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Tag: history of West Papua

  • If You Cared About Standing Rock, You Need To Know About West Papua

    This week, activists across the world celebrated as the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would not grant the permit for the Dakota Access pipeline to drill under the Missouri river. This followed campaigning efforts from local Standing Rock Sioux tribe and thousands of Native American supporters from across North America and further afield, who argued that if the pipeline was approved, their spiritual lands would be compromised and local waters would be contaminated, threatening their livelihood. With a message that resonated with indigenous rights activists and environmentalists everywhere, campaigners were successful in forcing officials to back down.

    The announcement was, however, met with scepticism from some first-nation Americans. With a heavy awareness that the DAPL would appeal the decision, many tribe members were cautious about celebrating too soon. After all, exploitation of indigenous groups, particularly in excavation projects, is common place: in Australia, historically aboriginal lands have been named as the preferred site for a nuclear waste dump, and in Nigeria, the indigenous Ogoni people have, according to numerous reports, been subjected to ethnic cleansing in the course of mishandled oil extraction projects.

    It’s clear then that the exploitation of indigenous peoples is commonplace. So what set Standing Rock aside from the cases of groups in Australia, Nigeria and so many more? The answer is clear: a global coalition of activists. And no case study demonstrates more clearly the importance of activism in the struggle for indigenous rights than the situation in West Papua.

    West Papua forms half of the Papua island, to the west of Papua New Guinea in South-East Asia. The island itself is split in half. The indigenous people of West Papua have Melanesian roots, and culturally and ethnically enjoy many similarities to the people of Papua New Guinea. However, the region’s fraught history and decades of political turmoil have left it without international recognition. It was formally colonised by the Dutch in 1898, and while the Netherlands began a process of decolonising the region following the Second World War, this was co-opted when Indonesia asserted a claim over the territory. Papuans fought back, declaring independence in 1961, but Indonesia soon retaliated by invading, backed by the Soviet Union. The situation was exacerbated when the US, prompted by fears of spreading Communist influence, interfered, brokering a deal with Indonesia to grant her control over West Papua. This was in theory meant to be followed by a referendum with the end goal of self-determination, but this never happened.

    Since then, the military occupation of West Papua has resulted in over 500,000 deaths. The occupation has devastated indigenous people and scarred West Papuan communities: the Biak massacre of 1998 is a particularly haunting example of this. On the anniversary of the unsuccessful Papuan declaration of independence, over 200 independence demonstrators were forced by the army into two Indonesian naval vessels and taken to two different locations to be thrown into the ocean. In the following days, the protesters’ bodies washed up on Biak’s shores, or were snarled in fishing nets.

    The Biak tragedy is just the tip of the iceberg. Aside from the scores of unlawful deaths, there are widespread reports of violence, including sexual violence, against civilians. In a public report to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in 1999, the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women concluded that the Indonesian security forces used rape “as an instrument of torture and intimidation” in West Papua, and “torture of women detained by the Indonesian security forces was widespread”. Political prisoners engaged in peaceful demonstration are routinely convicted in unfair trials, and large numbers have yet to be released. The depth of suffering in West Papua is such that, in 2004, a groundbreaking report from Yale Law School referred to the Indonesian policy in West Papua as “genocide”- a label which was, apparently, taken lightly by the international communiyu.

    It has been clear for a while now that the situation in West Papua has reached, and remained at, crisis point. So how do we explain the lack of public awareness and concerted policy responses? The problem is that most campaigns and activist movements are catalysed by news stories that shock us and compel us to take action, but there is a distinct lack of reporting on the West Papua situation. West Papua is effectively off limits to international journalists, and the penalties for flouting the region’s restrictive laws are severe: if discovered without permission they are arrested and deported by the Indonesian authorities. Some have even been attacked and imprisoned. Indonesian President Joko Widodo announced earlier this year that Papua would be open to foreign journalists, but this does not reflect the reality on the ground.

