the Australian Defence Force Academy, says, "Far from having its origins in ethnicity, the present killings in Central Kalimantan, like those in western Kalimantan in 1998-99, reflect deep conflict over natural resources."

In the current Borneo scenario, the Indonesian government encouraged farmers from the over-populated islands of Java, Bali and Madura to "transmigrate" to lesser-populated outer islands, such as Borneo and New Guinea. The new settlers -- there were some 100,000 Madurese in Kalimantan at the time of the massacres, many have since left or been evacuated -- were encouraged to cut down the forests and make farms. Businessmen and military leaders from Java, encouraged by government policies and a laissez faire attitude towards the environment, denuded the rainforest for timber and to make way for oil palm plantations. The hitch was that the forests traditionally belonged to local people such as the Dayaks who lived, to varying degrees, in some kind of harmony with nature. But as John Walker adds, "Indonesia does not guarantee indigenous people's rights over land." The Dayaks were left disenfranchised and land-poor.

Michael Dove, a professor at Yale University, adds, "For three decades, the indigenous Dayak have seen their natural resource base steadily eroded. Vast amounts of Dayak lands and forests have been destroyed or appropriated for logging concessions, rubber and oil-palm plantations, pulp plantations and transmigration sites."

Riska Orpa Sari, a Dayak woman who wrote Riska: Memories of a Dayak Girlhood, says the current conflict is based on control of the forests. "For centuries, our needs and rights have been denied by the government," she says.

"A flow of human beings has been sent like cattle to Kalimantan. Thousands of hectares of lush rain forest have been clear-cut to fill the need for land for the newcomers [and] the source of life for the Dayak and many rare species of wildlife is intensively cut and timbered.

"So, betrayed and exploited, the anger exploded. Being used, neglected and ignored left our people bitter. Vengeance emerged. The need to defend our land has come to the surface, the need to take our land and natural world back."

Worldwide, the fight for control of nature has been one of the most important, but frequently overlooked root causes of bloody ethnic and political conflicts. Unfortunately, Kalimantan's eco-war is not an isolated case.

The conflict in Somalia, for example, is a war between clans who are fighting over access to grazing lands. In Mexico, the Zapatistas in Chiapas were fighting above all about who was going to decide how their resources were to be allocated. The numerous fights in the Congo focus on who has access to minerals. In the forests of Amazonia, tribes of Indians who not only take heads but also shrink them (at least historically) are continuing their battles against gold miners who are moving into their territories, often with the support of national military forces that do not appreciate cultural diversity.

In 1998 we visited a group of Dayaks in a settlement called Tanah Merah (Red Earth), upriver from Samarinda in Kalimantan. These are people from the Kenyah tribe, who have had no role in the current violence. Ironically, these people also were internal transmigrants, having been resettled several decades ago from their traditional homes further upriver. We stood on a hilltop with Pak Pajan, the village chief. We had just spent a few hours with him in old growth forest, where the air was cool underneath the forest canopy and ripe with the scent of growth and decay. It was perhaps ten degrees hotter outside the shelter of the forest, and the barren neighboring slopes, upon which would be planted agro-business monocultures of eucalyptus or acacia, seemed to stoically wither under the equatorial sun. Pak Pajan's people, part of a tribe of some 40,000, found mostly in Borneo's highlands, practice shifting cultivation, and rely on the forest for food, shelter and as the foundation of their cultural heritage. But the Kenyah were being smothered by land hungry immigrants and government plantation schemes that wipe out rainforests. Pak Pajan did not speak about wild rebellion, but clearly he was a troubled man, caught in a Borneo squeeze-play. I wonder what his flash point would be?

Riska Orpa Sari adds, "I know that the Dayak people want to live in peace with nature. We are the people of the forest. We do not make peace with people who destroy our home.