Hamish McDonald – Political leaders in Canberra and Port Moresby want the voices of a diplomatically awkward rebellion buried in East Awin, Papua New Guinea, a settlement in a vast and sparsely populated landscape of rivers, swamps and forest.
To reach East Awin takes an expensive flight to the little town of Kiunga, a two-hour trip up the Fly River, followed by a three-hour truck ride through axle-deep mud, and finally a 12-kilometre walk when the road becomes impassable for normal vehicles.
Paulus Samkakay's quest for political asylum took him to the fringes of Australia, took the life of his youngest child and ended in bitter disappointment here. Samkakay, 35, was the political refugee from Indonesia's restive West Papua whom the Howard Government turned away earlier this year.
He made it to Australian territory, the Torres Strait island of Boigu, on May 11, only to be held in detention at an out-of-the-way hotel and blocked from journalists and human rights lawyers.
Two months later, he was turned over to Papua New Guinea, under an agreement signed in 2003 that asylum seekers spending more than seven days in transit through PNG are deemed to be Port Moresby's responsibility.
While his application was being studied by Australian authorities, his wife, Yokbet, and three children waited in a tiny village just inside PNG territory, and the youngest, a three-month-old girl, died of an unknown illness.
Reunited in July, the couple and their two remaining children were transferred to East Awin, placed in a small guesthouse and told they had six months before they had to build their own house and find their own source of income. "I came to the land of the kangaroo with big hopes," Samkakay said, his eyes filling with angry tears.
The dockfront activist from Merauke, a port town on the south coast of Papua, is a prime example of the kind of refugee Canberra does not want, if it wants any at all. He embodies the disillusionment of most Papuans with Indonesian rule.
His late father, Boneffasius Samkakay, had been one of 1000 local figures hand-picked by Indonesia to carry out the 1969 act of self-determination after a transition from Dutch rule.
They dutifully delivered a 100 per cent pro-Jakarta vote, and Samkakay carries the certificates of appreciation given to his father from former president Soeharto and the Indonesian army commander at the time, General Sarwo Edhie Wibowo.
But he also carries a carefully folded Morning Star flag, the flag of the Papuan independence movement whose appearance at sneak flag-raisings across the border is usually followed by tough crackdowns and long jail terms.
After Soeharto's fall from power in 1998, Samkakay was prominent in the upsurge of open independence activism, becoming a member of a Papuan youth council. He was first arrested in 1988 and has had to lie low on several occasions.
Finally in March, in the tense atmosphere following the crossing of the Torres Strait by 43 Papuans, he says he was summoned to a meeting with local police, and decided to clear out.
The family walked along the coast to the PNG village of Bula, where they stayed for a month. At the beginning of May, Samkakay set off for Boigu, finally making the short canoe crossing, helped by two other Papuans. On arrival, they handed over a letter describing themselves as political asylum seekers. Samkakay was immediately arrested, flown by helicopter to Horn Island and kept in a hotel.
His immigration case officer was in contact with a counterpart in Merauke, named as Ibu (Mrs) Ida, while the Indonesian interpreter employed by Immigration kept telling him not to raise independence issues, saying: "There's no need to talk about things that are already over." In July, just before being sent back to PNG, he was formally notified: "Because of Australian law and where you landed, you are not able to apply for any visa in Australia."
But in East Awin, a string of settlements in country inhabited by cannibals about 40 years ago, the 2500 Papuan settlers are far from reconciled to their fate and precarious subsistence livelihood.
Deliberately chosen for its inaccessibility, East Awin is a gruelling day's journey to the nearest marketplace in Kiunga for its peanuts and other produce, with truck and boat fares chewing up much of the earnings.
"From the beginning it was not logical to build a settlement so far from the river and the road," said Father Jacques Gros, 66, a French-born Catholic priest who lives in the settlement and walks its muddy roads barefoot. "But nothing can be done – we have to make the best of it."
The Papuans are from diverse backgrounds, the majority villagers from directly across the border, some educated people from the cities of Jayapura and Biak on the north coast, some Dani highlanders from the Baliem Valley. Most arrived in the late 1980s after a flare-up of violence.
A further 8000 Papuans are squatting in camps close to the border between the Star Mountains and the Torres Strait, not regarded as refugees.
Many remain in close contact with the rebel Free Papua Organisation, the OPM, which keeps up a political and guerilla struggle against Jakarta rule, and whose operatives such as John Wakom live along the Fly and maintain contact with its armed groups.
Fear of Indonesian spies and informers pervades the community. The murder of a European journalist in Kiunga some years ago, found with his throat cut in his room at a Catholic school, is attributed to an agent.
On an overnight visit to East Awin, this reporter was advised by the PNG Government's camp manager, Jex Punai, to lock all doors and keep a parang, or machete, by his bed: "It's just a precaution. You just never know, there are so many factions here."
After hopes raised by the Indonesian political flux following Soeharto's fall in 1998, the Papuans realise they are facing more difficult times as Jakarta regains some strategic importance for the West.
"We were sold out in the Cold War and now it's happening again in the war against al-Qaeda," says John Ondawame, who runs the Papuan independence movement's sole quasi-diplomatic office in the region, located in Vanuatu.
Ondawame said the OPM's armed resistance was weak, but important, and the Papuan cause was getting more notice internationally. "The situation is the reverse of Aceh," he said, referring to the fierce separatist war at the other end of Indonesia which has ended in an autonomy agreement.
Afonsina Hambring, 49, who spent three years in the jungle with her husband, an OPM commander, before crossing to PNG in 1988, leads the Papuan women's association here. Their main activity is prayer. "Every second we pray that God will start a war to change us," she said. "To make us one. Let's not get to the position of East Timor, fighting against each other."
Paulus Samkakay, sent to East Awin by Australia, is determined not to be silenced as a condition of his "permissive residence". "I am under orders from the PNG Government not to engage in any political activity," he said. "But I will not agree – it is within my human rights. I am a supporter of independence and will keeping saying so. If Australia will not take me, maybe Holland."