The Dayaks gave up head-hunting 30 odd years ago, but they still know how to chop off heads. Many of the 400 Madurese settlers murdered by bands of young Dayak men since the killing started a few weeks ago in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, have been found headless. Is this merely savagery versus civilization - or is it an ugly but legitimate anti-colonial struggle? The Madurese settlers moved to Borneo in good faith, but they do not share either language or religion or ethnicity with the indigenous people of Borneo, who did not invite them. And it is an open secret that the whole policy of 'transmigration', while ostensibly meant to relieve overcrowding on the congested central island of Java, was really designed to homogenize and control the non-Javanese, largely non-Muslim areas of the Indonesian archipelago like Borneo, the Moluccas and West Papua. Then the old dictator fell in 1998 after 30 years in power and was replaced by a weak democratic government. Senior armed forces officers, worried that democracy will reduce their opportunities for large-scale corruption, secretly encouraged regional separatist movements in the hope both of making themselves indispensable and of destabilizing democracy itself. Mau Mau revisited So soon there were 'ethnic clashes' in Borneo, in West Papua, and in the Moluccas, building on existing grievances but facilitated by the military's deliberate policy of non-intervention. The first Dayak-Madurese clashes, in western Borneo in 1999, left 260 dead. This time the fighting is in south-central Borneo, the death toll is worse and the military have done little except help the Madurese to flee. It's a bad business all round, but what can explain or justify the brutality of the Dayaks' behaviour? The best analogy, perhaps, is the Mau Mau movement in Kenya. Back in the Fifties, the last decade before the British realized that the game of empire was up, there was a substantial white settler population in the Kenya Highlands, the most desirable farming land in Kenya. Kikuyu tribesmen, whose families had been pushed off that land, formed a terrorist army called Mau Mau and began attacking the settlers, often massacring entire families. Whatever the rights and wrongs of their tactics, they were certainly right to resist the invasion of their lands. They won, in the end, and their leader, Jomo Kenyatta, became the first president of independent Kenya. The motivation of the Dayaks in Borneo is not much different from that of the Mau Mau in Kenya. So are they headed for the same outcome? It depends. Leave and let live Indonesia is undoubtedly still an empire, not a coherent nation. The archipelago was never united under a single government until the Dutch imperialists did it, using mostly Javanese troops to conquer the rest. After the interlude of the Japanese occupation during World War II, the war of independence against the Dutch in 1947 was fought and won mostly in Java by the Javanese - and they just took over the empire. Under both the independence hero Sukarno and his successor Suharto, it remained an empire, run mostly by and for the Javanese, who account for less than half the population. If its new democratic rulers do not realize that it now has to be run differently, with enough self-determination for its smaller peoples, then Indonesia will break up as other colonial empires have. It is entirely possible to reconcile most of Indonesia's other peoples to living in a genuinely multi-ethnic democracy if their rights are respected (with the exception of West Papua, which will probably have to be set free in the end). But in order to win back the loyalty of the Dayaks to the Indonesian state, most of the Madurese, who were evidently sent to the wrong place, will probably have to be evacuated. Can the Indonesian government act on these realities in time? Not under the present president, Abdurrahman Wahid, a blind and increasingly erratic leader who showed his deep concern for the fate of the Dayaks and Madurese alike by leaving for a two-week trip to west Asia and Africa as the slaughter mounted in Borneo, saying he was not worried about it. Unless 'Gus Dur', as he is popularly known, either resigns or is impeached in the next few months, both Indonesia's democracy and its territorial integrity are at risk.