Word: sampit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...further understand the program's dangers on the ground, listen to Baharudin Isa, the half-Dayak regional secretary for Sampit. Sitting in the relative calm of his office a few hundred yards from the teeming mass of refugees camped around the regional administrative building, a visibly exhausted Baharudin describes what autonomy will mean in Kalimantan...
...immediate spark to the slaughter can be identified: a murder in Kereng Pangi, a small village near Sampit. A group of Madurese allegedly tortured and then killed a young Dayak in December after a gambling dispute. The murderers, Dayak community leaders say, bribed police and escaped to Madura...
...gruesome quality of the massacre makes it indelible, but also obscures what it says about Indonesia as a whole. Yes, the police couldn't, and often didn't even try, to save the Madurese victims. The center of Sampit is decorated with a plinth commemorating Indonesia's 1948 independence, guarded by a life-size plaster statue of a policeman?an apt symbol of their frozen response to the crisis. Two battalions of soldiers were brought to Sampit a week after the massacres broke out to restore order, but Madurese houses continued to go up in flames long after their arrival...
...Autonomy is Indonesia's big hope these days. In the center of Sampit, it's extolled on a giant billboard urging locals to support officials who assume power under the new scheme. With the autonomy program, much of Jakarta's former power over finance and administration has been passed down to some 360 regencies?what would be called counties in other countries?and municipalities. It's a radical shift in the way Indonesia is governed, decided upon in direct response to restive populations in Aceh, Irian Jaya and Riau. The autonomy program, however, also encourages resentments and jealousies...
...Rather than preserving Indonesia's unity, the effect of the new laws may be widespread social splintering of the sort described in Sampit. According to Hans Vriens, who heads the Jakarta office of the Washington-based consultants Apco, which has completed a study of the autonomy program, the hastily implemented new system will leave a few resource-rich areas better off. But much of the rest of Indonesia will suffer from a precipitous drop in income. The result: economic chaos that could engender "a widespread breakdown in law and order," as well as an intensification of existing conflicts...