JAKARTA, Oct 19 (Reuters) - Indonesian police fired tear gas and warning shots in eastern Papua on Wednesday, breaking up a meeting and detaining 300 people who had declared the province independent, a police spokesman told Reuters.
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 percent of the country's GDP. (Reporting by Olivia Rondonuwu; Editing by Neil Chatterjee and Nick Macfie)
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