    This is worsened by the fact that Indonesian authorities have made it near impossible for many NGOs to operate in West Papua: organisations such as the International Red Cross, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have all been denied access, and their vital services denied along with it.

    West Papua represents one of the most atrocious systems of repression of indigenous peoples that we see in the world today. But the Standing Rock victory shows us that the will, manpower and resources do exist to mount an effective opposition tothreats to indigenous peoples’ rights. Even if it isn’t possible to go to West Papua and prevent these atrocities from happening directly, there is still a lot that each of us can do: you can support the fundraising efforts of the few NGOs that are allowed to operate in West Papua, you can write to your Member of Parliament, you can share resources and information with friends, family and colleagues, and you can help increase the public awareness that is so sorely needed to effect change.

    Standing Rock taught us that persistent efforts can succeed- this lesson must not be forgotten, especially when it comes to groups that need protection the most.

  • 5 Things You Need to Know About Indonesia’s Occupation of West Papua

    by Connor Woodman

    The Indonesian president, Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo, recently finished his tour of the EU, signing five cooperation agreements with the UK during his stop in London. The protest that confronted Jokowi’s visit fractured his attempt to keep hidden one of Indonesia’s dark secrets: the 50 year war in its easternmost provinces. Here are five things you should know about Indonesian rule in West Papua:

    1. It is one of the world’s longest-running military occupations.

    Indonesia seized West Papua, the western half of the island of New Guinea, in 1963, shortly after the Dutch colonists pulled out. Political parties were immediately banned, nascent Papuan nationalism crushed, and tens of thousands of troops, police and special forces flooded in. In 1969 a UN-supervised sham referendum was held, and just over a thousand hand-picked representatives were bribed, cajoled and threatened into voting in favour of Indonesian rule.

    A police state has shackled the vast region ever since, battling a low-level tribal insurgency and suppressing independence aspirations with such vigour that raising the Papuan national flag can land you 15 years in prison.

    2. It’s possible that Indonesian rule constitutes a genocide.

    Although international media and NGOs have been nearly uniformly banned from the territory for decades, most observers estimate that over 100,000 native Papuans have been killed since the 1960s – at least 10% of the population. With echoes of Indonesia’s rule in East Timor, which eliminated around one third of the population, a 2004 report from Yale Law School concluded: “[There is] a strong indication that the Indonesian government has committed genocide against the West Papuans.” Several other scholars have reached a similar conclusion.

    Reports of barbarous killings regularly emerge, and one study recently described torture as a ‘mode of governance’ in the provinces. The abuse tends to be intertwined with projects of resource extraction and ‘transmigration’ – the effort (formerly supported by the World Bank) to shuttle hundreds of thousands of landless Indonesian peasants from the rest of Indonesia into West Papua.

    During a military campaign in the early 1980s, the Indonesian army ran under the slogan, ‘Let the rats run into the jungle so that the chickens can breed in the coop’. In practice, this meant wiping out Papuan villages and bringing in ethnic Indonesians to work on economic projects like Freeport’s giant Grasberg gold and copper mine. The influx of Indonesians has left the original inhabitants a near-minority in the land, struggling to maintain their culture and often nomadic way of life. An Indonesian minister once in charge of the transmigration programme has stated: “The different ethnic groups will in the long run disappear because of integration, and there will be one kind of man.”

    3. West Papuans overwhelmingly want independence.

    Even the pro-Indonesian US ambassador admitted in the late 1960s that “possibly 85 to 90%” of West Papuans “are in sympathy with the Free Papua cause.” Paul Kingsnorth, an investigative reporter who travelled the region in the early 2000s, described the independence campaign as a “broad-based social movement, which almost everyone in West Papua, if you get them alone, will admit to belonging.”

    Nothing speaks to this more than the long campaign of armed resistance and civil disobedience against the Indonesian state. In 2011, documents leaked from the Indonesian army detailed a “longstanding guerrilla network that is relatively well organised and which operates across the whole country.” A recent book describes the non-violent wing of the movement as ‘savvy and sophisticated’, and notes that “Papuans in 2015 desire freedom as much, if not more, than Papuans who desired freedom in 1963.”

