The Wire

A country facing an often violent struggle for independence may not seem like the ideal tourist destination. The region of West Papua was a Dutch colony until it was handed over to the Indonesian government in nineteen sixty two. Since then, the West Papua Revolutionary Army been fighting a low-scale war for independence. But that war was no deterrent for youth worker Kylie Pointon, who has just got back from almost four weeks in the region. She told The Wire’s Ryneisha Bollard that one of the clearest signs of Indonesian control was the influx of migrants from Java.