Terry Friel, Wamena – Indonesia's first democratic election in four decades has hit trouble in remote Irian Jaya, where separatist passions have prompted some voters to boycott the poll and some ballots may not be delivered in time.
Separatists say they cannot accept the election and are prepared to die for their cause.
"If there's a war with Indonesian soldiers, we are ready to kill," one former war commander with the Free Papua Movement (OPM) told Reuters at a secret location in the isolated Baliem Valley in the vast province's central highlands.
"We are ready to die for freedom – many already have and so are we," said the man, a relative of OPM leader Mathias Wenda, asking that his name and the name of his village not be published for fear of reprisals.
Independence supporters, including ordinary Irianese, are using the election to focus attention on their demands to split from Indonesia 30 years after the Dutch handed over control.
On Monday, an election gathering of more than 3,000 Lani tribespeople at Pirime, 80 km west of the central highlands district capital Wamena, erupted into a spontaneous rally for independence with many saying they would boycott the poll.
Many people on the streets of Wamena and in surrounding highlands villages angrily accuse Indonesia of widespread human rights abuses and of exploiting the province's vast mineral, gas and timber resources without giving back money or jobs.
Melanesian Irian Jaya is ethnically and culturally closer to Papua New Guinea than the rest of Indonesia, especially the dominant Javanese.
In the Baliem Valley, many tribesmen still wear only penis gourds and feathered head dresses and the women just grass skirts.
The OPM, numbering several hundred men, has recently stepped up its operations, prompting the Indonesian military to say it would declare the PNG border area a military operations zone.
The June 7 election will end the parliamentary stranglehold of the ruling Golkar party, once the unbeatable political vehicle of reviled former president Suharto.
Independence activists are seizing on the end of the Suharto era and new President B.J. Habibie's offer of independence to another restive territory, East Timor. They say whole villages throughout the highlands have refused to register for the election as a pro-independence boycott because no party supports a split.
Only a handful of red and green flags hang limply outside Wamena's main market, in contrast to the sea of flags and banners in the colours of the 48 parties contesting the election that dominate many Indonesian cities in the countdown to the poll.
Wamena's daily campaign rallies, allocated according to a roster, rarely attract more than a truckload of party faithful, who drive around the town of 2,000 a couple of times, singing and chanting.
But district officials say more than 200,000 voters have enrolled, 85 percent of those eligible.
However, two weeks out from polling day, all Wamena district's ballot papers for the national, provincial and district elections remain piled in a government warehouse, awaiting distribution across a region where getting supplies to some villages can take weeks.
Many villages in the rugged area can only be reached by foot or by riverboat from towns that in turn can themselves only be reached by plane.
Election officials are counting on a massive airlift to deliver the ballots in time, but are at the hands of the notoriously bad and unpredictable weather.
"We need good weather from now until election day so that our programme can be done on schedule," said deputy chairman of the local election committee, Enky Nahuway.
But another official sitting among the more than half a million ballots warehoused in Wamena was more cautious. Asked if the papers could be delivered in time, he said: "We hope so."