Arrested by Indonesian police in Irian Jaya for reporting while on a tourist visa, Swiss journalist Oswald Iten spent 11 days in jail before being deported. This is what he saw from his cell.

When the door to the cell slammed shut behind me, the first thing I noticed was the stench of urine and other human excreta. Then I saw, through the dim, humidly hot air, bodies lying packed on the filthy concrete floor. It was one o'clock in the morning. Someone in the lineup of bodies handed me a cardboard box, so that I'd at least have something clean to lay my head on.

The police had taken me into custody the previous day and grilled me for nine hours, because on December 1 I had taken "political photos" of pro-independence ceremonies, ostensibly not permitted by my tourist visa.

So there I was, in a cell with about 40 other prisoners. Among them were 26 members of the Satgas Papua, a militia of the independence movement which had established posts throughout Irian Jaya, also known as West Papua, and was responsible for guarding the Morning Star freedom flag.

Among the prisoners was the militia chief Boy Eluay, son of Theys Eluay, the head of the Papuan presidium (a body of selected leaders advocating independence), and Alex Baransano, the city commander of the Satgas in Port Numbay, as the West Papuans now call Jayapura.

The members of the Satgas Papua were unharmed. But at 4.30am on Thursday, December 7, noise from the guardroom penetrated the stuffing I'd put in my ears to help me sleep. At first I thought the guards were doing some rhythmic gymnastics, but it also sounded like blows landing on a body. My fellow prisoners were wide awake, and they tried to hold me back when I went to the entrance of our cell block. The upper part of the door was merely barred, so I had a view of the guardroom.

And what I saw there was unspeakably shocking. About half a dozen policemen were swinging their clubs at bodies that were lying on the floor and, oddly enough, did not cry out; at most, only soft groans issued from them. After a few long seconds, a guard saw me looking and struck his club against the bars of the cellblock door.

I quickly went back to my usual spot, from where I could still see the clubs, staffs and split bamboo whips at their work. Their ends were smeared with blood, and blood sprayed the walls all the way up to the ceiling.

Sometimes I saw the policemen hopping up on benches, continuing to strike blows from there or jumping back down onto the bodies below (which I could not see from my cell).

By about 5.15am, things quietened down and I heard the sound of water from a hose. But then the orgy of torture resumed, apparently with a new load of prisoners. My fellow inmates told me that a police post had been attacked during the night.

At one point, a guard came into our cell and indicated to me that what was going on outside was to be understood as the normal retribution for the death of policemen. The attack had taken place at 1.30am in the suburb of Abepura, and two policemen and a private guard had been killed.

At 7.30am the torturers went outside for morning muster, things quietened down and I looked over into the guardroom: the floor was covered with blood, as in a slaughterhouse. Some of my fellow prisoners were ordered out to clean the place up. Shortly before 10 o'clock, noise broke out again.

The cell block door was opened, and with the ends of their staffs the guards drove about three dozen new prisoners in, whose hair had been marked with white from a spray can, like sheep earmarked for shearing. The newcomers were jammed into a single cell. Then the cell block door was opened again and one body after another was tossed into our already crowded cell, some of them more dead than alive.

Most of them remained motionless where they fell, either unconscious or utterly exhausted. One of the tortured men was virtually blind and had to be led in by the hand by another prisoner; I couldn't tell whether his eyes had been totally destroyed or were merely swollen shut. The last one to enter was a large man, who fell over the bodies on the floor and lay there groaning horribly. He tried repeatedly to straighten himself up, only to fall back down again.

Now and again the faces of guards appeared at the barred window, looking down impassively at the tangle of maltreated bodies. In the back of the big man's head, there appeared to be a coin-sized hole through which I believed to spot some brain tissue.

After nearly an hour and a half of groaning and spasmodic movement, his suffering visibly neared its end. About two metres from me, his powerful body raised itself again and his head struck the wall. A final laboured breath issued from him, then his head dropped down onto the cement floor. At last his agony was over. After a while, three lackeys came and dragged the body out.

Later I learned that the man who had been tortured to death was named Ori Dronggi. I saw a picture of his corpse in the newspaper Cenderawasih Pos. The dispatch said three dead Papuans had been brought to the morgue, and the police stated they had "died in the fighting".

I don't know how the other two men died; one of them may have been the second man I had seen with a hole in his head, who had wiped his blood away with the same rag my cellmates generally used in their attempts to keep the toilet clean.

I had no longer seen him among the prisoners the following day. (All the men who had been arrested after the attack on the police outpost were released after 36 hours.)

Ori Dronggi was one of 18 men from the highland town of Wamena, all of whom had been arrested in a dormitory near the university in Abepura immediately after the attack on the police post. The chances are he had had nothing to do with the attack; the same was true of the 35 other men who had been tortured (I had counted them the following day).

A rumour went around that the police post had been attacked because one of the men on duty there was the one who had torn the Morning Star flag down on October 6. About half a dozen Papuans had been killed back then and in the days after it – and several times that many Indonesians, who fell victim to the Papuans' blind vengeance.

As a result of that chain of events, thousands of Indonesian settlers had fled from Wamena and the Baliem Valley.

The "negative" balance of casualties was seen as a disgrace for the police; their rage at the people of Wamena had already become legendary, so it was no surprise when, following the attack at Abepura, they took prisoners from that group.

Not a hair on my head was touched. In fact, the otherwise sadistic guards went out of their way to be nice to me. But the mistreatment of other prisoners continued.

On December 11 I again witnessed a horrible scene. About 2.45am, three new prisoners were brought in. Two of them were badly beaten outside my field of vision. The third Papuan fell right in front of my cell.

A booted guard kicked the man in the head; the prisoner's head banged loudly against my cell door, blood spurting from it onto my leg. The guard was apparently fascinated by the head going back and forth between his boot and the bars of my cell door, like some outsized ping-pong ball, so he kicked it a few more times. A second guard joined in with a swift kick to the middle of the prisoner's face, knocking him unconscious. But that still wasn't enough.

A third guard, who had been watching the scene with rifle in hand, now struck the butt of his weapon about five times into the senseless man's skull, which made a horrible sound. I could hardly believe it, but the victim was still alive the next day. He was taken away for interrogation.

After 12 days, Jakarta issued an order for my deportation. The fact that I was not harmed in the prison at Jayapura was due, among other things, to the swift arrival of a Swiss embassy official from Jakarta.

But several dozen less privileged prisoners remained back in the cell, with the Satgas militiamen still among them. Their life in prison will doubtless continue to be as I experienced it, marked by violence.

Each morning, while the police hold their muster, a loudspeaker broadcasts the Indonesian national anthem through the prison bars. At that point, the Papuans in their cells join in singing their independence anthem.

[Neue Zurcher Zeitung]