- The Guardian,
- Saturday March 3 2001
Muhammed Yasin, the chief of Kuala Kuayan, a village deep in the jungle of Central Kalimantan, admitted to the Guardian that he had travelled with some of the 60-strong gang who killed the migrants from the island of Madura in the town of Parenggean.
Mr Yasin insisted, however, that not only had he nothing to do with the executioners, he was in fact their hostage.
When the gang arrived in Parenggean they hijacked a convoy of trucks that was evacuating about 400 Madurese, chased off its six police officers, and took 118 refugees to a school playing field and butchered them with machetes and spears.
It was the worst incident in a two-week orgy of ethnic violence that has officially left more than 500 people dead, and possibly twice this, all but a handful of whom were descendants of or migrants from the island or Madura.
The tens of thousands of Madurese who survived have fled the province, many with vicious wounds, and with only the clothes that they were wearing.
"It's a complete lie to suggest that I had anything to do with the slaughter in Parenggean," Mr Yasin said. "The people spreading these rumours are provocateurs." He said he left Kuala Kuayan before the gang, but that they overtook him and his wife while on the road.
"They bullied and threatened me to go along with them," he said. "They killed people on the road and I feared they were going to harm us. So when we got to Parenggean I sought protection from the officials there."
His version of events is at odds with the reports of witnesses in both Kuala Kuayan and Parenggean.
A neighbourhood chief in Kuala Kuayan, for instance, believes that Mr Yasin organised it all.
"[Yasin] said he got a phone call from Parenggean [on the Sunday morning] telling him that the Dayaks there needed help to 'sort out' the Madurese," Armili Madras said. "So six vehicles left under the command of Mr Yasin."
The next thing Mr Madras knew was when one of the drivers came back many hours later with three human heads in his car, saying they were from the massacre in Parenggean. That driver has gone into hiding, as have all the other people from Kuala Kuayan allegedly involved in the killing.
Mr Madras said he finds the phone call theory hard to believe, claiming that Mr Yasin does not have a telephone at his home and that the Dayaks in Parenggean had agreed that morning to give the authorities five days to evacuate the Madurese.
"What's more, the village police chief here said his counterpart in Parenggean said no one called Kuala Kuayan for Mr Yasin that morning." He alleged that at the time there was only one working telephone in Parenggean.
Udin, a local government official in Parenggean who witnessed the arrival of the gang and the execution, said he saw Mr Yasin play a prominent role. "I never saw him actually kill anyone but he seemed to be directing events at the start," he said. "He brought the people and he was ordering them around."
Mr Udin's boss, sub-district chief Rukmana Priyatna, said that after Mr Yasin had directed the heavily armed Dayaks as to what to do he went off and prepared their food, as if not wanting to be seen to be playing too prominent a role.
"He never asked me for protection at any time," Mr Priyatna said.
Mr Yasin's friends and neighbours in Kuala Kuayan were eager to rush to his defence, however. "He was here with us in Kuala Kuayan," said one man who asked not to be named.
"He wouldn't have done anything like that," Manarung, one of Mr Yasin's work colleagues, said. "He even helped organise the evacuation of refugees from this sub-district."
In the interview, Mr Yasin appeared to be a man of mixed emotions. With one breath he went out of his way to extol his love of all Indonesia's hundreds of ethnic groups: "We are all one nation in one country under one flag. People should have the right to live anywhere."
Yet his next words claimed the Madurese would never again be welcome in Kuala Kuayan: "We can't have them back," he said. "They just cause too many problems. Over land disputes, by carrying weapons, and [by] never apologising or admitting their mistakes."
Another villager, Armin Effendi, said: "He should at least be investigated."
The Indonesian police, however, have shown no signs of even beginning to investigate or search for the perpetrators of the massacre, let alone the hundreds of other killings.
"We haven't received any orders to do anything," Sergeant Abdul Rahman said in Parenggean. "And, as far as I'm aware, no special team has been set up to probe the massacre."
In Parenggean, meanwhile, the school football pitch remains littered with blood-stained shoes, ripped belts, scrawled verses from the Koran written in a child's exercise book and soiled family photos.
