By dusk, Indonesian Army Corp. Sahrudin was dead, hunted to exhaustion and pierced through the chest and side with three long arrows. Next to him, lower jaw ripped away and back of his head blown off by Sahrudin's dying shot, lay Bambier Wenda, 35, a West Papuan guerrilla fighter and Dani tribesman.
At dawn that day, Dec. 15, 2000, Sahrudin and four fellow soldiers had climbed the high hill where the Dani of Tiom and Pirime villages in Irian Jaya's western Baliem Valley had hoisted the banned West Papuan independence flag. The Indonesian soldiers severed the flagpole with bursts of their automatic rifles.
"We asked them, 'Why did you take down our flag?' " says Wenas Tabuni, 30, a Dani warrior and guerrilla of the Free Papua Organization (OPM). For nearly four decades OPM has been fighting to gain independence for West Papua, the name the indigenous population give to Indonesia's easternmost province.