"I am free now," says Jacob Rumiak, having just flown from London to Tokyo under the protection of a United Nations travel document. "But if I return to West Papua, I'm a dead man."
Jacob has survived to date, he believes, through divine intervention. "I was imprisoned for 10 years. The Indonesian military tried everything they could come up with (torture, being hung out of a helicopter, innumerable threats of execution) to stop me speaking out for West Papuan rights."
Two centuries ago the landmass of Papua -- 100 km north of Australia's Cape York -- was carved up. A line was drawn through the center, with the eastern part divided between Britain and Germany, and the west taken over by the Netherlands. In the 1950s, assisted by Australia, the Dutch colonial government prepared West Papua for independence. Its national flag, the Morning Star, was raised in 1961.