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| Southeast Asia |
| Two women shot in Indonesia's Papua province |
| 2002-12-28 |
| Two women, one of them the wife of a human rights campaigner, have been shot and wounded in Indonesia's Papua province, an activist says. The women, Else Bonai and Merauje, were travelling on a public minivan near the border with Papua New Guinea when shots were fired at them, Papua human rights group spokesman Elsham Aloy Renwarin says. The shots came from the bush near the border. Else, the wife of Elsham director Johannes Bonai, suffered wounds on both legs while bullets hit Merauje in the left leg and hand. Both are undergoing a surgery at the army hospital in Jayapura. "It was the work of professionals," Mr Renwarin said. Papua deputy police chief Brigadier General Raziman Tarigan has said that Kopassus special forces soldiers were suspected of having carried out the attack. This is one of those fights that mostly falls outside the Islamist model, though Laskar Jihad did send thugs to Papua to stir up trouble with the locals against the independence movement. Papua is chock full of Melanesians, with the western half under Indonesia control and the eastern half the independent nation of Papua-New Guinea. There's a strong independence movement, since the "unanimous" UN-sponsored "free choice" plebiscite of 1969 was shady in construction and the vote wasn't extended to the 700,000 Melanesians. (Our Australian readers probably know a lot more about the situation there than I do...) On August 31 gunmen opened fire on buses near the US-owned Freeport gold and copper mine in Papua, killing two US teachers and an Indonesian colleague and injuring 18 others. There was a shootout between the Indon coppers and the local bad guys the next day, and a couple weeks later 15 members of the Free PAPUA Movement were jugged, but speculation has been that the killings were done by the army. I suspect that this shooting was by the same people, though I have no idea what the reasoning was behind it, if any. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |