‘’Many people in Australia know very little about West Papua, even though it is pretty much our nearest neighbour and my concern is people should start to be able to see what’s happening, particularly with human rights, more or less on our border,’’ Hill said.

‘’The number of [West Papuans] people killed is very hard to tell. The most confident estimates suggest between 50 to 100,000 people were killed by Indonesian military at the time.’’ 

The University of Wollongong Emeritus Professor was just six months into a role with the United Nations in the mid 1990s, when two members of his staff were taken hostage by rebels in West Papua.

A senior UN official and Ambassador of the United Nations to Indonesia at the time, Professor Hill was responsible for the UN’s role in negotiating the safe release of the hostages and the subsequent aid initiatives.

When the group of tribal West Papuan freedom fighters find out one of their hostages is a pregnant woman, they decide that the baby is a “Gift from God” and must be their new “Messiah”.

They plan to keep Martha hostage until the baby is born, and then carry the baby, to be called Papuani, into battle as a mascot to protect them against the Indonesian military bullets.

‘’It took us about five months to secure their release. The woman from my office was pregnant so we were quite concerned about what would happen to her,’’ Prof Hill said.

He intentionally made his Captives for Freedom book read like a detective’s novel so as to give real-life accounts of the events that unfolded throughout the negotiation and release of hostages.

‘’I was reporting everyday to the UN Security Council about what was happening so I have contemporary reports of what we did at the time,’’ he said. ‘’I wanted readers to see the plot developing as opposed to being told in advance. I think it works pretty good.’’

Prof Hill, who worked for the UN for 11 years from the mid-1990s, believes there were a number of reasons why the freedom fighters chose to capture the two foreign UN workers.

‘’But the key reason was that they wanted to bring world attention to the problems the West Papuans were having of basically being pillaged, raped and murdered by Indonesian military,’’ he said.

Captives for Freedom: Hostages, Negotiations and the Future of West Papua is available from amazon.com and the UOW bookshop.