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JAKARTA (AFP) - At least 26 people were killed, some beheaded, when independence supporters clashed with police and turned on civilian settlers in the remote Indonesian province of Irian Jaya, police and rights activists said Saturday. Day-long clashes erupted early Friday when police and soldiers tried to pull down five separatist "Morning Star" flags in the mountain city of Wamena, 180 miles (290 kilometers) southwest of the provincial capital Jayapura, human rights monitors and police said. The clashes continued into Friday night as native Papuans who first fought with police turned their anger on non-native settlers in the province, also known as West Papua, killing at least 18 with machetes and arrows or burning them alive, police said. Houses were burned and women raped, they said. Rights monitors added the dead included children. A soldier at the military base in Wamena said "some 2,000 non-native Papuans" were sheltering there late Saturday. Thousands of settlers were also cramming Wamena's airstrip in the hope of catching a flight out, the state news agency Antara reported. The local Wamena government appealed to the governor of Irian Jaya for a Hercules aircraft to evacuate them, Antara reported. Friday's violence erupted when police opened fire on Papuans who stoned them as the officers approached the flags, the director of the Institute for Human Rights and Advocacy Studies (ELSAM) Yohannes Bonay said. Bullets killed two Papuans and 19 suffered gunshot wounds, Bonay told AFP by telephone from Jayapura. Provincial police chief Brigadier General Sylvanus Wenas said members of non-governmental and unofficial pro-independence security units - who are generally tolerated by Indonesian authorities - then embarked on a slaughter of non-Papuan settlers. Hospital sources in Wamena said 26 bodies received at the hospital, four of which were Papuans, were buried together in Wamena's public cemetery on Saturday afternoon. "Some died of bullet wounds, some were beheaded and some died of arrow wounds," an individual named Marten, a male nurse in the emergency ward of Wamena General Hospital, told AFP by phone. Forty people were being treated for serious injuries in Wamena, and four injured police officers were flown to Jayapura for treatment, Theo, another nurse, said. Wenas said police knew of 18 non-native Papuans who had been killed. "Satgas Papua [pro-independence security units] killed 18 people. They burned down homes, they raped women then killed them, they burned people alive," Wenas said. Bonay said human rights monitors in Wamena had so far confirmed the deaths of at least nine non-Papuans from beheadings, machete and arrow wounds, as well as the two Papuans shot dead, and one policeman. Among the non-native Papuans killed were a 38-year-old woman who was beheaded, and her eight-year-old daughter who died from an arrow wound, Bonay said. Police reinforcements flown into the area Saturday arrested 59 people, Wenas told AFP. "They've been arrested for inciting riots, fighting police and torturing and killing settlers," he said. Wenas said police decided to remove the flags themselves after appeals to residents to lower the flags went unheeded for 20 days. Last December Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid said he would allow the flying of the separatist flag, but only if it were raised alongside the national Indonesian flag and on a shorter flagpole. Wenas said the order to lower the flags came from newly installed national police chief Suroyo Bimantoro. "Bimantoro ordered me to take down separatist flags now, [and] since the annual session of the national assembly recommended it, it was our duty," he told SCTV private television station. Hundreds of students in the provincial capital of Jayapura protested in front of the Cendrawasih University campus for five hours on Saturday, accusing police of brutality in Wamena. They dispersed after negotiations with police. Separatists in Irian Jaya have demanded Jakarta recognize its independence, claiming a United Nations-conducted "act of free choice" in 1969, which led to the former Dutch territory becoming part of Indonesia, was unrepresentative. Wahid has flatly ruled out independence for the province of some 2.5 million people, most of whom are Melanesian Christians. The Papuans have long resented Jakarta's policy of inundating the province with settlers. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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