It is home to many people distinct from the Javanese, who control the political system.
Many Javanese rituals predate Islam in form, although they have been filled out with Muslim prayers.
If democracy is to prevail, they argue, outsiders will have to live with this Javanese mumbo-jumbo.
Its title, meaning Milk Brigade, plays on a popular Javanese song, Kopi Susu (Milk Coffee).
And adding to other injuries, the Papuans have endured racist treatment by the country's Javanese majority.
Others say that, like a Javanese king, he will want to die on his throne.
Many people say he sees himself as a Javanese king, with an almost mystical power.
They are straight talkers, easily infuriated by the Javanese, who never seem to say what they mean.
On a ridge near Sayan stands the unique Bambu Indah, a compound of 100-year-old royal Javanese houses.
Javanese leadership, the sultan explains, requires a king to control his own desires to serve the people.
Getting the Javanese to abandon the religion they had followed for more than 1, 000 years was not easy.
But many Indonesians believe that the influence of Javanese tradition on present-day politics goes much deeper than that.
Many Javanese think of Sukarno and Suharto, not to mention Wiranto and Budiono use only one, and that is often abbreviated.
He is not a military man and he is not Javanese, as most vice presidents before him have been.
Tens of thousands of Javanese have been resettled in the province, partly to sanitize the land border with P.
None of them is really a family name, since Javanese seldom use them.
Suharto created a New Order for the vast archipelago, and recreated himself as a new kind of Javanese king.
The Javanese number about 70 million, or more than a third of Indonesians.
Many Javanese retain mystical religious beliefs that existed before the Islamic missionaries arrived.
It is the boundary between Asia and Melanesia -- the Papuans are Melanesians, they have nothing in common with the Javanese.
They speak Chinese to each other, something rarely done in Javanese cities.
It reveres the Islamic scholars, known by the Arabic term ulama or the Javanese term kiai, whose influence remains strong in east Java.
That, he says, is where Suharto, who is often considered to have derived his own ideas of power from Javanese culture, went wrong.
Ex-President Suharto, the country's deposed ruler, a Javanese, was, and presumably still is, deeply superstitious, being guided by his astrologer in important decisions.
Mr Suharto seemed to model himself on a Javanese monarch, to be regarded with awe rather than affection, Mr Habibie wants to be liked.
The city's many ethnic communities - Javanese, Batak, Chinese, Melayu, Indian, Arab - have managed to stay fairly separate, each with their own way of life.
Hashim, an avid collector of antiques, is also smarting over a scandal involving smuggled Javanese statues that he bought from a Dutch art dealer in 2006.
Under the 32-year dictatorship of Suharto, which ended ten years ago this week, Indonesia, in keeping with the traditions of Javanese statecraft, used its clout discreetly.
"This is typical of a traditional Javanese king, the idea that he can do no wrong, " says Arbi Sanit, a political scientist at the University of Indonesia.
Migrants from Java, they were dispersed as part of the Indonesian government's decades-old transmigration program, designed to ease Javanese population pressures by encouraging relocation to the outer islands.
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