WE WILL LOSE
EVERYTHING
Conducted by the
Catholic Justice and Peace Commission
of the Archdiocese of Brisbane
1 May 2016
A Report on a Human Rights
Fact Finding Mission
To West Papua

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Conducted by the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission of the
Archdiocese of Brisbane
1 May 2016
“We will lose everything!” This was the grim prediction made by the four members of the Executive of
the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) when they presented their three year
campaign strategy to a Brisbane meeting of representatives of solidarity groups from around the South
Pacific in January 2016. When ULMWP Secretary-General, Octovianus Mote, uttered these words on
behalf of his colleagues, both the anguish of the people of West Papua and their grim determination to
overcome their oppression was evident in his voice. Faced with becoming a small minority in their own
land within a few short years and living with unrelenting intimidation and brutality at the hands of the
Indonesian Government’s security apparatus together with rapidly growing economic and social
marginalisation, he stressed the need for urgent action to stop the violence in their land and to secure an
international commitment to give their people a genuine opportunity to freely determine their future.
The message was clear. The situation in West Papua is fast approaching a tipping point. In less than five
years, the position of Papuans in their own land will be worse than precarious. They are already
experiencing a demographic tidal wave. Ruthless Indonesian political, economic, social and cultural
domination threatens to engulf the proud people who have inhabited the land they call Tanah Papua for
thousands of years
One week after the meeting in Brisbane, a two person delegation from the Catholic Justice and Peace
Commission of the Archdiocese of Brisbane set foot on Papuan soil to speak to Papuans directly about
their situation. The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Leaders Summit in Port Moresby in September 2015 had
agreed to send a human rights fact-finding mission to West Papua, but the Indonesian Government has
not allowed this to happen. One of the Commission’s objectives in sending the delegation was to build
relationships with the Church in West Papua for future collaboration on human rights and environmental
issues. However, because of the Indonesian Government’s unwillingness to accept a PIF mission, our
delegation effectively became the first of a number of shadow human rights fact finding missions to West
Papua from the Pacific.
WE WILL LOSE EVERYTHING
A Report on a Human Rights Fact Finding Mission to West Papua
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WE WILL LOSE EVERYTHING
Over the next two weeks, the Commission’s
Executive Officer, Mr Peter Arndt, and prominent
Sister of St Joseph from Sydney, Sr Susan Connelly,
travelled through Merauke, Jayapura, Timika and
Sorong. They heard many stories of bashings,
torture, murder, economic hardship, social
marginalisation and cultural deprivation. Just as in
Brisbane, Papuan voices were filled with a sense of
urgency and fear. Yet, beneath all this, there is an
unmistakeable determination to continue to strive for the long cherished dream of freedom. This report
seeks to briefly sketch the historical context of the present situation in West Papua, to document some of
the stories and information collected about the present human rights situation, and to make an
assessment of the way forward.
The Commission makes it clear that this report seeks to present the voice of the people of West Papua as
accurately as possible. Our delegation’s program while in West Papua was determined by Papuans.
Papuans worked closely with us throughout the two weeks of our visit. Since our return to Australia,
Papuans have continued to provide us with information and advice. A wide range of Papuans were asked
to read the report in draft form and to indicate where changes were needed so that the published report
accurately reflects their situation and views. The final report will be co-launched by the Commission with
Papuans not only in Brisbane, but by Papuans and their supporters in West Papua, Jakarta, Indonesia and
Port Vila, Vanuatu. We intend that the preparation and publication of this report be a genuine
collaboration between Papuans and us. The struggle for justice, freedom and dignity is theirs and we
have tried to ensure that Papuans not only participate as fully as possible in the work of publishing this
report, but that they effectively lead and direct the process.
The Heart of the Matter
The present violence and marginalisation endured by the Papuan people have their genesis in shabby
dealings by international powers which enabled the Indonesian Government to occupy West Papua in the
1960s without the free consent of the people. This was brought home clearly to our delegation one hot,
humid Tuesday afternoon when we visited an old woman who was one of the 1022 Papuans chosen to
Children in Biak welcome a human rights fact finding
mission with singing at a meeting with survivors of human
rights violations, January 2014.
Pasifika collection
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represent their people in the so-called “act of
free choice”.1, 2
She participated in one of eight assemblies
organised by the Indonesian Government
under the supervision of United Nations
authorities to vote on integration of West
Papua into the Indonesian Republic. The
assemblies were held in Merauke, Wamena,
Nabire, Sorong, Fak Fak, Manokwari, Biak and
Port Numbay (Jayapura) between 14 July 1969
and 2 August that same year.
Our host told us that she was separated from her family and
taken with other assembly participants to ‘special accommodation’ two weeks before the vote. In that
period, she was not allowed any communication with her family or others and was subjected to intense
pressure from Indonesian authorities to support West Papua’s integration into the Indonesian Republic.
She was threatened with dire consequences if she did not support the Indonesian takeover. She recalled
the vote being taken in a hall surrounded by armed Indonesian soldiers. She read a statement of support
for integration with the ‘Unitary Republic of Indonesia’ written by the Indonesian authorities to the
assembly. Once statements were read the armed Indonesians asked who agreed. She and the other
participants, under great duress, put their hands up in agreement. There was no vote. During the
assembly a large crowd of Papuans gathered outside the hall. When they heard the support for
integration, they shouted their fierce opposition to the decision. A Papuan priest who accompanied us to
the woman’s house was present in that crowd. He was a teenager at the time and he recalled that
West Papuans protest the Act of Free Choice,
1969, West Papua
Hugh Lunn
1 The following paragraphs which provide a brief outline of some of the significant events and incidents in the period between Indonesian
occupation of West Papua and the “act of free choice”, the vote itself in 1969 and the immediate aftermath in the United Nations are drawn
from two authoritative accounts by John Saltford and Pieter Drooglever, viz., Saltford, John, The United Nations and the Indonesian Takeover
of West Papua, 1962-1969: The Anatomy of Betrayal. London: Routledge Curzon, 2003 and Drooglever, Pieter, An Act of Free Choice:
Decolonization and the Right to Self-Determination in West Papua. Translated by Maria van Yperen, Marjolijn de Jager and Theresa Stanton.
Oxford: Oneworld, 2009.
2 According to John Saltford and Pieter Drooglever, who have separately conducted scholarly analysis of the archival evidence, 1026 West
Papuans were selected to participate in the Act of Free Choice, which took place in a series of assemblies over several weeks. Four Papuans
were sick so the total number of those who participated in the Act of Free Choice is 1022, less than 0.01% of the population.
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WE WILL LOSE EVERYTHING
Indonesian security forces chased protesters away. Many were beaten. Our host’s husband was so angry
at the outcome, he threatened to separate from her.
In all eight assemblies, the vote for integration with the Indonesian state was unanimous, but Papuans
