Election tensions in the Indonesian province of Papua have boiled-over, with reports that police shot and injured 11 people at a pro-independence rally on Monday. Police deny any shootings took place.
The protestors were urging Papuans to boycott this week's parliamentary elections. It followed a dawn raid on the offices of the KNPB, the West Papuan National Committee, in which 15 people were arrested.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono took office in 2004 with a promise to settle the conflict in Papua, where a low-level insurgency has been waged for decades. But the recent election period has seen a surge in separatist violence and a heavy security presence in the region.
Presenter: Joanna McCarthy
Speaker: Tito Ambyo from Radio Australia's Indonesia service
Ambyo: Well, there have been many conflicting accounts, but one of the accounts goes like this: yesterday at 5 am in the morning, around 500 people were holding a peaceful protest in front of the regional parliamentary office and they were raising the Morning Star flag, the Papuan independence flag. Then a couple of hours later, they were moving to a nearby market and the police started to try to negotiate with them, especially for them to lower the Morning Star flag, and the negotiation failed, and the police decided to arrest some of the protesters, which angered the protesters and they started shooting at the police with arrows and they started destroying cars, and then the police started shooting, especially after a police officer was injured, shot by an arrow in his stomach. And the chief of police in Nabire have denied that they've shot into the crowd, but there have been reports of bullet wounds in the injured.
McCarthy: Now the protesters are urging a boycott of this week's elections. What are their grievances about the election?
Ambyo: Well, there have been a lack of representations of Papuans in the local and national political scenes, and especially local. So one of the biggest issues that has a direct relationship with this event is how the candidates are chosen in this election, because now voters have to choose individual candidates, which means individual candidates would have to promote themselves, campaign for themselves which involve a lot of money, which local Papuans do not have, especially when they have to compete with people from outside Papua, business people from outside Papua, from Java, from Sulawesi who are seen to have and they do have more money and political clout. So there is a dissatisfaction about how they can't compete with outsiders.
McCarthy: Now this of course comes only weeks after President Yudhoyono met with exiled Nationalist leader, Nicholas Jouwe. It doesn't appear that those talks have had any success in appeasing the separatist movement, why is that?
Ambyo: One of the problems is that after the death of Theys Eluay in 2001, one of the Papuan leaders, there hasn't been a strong leadership within the separatist movement. So even when Nicholas Jouwe came back to Indonesia and to Papua, people were celebrating and the Papuans respect him as someone who fought with them in the past. But I don't think his decisions are seen as the decision that is carrying forward the independence movement.