Barefoot and camouflaged by face paint and leaf headdresses, the ragtag guerrillas of the Free Papua Movement (O.P.M.) creep through the dense jungle along the Papua New GuineaWest Papua border, silently watching the patrols of the Indonesian army. Forbidden by their commanders to attack, they capture information instead: the soldiers' names, the routes they take, what weapons they carry, where their posts are. "They're like ghosts," says Australian photographer Ashley Gilbertson, who visited the area last month. "They can get within a few meters of the Indonesians and not be heard or seen."
Just as shadowy is the border the guerrillas flit across. Running through some of the world's most impenetrable terrain, the 141st parallel is clearly marked only on maps and routinely policed only on the western side. But where Indonesian troops mostly respect the line, West Papuans-dark-skinned and frizzy-haired like their cousins over the border-cross it at will. Not all of them are refugees. Gilbertson has taken the first pictures of an O.P.M. base and training camp which rebels say they sited a few kilometers inside P.N.G. to avoid detection by Indonesian troops.
In a clearing a little smaller than a football field and flanked by thatched huts, O.P.M. officers bawl 40 would-be guerrillas at a time through basic training. Though they drill with earnest discipline six sweltering days a week, these troops are pitifully short of matriel. They have only seven automatic rifles: two are World War II relics; the rest were stripped, like their fatigues and boots, from Indonesian corpses. Bullets are so scarce trainees are forbidden to use them. They parade with wooden guns; on patrol they carry spears, bows and arrows. Traditional weapons are better than rifles, the rebels say, "because they have no voice."
But in the struggle for West Papuan independence from Indonesian rule, a voice is what the rebels badly want. Formed in 1964, the year after the U.N. transferred the former Dutch New Guinea to Indonesia, the O.P.M. has little military clout. According to Bob Lowry, a Canberra-based defense expert, it is "an irritant to the Indonesian administration," but aside from sporadic kidnappings near the border and sabotage at the giant Freeport McMoRan gold and copper mine, "it has not been able to mount major operations" for 15 years.
The O.P.M. owes its survival, says Lowry, to the brutality of Indonesian troops during the Suharto regime, who came to be seen -and hated-as a jackbooted occupying force. While decrying "any efforts to establish a country within the country," President Abdurrahman Wahid has taken a more conciliatory stance, changing the province's name from Irian Jaya to West Papua, increasing development aid, and sponsoring a council of elected Papuan leaders.
Pressured by the O.P.M.'s political wing, the rebels are observing an informal ceasefire. But that has handed the microphones-and Wahid's ear-to articulate, urban-based activists whose pacifist approach has little appeal for the guerrillas. Lest persuasion fail, the army is moving more troops to the province. In their hideouts across the border, the rebel trainees are frustrated. "They're asking, When can we have real guns?'" says Gilbertson. Guns, at least, make a noise.