and many other international witnesses are adamant that this support was not free nor fair. It was
extracted at the point of a gun on the day. Papuans told us that they experienced threats and actual
violence, including aerial bombardment and strafing from machine gun fire, from the first moment
Indonesian troops started administering the territory on behalf of the United Nations on 1 May 1963.
From the inauguration of the Indonesian Republic on 17 August 1947 with Sukarno as its first President,
the Indonesian Government set out with single-minded determination to ensure that all the colonial
territories of the Netherlands East Indies, including West Papua, were included in the Republic. By 1949,
after a number of military actions initiated by the Dutch and various diplomatic negotiations, all of the
Dutch colonial territory except West Papua was incorporated into the Indonesian Republic.
Throughout the 1950s, the Indonesian Government used diplomatic negotiations with the Netherlands
and in the United Nations in an attempt to wrest West Papua from Dutch control, but it was unsuccessful.
As this was happening, the Netherlands Government belatedly worked with Papuans to prepare them for
autonomy and in 1961. The Dutch established the West New Guinea Council through a mix of direct
elections by Papuans and appointment. In the same year, Dutch Foreign Minister Luns submitted a plan
to the UN General Assembly. The plan proposed the Dutch relinquishing sovereignty and a UN
administration assuming control. The plan recognised self-determination for the Papuan people. The
Dutch could not get the necessary support from the UN General Assembly and abandoned efforts to
promote it, but, on 1 December 1961, the members of the West New Guinea Council voted for a change
of name for their land from West New Guinea to West Papua and selected an anthem and a flag. They
also passed a series of resolution supporting the doomed Luns Plan and its commitment to selfdetermination
for the people of West Papua. Later that month, Indonesian President Sukarno issued a
command for the whole of the Indonesian people to mobilise in order to effect what he called the
liberation of the people of West Irian. From that point on, all Indonesian negotiations and actions were
based on a non-negotiable demand that West Papua would become part of the Indonesian Republic.
The New York Agreement was signed by Dutch and Indonesian officials on 15 August 1962. It provided
for a United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA) to take control of West Papua from the
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Dutch on 1 October 1962 and for control to be transferred to the Indonesian Government some time
later. A provision for an act of self-determination by the Papuan people at a later stage was also included
in the agreement. Even before the Agreement was signed, Indonesian paratroopers were being dropped
into West Papua and, from that time onwards, the Indonesian security forces in West Papua engaged in
systematic violence to intimidate Papuans seeking to oppose their occupation and to prevent Papuans
demonstrating in favour of a UN-administered act of self-determination by all Papuans. After the UN
General Assembly gave its stamp of approval to the New York Agreement in September 1962, the UNTEA
officially assumed administration of West Papua on 1 October that year. The UNTEA included a civil
administration for the territory. Although Pakistani troops were on the ground as part of the UN
presence, they were only military observers and did nothing to curb the brutal determination of the
Indonesian security forces to eradicate any opposition to Indonesian control.
In November 1961, Indonesian troops were reported to have beaten up Papuan police in Sorong and
surrounded an airport in Sentani, preventing Papuan police from performing their duties. In December of
that year, Indonesian troops fired at a crowd of demonstrators in Merauke and bombarded a Papuan
police station in Sorong with mortar shells.
In December 1962, a confidential letter was sent to all Indonesian police commissioners working with
UNTEA from the head of the police branch of the Indonesian mission to UNTEA. It instructed them to
ensure that police under their command sign pro-Indonesian statements calling for the early departure of
UNTEA and an end to any plans for an act of self-determination.
Control of West Papua was handed over to the Indonesian Government on 1 May 1963, who under the
terms of the New York Agreement were to administer the territory as a trust on behalf of the United
Nations. In reality the Indonesian government had no intention to fulfil the terms of the New York
Agreement. Indonesian security forces and pro-Indonesian Papuan groups used violence to intimidate
opposition to the Indonesian takeover and to quell demonstrations and rebellion. As both armed and
unarmed d resistance grew, so did the Indonesian military action in response. In 1967 and 1968,
Indonesian military aircraft bombed and strafed the town of Manokwari killing many Papuans.
Paratroops were used in the Paniai district to unleash enormous bloodshed. Papuan leaders who led
opposition to Indonesian control were killed. Foreign observers visiting West Papua in the years leading
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WE WILL LOSE EVERYTHING
up to the 1969 vote noted how unpopular the Indonesian occupation was. In March 1968 Reynders, a US
consular official at the time, described West Papua as existing in ‘a continuous state semi-rebellion’.
Despite knowledge of what was happening, the UN and its member states, failed to act to ensure that the
conditions for a truly free and democratic expression of the will of the Papuan people occurred. The
evidence clearly points to the conclusion that the so-called 1969 Act of Free Choice was neither
democratic nor free. Consent to West Papua’s integration into the Indonesian Republic was extracted by
Indonesian coercion abetted by the failure of the UN to intervene when it saw Indonesian authorities
contravening provisions of the New York Agreement.
When a report on the Act of Free Choice was discussed at the UN General Assembly, the Ghanaian
delegation proposed another act of self-determination by 1975, but this move was rejected and the
General Assembly simply ‘took note’ of the official report, effectively giving its approval to the Indonesian
occupation of West Papua.
Compare these circumstances with the UN’s management of the move to self-determination in the
Australian-controlled eastern half of the island of New Guinea at the same time. In 1968, the UN General
Assembly asked that Australia prepare the territory for a full and free vote on independence by all adults
in that territory. A free and fair plebiscite was subsequently conducted in Papua New Guinea and the
country gained its independence in 1975. The difference between what happened under the supervision
of the UN in the eastern and western halves of the island of New Guinea is stark. It is nothing short of an
enormous scandal.
Peter and Sr Susan were deeply moved by their encounter with the old woman who participated in the
notorious vote of 1969. She still showed great distress and guilt over her part in the vote all these years
later. She sees her support for the Indonesian occupation as a betrayal of her people’s wishes. Worse still
she cannot publicly share what happened for fear of what that might mean for her own life and the life of
her family. Her distress and guilt is all the worse because of the many brutal acts of repression at the
hands of Indonesian security forces she has witnessed in her town since that fateful day. Most
governments of today, including the Australian Government, emphatically affirm their recognition of
Indonesia’s sovereignty over West Papua. They ignore the historical injustice as well as the contemporary
failure of the Indonesian government to protect Papuan life and ensure Papuans can live to their full
potential. Papuans, like this troubled old woman, continue to point to the events surrounding the 1969
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vote, as well as their daily experience of fear and violence, as an outrageously unjust denial of the will of
the Papuan people and the beginning of decades of ruthless oppression.

