For 30 years, West Papua has been terrorised and plundered by its conquerors. Now the hill tribes are fighting back, reports Ian Williams
Erson Wenda stands on a ridge above the remote Baliem Valley, gesturing wildly with his arms, tears in his eyes. "The soldiers came from over there. They took people from my village, tying their hands, and brought them to these holes."
He bends forward, his hands behind him, re-enacting what happened when 11 of his terrified neighbours were shot and dumped into shallow graves on the ridge. A silent crowd gathers as he continues his story. A tribesman, wearing only a codpiece and feathers in his hair, stamps his spear and utters a deep moan. An old man in soiled shorts steps forward, pointing to bullet wounds in his thigh and foot.
Rain suddenly sweeps in across the valley, hammering on the tin-roof missionary's house at the foot of the ridge. Everyone scrambles for the shelter below. Erson's words now compete with rain on the tin roof: "They hacked the bodies before they threw them into the holes."
For the first time, the full horror of Indonesian rule in Irian Jaya (or West Papua, as Papuans prefer to call it) is emerging. For more than 30 years Jakarta fought a dirty war against the rebel group OPM and anyone thought to sympathise with them. Thousands are thought to have died.
Only now are villagers like Erson coming forward to have their reports documented by human rights workers in the highland capital of Wamena. "We're not scared any more. Before, if you as much as mentioned the rebels you'd be killed. People would be terrorised for as much as writing down their name. People were scared to even use the word Papua," says Yafet Yelemaken, who is gathering the evidence.
Years of repression now fuel an urgent desire for independence. The Baliem Valley is technically still an area of military operations, but suddenly the hated Indonesian military has disappeared. All along the bumpy road that threads through the valley, villagers have set up their own security posts.
Groups of men in bare feet and tattered clothes spring to attention as strangers approach. They brandish the ancient weapons of the Dani tribe that dominates this valley: bows and arrows, spears and crude knives.
Veteran members of the OPM, whooping and waving, emerge from the hills, like men from another age. They wear elaborate feathered head-dresses and enormous gourds over their loins. Their necklaces of giant boar's teeth glint as the valley is again bathed in sunshine.
"We're not afraid. Not now," they insist. Some of those we spoke to thought West Papua was already independent. Later, at Wamena's ramshackle airport, I sat between a naked tribesman wanting to sell me a necklace and a villager taking her child for medical treatment in the capital, Jayapura. It was funny, said the woman, so many strangers – single Javanese men – had arrived in Wamena recently, yet there seemed to be no work for them.
It was a throwaway comment, and I thought nothing of it at the time. After all, the Baliem Valley seemed to have already thrown off the Indonesian shackles.
In Jayapura the independence movement organised its most forthright challenge yet. Hundreds flooded the city centre last week for the raising of the outlawed Morning Star flag. The only sign of Indonesian authority was a solitary and bemused traffic policeman.
Indonesia's President Abdurrahman Wahid has said he will never let Irian Jaya go. Yet in the valley and here in Jayapura it looked too late, as black-clad militiamen, forbidden flags on their breasts, paraded openly.
These men policed the port with sticks and knives when a refugee ship arrived from Ambon. The atmosphere was tense, and at first nobody was allowed ashore. The few eventually permitted to land for medical treatment were escorted, menacingly, by those same militiamen. One pro-Indonesian businessmen was reportedly kidnapped and beaten by militia men. Chinese shop owners have been threatened.
At the local human rights office, long-standing critics of Indonesia's heavy-handed rule were deeply uneasy, drawing parallels with strife-torn Ambon and East Timor.
"This is a time-bomb waiting to explode. I'm afraid it's all going to end in tragedy," said Albert Rumbekwan, one activist. And then cryptically: "Why are we accepting favours from our enemies?" Among those "favours" is cash for the black-clad militia, from an unlikely, but disturbing source.
The self-proclaimed "Big Leader" of the West Papua independence movement, who runs the militia, is 62-year-old Theys Eluay, a tall, imposing man with a shock of white hair and a taste for loud jackets and ties. He was once a member of the ruling Golkar party and voted for integration with Indonesia in a dubious 1969 plebiscite of local leaders. For 30 years, he kept quiet about Indonesia's human rights abuses.
More sinister is his main source of money: Yorris Raweyai, deputy head of an Indonesian youth organisation with close ties to the Indonesian army and ex-President Suharto.
Yorris's youth organisation is involved in gambling, prostitution and protection rackets. In the past it was used by the military for the dirty work that they preferred to avoid: Yorris is awaiting trial over an attack in 1996 on the headquarters of Megawati Sukharnoputri, then an opposition leader. Now it is his money funding Eluay, his West Papuan separatist movement and their black-clad militia, called Satgas (Taskforce), and now claimed to be 7,000 strong.
Why is it being accepted? "The people are hungry for freedom, and that seems to matter more to them than the personalities fighting for it," says human rights activist Albert Rumbekwan.
More worrying, Rumbekwan's office has received reports of rival "red and white" militias, loyal to Jakarta, being trained by the military in other cities. At least one clash has been reported. Jakarta is boosting the number of troops in the province, they claim. I thought again about the woman at Wamena airport and her story of those single Javanese men arriving.
Unlike East Timor, or Ambon, Irian Jaya has rich reserves of minerals and metals. The Grasberg mine, in the mountains of this wild province, has the world's biggest gold deposit. Freeport McMoran, the American firm that runs it, is Indonesia's single biggest taxpayer.
Economically, the province is vital to Indonesia. The fear among human rights groups in Jayapura is that some powers in Jakarta want to create conditions to justify a military crackdown here or to unleash chaos to undermine President Wahid's dwindling credibility.The parallels with East Timor and Ambon are frightening indeed.
[Ian Williams is Channel 4 News Asia Correspondent]