    Most West Papuans consider themselves Melanesian, with more in common with darker-skinned Pacific populations than the Indonesians who often treat them as racially inferior. Culturally, linguistically, ethnically – Papuans have little in common with Indonesians. For the overwhelming majority, nothing short of independence will suffice.

    4. The Indonesian state is terrified of international exposure.

    Alongside barring international media from West Papua, Indonesia runs counter-intelligence operations overseas to neutralise the international independence movement, surveilling and harassing campaigners based in Australia and elsewhere. Leaked military documents bemoan the success activists have had in “propagating the issue of severe human rights violations in Papua,” and Indonesia has been working hard to ensure exiled Papuan representatives are barred from regional Pacific organisations. Foreign visitors in the provinces are placed under routine surveillance, and Indonesian concern at the opening of the Free West Papua campaign office in Oxford even prompted the British ambassador in Jakarta to publicly distance himself from independence aspirations.

    5. The West – including Britain – has supported Indonesia’s occupation for decades.

    Britain’s historic alliance with the Indonesian state dates primarily to General Suharto’s bloody coup in 1965-6. In the midst of the slaughter of at least 500,000 suspected members of the Indonesian Communist Party – which British officials gleefully described as a ‘ruthless terror’ – the Foreign Office argued that “the Generals are going to need all the help they can get”, releasing £1m in aid and granting the export of military equipment. The Indonesian left was duly decimated – never to recover – and the pro-Western Suharto was firmly in control.

    Since then, Britain’s support for Indonesian rule in West Papua has been unwavering. Privately recognising the ‘savage’ nature of Indonesian rule, publicly officials have voted to legitimate Indonesian rule at the UN and pledged support for Indonesia’s ‘territorial integrity’. Until the late 90s, the UK was one of Indonesia’s primary arms suppliers. Kopassus, the Indonesian special forces, have been trained and armed by the UK, US and Australia, despite a well-documented record of horrific human rights abuse in Papua. Britain funds and trains Detachment 88, the Indonesian counter-terrorism unit accused of massacres in Papua’s central highlands.

    While in opposition, David Cameron described the situation in Papua as ‘terrible’; once in power, he headed to Jakarta with representatives from BAE Systems in tow. By contrast, Jeremy Corbyn is a long-time supporter of the Papuan struggle – another example of his “direct and open challenge to the British system of government of international alliances”, as Peter Oborne described it. It remains to be seen whether or not he will be able to dislodge the British establishment’s ossified support for the Indonesian state if he comes to power.

    Photo: Dominic Hartnett/Flickr

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  • Inside the West Papua Resistance

    Inside the West Papua Resistance

    The Diplomat.com – By Rohan Radheya, June 29, 2015

    The Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM) was first created in the 1960s by a group of comrades who called themselves West Papuan Freedom fighters. The organization was created to fight the Indonesian Army, which had occupied large parts of West Papua after the Dutch colonialists withdrew.

    The movement grew rapidly in the late 1970s with fighters joining its ranks in all major provinces of West Papua. Their operations mainly consisted of attacking Indonesian patrols. Over the years it started to carry out more sophisticated attacks on foreign mining companies, such as blowing up pipelines in the Grasberg mine in Freeport.

    It carried out assaults on civilian aircrafts in Timika, targeted foreign migrant workers, and kidnapped foreigners and journalists during the infamous Mapenduma incident.

    The militant wing of the OPM allegedly had ties to former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddaffi, who had also supplied weapons to the group. Some senior OPM Commanders underwent training in Libya in the 1990s.

    The diplomatic wing of the OPM also received support from the government of Senegal in the 1990s and were permitted to open a mission in Dakar.

    Today, the military wing has many splinter groups who operate independently.

    Some factions have agreed to a truce with the Indonesian government; others continue to wage their guerrilla campaign.

    Photojournalist Rohan Radheya was allowed to follow elements of the military wing, visiting their headquarters deep within the jungles of West Papua.

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