Police reinforcements were being flown to the town of Timika in Indonesia's Papua province following three days of street clashes in which three people died and dozens were injured.
One company – about 100 men – of paramilitary police arrived from the provincial capital Jayapura on Tuesday and another company would arrive from Makassar in South Sulawesi later Wednesday, said provincial police chief Budi Utomo. He said police would form a buffer force between the two warring groups and try to mediate a settlement.
The clashes have pitted thousands of mostly Amungme hill tribesmen who oppose the establishment of a new province of Central Irian Jaya against hundreds of supporters of the plan.
"They are to maintain a barricade between the two sides so that they do not attack each other again," Utomo told Metro TV station in a telephone interview. The tribesmen have used bows and arrows and spears during clashes on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
Around dawn Wednesday tribesmen angered by police efforts to prevent a renewed clash slightly injured one officer with an arrow. "His chin was grazed by an arrow and he is now back with his unit after treatment at the hospital," Captain Ruslan Abdul Gani told AFP from Timika.
He said Utomo was currently mediating a peace deal between the two camps involving "compensation under tribal laws." Tribesmen have said the violence will not end until the number of fatalities from each side is the same. Two of those killed were opponents of the new province.
"We are trying to persuade them to accept another form of compensation," Utomo said earlier in his radio interview. He said it may include the slaughter of pigs, highly prized animals in the local culture.
Tribal representatives say they fear that an influx of outsiders to help run the new province will marginalise them like Australia's Aborigines.
The central government says the purpose of dividing the existing province into three is to improve administration in the mountainous 411,000-square-kilometre territory, which has a population of about three million.
Opponents say the real aim is to lessen support for a long-running separatist movement. They say it violates the grant of special autonomy to the resource-rich province which went into effect in 2001.
Tom Beanal, a leading rights activist and Amungme tribal leader, arrived in Timka Wednesday and is mediating between the two camps, said Jopi Klangit, an activist of the Amungme Tribal Institute.
Trouble began after the declaration Saturday of the new province by local legislators and administrative leaders. Despite criticism in Jakarta, including from parliament speaker Akbar Tanjung, ministers have said they will go ahead with the division.
Indonesia has faced a sporadic low-level armed separatist revolt, along with peaceful pressure for independence, since it took control of Papua in 1963 from Dutch colonialists.