https://cjpcbrisbane.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/we-will-lose-everything-may-2016.pdf

Much more at link

Land Rights: Counter-mapping West Papua

Nabil Ahmed
DOWNLOAD PDF
Environmental Violence

An enormous crocodile coils around a giant spiral, carved into a mountain. The crocodile breathes fire into the hole; its monstrous tail curves out of the horizon. The crocodile came from a faraway place. Its claws scar the earth. In the background men are seen carrying heavy burdens on their backs next to a cluster of huts. The eyes are drawn to the tail and to the march of thousands of people that move along it. The people who come as far away as the tail amass around the hole and are standing in defiance in front of the crocodile’s jaws. This scene of confrontation on a large canvas makes up the Indonesian artist Djoko Pekik’s painting titled “Go to hell crocodile”.[1] The ‘crocodile’ in the painting is Freeport, the transnational mining company that owns Grasberg mine in West Papua. There is no subtlety in Pekik’s large canvas. Its harrowing environmental record together with its collusion with an occupation makes Freeport a violent behemoth to West Papuans. This is a kind of “environmental violence” where the target is both the territory and its indigenous people. What I call “Environmental violence” attacks the life-world, extinguishing it abruptly or gradually. It penetrates both the organic and non-organic. A part of, but not limited to, armed conflict, its indirect effects can lead to the loss of the livelihood of a people, and to a protracted degradation of ecologies.

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If, as Raymond Williams writes, “we have mixed our labour with the earth, our forces with its forces too deeply to be able to draw back and separate either out” [2] , then human agency and the agency of the earth are thoroughly mixed up. This entanglement is no longer only about labour power that is transforming our planet. Human action resulting in environmental degradation, deforestation, ecosystem destruction and species extinction and climate change, in the form of rising sea levels and greenhouse gases, are another form of planetary violence. While we share responsibility for pollution through our patterns of consumption, the responsibility for planning, releasing, activating, regulating contaminants and therefore exposing populations to harm on a territorial scale, lie mostly with a small number of powerful actors––states, capital, transnational corporations––that dictate, control and compete over resources as vast tracts of the earth are laid to waste. New forms of eco-political and aesthetic practices are called for, to hold accountable those who profit from such violence and those in whom we place our trust for protection.

The colonial practice of land grabbing has intensified under neoliberal capitalism where nation states and corporations stand to profit from the poor around the planet. Historically, maps, surveys, and planning have been used to make territories legible by the state, to make territorial claims as forms of slow institutional violence that are now increasingly organized around techno-science and geospatial data, GIS, remote sensing and satellite imagery. For example, the application of such spatial technologies, along with state policies, are used to appropriate indigenous land, or are used to evidence legal arguments for land grabs. Can there be a counter-cartography that brings together the epistemological diversity of the peoples whose land is under threat yet one that can use the same cartographic methods, language of science, understood and accepted in legal forums? What are their associated risks?

Historically, the practice of counter-mapping by local indigenous communities has played an active role in Indonesia as early as the 1990s beginning in Kalimantan.[3] Nancy Peluso coined the term in 1995 through her fieldwork in Dayak territories in Kalimantan where she showed how local villagers made sketch maps or appropriated state maps to in order to defend their territorial rights against a crony state which was giving away wholesale land to timber concessions in the vast tropical Borneo rain forests. Though the roots of the term lay in parish mapping projects, cognitive, map art practices etc. What is clear is that counter mapping is a political term which, while it crucially has a precedence in indigenous claim making against the state,[4] it is also deployed widely by activists and communities worldwide.



Planetary Claim-making

In the context of West Papua, this article explores counter-mapping as an act of resistance along two spatial trajectories, an ongoing environmental project of evidencing a slow moving environmental disaster and conflict in West Papua [5] and strategies of ‘bottom-up’ efforts at geomatics practiced by indigenous people that locate common rights in long-living family trees, patterns of historical land use, to claim the boundary of their territories––hacking their habitats to make counter claims against the state and capitalist interests. As a political act, its aim to “appropriate the the state’s techniques and manner of representation” has its danger in that fixing indigenous spatial knowledge into maps that follow standardized geospatial protocols can become stratified in the state cartographic project, the very powers it seeks to contest.[6]

Extractive industries have exploited remote sensing technologies soon after the launch of the first Landsat satellite in 1972. The Landsat satellite was a sensing technology that could recognize surface lineament patterns that would show underground geological structures..[7] As an act of counter mapping, similar methodologies can be used to monitor mining activities and related land cover changes. This article describes some of the work undertaken that evidences and monitors “out of sight” mining activities and their resultant contaminations in West Papua, to capture pronounced and subtle land cover changes (e.g. vegetation disturbance, vegetation decline, river dynamics, turbidity) using remote sensing data.

The two practices are different but share common aspirations of environmental justice, one an artistic research project that sometimes seeks to support of Papuan diaspora activist’s political claims in international forums and draws inspiration from the others regional resistance. Two very different epistemologies connecting sky and ground, remote sensing science and indigenous agency/knowledge can act in territorial claim making. In light of current indigenous and environmental activist gains in the Indonesian constitution, which recognizes customary forest rights, methods for evidencing environmental violence in West Papua might help keep alive its emancipatory dreams.



