LONDON -- The biggest single taxpayer in Indonesia is the U.S. firm Freeport McMoran. The money comes mostly from its Grasberg mine in the mountains of West Papua, which sits on the largest gold deposit in the world. That is why Jakarta, which used every dirty trick in the book to hang onto East Timor in 1999, will fight even harder to hang on to West Papua, the western part of the great island of New Guinea.
A grim hint of what that might mean came last week in the West Papua town of Wamena, when Indonesian troops chopped down a flagpole bearing the Morning Star flag of the Papuan separatists and set off two days of rioting that cost 30 to 45 lives. It was the first big outbreak of political violence in the territory since Indonesia's first democratically elected president, Abdurrahman Wahid, took power a year ago.
Wahid's dilemma, as he strives to hold his sprawling island country of 210 million people together, is that the 2.3 million Papuans have a good case for independence, but he needs their resources. He must also be careful about offending his powerful army -- and with other separatist movements on the rise in Indonesia from oil-rich Aceh to the Moluccas, he doesn't want another precedent for successful separation like East Timor.