Red Cross sets date with Irian rebel chief

Red Cross sets date with Irian rebel chief

JAKARTA (JP): A team from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has set a date to meet with Irian Jayan separatist leader Kelly Kwalik next week, raising new hopes about the fate of 13 hostages who have been held captive by the rebels since Jan. 8th.

A spokeswoman for the ICRC office in Jakarta confirmed yesterday that the Red Cross team finally made contact with Kelly after trying for a week.

"They have contacted us and we received a letter from them earlier this week," Sri R. Wahyu Endah, ICRC's information assistant, told The Jakarta Post last night.

She said there was some confusion because the letter was dated Feb. 6, and suggested that it might have been wrongly dated.

Asked to comment on the latest developments, she quoted the ICRC head representative to Indonesia, Henry Fournier, who is in Irian Jaya, as saying "anything can happen next week."

Kelly proposed in his letter to meet with the head of the team, but only at a location and time of his choice, Endah said, adding that this meeting would probably take place in the next seven days.

Kelly sent the letter in response to an appeal by the ICRC team, which has been in Wamena for the past week to try to break the hostage impasse.

The appeal was made to a meeting of leaders of the Amungme tribe in Timika, Kelly's home village, and by dropping thousands of leaflets from the air over a large area in the mountainous Jayawijaya regency.

Kelly's letter was the first contact since the rebels cut off all radio communications on Jan. 25. The rebels, along with the hostages -- four Britons, two Dutchmen and seven Indonesians -- have also abandoned the Mapunduma village where they had settled for the first two weeks. With no further contacts, their precise whereabouts became unknown.

Antara also quoted Endah as saying that Kelly had insisted that no other people would be present at the proposed meeting.

She said the hostages sent letters to their relatives back home through the courtesy of ICRC. Generally, their letter suggested that they were in fine condition and appealed for a "positive solution" to the hostage problem.

Before the ICRC intervention, the military and local missionaries have failed to convince the rebels to release all the hostages. Some had already been freed.

The rebels abducted 27 people, all members of a scientific expedition to the Lorentz natural reserve in Jayawijaya. Fourteen hostages were released -- a German and 13 Irianese -- in return for food and medicines but the negotiations stopped when the government refused to meet the rebels' main demand -- a recognition of a separate West Papua state in Irian Jaya.

The military has stressed that it would continue to use persuasion to obtain the release of the hostages in spite of pressures to use force.

Yesterday, the chief spokesman of the Trikora Military Command Lt. Col. Maulud Hidayat said the military has also left supply of batteries with tribal leaders in the hope that the rebels would take them and use them on their radio communications and re- establish contacts with the military once again, Antara reported.

Maulud said the radio contact might have been stopped because the rebels had ran out of power. (emb/mds)