Topologies of Extraction

West Papua, the western half of the sub-continental Island of New Guinea, has been described as a “rich mother lode of natural and cultural history” for ecologists and conservationists.[8] Its immense territory, spanning 400,000 square kilometres hosts the largest tropical forest in the Asia-Pacific and its only glaciers (fast disappearing). Thousands of yet unknown to science plant and animal life inhabit the vast forests, rivers, swamplands, lakes, mangroves, and savannahs. From an ecosystem perspective, West Papua’s extreme biodiversity is attributed to its wide altitudinal range.[9] Its biodiversity is mirrored in an indigenous population of Melanesian Peoples represented by numerous tribes and languages. According to the government’s current Master Plan for the Acceleration and Expansion of Indonesia Economic Development (MP3EI), Papua and Maluku are designated as regions for mining, plantations, fisheries and forestry. The untapped economic potential is enormous. But this development is selective as customary land is taken sometimes with the barrel of a gun and other times with wicked promises of prosperity for the indigenous people of West Papua. Systematic land-grabbing and deforestation are common practices. Reportedly 2,064,698 hectares of land has been appropriated for palm oil plantations alone, while over the last 10 years Papua has officially lost nearly 5 million hectares of forest.[10] The transnational BP is operating a project called ‘Tangguh LNG’ in Bintuni Bay for the extraction of natural gas. [11] Grasberg mine in West Papua contains the world’s largest known deposit of gold (91.4 tonnes compared to Freeport South Africa at 60.44 tonnes). It constitutes the world’s third largest open-pit copper mine reserves (32 million), however at extraction rates of fewer than 10 cents per pound, it is the cheapest copper in the world and is expected to generate 80 billion US dollars for the mining companies.[12]

Freeport dumps vast amounts of waste as by product into the regional ecology. Arsenic, a by-product of copper mining, is in and around the soil and the water of the land that belongs to the Komoro people, which the mine uses as its dumping ground. Yet beyond the superlatives, this is by no means a normative case of environmental poisoning by a mine. In contemporary Indonesia, a stark example of an unfolding state crime is in its complicity in the poisoning of an occupied territory. A damning 2013 report by the Asian Human Rights Commission meticulously documents the mass killings through aerial bombing and indiscriminate shooting perpetrated by the Indonesian military in the Papuan central highlands between 1977 and 1978.[13] However, gross human rights violations did not abate after the fall of the Suharto regime. King and Wing explain, while the period of the mid-1970s is often referred to as the era of the greatest suffering, as Indonesia’s military used Papua for its combat training exercises while simultaneously conducting a genocidal campaign in East Timor, the current situation is a “silent genocide”.[14] Freeport’s investments in West Papua are protected by Indonesia’s military forces, responsible for documented massacres and human rights violations against the Papuan people including aerial bombings, extrajudicial killings, torture, assassinations, disappearance, detention, and rape of civilians. The state and the mining company have poisoned and continue to poison, West Papua, a zone of conflict.

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In many ways the Grasberg mine and its environmental violence has been a nexus of their grievances and a site of conflict. In the Mimika region mining and its tailing has permanently altered the landscape. Freeport, which now shares the mine with Rio Tinto uses a 293,000-hectare area including the Otomina and Ajkwa River to the Ararfura Sea in effect as a geotechnical system for tailing deposition. The journey for the toxic waste begins from the mine located over 4,000 above sea level through its ore-processing centre down to the lowland estuaries and a diverse forested coastal zone of mangroves sago, tropical and cloud forests. The movement thus traverses both a vertical and horizontal path of destruction. Over 200,000 tons of tailings flow through the river per day into this area, which contain highly toxic arsenic, copper, cadmium, selenium. The mine is in the heart of the ancestral land of the indigenous Amungme and Kamoro, two of the many ethnically Melanasian indigenous people that make up Papua. Already large tracts of their ancestral forests have disappeared, with equally irreparable biodiversity loss.

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Mapping a Genealogy of Conflict

The destruction of Papuan mountain, rivers, forests and land connects to a planetary scale. The tropical rainforests in the archipelago are part of the equatorial ‘green belt’ that includes the Amazon, and Congo that sustains the planet. Equatorial forests and the Pacific ring of fire forms a diagram for this research in that like a giant horseshoe and a thick line, they cut across from the Indonesian archipelago, intersecting again on the other side of the planet, in Latin America. Under neoliberal imperative of resource accumulation, such tropical forest-geological fault lines produce new alliances of geo-politics, a politics with the earth, among Asian, African and Latin American territorial struggles.

According to the FAO in 2010 Indonesia as a whole had 52 percent forest cover with an annual deforestation rate of 0.5 percent over the last decade. [15] So far, much of the deforestation and related conflicts has taken place in forested regions in Borneo and Sumatra. However, vast tracts of Papuan forests are equally under threat for palm oil production. The exploitation of Indonesia’s land resources began under Dutch colonial occupation through forest enclosures under the term Domeinverklaring in 1870. Land that had been part of the commons were formalized into Dutch colonial state property which it considered ‘unused’. After 1949, the newly independent Indonesian state only asserted its rights on indigenous land further, continuing with the annexation of West Papua (then Irian Jaya) in 1969 as part of a cold war geopolitical game. What then began in full swing under President Suharto’s regime of crony capitalism and rampant corruption of exploiting forest resources has not stopped since the fall of that regime in 1998. Land grabs surrounding forests in indigenous territories estimated to be forty million hectares spread through the archipelago in Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan, Sulewasi, Maluku, Flores and Papua. Conflicts have mainly resulted from overlapping claims where state and local governments handed over concessions and permits to logging, mining, and palm oil companies.

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In May 16, 2013 the word ‘state’ was removed in front of the word ‘forest’ in Indonesian constitution. Known as Ruling No. 35, customary forests are now classified as titled forests. The landmark ruling was a result of the Indigenous People’s Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN), the indigenous community of the Kenegerian of Kuntu and the indigenous community of the Kasepuhan of Cisitu petitioning a judicial review on numerous articles of the National Act No. 41 Year 1999 on Forestry. The 1999 law had already recognized customary forests however it had defined customary forests as “state forests located in the areas of custom-based communities.”[16] Finally the possibility of territorial wrongs righted had appeared on the horizon for millions of indigenous people in the archipelago.

Since the passing of the Forest Act of 1967, the same year mining concessions were handed over to Freeport, no government mapping exercise has taken into account local land claims. Up until the ruling, any local claims to territorial rights were always trumped by state power and government produced maps. But under the new constitutional ruling, what had been indiscriminately destroyed or considered expendable, as state-owned forest could perhaps now be questioned. The two organizations, which have been spearheading the urgent counter-mapping project, are Network for Participatory Mapping (JKPP) a grassroots organization that uses local spatial knowledge to evidence land rights and the Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN). The two organizations together have submitted ancestral domain maps outlining over two million hectares of customary forests to the Indonesian Geospatial Information Agency. So far the two territories that have at least been partially mapped are West Kalimantan and Papua, which took as long as fifteen years to complete. Yet it remains to be seen how the government will incorporate this rich spatial data to implement the changes in practice. Here lies the challenges faced by indigenous activists: the longer it takes for the maps to be produced; the less chances there are of implementation in the law. Furthermore the customary rights to forests also have to be recognized separately by regional governments and not only at a federal level. According to Abetnego Tarigan from WALHI, official mapping data does not exist. There are still over thirty million hectares of indigenous territory left for mapping, a mammoth task for the activists, especially when the encroachment on land continues. Though in light of the recognition of customary forests, the need to produce various types of counter-maps have become even more crucial in order to demarcate ‘state’ and ‘local’ forests, contested territories and evidence pollution and deforestation such as in the Mimika region in Papua.

