Greg Poulgrain – The Jakarta media yesterday strongly criticised Indonesian army personnel who shot dead nine Papuans in a pre-dawn raid in the highlands of West Papua.
The front-page Indonesia Pos photograph showed "four soldiers treating the body of a Free Papua Movement (OPM) rebel like an animal they had hunted and killed". The English-language Jakarta Post said that "even in the most brutal of wars such behaviour is intolerable". It added: "If a person can still say there is nothing wrong with four soldiers treating a corpse in this manner, then we may conclude that there is something wrong with that person's mind."
Amien Rais, speaker of the People's Consultative Assembly, spoke more directly when he said that Indonesia was suffering from "a foul smell everywhere". It was not clear whether he was referring to the death toll caused by the army in Papua, Aceh, Maluku, Sulawesi and other Indonesian localities, or to the army itself. When President Megawati Sukarnoputri's top minister, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, in charge of political and security affairs, visited Australia last month, he denied any troop build-up in Papua.
Yet Papuan church and human rights groups, such as Elsham, are alarmed by the rapid increase in troops during the past six months. There are now estimated to be more than 35,000 soldiers in the province and sources have reported provocativeincidents at Wamena and Timika. They say that in the hills behind Jayapura, the capital of West Papua, for two hours every afternoon for several months, the army has been practising, firing thousands of rounds. Local Papuans have been asking whom the soldiers are going to shoot. Recent reports have said that 3000 more troops will land this month at Nabire on the northern coastline.
They are said to be equipped with gold-mining gear to take part in the gold rush that started 50km inland several years ago. Mr Yudhoyono has recently drawn attention to the high cost of fighting terrorism and separatism in Aceh and Papua, saying it has been "draining his country's struggling economy".
Sections of the Jakarta media have criticised army strategy and the exorbitant cost of its open war in Aceh; but Papuan rights groups say the undercover campaign in their province is against a population calling for peaceful dialogue. They also say the army's answer is provocation, with prominent political figures and educated Papuans targeted.
During the past 30 months, more than 1000 Papuans have died at the hands of Kopassus special forces. It has been alleged that some of these people have been poisoned. The shooting of two Americans near the Freeport mine last year caused the US Congress to refuse training for Kopassus.