Word: sampit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...meet Ma'ruf. At 27, married at 15 to a 13-year-old girl, he still has a boyish face and a loose-limbed manner. He was born and raised on Madura but, unemployed, unmoved by the prospect of spending his life in the tobacco fields, he left for Sampit in Borneo several years ago and found work as a driver. Last February, long simmering tensions between the Madurese and the native Dayaks erupted. The Dayaks, in hand-to-hand, town-to-town combat, embarked on a rampage intent on exterminating all things Madurese. The killings began on a Sunday...
...Economic rivalry is a factor. "The Madurese control all the small businesses, the trishaw drivers, the markets, the porters at the harbor," notes Baharudin, the Sampit official. Many of the Madurese competing for these lower rungs of the economy were recent immigrants, fleeing the poverty of their native Madura, desperate for work. At the site of the largest massacre, Parenggean, the town's main industry was controlled by the Madurese loggers. To make matters worse, a Forestry Department official says, the Madurese had persisted in logging forest that was sacred to the Dayaks. Now the sawmills in the town...
...analysis in the world won't explain the ferocity that destroyed her world to Sunnayah, who sits in the Sampit refugee camp fingering a string of white plastic pearls around her neck. She is one of the lucky ones. Her husband is next to her along with her three girls, Kirin, Ati and Fitriani. "I just can't understand it. Why they would do this? We were neighbors. I was born here. My parents were born here...
...When the violence between Dayaks and Madurese began last week, many Madurese escaped into the jungle. A community leader negotiated a truce under which Madurese would be escorted to the safety of a refugee camp in Sampit, the provincial capital of Kalimantan, and then loaded onto boats to leave the island. The truce was broadcast over the loudspeakers of the local mosque normally used to call the faithful to prayer. Almost 400 Madurese emerged from the jungle and climbed onto trucks. The unfortunate ones were diverted to the soccer field. They were butchered as they climbed down from the trucks...
...Sampit As a wave of ethnic violence that claimed at least 469 lives in Borneo came to an end, Indonesian Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri comforted victims and indicated that declaration of a civil emergency-a step short of martial law-was not required. After 10 days of attacks on Madurese settlers by Borneo's native Dayaks, security forces brought the conflict to an end. The Dayaks have long sought to drive out the Madurese, contending that they were taking Dayak jobs and land...