JAKARTA -- Insult a Madurese and you will be "answered with a knife", so wrote Dutchman Tadema Wop in 1866. No Madurese, he said, would ever be seen without a spear or kris or a tjaloq -- a kind of machete with a bent point.

"He uses such a tjaloq for almost everything. He cuts wood with it, cuts brush to clear himself a path ... and equally he uses it to cut off arms, legs and the head of his fellow man, if it so happens to come out that way," the colonialist wrote in his memoirs, immortalising a stereotype about the Madurese that persists to this day.

And so non-Madurese are not surprised that when a Malay bus driver in the Sambas region of West Kalimantan stared angrily at a Madurese passenger who refused to pay the fare, he returned soon after with a long knife to try to kill the driver. That was two weeks ago, and, following a January incident when a Madurese mob attacked a Malay village over the beating of a Madurese thief, killing three people, Malay patience finally snapped.

Aggravated once again by the "culturally-insensitive" Madurese custom of carrying knives and penchant for revenge in someone else's homeland, the indigenous Malays and Dayaks, who each account for about 35 to 40 per cent of the province's estimated four million people, have ganged up to chase the interloper out.

Anti-Madurese clash No 9 in two decades has so far killed more than 100 people in one week. The last big one two years ago claimed between 500 and 1,000 lives. That one, like all previous clashes, claim the Dayaks, was triggered by a Madurese stabbing a Dayak to death and then refusing to accept the demands of Dayak adat or customary law concerning such a sin -- usually a fine of about 11 million rupiah (S$2,300) to the family of the victim and his community as well as turning himself in to the police.

When a transgressor refuses to accept the requisite adat demand, then tradition also requires the Dayaks to perform a ritual that calls for the shedding of blood. "The killing of the Madurese was not for reasons of revenge, but rather the need to fulfil traditional obligations that have bound the Dayaks since time immemorial," explained the Kalimantan Review in an article about the bloody conflict in 1996-97.

Against the numerically superior Dayaks, the Madurese have never been a match, ending up invariably as the bigger losers. But now, the 120,000 Madurese, migrants and descendants of settlers transported by official edict from the arid island off the eastern tip of Java to the sparsely populated island of Kalimantan since the beginning of the century, face a united front of Dayaks, Malays, Chinese and even Bugis settlers.

"Everyone is fed up with the situation," Dayak anthropologist Stephanus Djuweng tells The Straits Times. Citing an irreconcilable "cultural gap", he says ethnic cleansing is not the appropriate term to use here although "they want something like that".

"The indigenous people of West Kalimantan don't want the Madurese," he says. And peace pacts arranged by officials imposed by Jakarta --long seen as autocrats more interested in robbing Dayaks of their ancestral land than in protecting their interests -- are futile because they do not involve the actual combatants, only "the elites in the city".

Yet, as Jakarta officials are beginning to acknowledge, the Madurese migrants are as much victims of 32 years of New Order policies as the indigenous Dayaks and Malays. A confidential government report prepared last year tracing the background of the 1996-97 ethnic clash concluded that Jakarta had not only marginalised West Kalimantan's indigenous peoples economically and politically -- only one of the province's six districts, the most remote, is headed by a Dayak -- but also exacerbated the problem by transplanting the Muslim Madurese there.

The Madurese as a community, concedes a senior government official, are "sociologically unsuitable to harmonious living with the Dayaks", who consider Muslim beliefs and practices totally incompatible with their culture even though they can co-exist happily with the other main ethnic group, the Muslim Malays.

"For a long, long time, the Dayaks have accumulated a lot of unhappiness against the government," notes the official. "The Madurese are the victims of that unhappiness."

It did not help that although most Madurese worked in urban areas as pedicab drivers, coolies and stevedores, some were able to acquire land in the coastal areas as small-time rice farmers under official schemes, taking them a notch above the dispossessed Dayaks. And so, in yet another replay of the classic case of political and economic tensions manifesting themselves as ethnic tensions, the Dayaks and Malays of West Kalimantan turn against the alien in their midst instead of the larger politico-economic forces they cannot control.