Ethnic Dayaks. AP Photo--Jonathan Head

The horror makes sense to Elias Ubek. Two years ago he joined a mob of fellow Dayaks in torching a Madurese village in Kalimantan--the Indonesian half of the mammoth, swampy island of Borneo. During the orgy of violence Ubek entered into a trance; a strange buzzing filled his ears. He says he did not emerge from that state for hours, well after he had murdered a childhood friend of his--a Madurese man accused of stabbing a Dayak--and eaten, uncooked, parts of his leg, arm, heart, innards and penis. Even today Ubek insists he had to perform that act--"to make sure that his sin did not spread to me, my family and my kin." In Borneo, says Ubek, "you have to eat the hatred."

Many more Indonesians may soon discover just what that tastes like. Across the province of West Kalimantan last week, Dayaks again sought vengeance against Madurese. News reports told breathlessly of their primitive weapons, of beheadings and rumors of cannibalism. (Never mind that much of the violence this time was perpetrated by local Malays.) But far more frightening is what the killing says about Indonesia's social balancing act. Dozens of the archipelago's islands are home to minorities as resented as the Madurese. Religious divides--like those that fueled pitched battles between Christians and Muslims on the island of Ambon a month ago--scar many regions. A national election campaign that kicks off in less than two months promises to unleash a new round of unpredictable passions. And few can either make sense of the violence or promise that it will wane. On the chalkboard behind his desk in Jakarta, psychiatrist Suharko Kasran has sketched a "national aggressiveness curve"; over the past half-century, the line has risen inexorably. "It may be that my nation is a little bit sick, neurotic even," Kasran says.

By week's end an influx of troops seemed to have stopped the madness in Kalimantan at least. But the calm owed much to the fact that mobs of Malays and Dayaks had chased out thousands of Madurese--who originate from an island off Java--from the contested regency of Sambas, about 800 km north of Jakarta on the western coast of Borneo. Sketchy reports put the death toll in a single week of bloodletting at 180. Some 21,000 Madurese refugees crammed into shelters and an indoor sports stadium in the provincial capital of Pontianak, while 9,000 are waiting in safe areas around Sambas.

Their future is uncertain in more ways than one. The Madurese--a mere 8% of the province's population--have inspired resentment ever since they began emigrating to Kalimantan in large numbers in the 1960s. A series of riots in 1997, in which as many as 3,000 people may have died, were only the most recent in a string of battles between Madurese and indigenous Dayaks. Over the years, thousands of Dayaks have been displaced from their rainforest lands by giant logging companies; by the 1990s, 12 million hectares of forest were held by just 100 licenses. Yet Dayak anger did not fall upon the ethnic-Chinese tycoons who owned those firms. As Dayaks began to settle in towns along the edges of the forest, the slights they felt were more local--from petty crime, land disputes and a certain pushiness that was ascribed to those Madurese who became their neighbors.

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