Home for the Boomerang

During President Sukarno's konfrontasi with Malaysia, the Indonesian army equipped, trained and sheltered guerrillas to harass the Malaysians along the two countries' common border on the island of Borneo. Now the move has boomeranged. Once Sukarno's successor, General Suharto, had ended the foolish quarrel with Malaysia, the guerrillas were left on their own in the jungles of Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo. Peking, which sees the island's large Chinese population as the advance phalanx for an ultimate Communist takeover, has been exhorting the mostly Chinese guerrillas not only to continue to offer a major challenge to neighboring Malaysia but also to turn on their former Indonesian mentors.

Numbering 750 hard-core fighters, plus several thousand support troops, the guerrillas have repeatedly attacked Indonesian military sites and terrorized Malaysian border areas since July. They have also tried to enlist by intimidation Borneo's primitive Dayak tribesmen, the descendants of legendary headhunters. This tactic provoked a reaction that their Maoist guerrilla handbooks did not even hint at. Meeting terror with terror, the Dayaks exploded in an avenging rampage of killing, burning and cannibalism against all Chinese.

No Homes or Hope. Last week TIME Correspondent Peter Vanderwicken, after a visit to the remote jungle battleground, filed this report:

It is an ancient tradition among the pagan Dayaks that collecting the severed heads of the enemy brings honor and virility. The guerrillas should have reckoned with this tradition when they butchered a dozen recalcitrant Dayaks in the village of Taum. Angry tribal powwows quickly followed throughout northwest Kalimantan, and runners were sent from village to village with bowls of blood, the signal to all Dayaks to get ready to use their homemade pistols, poison darts and machete-like parangs against the Chinese.

The Dayaks were soon engaged in a full-scale massacre. They attacked Chinese in their homes and in their shops, killing them, beheading them, even chopping out their livers and hearts and eating them. Before the Indonesian army could cool off the Dayaks, at least 250 Chinese had been slaughtered; Catholic missionaries believe that as many as 1,000 were actually killed.

About 25,000 of the traumatized Chinese have descended on the sleepy West Borneo port of Pontianak, where they live in dismal squalor. The Chinese are crammed into makeshift quarters, bathe in muddy, sewage-filled canals and wander aimlessly along the waterfront, many of them without homes or hope. Pontianak's Communist propagandists could easily use these displaced Chinese as a breeding ground for more unrest and tension.

Burrowed in Bunkers. A few Chinese are drifting back to their villages under the protection of reinforced Indonesian troops, but the guerrillas themselves remain threatening and elusive. As in Viet Nam, they burrow deep in underground bunkers and in mountainside caves, attack only when they consider the odds right. Two weeks ago, 500 guerrillas caught Indonesian troops in a heavy mortar barrage at Fir Mountain, near the Malaysian Borneo state of Sarawak, where the soldiers had stumbled upon a major guerrilla encampment. While the Indonesians flew in more troops, the Malaysians evacuated Indonesian casualties.

The Malaysians are helping out for good reason. Most of the guerrillas are actually Sarawak Chinese, and the name of their movement alone--Sarawak People's Liberation Army--indicates that their aim is to overthrow Malaysian rule there. Nor do the Indonesians minimize the danger that the guerrillas pose to themselves. Citing captured guerrilla documents that urge a large-scale Chinese uprising throughout the island, Indonesia's commander in West Kalimantan, Brigadier General A. J. Witono, told me last week that the guerrillas are part of a two-pronged campaign of armed revolt and political subversion mounted by Peking against all of Borneo. He is making progress against the guerrillas, he says, but will not even guess when he finally may be able to mop them up.

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