This is a preview for a Patreon only episode.

If you want to hear it in full, go to patreon.com slash popular front.

Click the collections tab at the top. You'll see bonus episodes there. There are hundreds of them.

So let's talk about your trip out there. It's a very hard place to go to, especially if you want to be there on the ground with the militants, with the rebels.

Tell us about that.

Yeah, like it's basically really like stupid to go there if you're going to go through Jayapura or any of the official Indonesian channels,

because for one, Indonesia doesn't allow journalists to go there. And then if you do go there,

there's so many spies in Jayapura and you'll just be followed. So if you want to go out to

Wamanagh, which is in the highlands, they'll just follow you and tell you there. And even if you're not there to meet, you know, the guerrillas, you know, you're at risk

of imprisonment and all that.

So it's just basically, they've made it impossible, really.

So I went through PNG to an area in the Star Mountains right on the border with PNG,

which Indonesia kind of doesn't really go on the ground there

because they're not great fighters and they don't really know the terrain.

And so I went there back in like 2023 to look.

It was kind of,

I was meeting the spokesman for the TPNPB, Sebi Sandbom,

because he was just in the middle of the hostage crisis where they just took the New Zealand

pilot Philip Merton's hostage. So I wanted to kind of talk to him about that and do a, I don't

know, a bit of a documentary on that. But then we decided halfway through would go to the border

and like kind of look at this

bombing campaign that they'd said had happened a year or two earlier in kiwi rock and we got there

...