Jakarta – Fighting in Indonesia's restive Irian Jaya province killed four soldiers from the country's elite special forces and a separatist rebel, media reports said Sunday. The death toll was the highest since a series of skirmishes in December that killed at least 20 people.
The state Antara news agency said the latest clash occurred on Saturday when rebels launched a surprise attack on a military outpost in Betaf, a town near the border with Papua New Guinea, about 2,500 miles northeast of Jakarta.
The news agency said the guerrillas tortured and then killed the four members of Kopassus, the US-trained special forces brigade accused of numerous human rights abuses in Irian Jaya and other violence-wracked regions.
Irian Jaya, also known as West Papua, is located on the western half of New Guinea island. Rebels of the Free Papua Movement have been waging a war of independence since Indonesia occupied the former Dutch colony in 1963.
Indonesia formally annexed the region in 1969 after a UN-sanctioned "Act of Free Choice" in which about 1,000 tribal leaders supposedly expressed their desire for integration. Critics have dismissed the process as a sham.
Since then, repeated offensives by heavily armed government forces have failed to eliminate the insurgents but have resulted in thousands of civilian deaths. The rebels, armed with bows, arrows and spears, have managed to evade troops by hiding in Irian Jaya's jungle-covered mountain ranges.
Last month, a group of the rebels abducted 16 people, including three South Korean employees of a logging company, also near border area. They have since released 13 captives and demanded direct talks with President Abdurrahman Wahid.
Meanwhile, violence in Indonesia's strife-torn province of Aceh has killed at least six people in the last two days, police said Sunday.
The deaths bring to at least 34 the number of political deaths in the province since rebel representatives and government officials agreed to extend a cease-fire earlier last month. More than 6,000 people have been killed in the past decade.
Aceh, 1,100 miles northwest of Jakarta, is an oil- and gas-rich province on the northern tip of Sumatra, where separatist rebels have isputes/peasant struggle