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Journalism of Courage
JAKARTA, OCT 7: Thirty people have been killed and 45 wounded in clashes that erupted in Indonesia’s remote Irian Jaya province after police pulled down a pro-independence flag, the Antara News Agency reported today.
It said some of the dead were migrants from other parts of indonesia who had been slaughtered around the central Irian town of Wamena by locals armed with bows and arrows and machetes in a wave of violence that broke out yesterday.
Thousands of frightened residents were crowding the local airport, trying to flee, it added. Doctors and medical staff at Wamena hospital, afraid for their own safety, had also begun leaving the area, Antara said.
Resource-rich Irian is one of Indonesia’s separatist hotspots where clashes between security forces and civilians demanding independence are common. A low-level separatist insurgency has simmered in the sparsely-populated eastern province for decades.
