The rampage against Madurese migrants by indigenous Dayaks began Feb. 18 in the provinces of West and Central Kalimantan. Thousands of Madurese fled their homes, telling tales of children whose heads had been cut off. The exact death toll is still not known, but some estimates say that more than 1,000 have been killed in the past two weeks. Gangs of semiorganized Dayak men-some with their faces painted and crying “Long live the Dayak”-are on a mission to rid their homeland of Madurese migrants. Victims’ bodies have been regularly mutilated, and severed heads have been paraded on sticks or displayed on roadsides. Police and security forces have stood by rather than intervene.
Similar outbreaks took place in 1997 and 1999 when 3,000 people, mostly Madurese, were killed. One of the most shocking elements in all these episodes of violence is the taking of heads. Headhunting, clearly, has resumed in Kalimantan.
Some background: Headhunting was known on many islands of the Indonesian archipelago, particularly among interior groups. Scholars have offered a host of explanations for why headhunting was practiced. More was involved than bloodthirsty violence or settling of old scores. For some groups, headhunting was a ritual practice closely tied to rites of passage. Taking heads was necessary for boys to became men, or else it ensured fertility and thus guaranteed that crops would grow.
For others, headhunting was a way of scaring off outsiders moving inland or of exacting retribution for violence suffered at the hands of invaders. On the neighboring island of Sulawesi, one ethnic group even continues to conduct headhunting raids on their coastal neighbors using a coconut (which they purchased at a market) as a surrogate for a head. Their “victims” are not even aware that they are part of a ritual in which the dominance of the coast is symbolically inverted and the autonomy of the interior group celebrated.
The Madurese have been caught in the middle. Sent to Kalimantan as part of a government-orchestrated transmigration program to relieve overcrowding on their native Madura, settlers were promised a new land of opportunity on Kalimantan. Hundreds of thousands have come since the 1960s. Dayak see land and business opportunities that rightfully belong to them given instead to the Madurese migrants. Government-approved logging and development projects that shunt Dayaks aside have made matters worse.
The Dayak headhunting sprees come on the heels of rumors of another kind of headhunting. Rumors have swept through Kalimantan that “government headhunters” have been sent to take Dayak heads. Attributing their own beliefs in the potency of heads to politicians and generals in distant Jakarta, these Dayak fear that government construction programs require a head be taken for the project to succeed.
Religious and ethnic violence has wracked Indonesia since the fall of former President Suharto’s New Order regime in May 1998. Though individual motives are difficult to discern, collectively the mass violence and severing of Madurese heads is aimed at the Indonesian national government as much as it is at Madurese. Resentment of government actions and Jakarta’s indifference to Dayak protests has soared in the past decade, and with it has come violence.
While on the surface the conflict thus pits indigenous Dayaks against Madurese immigrants, the reality is more complex. The third player in all this, and the one to whom Dayak marauders are sending messages, is the national government. Madurese heads are symbols that Dayaks are using to communicate anger and disenfranchisement in a grotesque kind of morality play. Heads, once again, are powerful political symbols in a fractured social landscape.
