Jakarta – Three people were killed and seven others injured yesterday when police clashed with a crowd defending a separatist flag hoisted in the Indonesian province of Papua, formerly known as Irian Jaya.
Police said the clash broke out after about 500 people hoisted the separatist Morning Star flag outside a church in the coastal oil town of Sorong.
"We opened fire using rubber bullets after they attacked us," the Sorong police chief, Superintendent Charles Victor Sitorus, said by telephone. "We received a report about the flag hoisting from the local priest. Then we sent our personnel to the scene, but we were attacked by the mob."
He said three civilians were killed in the shooting, but insisted that only rubber bullets had been used. Four police and several civilians were wounded.
A staff member at Sorong's state hospital said the three dead had all suffered bullet wounds, while some of the injured had wounds inflicted by blunt objects and arrows. "The three people from the Emanuel church incident this morning are now in the morgue, while seven others, including several policemen, are being treated at the emergency ward," he said.
Indonesia's Antara news agency said some of the crowd had fired arrows and attacked the police with stone axes and other rudimentary weapons, forcing them to open fire.
Jakarta has allowed the raising of the Morning Star flag in specific Papua locations on condition that it only be alongside, and lower than, the Indonesian flag.
In May and June it also allowed the holding of a pro-independence Congress of the Papuan People in the capital, Jayapura. The congress issued a resolution saying that the western half of New Guinea island, which borders Papua New Guinea, had been independent since it was declared a West Papuan state in 1961.
The congress demanded that Jakarta recognise Papua's independence, saying that a United Nations-conducted "act of free choice" vote in 1969, which led to the former Dutch territory becoming part of Indonesia, was unrepresentative.
The clash in Sorong came a day after separatist leaders had threatened to wage all-out war against the Jakarta government if their calls for independence remained unheeded.
The chairman of the pro-independence Presidium of the People of Papua, Mr Theys Eluay, condemned the Indonesian national assembly for recommending that the Government not tolerate separatism and ban the raising of the separatist flag. He argued that the incorporation of Papua into Indonesia had been achieved by military force and a fraudulent vote.
President Abdurrahman Wahid pledged at an annual session of the People's Consultative Assembly, which ended last Friday, not to tolerate separatism in the vast Indonesian archipelago. He told MPs that Papua would instead be accorded special broad autonomy before the end of the year.