UPDATE
Half a day after this story was published the NZ pilot
Phillip Mehrtens was released unharmed.
This is a great outcome for Phil, his family and all humanitarians. Many feared a bloodbath with the hostage
killed in an ‘accidental crossfire’ twixt the Indonesian army and the
rebels. The fact that didn’t happen adds
some hope that the crisis is edging towards a solution.
THE SHAMEFUL SILENT WAR
NEXT DOOR
Why doesn’t the
Australian government condemn a brutal guerilla war next door? Largely because Canberra handles brittle Indonesia
tenderly lest it snaps off trade and security deals with its spacious but
under-occupied neighbour.
Raw facts drive policy harder
than moral values. The population ratio is 11 Indonesians to every Aussie. Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous
nation and has more Muslims than any other country.
Tribesman archers versus chopper
gunships don’t top news bulletins because Western journalists are banned from
the resource-rich Indonesian provinces collectively known as West Papua.
Reporters can rarely verify stories of killings, starvation, torture and discrimination
in the largely Christian province.
Now the allegations are
hardening.
A sober but scathing report
by the US-based independent NGO Human Rights Watch launched in Jakarta
on Thursday carries authority because the checking appears thorough and the
sources referenced. It is directed at
the Indonesian Government and the UN.
The 76-page document
printed in the US is titled If it’s not racism, what is it? Lead author Andreas Harsono (left) said HRW staff spent
almost five years “conducting 49 in-depth interviews with Papuan activists,”
who’d been arrested and prosecuted. “In addition, we interviewed lawyers,
academics, officials and church leaders. Informants weren’t paid.”
Jakarta took over the
western half of the tropical mountainous island of New Guinea from the colonial
Dutch after a flawed referendum in 1969. According to four Australian academic researchers including
a former AFP investigator, “hundreds of thousands” have died through fighting
and starvation since 1,025 hand-picked locals voted to join the Republic.
Papuan preacher Rev Ronald Tapilatu (below) told Michael West Media he was certain that most of the two million ethnic Melanesians wanted independence but didn’t sanction violence:
“The Indonesian
government wants the issue to be domestic, but until it gets widespread
international coverage little will change.”
Global interest essential
for change
Before she became Foreign
Minister Senator Penny Wong revealed that
Labor was distressed by “human rights violations” in West Papua.
As reported
earlier on this website, Deputy PM Richard Marles stressed no
Australian support for independence.
Swedish and German Embassy
staff were at the HRW report launch but no one from the Australian Embassy
registered. The UN resident coordinator Valerie Julliand was also absent. She was kicked out of Indonesia last
December reportedly for criticising HR issues in Papua.
Ironically Indonesia is a
member of the UN Human Rights Council until 2026. It
says
its aim is to “intensify human rights dialogue at global and regional levels,
and bolster the implementation of universal human rights values.”
The villainy is not single-sided
Six years ago, 19
civilian road builders were ambushed and killed. This August independence
fighters allegedly murdered Kiwi
chopper pilot Glen Conning; he was flying for an Indonesian company ferrying
local health workers who were unharmed.
Another NZ pilot Phillip
Mehrtens was seized early last year by the West Papua National Liberation
Army. He's said to be alive and held hostage. The group
denies shooting Conning and has hinted at
military involvement.
HRW researchers using
multiple languages gathered info in many locations including Surabaya, the
capital of East Java and the nation's second-largest city. Riots here in 2019
followed an attack on a Papuan student dorm by “militant nationalists and
security forces”.
They were reportedly angered
by the display of the Morning Star independence flag. Under Indonesian law,
offenders face up to 20 years jail time.
Forty-three Surabaya students
were arrested for supporting the Papuan Lives Matter movement that’s based
on the US social crusade Black Lives Matter.
After the police action which included much racial abuse, violence
erupted in 33 Indonesian cities. Houses and cars were firebombed.
Like
Marles, the HRW report stresses it “takes no position on
claims for independence… We support the right of everyone to peacefully express
their political views … without fear of arrest or other forms of reprisal.
“The Indonesian
government has legitimate security concerns in West Papua stemming from Papuan
militant attacks.”
Unlike Marles, HRW adds a
rider: “But these do not justify the government's failure to uphold
international human rights and humanitarian law prohibitions against arbitrary
arrest and detention, torture and ill-treatment of persons in custody, and
unlawful killings.”
When former Jakarta
Governor and one-time furniture exporter Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo was elected
president in 2014 many assumed he’d be Mr Fixit. Because he had no military
background it was expected he’d tackle the West Papua issue with diplomacy.
Instead, he left the task
to the army way of violence, more troops and air power. Along with the bombs
and bullets disinformation and misinformation campaigns have been run against
poorly organised small gangs at first using pre-gunpowder weapons.
Now they’re getting a few
modern
arms,
some ostensibly sold by corrupt soldiers.
The HRW document’s 18
recommendations call for open access to the province by foreign observers, an
end to discrimination, accepting the right to peaceful protest and Indonesian security
forces following international rules and protocols when dealing with dissent.
The chances of brittle
Jakarta politicians taking notice of what it will see as Western outrage are
slim. HRW sent a copy of its findings to
Vice President Ma’ruf Amin in June and talked to his staff, but said there was no
response.
Living conditions in West
Papua should shake any conscience
Overseas academic reports
estimate
that between 60,000 and 100,000 people have been internally displaced in the
past six years. Malnutrition is rife and
child and mother mortality
rates are the highest across Indonesia; life expectancy is the
lowest.
Yet these wretchedly poor
people, the crushed indigenous owners, are literally living on a mountain of
gold. If there’s ever a case for equal
distribution of wealth West Papua could be the global example of moral
economics and Indonesia would deserve to win its first Nobel Prize.
That
won’t happen because the Indonesian do-nothing position is bolstered by interests
so big and powerful they could crush countries. The Grasberg mine in Central
Papua has ‘proven
and probable reserves of 15.1 million ounces of gold.’ That
makes it the world’s biggest deposit of the precious mineral now fetching peak prices
– currently $2,570 an ounce.
The mines are run by the
Indonesian Government and the US company Freeport-McMoRan. The
gross
profit for the year to 30 June was US $7.816 billion,
a 23.97 per cent jump year-over-year.
There’s little sympathy
across Java for the independence activists widely damned as terrorists and
traitors by a largely biased media. Attempts
to crush the rebels could get tougher when disgraced former general Prabowo
Subianto becomes president next month.
Indonesia has about
400,000 men and 30,000 women in uniform,
and an equal number of reservists. Rev
Tapilatu estimated 10,000 troops are in
West Papua on rotation.
In 1996 Prabowo led a
special forces operation to free a group of Indonesian and foreign biologists taken
hostage in West Papua. The military used
a disguised Red
Cross chopper that had been used in peace negotiations to
ferry troops, violating the rules of the international agency’s independence.
His record of alleged
human rights abuses when he served in East Timor last century suggests a
bloodless settlement in West Papua is unlikely.
##
First published in Michael West Media 21 September 2024:
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