Some 300 Dayak protestors burned two police posts in the Borneo city of Palangkaraya Friday in retaliation against the killings of four of their tribesmen by police, witnesses said.
The Dayaks, many of them students, massed outside the local parliament and urged lawmakers to press police to investigate the shootings, a local journalist told AFP by telephone.
They then burned two small roadside police posts and threatened to attack Madurese migrants, he said.
The Dayaks also demanded police turn over the bodies of two other tribesmen they claimed police were holding, the private SCTV television channel said.
Dayaks in the past weeks launched a wave of bloody ethnic cleansing against the Madurese, killing some 500 and forcing some 50,000 others to flee.
President Abdurrahman Wahid, who visited the city on Thursday, said in Jakarta that two policemen and six Dayaks had been killed in the clash.
"Some people tried to storm the governor's house," Wahid said.
The president also said more troops could be sent to Central Kalimantan if current security personnel could not contain the violence.
"We should not worry and panic," he said, speaking after Muslim Friday prayers near his private home.
But one of the demands of the Palangkaraya protestors was that Jakarta immediately withdraw the elite police mobile brigade Brimob from the province.
Police said five people, four Dayaks and a policeman, were killed and several others wounded Thursday when police opened fire on a mob of unruly Dayak protestors minutes after Wahid's visit.
"Four protestors were shot dead and a policeman was lynched by the mob," police spokeswoman Andi Selvy told AFP by phone from Palangkaraya.
She said three other people were wounded in the shootings.
On Thursday, hospitals had said they knew only of one protestor killed and two others injured, all by gunshots, while the state Antara news agency put the number of Dayaks shot dead at six.
Thursday's Dayak protest was staged outside the residence of Central Kalimantan governor -- while Wahid was holding talks inside -- to protest Jakarta's plan to return thousands of fleeing Madurese refugees to the province.
Antara also said that Dayaks were on the rampage, burning houses belonging to settlers from Madura island in Palangkaraya on Friday.
Another local journalist who witnessed Thursday's incident said that at first police fired three warning shots into the air, but failed to disband the protestors.
The police then fired a series of volleys aimed at the demonstrators, causing the crowd to panic. He said he saw five people injured.
The protestors were also demanding the release of several Dayaks detained by police over the violence in the area, he said.
Wahid visited both Palangkaraya and Sampit, the central Kalimantan town hardest hit by savage attacks by Dayaks on Madurese migrants. Most of those killed were Madurese, and many were beheaded.
Analysts have blamed cultural differences between the two communities as well as the dominance of the Madurese in the local economy for the violence.
Dayaks have accused Madurese of stealing their land but experts have said they lost much of it to government-sponsored logging and plantations and that Madurese have been made scapegoats.
Wahid on Friday said the conflict between the two groups was not religious despite the fact that Dayaks are mainly Christian and animist while Madurese are Muslim.
"There's no religious war there. Mosques are still intact," he said -- JAKARTA (AFP)
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