Boven Digoel

Boven-Digoel was a Dutch prison camp in the Dutch East Indies at the headwaters of the river Digul, where Indonesian nationalists and communists were interned between 1928 and 1942. The penal colony was located in an isolated part of New Guinea, and surrounded by hundreds of miles of impenetrable jungle and hostile Papua tribes, so that contact with the outside world, and escape, was next to impossible. It was notorious for its endemic malaria.

Among those interned here were Marco Kartodikromo the writer, Mohammad Hatta, who would become the first vice president of Indonesia, and Sutan Sjahrir, the first Indonesian Prime Minister.