Four Madurese men have been killed in the latest upsurge of clashes with ethnic Malay residents in an Indonesian Borneo town, a hospital official and a local journalist said Tuesday.
The hacked bodies of two victims, both Madurese settlers, were found in a storm drain in the West Kalimantan provincial capital Pontianak, said Iskandar Maulana, a guard at a city hospital morgue.
"Both victims died from wounds from arrows and sharp weapons and their bodies have been claimed by their families," he told AFP by telephone.
He said the two victims were believed to have died in clashes which spread after Malay residents insulted thousands of Madurese refugees who had refused to be evacuated from two sports halls in Pontianak.
A local journalist said the bodies of two other Madurese men were reported to have been brought into a police station in Pontianak after they were murdered by a mob of Malay residents on Monday night.
"We have not seen those two bodies with our own eyes yet, and we have been trying to confirm this report since last night," the journalist told AFP.
"I went to the precinct myself but was told that the bodies were never brought in there," she said, adding that more than 600 police and military soldiers have been deployed across the city.
The state Antara news agency also put the death toll from violence Monday at four.
The deaths brought to a total of five people -- including a six-year-old Malay boy -- killed in Pontianak since the clashes first erupted early Sunday.
Tensions had lessened by Tuesday, the hospital official said.
"I've been guarding the hospital since 7:00 pm last night and until this morning we have not received any injuries or casualties," he said.
Dozens of armed police were guarding the area where both sports halls housing the Madurese refugees are located, Maulana added.
Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo island which is also shared by Malaysia and Brunei, has seen repeated outbreaks of ethnic violence.
Violent attacks on Madurese by Dayaks, backed by ethnic Malays in the town of Sambas in 1999, left 3,000 people dead and tens of thousands of migrants displaced, many of them housed in the Pontianak barracks.
On Monday three refugees were wounded when Pontianak authorities began trying to move thousands of Madurese refugees from centres in the city to new resettlement areas 17 kilometers (27 miles) east of Pontianak.
The evacuation started after angry residents stormed the centres on Sunday following an attempted robbery, believed to have been carried out by Madurese refugees, left the six-year-old boy dead Saturday night.
But the Madurese were still refusing to move from their camps, despite the issuance of an evacuation order by West Kalimantan Governor Aspar Aswin.
"The governor actually ordered them to leave the camps on Monday, but until today, they are still at the camps and refusing to be moved," said Saleh Andi of the mayor's information office.
"So right now, we can only wait for the result of negotiations between provincial officials and the refugees," he told AFP.
He added that the refugees, estimated at around 63,000 people living in four sports halls in Pontianak, were among thousands of Madurese who had fled the clashes in Sambas in 1999.
"The local residents don't want them here, and yet they refused to be resettled... so, we are the ones who have to deal with the headaches."
Indigenous Dayak tribes have long resented the commercial dominance of ethnic Madurese, relocated to Kalimantan largely through a government-sponsored program designed to move residents from crowded areas of Indonesia to thinly populated regions -- JAKARTA (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
