RNZI Posted at 04:05 on 16 February, 2009 UTCA

Catholic Archbishop in the Papua region of Indonesia, is encouraging people to return to traditional practices to avert natural disasters.Archbishop Nicolaus Adi Saputra of Merauke has suggested people return to the practice of building wambad mounds on which sago trees and other crops can be planted, to protect against rising tides.

The archbishop made his comments in the wake of tidal flooding in early January that hit five villages in the Wan subdistrict of Merauke.The villages were inundated with up to one metre of seawater in the worst flooding in recent years.

It destroyed banana, cassava, coconut and other crops, and according to some reports several thousand villagersnow face a food crisis.Archbishop Saputra says wambad allow seawater to drain from the land quickly, thus helping to preserve crops.

Jakarta - Separatist rebels killed an army soldier and set a bridge on fire in Indonesia's easternmost province of Papua, media reports said Sunday. Army Private Saiful was shot in the head Saturday when rebels of the Free Papua Movement (OPM) attacked security posts in Tigginambut of Puncak Jaya district, district police chief Chris Rihulay said.

It was the latest in a series of attacks by separatists in Papua province in recent days. On Tuesday, alleged separatist rebels killed two motorcycle taxi drivers in Puncak Jaya district, an area where rebels have been active, police said. In January, insurgents armed with sickles and arrows raided a police post and stabbed the wife of an officer before making off with four guns and ammunition. Police arrested one person for that attack. The OPM is a small group of separatist rebels that has been fighting a sporadic rebellion in Papua, formerly Irian Jaya, since the early 1960s. Papua, a predominantly ethnic Melanesian province 3,700 kilometres north-east of Jakarta, is a former Dutch colony that became an Indonesian

Thursday April 9, 5:00 PM

- - - - JAKARTA - Indonesians went to the polls across the vast archipelago of more than 17,000 islands in parliamentary elections considered key to setting the pace of further reform in Southeast Asia's largest economy. The elections, a massive exercise in democracy with more than 170 million eligible voters, were marred by overnight violence in which at least six people died in the eastern province of Papua.