Tim Johnston – Indonesia may be gearing up for a new offensive against separatist rebels in the restive eastern province of Papua, observers believe. Analysts in Jakarta have warned that the killing of 10 suspected members of the Free Papua Organisation (OPM) this week could be the first shots in a renewed campaign.
"What we may be seeing in this operation is the stepping up of operations to go after the OPM in a way that is probably not unrelated to the military emergency in Aceh," said Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group yesterday.
Indonesia's influential military, which had been forced to take a back seat since the fall of disgraced dictator Suharto five years ago, is once again in the ascendancy despite continuing questions over its human rights record.
The army won the political debate this week to have the military "emergency" in another restive province, Aceh, extended. More than 1000 people are believed to have been killed there in the past six months of emergency.
Papua has been relatively peaceful in recent months, but the military has been bringing in reinforcements. "It is as though we have been moving in the direction of a crackdown in Papua, but a much less visible one than in Aceh," Dr Jones said. The military declined to comment yesterday.
The OPM group killed on Wednesday included senior commander Justinus Murib. Pictures of his bloodied and shirtless corpse, supported by grinning soldiers, have been published widely in the Indonesian press. Indonesian analysts believe Murib was behind the attack on an army base in the town of Wamena in April in which two soldiers were killed and weapons stolen. The army says he was planning further raids.
The OPM is not the force it once was. Ill-armed and fractured along ethnic lines, it has had little recent military successes and parts of the organisation have made tentative efforts at beginning dialogue with Jakarta. "They hope dialogue is the way forward to a peaceful solution and the end of the human rights problem in Papua," Aloy Ranuarin, of the Papua-centred human rights organisation Elsham, said yesterday.
But their efforts have been futile. "I can't imagine Jakarta saying 'yes' to any negotiations because they are so much stronger than the OPM. The OPM does not constitute a real security threat," Ms Jones said.
The OPM has been fighting for independence since the former Dutch colony was annexed by Indonesia in 1963. The UN gave respectability to the shotgun marriage in 1969 with a so-called "Act of Free Choice", which critics say was anything but.
Thousands of people died in the ensuing attempts by the army to suppress revolt, but the situation seemed to be improving after Suharto's fall in 1998, when a number of influential Papuan leaders forswore violence and formed a negotiating bloc, the Papua Presidium Council.
Hopes for a peaceful solution received a possibly fatal blow in 2001 when the council's charismatic head, Theys Eluay, was murdered and his body dumped in a ravine. Seven members of the army's elite Kopassus unit have been jailed for their part in the murder, despite the post-conviction assertion by the head of the army, General Ryamizard Ryacudu, that they were "heroes".