Police arrest people who attended the Papuan People Congress event in Abepura, at the outskirts of Jayapura, in Indonesia’s Papua province yesterday

Indonesian police fired tear gas and warning shots in eastern Papua yesterday, breaking up a meeting and detaining 300 people who had declared the province independent, a police spokesman said.
The detentions of members of the Papua People Congress follows a deadly clash between police and striking workers at Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc’s Grasberg mine in the same province . 
The central government has kept a tight rein on Papua, where a low-level separatist insurgency has simmered for decades amid repeated demands for a referendum on independence from Southeast Asia’s biggest economy.
Declaring independence amounts to treason in Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of 17,000 islands.
Human Rights Watch said the situation in the region’s capital, Jayapura, was tense.
Freeport’s Grasberg mine, disrupted by a strike since mid-September, contributes 1.6% of the country’s GDP. Reuters