Within the context of evidencing land cover change caused by the activities of the Grasberg mine, counter-mapping can also be a valuable tool. A research project is currently underway that brings a number of scales, and forms of territorial evidencing to produce a composite picture for evidencing environmental violence in West Papua.[17] The project takes shape around several sets of spatial data: the identification of human impact through settlements, mining infrastructures, tailing deposition areas, sedimentation and second; the natural features of the area of interest, mainly variety of vegetation (forests), water (rivers, estuary). It further seeks to show the interaction between mining activity and natural resources, vegetation loss, and the territorial scale increase of the tailing deposition area continuously moving to the mouth of the Arafura Sea. Superimposing and calculating these data sets can show what customary lowland forest areas have been destroyed or might be under threat from future deforestation. Combined with fieldwork, and analysis to determine the chemical makeup of the tailing area can begin to connect this wealth of data that can be used and monitor the mining company’s activities in a conflict zone. Furthermore a territorial scale resource and conflict-mapping project is underway to overlay sites of commercial presence (foreign and domestic) around oil, gas, minerals, timber, military presence, language and ethnicity, trends of human rights violations to support a people’s struggle.



Indigenous Politics and Counter-mapping

Participatory mapping is a form of ‘local territorialization’ where the maps and map-making act as an advocacy tool for land rights.[18] Using the same language of state cartography such as zoning, resources, land use, and boundaries, indigenous people are asserting their own claims for securing land rights. The inclusion and recognition of ancestral domain maps in the Indonesian national spatial data infrastructure is a win for the indigenous people of the archipelago. Politically for the nation state it fits into the state motto Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (Unity in Diversity) with increasing recognition of indigenous rights. On the other hand for West Papua, inclusion can be seen to even detract from the independence movement and its long time dream of Papua Merdeka (Free Papua). Counter-maps are like counter narratives, howeverdo they lose their power when included in grand narratives such as nationalism? Maps and imagery of landscape transformation in Papua can provide evidence towards realizing this emancipatory dream in legal and contemporary forums. The question that remains is how to win incremental rights while keeping alive dreams of emancipation.

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Contrary to the imagination of European explorers and popular culture, the vast forests of Papua were not ‘pristine’ scenes of natural history populated by Stone Age savages. Rather, even the scarce and scant paleo-ecological evidence shows human impact on the island going back over 30,000 years. The indigenous people of Papua, through the practice of agriculture, clearance, burning, produced “human landscapes, such as grasslands, secondary forests, and coastal woodlands”.[19] While the indigenous Papuans managed to alter their landscapes as shepherds of the forests over thousands of years, mineral exploitation by Freeport accelerated radical negative ecological impacts that have altered the landscape permanently. While the first established a new balance, the latter took the ecology out of balance and when it’s empty they would move out. It is the landscape that we turn to and forms of resistance, counter mapping as hacking habitat. In Amungme cosmology, spirits inhabit their landscapes. One of the most respected of the spirits is Tu Ni Me Ni, representing fertility and embodied in the landscape with “her head in the mountains, her breasts and wombs in the valley and her legs stretched out toward the distant coast”.[20] When Freeport sliced off their mountain they destroyed their spirit. Evidencing the violence on Papuan landscape from the sky and ground is evidencing cosmological crimes.



REFERENCES

[1] “Pulling no punches”. Jakarta Post. 28 May 2014. Accessed 3 June 2014. http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2014/05/28/pulling-no-punches.html

[2] Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1980), 83.

[3] Kalimantan rainforests in Borneo and numerous indigenous communities suffered devastating forest exploitation at the hands of multinational companies and the Indonesian state. On early use of counter mapping see Nancy Peluso, “Whose woods are these? Counter-mapping forest territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia. Antipode, 27:4 (383 – 406) 1995.

[4] It is perhaps indigenous peoples that teach us that the end of state sovereignty is not temporal but geographic. On the latter point I pick up on Thom Kuehl’s reading of Nietzschean eco-politics, see Tom Kuehls, Beyond Sovereign Territory: The Space of Ecopolitics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

[5] This research is part of ‘Earth Sensing Association’, a research association initiated by Nabil Ahmed for the diffusion of knowledge at the intersection of environmental change and conflict.

[6] Ibid, 384.

[7] Floyd Sabins, “Remote sensing for mineral exploration”. Ore Geology Reviews 14 (1999), 157 183.

[8] Bruce Bechler and Andrew J. Marshall, The Ecology of Papua Part 1 (Hong Kong: Periplus, 2007), 3.

[9] Ibid, 755.

[10] See Human Rights in West Papua 2013. International Coalition for Papua (ICP) (Wuppertal: ICP, 2013), 53. See also the website awasmifee.potager.org.

[11] LNG stands for liquid natural gas.

[12] Denise Leith. The Politics of Power: Freeport in Suharto’s Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press), 3.

[13] See Asian Human Rights Commission, “The Neglected Genocide: Human rights abuses against Papuans in the central highlands 1977–1978”. Hong Kong: AHRC, 2013.

[14] John Wing and Peter King, “Genocide in West Papua? The role of the Indonesian state apparatus and a current needs assessment of the Papuan people”. Sydney: West Papua project, 2005, 2.

[15] “Papua and West Papua: REDD+ and the Threat to Indigenous Peoples. Rights, Forests and Climate Briefing Series.” Forest Peoples Programme, October 2011

[16] Indonesia Nature Film Society & HuMa. The Customary Forests after the Constitutional Court’s Ruling No. 35. Video documentary, 2013.

[17] The remote sensing research is carried out with Mike Alonzo and Jamon Van den Hoek.

[18] Peluso, Nancy Lee. “Territorializing Local Struggles for Resource Contol: A Look at Environmental Discourses and Politics in Indonesia.” In Greenough, Paul R, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. pp. 231 – 252.

