Marianne Kearney, Wamena – Mr Yesaya Oagai, sitting cross-legged before a group of men from nearby villages in the lush Baliem valley, wins a chorus of agreement when he holds forth on Indonesia's motivation for developing its most backward province – Irian Jaya, also known as West Papua.

"They make proposals to the outside world to get money for helping people, but then they do nothing. They are smart in this way," he says, warming to his topic.

And like an increasing number of Papuans, he is increasingly cynical about whether Indonesia's plans to develop the region will ever help him and his village.

"They give us family planning until we don't have any children. They want to finish off the black skins here." Mr Yesaya, who is in his fifties, may not have had the benefits of an Indonesian education and has no access to the latest debates and news on television. But like most of his contemporaries in the village, he is surprisingly articulate about his views.

In another village not far away, where men over 30 years of age still don the traditional penis gourd and some of the women still wear straw skirts, talk of independence centres on how communities such as theirs might be developed.

"Lots of us want to go to school. A few have enrolled but then stopped because they have to buy school uniforms and all the extra things," says Mr Paulus Mabel, who notes that the Indonesian school system is too expensive, so most children try to go to mission-run schools instead.

"In fact, we don't know the real meaning of independence or autonomy," he admits, but he suspects it might give Papuans more control over their culture and their life. "They don't feel happy with our culture, they want it to disappear. Whereas Papua Merdeka wants to preserve the culture," he adds.

Tradition amid modernisation

Their culture, which has remained virtually untouched and unchanged for thousands of years, has survived largely intact despite Indonesia's attempts to modernise them and bring them into the new world. Rituals such as marriage and cremation ceremonies are still carried on, sometimes only metres away from the intrusions of the modern world – in this case a bitumen road.

Along this road, dozens of betel-nut chewing women make a pilgrimage to a surprisingly modern brick house. Behind the house lies the village compound where several villages have arrived, their gifts of pigs having been laid out for cooking.

The men, clad in penis gourds, arm bracelets, and feathered headbands, hunch over the pigs, slicing and separating the organs with huge knives. Women at the other end of the compound sit wailing outside the round hut of a woman who died. As each new villager arrives, he or she perform a ritual crying in front of the village elders.

Surrounded by traditional round grass huts, concessions to the modern world appear to be mostly superficial. Younger men and all except the older women, have some kind of modern clothes.

Missionaries have also left their mark – the village claims to be Catholic, so before cremating the dead woman, the local priest makes a sign of the cross, welcomes God with the Dani words of welcome, and launches into Dani prayers. Many of them see little advantage in following a modern Indonesian lifestyle.

They might not understand the modern world, but they do know that their unique culture is one of their few tradable assets. They even blame the Indonesians for their sudden drop in tourism.

"Tell the world this village is quiet. The Indonesians say it is chaotic here but it is not. We want more tourists," says the village head, desperate for some hard cash.

Dr Benny Giay, an anthropologist originally from the Baliem valley but educated in Jayapura, remembers Indonesia's first attempts at "civilising" the Papuans.

Under "Operasi Koteka", started in 1972, Jakarta tried to persuade the Papuans to abandon their primitive dress. As a semi-naked high school student at the time, Dr Giay was one of their first targets of modernisation.

"They thought that if they gave us just two pieces of clothing, then overnight we could join the modern world," he laughs.

"But they didn't tell us you had to wash the clothing or give us any soap. In six months, many people's clothes, without washing, just fell apart and they went back to their traditional clothing. The Indonesians say we are backward but how stupid is 'Operasi Koteka' if they don't even think about how to replace the clothing?"

'Development' breeds dependency

The limited success of "Operasi Koteka" can be seen in Wamena's main streets. Dani tribesmen, naked except for their penis gourds, some decorative armbands or neck bands and perhaps a Bob Marley-style cap, walk about freely, with no hint of self-consciousness.

"It is the Indonesians who have the problem with the koteka, not us. I felt very comfortable wearing my koteka but when I started wearing clothes I felt as if I was naked," says Dr Benny.

Preserving highland culture is not just a simple matter of allowing men to continue to don their distinctive penis gourds.

The "wipe out the koteka" approach to development means that instead of making the most of the native people's farming skills and developing Irian Jaya's market, which could then be expanded to export elsewhere, the authorities in Jakarta focus on short-term and sporadic aid projects which do not reduce the highlands' dependency on outside markets.

The Indonesian development of Irian Jaya gives a new twist to the term "cargo culture" – a term to describe Papuans' messianic belief that the gods would return and deliver them the "cargo", or the white man's modern goods – say local critics.

The economy of the highlands is made dependent on Indonesia's "cargo drops", and Jakarta's ninsistance on developing projects without consulting the locals means that Papuans lose their sense of initiative and wait for the largely non-Papuan civil service to come up with solutions.

Autonomy in name only

The development of Wamena, the small town at the centre of the Baliem valley, is a prime example, critics say. The Baliem valley is one of the most fertile places in the region. It is also one of the wettest places on earth and its rivers are teeming with marine life.

Yet over 30 years after Indonesia took control of Irian Jaya, the town still has to import drinking water and much of its food, except fruit and vegetables, from Sulawesi or Java. Ironically, the people producing goods locally rather than those importing them are struggling to eke out an existence.

The Dani and other local tribes live on the margins of Wamena's cash economy because their fruit and vegetables sell very cheaply in the town's over-saturated market, while the cost of goods that come in from outside – from places such as provincial capital Jayapura – is two to three times the standard price. Every single knife and fork, plastic chair, paper napkin and item of modern clothing is flown into Wamena.

The whole town has been built around the airport, and its economy is virtually dependent on the salaries of civil servants and security personnel.

The province is timber-rich but the logging industry has been developed solely to service the rest of Indonesia, says Mr Augustinus Rumansara, a community development manager with the World Wide Fund for Nature.

Most of the timber cut from Irian's vast forests is sent to Java to be turned into furniture, plywood or paper, which then is re-imported back to its source. Thus Irian pays a high price for re-importing its own timber and the profits stay elsewhere.

"The government has a colonial approach to development. Irian is seen only as the source of raw materials for industries elsewhere in Indonesia, but they never think about creating opportunities for local markets," says Mr Augustinus.

In the 1970s, he was one of the few people to introduce the highlanders to coffee-growing, hoping that this cash crop would provide the farmers with a much needed source of income. However 20 years later, only a trickle of the high-quality arabica beans ever reach Jayapura, while most of Jayapura's coffee is imported from Sulawesi.

Even with high costs of flying the beans into Jayapura, farmers could still turn a profit if they had a co-operative or marketing board to sell their beans, but lacking this kind of long-term funding, Mr Augustinus has not been able to develop the industry. Meanwhile, government plans to develop the arabica business have been on the drawing board for the last 10 years.

Papuans are constantly told that they are not as clever as Indonesians, says one Papuan forestry official. In the civil service, this bias and the lower education levels of the tribesmen means that few of them are in positions to control how their province is developed.

It is little wonder that most Papuans usually greet the question of the proposed autonomy, due to be implemented next year, with a cynical laugh. "In 1996 we already had autonomy, but it was autonomy only in name," said one civilian militia member.

The constant racist reminders that Papuans are not as good as their Indonesians neighbours has also united the province's dozens of different tribes, helping to forge their identity as one race that is very different from that of Indonesia's. Says Mr Edie Waromi, an independence supporter: "Our heart, our culture is Melanesian, not Indonesian."