By PHILIP ENGLISH
John Ondawame has Swedish citizenship but home is West Papua, which he has not seen since 1975.
He believes that if he returned to West Papua today he would not live beyond six months. "I would disappear."
Even so, since being granted asylum in Sweden in 1979 he has been campaigning to go home, not to West Papua under the control of Indonesia but to an independent West Papua, which he says should rightly be part of the Pacific community.
"Even though I live in Europe or far away from my home, my obligation is to my people," he says.
"One day I will go back to West Papua when it is a free and independent democratic state."
Mr Ondawame is in New Zealand to tell the story of his country and the freedom movement that aims to win independence from Indonesia.
"We have no link at all with Indonesia. Ethnically, culturally, traditionally we have nothing to do with Indonesia. We are ... a Pacific people."
He says independence could be a long time coming. West Papua could be another East Timor.
Mr Ondawame says that, knowing Indonesia, rising bloodshed might be the consequence if a dialogue on peace does not come soon.
Like East Timor, West Papua is occupied by Indonesian security forces and rival militia groups. The predominantly Christian region has also been flooded by Indonesian migrants, many of them Muslim.
Some Papuans fear they may one day be a minority in their own country.
Less than two weeks ago, fighting broke out between Indonesian security forces and freedom supporters when police tried to pull down "Morning Star" flags of the independence movement.
Dozens of deaths and injuries occurred on both sides from gunshot wounds, arrows and bush knives.
Indonesian Air Force British-made Hawk fighter jets - the same aircraft used against East Timorese - were said to be buzzing villages where the flags were flying.
Mr Ondawame believes his country - called Irian Jaya before Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid changed its name to West Papua last year - is a victim of the Cold War and the West's preoccupation with halting the spread of communism in the 1960s.
After Indonesia was created in 1949, its former Dutch colonial masters retained control of the western half of the huge island of New Guinea because of its distinct Melanesian culture.
But Indonesia maintained a claim to all former Dutch territory. In 1962, the Dutch agreed to allow a United Nations administration to control the country for six years before a ballot on independence.
But Indonesia took over the following year, leading to a war in which thousands were killed before the end of the decade.
By the mid 1970s, Mr Ondawame was a leader of the Free West Papua Movement, organising guerrilla and political education campaigns in the jungle. Now he is international spokesman for the movement.
He believes that independence will be difficult to achieve because of the immense wealth of resources in West Papua that Indonesia will not want to give up and because the independence movement has few friends.
The United Nations does not support independence. Mr Ondawame says only Tuvalu, Nauru and Vanuatu can be counted on for support.
"The situation is so very tense we need international intervention. I believe New Zealand played an important role in the peace processes in Bougainville and East Timor, so why not in West Papua?"
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