Indonesian security forces recovered the bodies of four government soldiers who were killed in a separatist attack while searching for a New Zealand pilot taken hostage by rebels in Indonesia’s Papua Province, officials said yesterday.
The four soldiers were killed on Saturday after attackers from the West Papua National Liberation Army — the armed wing of the Free Papua Movement — ambushed 36 government soldiers in the mountainous district of Nduga in Highland Papua Province.
Security forces found the bodies on Wednesday, including that of a soldier who fell 15m into a ravine, and evacuated them to a hospital in Timika, a mining city in neighboring Central Papua Province, Papua military spokesman Colonel Herman Taryaman said.
Photo: AFP
The troops were ambushed by the rebels while searching for Phillip Mark Mehrtens, a New Zealand pilot who was abducted by the rebels in February, Taryaman said.
The rebels shot a soldier who fell into the ravine, and launched a second attack while troops were trying to get the body out, he added.
Security forces are searching for a fifth soldier who is still missing, but bad weather conditions and steep forested terrain have impeded the search and evacuation operation, Taryaman said.
Photo: AP
Security forces retrieved the bodies of the four soldiers a day after Indonesian Armed Forces Chief Admiral Yudo Margono dismissed the separatist group’s claim that it had killed more than a dozen government soldiers in the attack.
Margono confirmed only one fatality and said four other soldiers were missing.
The rest returned to their post, he said, adding that five wounded soldiers were in a stable condition in a hospital in Timika.
Rebel spokesperson Sebby Sambom said in a statement on Monday that his group’s fighters were holding the remains of 12 soldiers, including nine who he said “were arrested and executed.”
The rebels offered no proof to back up their statement.
The rebels carried out the attack in retaliation for Indonesia’s “massive military operation” in Papua, and the killings of two rebels in a shoot-out with security forces last month, Sambom said earlier.
Margono rejected the rebel claims as “fake news” and said the military operations in Papua were launched with a view to keep casualties at a minimum.
However, authorities would increase pressure on the rebels around several separatist strongholds, including in Nduga, he said.
The rebels in February stormed a single-engine plane shortly after it landed on a small runway in Nduga and abducted its pilot. The plane was initially scheduled to pick up 15 construction workers from other Indonesian islands after the rebels threatened to kill them.
Authorities would prioritize a peaceful approach for the release of Mehrtens, Margono said.
The kidnapping of the pilot was the second that independence fighters have committed since 1996, when the rebels abducted 26 members of a World Wildlife Fund research mission in Mapenduma in Nduga.
Two Indonesians in that group were killed by their abductors, but the remaining hostages were eventually freed within five months.
The pilot kidnapping reflects the deteriorating security situation in Indonesia’s easternmost region of Papua, a former Dutch colony in the western part of New Guinea that is ethnically and culturally distinct from much of Indonesia.
Papua was incorporated into Indonesia in 1969, after a UN-sponsored ballot that was widely seen as a sham. Since then, a low-level insurgency has simmered in the region, which was divided into five provinces last year to boost development in Indonesia’s poorest region.
Saturday’s fighting is the latest in a series of violent incidents in recent years in Papua, where conflicts between indigenous Papuans and Indonesian security forces are common.
Rebel attacks have spiked in recent years, as the government extended infrastructure and the controversial Trans-Papua Highway, a road being built into the heart of Highland Papua that has inflamed resistance.
Many indigenous Papuans believe the moves are a threat to their identity and traditional way of life, prompting attacks by separatist groups that have been followed by Indonesian military deployments.
The military activities in Papua have raised concern among rights groups, who say the security approach implemented by Jakarta for decades has proven unable to resolve violence in the region.
Amnesty International Indonesia called for prioritizing dialogue with the separatists to prevent potential human rights violations and a humanitarian crisis.
Data collected by the rights group showed that at least 179 civilians, 35 Indonesian soldiers, nine police officers and 23 independence fighters were killed in clashes between rebels and security forces from 2018 to last year.
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