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