[19] Bechler and Marshall, The Ecology of Papua, 1087.

[20] Chris Ballard, “The signature of terror: violence, memory and landscape at Freeport”. Bruno David and Meredith Wilson eds., Inscribed Landscapes: Marking and Making Place (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), 13–26.

http://continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/211

Stop denying human rights violations in Papua: LBH Jakarta
News Desk News Desk
The Jakarta Post

Jakarta | Tue, October 4 2016 | 02:30 pm

Stop denying human rights violations in Papua: LBH Jakarta

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A Papuan activist shouts slogans during a demonstration to commemorate the West Papuan declaration of independence from Dutch rule in Jakarta on Dec. 1, 2015. Police officers fired tear gas to disperse more than 100 Papuan protesters during the rally.(JP/DMR)
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The Jakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH Jakarta) has issued a statement condemning the Indonesian government’s “denial of reports of human rights violations in Papua” during the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 26. The legal rights defender, which has previously advocated on behalf of several Papuan groups, says that the violations really took place.

LBH Jakarta data show that between April and Sept. 16 this year, the government has arrested 2,282 Papuans staging non-violent rallies. Most of these arrests took place from May 28 to July 27, in which 1,889 protesters were arrested, LBH Jakarta said in a release made available Monday.

“Indonesia, through its representative, Nara Masista, said problems in Papua were related to separatists seeking to disrupt public order. She also said Indonesia’s commitment to human rights was solid,” the release said. “But the reality begs to differ. LBH Jakarta and our network has recorded human rights violations from arrests, murders and dispersal of rallies,” the statement said.

The data show that from 2012 until June 2016, 4,198 Papuans were arrested. “The arrests were made in different places and involved intimidation,” it said.

The violations continued with the Papua Police chief’s order on July 1 this year, which limited freedom of expression by stigmatizing rallies with the label of separatism, LBH claimed, adding that since then, every rally had been dispersed and the protesters arrested.

“From Aug. 13 to Sept. 16, 112 protesters were arrested while carrying out non-violent rallies in several places in Papua and Jakarta,” LBH Jakarta went on. (evi)

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/10/04/stop-denying-human-rights-violations-in-papua-lbh-jakarta.html

5 Things You Need to Know About Indonesia’s Occupation of West Papua
by The Fifth Column • May 11, 2016


West Papua (Novara) -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 uniformlybanned 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 2004report 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.

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AK Rockefeller, Flickr, Creative Commons
West Papua Freedom Fighters

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 distancehimself 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 representativesfrom 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.

This report prepared by Connor Woodman for Novara Wire.

http://thefifthcolumnnews.com/2016/05/5-things-you-need-to-know-about-indonesias-occupation-of-west-papua/

Asian human rights watchdog dismayed at lack of progress in Papua
By PMC Editor - June 20, 2016 1 221
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Indonesian human rights record in Papua ... government "must gaurantee indigenous Papuan protections", says Asian watchdog. Image: Unpo

After monitoring 20 months of the human rights situation in Papua and West Papua provinces under Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s administration, the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) is dismayed at the utter lack of progress in the protection and realisation of people’s rights.

Since President Widodo’s inauguration on 20 October 2014, there were considerable expectations for improvement in Indonesia’s human rights situation, particularly in Papua and West Papua.

President Widodo was believed to have a strong commitment to addressing the various human rights violations in Papua, providing remedies for victims and families, and evaluating the presence of security forces in the province.

Over a year of his presidency however, has neither resolved any of the past human rights violations, nor seen any adequate remedy and guarantee for non recurrence given to the victims.

Law No. 21 of 2001 on special autonomy for Papua and West Papua province has yet to bring benefits to local indigenous Papuans. Similarly, government development of public infrastructure has an economic and business orientation rather than benefits for the local community.

The government’s attempts to boost international investment to Papua and West Papua will likely see an increase in migration to the provinces from elsewhere in Indonesia, further fuelling local discontent.

Police involved
Furthermore, criminal justice institutions in the provinces do not function to address human rights problems.



The police are frequently involved in various human rights violations in the two provinces, and the accountability mechanism has failed to address this problem.

The Paniai case of 8 December 2014, where four indigenous Papuan children were shot to death, two adults seriously injured, and 17 others injured (AHRC-UAC-089-2015) is an indicative example of the brutality faced by Papuans, as well as the lack of any effective investigation or remedies.

Other cases that have also not been investigated and prosecuted under President Widodo’s administration include the case of a member of the Air Force heavily maltreating 22-year-old Amsal Marandof (AHRC-UAC-143-2015), the case of arbitrary arrest and torture of three indigenous Papuans on 27 August 2015 (AHRC-UAC-003-2016), and the case of the shooting and brutal attack on 10 indigenous Papuan youth conducted by police officers of Tigi Police Sector (AHRC-UAC-090-2015).

The AHRC has also observed the Indonesian government’s lack of willingness to deal with past human rights abuses in Papua and West Papua provinces.

The investigation report of the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) on the gross violations in Wasior Wamena Papua (2001 and 2003), for instance, has been sitting with the Attorney General for the past eight years, without any action taken by that office.

In the allegations of genocide in the Central High Lands of Papua from 1977-1978 as well, although the AHRC submitted a report to Komnas HAM, as of yet there is no progress in the investigation.

While Komnas HAM initiated establishing a team in November 2015 to audit human rights violations beginning from the integration of Papua to the Republic of Indonesia until the case of Tolikara (AHRC-UAC-106-2015, AHRC-UAU-002-2016), since then there has been no clear information on the team’s existence or work.

Recently, a government initiative under the Coordinator Minister of Politic and Security (Menkopolhukam), Luhut Binsar Panjaitan, was announced, to establish a special team dealing with human rights violations in Papua and West Papua provinces.

Initiative rejected
Local human rights groups however, have largely rejected the initiative, saying that representative indigenous Papuans in the team are not genuinely representing indigenous Papuans on the ground.

In fact, the initiative is typical of the government process to suddenly establish a team without proper consultation and discussion with Papuans on the ground.

The government tends to simplify the problems in Papua, and its economic and infrastructure perspective on Papua does not seriously take into consideration the history of human rights violations occurring from the time of integration to the present.

The AHRC therefore calls for President Joko Widodo and his administration to take serious and comprehensive steps to deal with the various human rights problems facing Papua and West Papua provinces.

The government should stop seeking political benefits in dealing with the provinces, and focus on improving the situation of the local communities.

