Post-Courier Online [Papua New Guinea], Tuesday 1 April, 2003
Sly militia activities fears
JAKARTA: An accidental discovery of an explosives cache in Indonesia's Papua
province has led to fears of covert militia activity in the region.
Concerns have been raised by tribal leaders in the coastal town of Sorong, where
police have arrested Muhammad Koya, a local businessman and Islamist politician.
Sorong's district police chief Faisal Abdul Nasir said Koya had been taken into
custody and faces up to 20 years in jail for storing 12 home-made bombs in the
warehouse of his cargo handling company.
"He said he stored them for self-protection," the policeman told AAP by telephone.
One month after his arrest, Koya remains in custody but his case has not
progressed.
"I don't understand why they haven't handed the case to prosecutors," said his lawyer,
Suyanto, who said the bombs contained TNT but suggested they had been planted
there.
Koya, 52, is the branch chairman of Vice President Hamzah Haz's United
Development Party and also the local representative of the Indonesian Association of
Muslim Intellectuals (IAMI). His lawyer denied that he was involved with any extremist
groups that have established a presence in Sorong and other coastal towns of Papua
in recent years.
Sorong is populated evenly by indigenous Papuans who are mostly Christian and
Muslim transmigrants who have resettled under government schemes over decades.
Such a mix leaves the region vulnerable to conflicts similar to that of the neighbouring
Maluku islands, where thousands of Christians and Muslims were killed in sectarian
violence between 1998 and 2002. Police say they are aware of the risk.
"Sorong is near conflict areas like Maluku and it's possible that conflicts may flow
from there, we have anticipated them," said Faisal, the police chief.
When fighting died down in the Maluku over one year ago, members of the Islamic
extremist group Laskar Jihad took the short boat ride to Papua.
However, Laskar Jihad's operations were shut down soon after the bombing in Bali
last year, Papuan leaders said.
Copyright, 2003, Post-Courier Online.
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