Stephen Fitzpatrick, Jayapura – Computing science student Johannes Kurisi was shot in the back almost a week ago during an apparent Papuan gang conflict, but he and the friends tending to him in a Jayapura hospital don't expect the assailants to be caught.
"The amber-skins aren't interested in helping us Papuans," declared 18-year-old fellow student Assa Asso outside Kurisi's hospital room, summing up in a few words one of the sharp currents of dissatisfaction in Indonesia's easternmost province.
Although Jakarta's transmigration program encouraging central islanders to relocate to the nation's outer reaches was ended in 2000, its effects will be felt in places like Papua for generations.
The scheme was ostensibly about easing population pressure on islands such as Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi, but it had the useful supplementary feature of spreading the dominant culture to areas where the Jakarta political elite would otherwise have had minimal influence.
The faintly self-deprecating joke among Papuan locals is that the migrant traders carry on their business from comfortable shopfronts, while indigenous Papuans sell their wares in the gutter.
While the mechanism of power is slowly shifting into indigenous Papuan hands, with both governors of the region's two provinces, and all regional heads, now being Papuans rather than Jakarta blow-ins, the poverty and power divide along ethnic lines remains stark.
The popular perception is there are very few Melanesians with flash cars or profitable restaurants, and almost no non-Papuans engaged in manual labour. The new arrivals even spend their time busily fabricating "traditional" Papuan handicrafts at Jayapura's art market.
Separatist leader Willie Mandowen, a leading force in the Papuan Presidium – a legitimate political organisation linked to the underground and armed Free Papua Organisation – is scathing of the "divide and rule" tactics being waged by Jakarta, even despite the relatively enlightened presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
Yudhoyono came to power promising peace in the provinces of Aceh and Papua; he and Vice-President Jusuf Kalla have somehow managed the former but the latter founders in bureaucracy and the refusal of a police state to relax its grip.
The recent and probably unconstitutional division of the province into two – Papua and West Irian Jaya – is believed by many Papuans to be a ploy to keep them from uniting.
Many argue that recent deadly "tribal clashes" in Timika, where Freeport has its giant gold and copper mine, were more about competition between military, police and other business interests over who gets the massive crumbs being pushed from the edge of the natural resources table, than about traditional tribal law.
And some, such as Jayapura woman Ani Warikar, point out that you can't go anywhere without being reported on by the "intel", or secret police. "They pose as soup sellers, as shoe repairers, motorcycle taxi drivers, anything," Warikar said. "They do anything to keep us in line."
The Australian had its own taste of Papua's retrograde police state, following several days of being tailed by distinctly unsubtle detectives – gold jewellery, discreet surveillance locations at the very next restaurant table, and the like. After being hauled into "intel" headquarters, given a stern lecture about not reporting on anything political and being ordered to hand over "everything you have written", we were set free with the parting shot that "hopefully, we won't meet like this again".
The encounter, while tense, was not without its light moments, such as a big-noting intel officer demonstrating his prowess at memorising mobile phone numbers and despite repeatedly getting them wrong, having the self-confidence to declare, "that's the kind of skill you need if you want to be in intel".
But the jokes were only on the surface. The Australian received several follow-up telephone calls from intel over the next few hours – evidently someone had thought to write the number down, rather than rely on memory – including one pretending to be an offer to meet a jailed political dissident. The last was clearly a clumsy attempt at a sting that would provide easy grounds for deportation.
The calls peaked on Saturday evening with the barely veiled threat that "there is nothing for you to do here in Jayapura; it would be best if you left tomorrow". Eight years after the fall of the dictator Suharto, and the supposed end of the Indonesian police state, there is one corner of the archipelago where its repressive tactics remain alive and well.