In particular, the government must guarantee protection of local indigenous Papuans, local human rights defenders and journalists, and consistently open Papua and West Papua to international monitors to ensure the progress of resolution.

Asian Human Rights Commission

http://asiapacificreport.nz/2016/06/20/indonesian-watchdog-dismayed-at-lack-of-rights-progress-in-west-papua/

Forgotten Bird of Paradise (full version) - undercover West Papua documentary

It was produced and directed by British filmmaker Dominic Brown, who travelled in West Papua without the knowledge or authority of the Indonesian authorities. The film provides a rare and moving insight into the ongoing struggle for freedom being fought by the West Papua people against Indonesian colonial rule.

For over 45 years the people of West Papua have suffered in silence. Slowly their voice is starting to be heard.

Papua Merdeka! West Papua. One People. One Soul



http://youtu.be/CaGou3vB3A0

Benny Wenda’s Story
Early life

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As a young child in the 1970s, Benny Wenda’s world was his village in the remote highlands of West Papua. Life consisted of tending gardens with his mother among the Lani people who, he says, ‘lived at peace with nature in the mountains’. In 1977 that life changed dramatically.

That year, the military appeared in his village. Now, every morning on the way to their gardens, Benny and his mother and aunties would be stopped and checked by Indonesian soldiers. Often the soldiers would force the women to wash themselves in the river before brutally raping them in front of their children. Many young women, including three of Benny’s aunties, died in the jungle from the trauma and injuries inflicted during these attacks, which often involved genital mutilation. Every day Papuan women had to report to the military post to provide food from their gardens, and to clean and cook for the soldiers. Violence, racism and enforced subservience became part of daily routine.

Later that year, and in response to military violence towards Papuans, 15,000 Lani people rebelled. In retaliation, Indonesian military aircraft bombed many Lani villages in the highlands, including Benny’s village. Benny remembers an attack where their huts and crops were burned and many of his family were killed or injured. Benny too suffered in the attack: his leg was badly injured and left untreated because his family was forced to flee into hiding in the jungle, leaving him with one leg significantly shorter than the other and an awkward limp. More than twenty years later the scars, the pain and the difficulty in walking remain.

Childhood in the jungle

Benny WendaBetween 1977 and 1983 Benny and his family, along with thousands of other highlanders, lived in hiding in the jungle. Life was hard. Food and shelter were scarce, and the weak struggled to survive the harsh conditions. Violence from the military remained a constant threat. In one particularly harrowing incident, soldiers happened across Benny’s family in the jungle. The soldiers ripped Benny’s two year old cousin from his aunty’s arms and threw her to the ground with so much force that the child’s back was broken. They then raped his aunty, forcing Benny to watch. His small cousin died two weeks after the attack; his aunty sometime later from her own injuries. Benny could not understand why the Indonesian military was doing this and, still, he had no knowledge of the context in which this violence took place.

After five years in the jungle, everyone else from his village had succumbed to the conditions and surrendered to the Indonesians. Only his family remained in the jungle. To surrender, Papuans had to present themselves to the local military post carrying an Indonesian flag, which signalled their loyalty to Indonesia and their willingness to live in the community under Indonesian rule. When Benny’s grandmother died, largely due to conditions in their jungle hideout, their family decided it was time to surrender for the sake of the children. Having already lost so many, Benny’s grandfather insisted that the children be taken back, telling his mother that Benny’s well-being was important, so that one day he will know what happened to us and why… and one day he will act.

After his family surrendered, Benny went to school. His education was entirely about Indonesia. He learned about Indonesia’s independence from the Dutch and celebrated it on the anniversary of 17 August 1945. He learned about buffalos instead of pigs and of rice paddies instead of the Papuan-style gardens that he had grown up working in with his family. He was told to eat rice instead of sweet potato, the staple for Papuans. Indonesian teachers and students alike called Benny and the other Papuan students ‘stupid’, ‘primitive’, and ‘dirty’ because they ate pork and their parents were ‘indecent’, with the men wearing nothing but the traditional koteka (penis gourd).

Benny still could not understand why Indonesians treated him this way. He constantly went to his mother with questions:

“Why did I grow up in the jungle? Why am I different to the others? Why do they call me stupid?”

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Benny giving a talk to students in Oxford, 2009

He would ask. His mother refused to answer his questions. ‘One day I will tell you the whole story’, was all she would say. In senior high school Benny was one of only two Papuan students in the class. The others were children of Javanese and Sulawesi transmigrants. One day, the teacher directed him to sit next to a Javanese girl. He smiled and respectfully greeted her as he sat down. She turned, scowled, and spat on him. He wiped her spit from his face, feeling terrible. ‘Maybe I really do smell’, he thought. ‘I disgust her. I must not be clean enough. That must be why she doesn’t like me.’ Assuming the problem was his, and desperate to please this girl, Benny went to the shop after school to buy an extra bar of soap. He washed himself three times over. The following day, he walked confidently into the class and sat down, smiling and greeting the girl with respect. But this time she stood up, attracted the attention of the entire class, and spat on him again. The class laughed.

Finally, it dawned on Benny: this had nothing to do with his cleanliness. This was racism. Benny stood up, enraged:

“You think that because I am black, because I am Papuan, that I am dirty!?! I have eyes, I have hands… I am human – just like you! We are both human and we both deserve to be treated the same. With respect.”

Events such as these drove Benny to take on a leadership role in the Papuan community. His motivation sprang not from politics, but from the desire to assert and celebrate Papuan identity, and to encourage other Papuans to do the same. Benny went on to complete a degree in sociology and politics in Jayapura. While at university, he initiated discussion groups for Papuan students in Jayapura – of all ages and from all tribes from both the highlands and coastal regions – so they could come together and talk about what it was to be Papuan. Above all, Benny wanted to change the mindset of Papuan children, children who had been brought up being told they were primitive, dumb and dirty, to teach them that they should be proud of being Papuan.

Searching for the truth

Screen Shot 2013-04-26 at 02.04.00But for Benny, questions remained. While he could speak of his own terrible experiences, he still understood very little of the broader conflict and context in which his personal suffering – and that of his village – had taken place. Frustrated with the lack of information he was provided in school, and his mother’s refusal to answer his questions, he sought out information about Papuan history. He searched the school library, the public library, the university library. But he found nothing. ‘Why do we only study Indonesian history? The history of Java, Sumatra and Bali? Where is the history of Papua?’ he asked.

During the 1980s, and even into the early 1990s, there was very little written history or discussion about the circumstances of Papua’s incorporation into Indonesia or the events that followed. Eventually, through story-telling, Benny came to learn how the Dutch had retained control of the province after 1945 and
promised independence. He found out about the declaration of Papuan sovereignty on 1 December 1961, about the West Papuan flag (the Bintang Kejora), the national anthem (Hai Tanahku Papua), the Indonesian invasion and the 1969 ‘Act of Free Choice’ when a small group of hand-picked Papuans were intimidated into voting for integration with Indonesia.

Finally he understood the root causes of why the Indonesians treated West Papuans as they did. Yet at that time, Benny recalls that no one was allowed even to use the word ‘Papua’ or ‘West Papua’, only ‘Irian Jaya’, let alone discuss publicly Papuan history, culture or identity. Books were censored. But knowing the historical origins of the oppression was enough. Of the decades of violence, discrimination and oppression, Benny needed no written record: he had first hand experience.

Demmak and the ‘Papuan Spring’

After the fall of Suharto, the relaxation of military control and the independence of East Timor in 1999, demonstrations and flag raisings occurred across Papua, with Papuans demanding their own referendum on independence. In the period between 1999 and 2000, known as the ‘Papuan Spring’, Jakarta held dialogue with Papuan leaders and the Presidium of the Papuan Council (PDP) was formed to represent the Papuan nationalist movement and to negotiate Papua’s future.

Benny WendaIt was during this period that Benny became leader of Demmak (Dewan Musyawarah Masyarakat Koteka), the Koteka Tribal Assembly. Demmak was established by tribal elders with the goal of working towards recognition and protection of the customs, values and beliefs of the tribal people of West Papua. It advocates independence from Indonesia, and rejects special autonomy or any other political compromise offered by the Indonesian government. As Secretary-General of Demmak, Benny represented the council of elders. The organisation supported PDP negotiations with Jakarta to the extent that they represented the aspiration of the Papuan people, which was independence from Indonesia.

But when Megawati became President in July 2001 policy on Papua changed. A compromised version of special autonomy was the only politically viable option. The Papuan Spring was over and the military crackdown on known ‘separatists’ began. In November 2001, Theys Eluay, leader of the PDP, was assassinated by soldiers. But Benny stood firm to Demmak’s aim: full independence.

Political persecution… and escape

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Benny in prison during his trial

The political freedom to express aspirations for independence quickly evaporated. Once again, it became dangerous to support independence. Secret documents later discovered by human rights organisations named specific organisations and individuals that had to be ‘dealt with’, including the PDP and Demmak. On 6 June 2002 Benny was arrested and detained in Jayapura. His home was ransacked without a warrant and the police refused to inform him of the charges brought against him.

He was tortured by police and held in solitary confinement for several months. Sometime later he was charged with inciting an attack on a police station and burning two shops in the small township of Abepura on 7 December 2000, which left a policeman and a security guard dead.

For his political views, Benny was being charged with a crime he did not commit.

These charges related to the infamous, ‘Abepura incident’, in which violent acts of retaliation by Indonesian police were committed against the Papuan community, resulting in the arrest of over 100 people, police violence and torture in detention and the death of at least three students in the days following. Two police officers were prosecuted for crimes against humanity before the Human Rights Court in 2005 for these events, but were acquitted. Benny faced criminal prosecution for the initial attack on the police station, for inciting acts of violence and arson and was likely to receive up to 25 years in prison. Yet he was not even in the country at the time the alleged planning and execution of the attacks took place.

Benny meets David Cameron

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Benny presents information about the campaign to David Cameron in 2007

His trial commenced on 24 September 2002 and lasted for several weeks. Armed policemen surrounded the courtroom each day, as Benny’s many supporters turned out in a show of support for their leader. Facing the judges he was stoic and resolute in proclaiming his innocence. To his supporters he was warm and encouraging, smiling and shaking hands with those who lined his path between the courtroom and police vehicle.

The trial was flawed from the outset. The prosecutor and judge requested bribes from Benny’s defence team, but were refused. The persons named as key prosecution witnesses could not be identified and failed to attend court to be cross examined on their statements. Defence counsel for Benny insisted that the witness statements be thrown out on the basis they were fabricated by police to implicate Benny in the attack. But the judge, who appeared biased and hostile to Benny throughout the proceedings, accepted the evidence. It was obvious that Benny would not receive a fair trial.

Rumours were rife that military intelligence would kill him in detention before the judge rendered a decision

Meanwhile, inside the prison, Benny was physically attacked several times by prison guards. On the advice of his lawyers, he did not eat the food provided in prison because of the risk of poisoning. Because the evidence against him in court was so weak, rumours were rife that military intelligence would kill him in detention before the judge rendered a decision.

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Benny pictured meeting US Congressman for American Samoa, Eni Faleomavaega in Washington D.C.

The court was adjourned pending a decision. Conviction – or death – seemed certain. Then, in miraculous circumstances that he does not want to explain for fear of endangering the persons who helped him, Benny escaped from Abepura prison on 27 October 2002. The Indonesian police allegedly issued a shoot to kill order. But aided by West Papua independence activists, Benny was smuggled across the border to PNG and later assisted by a European NGO group to travel to the UK where he was granted political asylum. In 2003, Benny and his wife Maria were reunited in England, where they now live with their children.

Benny holds a deep and enduring belief that justice will eventually prevail, and he sees his remarkable escape from persecution in Indonesia as testament to that fact. He recognises that other freedom fighters, like Arnold Ap, Theys Eluay and Bill Tabuni, have not been so lucky. But this only strengthens his resolve. ‘While my people continue to suffer and continue to die, nothing will stop my campaign’, he says.

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Benny pictured with his son after discovering that the Interpol ‘red notice’ had been removed

For him, there is only one way to stop the killing, and ensure that Papuans enjoy the same freedoms that people elsewhere in the world already enjoy: Papua must be independent. And to that end he continues his campaign.

In 2011, the Indonesian Government issued an International Arrest Warrant for Benny’s arrest through Interpol. This move was widely attacked, as a ploy to silence Benny and prevent him from travelling overseas to campaign for West Papua self-determination. Fair Trials International led an appeal to have the Red Notice removed so that Benny could once again travel freely.

In August 2012, in a landmark case Interpol removed the Red Notice against Benny, after an investigation concluded that the Indonesian Government had abused the system in a politically motivated attempt to silence Benny.

https://www.freewestpapua.org/info/benny-wendas-story/