NZ PILOT RELEASED IN WEST PAPUA

 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:

https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=https://michaelwest.com.au/silence-on-indonesia-west-papua-atrocities/&ct=ga&cd=CAEYACoTOTg3NDkxMjA0NTI2MDA2NzI2ODIcZTgwNDZlM2MwOTUxMjY4ODpjb206ZW46QVU6Ug&usg=AOvVaw1xx00b5yxbmfMWNbS9Yr4W

 

NOT CONTROL - JUST COERCION

 

            Good lord – what on earth can a girl choose to wear?

An Indonesian woman appears before her maker who’ll pass judgement – heaven or hell?   The almighty checks the freshly-deceased’s CV, noting she prayed regularly at the mosque, recited the Koran and lived an upright life.

 However she didn’t always wear a jilbab.  For the sin of letting strangers see her glossy black locks she’ll be condemned to the everlasting furnace, though not alone.  Also cooking will be her male rellies who didn’t curb her wilfulness, and Mum for her inability to raise a pious daughter.

As if the journey from child to adult isn’t traumatic enough, Ifa Hanifah Misbach had to endure the beliefs above, the condemnation of her deeply religious family, the slurs of her friends and the curses of Islamic leaders for using her intellect and exercising choice.

As a late teen she sat under a pine tree on a hill in Bandung – the capital of West Java - ‘when my tears flowed constantly’.  She also wrote a poem-  A Little Girl Is Asking God.

At the on-line launch of the Human Rights Watch report: I Wanted to Run Away: Abusive Dress Codes for Women and Girls in Indonesia, Misbach read from the book of verse she conceived beneath the bough:

‘God, is it true that I’ll drag my late father and all my brothers to hell because I don't veil? If so, that means all girls will bid not to be born into an Islamic family, if they’re like me, going to ask questions.

‘In the realm of eternity before entering the womb, they’ll ask to be born as sons only, because we daughters have no power over our own bodies.’

 

Misbach survived her intellectual wrestle and ’more than 30 years of bullying’ to be her own woman, undefined by men claiming the ability to faultlessly interpret religious texts. 

She’s now 45, a Connecticut University graduate, an academic and psychologist back in Bandung.  Her architect brother Ridwan Kamil is the provincial Governor – and a likely contender for the presidency in 2024.

Misbach said two of her patients had tried to kill themselves because of the pressure to conform, and ‘body dysmorphic disorders’ were often seen.

The HRW report asserts that pushing the jilbab is part of a movement ‘to reshape human rights protections in Indonesia.

‘It undermines women’s right to be free from discriminatory treatment based upon any grounds whatsoever under Indonesia’s Constitution. Women are entitled to the same rights as men, including the right to wear what they choose.’

The issue of equality in Australia is secular, the debate focusing on consent.  In Indonesia it’s about coercion to the point of resisters being denied schooling, work or promotion.

Research in 2019 found about 80 million Indonesians wear jilbab, mostly in Java. ‘It is unclear how many do so voluntarily and how many do so under legal, social, or familial pressure or compulsion.’  Until this century, films of everyday events showed most women scarfless.

It’s now the topic which elbows aside other concerns. The publisher of the online women’s magazine Magdalene was quoted saying: ‘No other women’s rights stories, from rapes to #MeToo rallies, from celebrities’ profiles to our long features, can compete with jilbab stories.’

As psychologist Alissa Wahid pointed out, this seems to be a ‘small issue in a grand landscape’ of problems besetting the Republic and its 270 million citizens, but it goes to deeper issues.

The eldest daughter of the late fourth president Abdurrahman ‘Gus Dur’ Wahid, wears the kerudung, a loose headscarf revealing some hair as often seen in Pakistan.  ‘This is not about the jilbab,’ she said.  ‘It’s about human rights, justice, democracy and social harmony.’

The 96-page HRW document reports Komnas Perempuan [National Commission on Violence Against Women] had identified ‘421 ordinances passed between 2009-2016 that discriminate against women and religious minorities’

Indonesia recognises six religions and has a Ministry of Religious Affairs.  A citizen’s faith gets stamped on their ID card. Despite regular attempts by zealots to impose sharia law the country remains constitutionally secular. 

Said Alissa Wahid: ’The regulation is very important, crucial, to maintain the idea of Indonesia as a cohesive nation-state. Everyone has the right to religious freedom.’  

Indonesia has 34 provinces, with 24 predominantly Islam. After some parents protested local governments and schools were making the jilbab compulsory for non-Muslims, President Joko Widodo stirred himself.  The President ordered all administrations and the nation’s 300,000 state schools to revoke mandatory jilbab regulations.  Intransigents risk sanctions, including withholding education funds.

The cheering lessened once the exclusions were discovered.  The decree doesn’t apply in the province of Aceh which makes its own religious laws, or the 30,000 pesantren [Muslim schools].  Fundamentalists used the Trump truth-twisting trick by claiming the Jakarta order is a sign of Islamophobia, and means girls will be forced to abandon their headscarves.

HRW Australia Director Elaine Pearson called on the Indonesian government to end all discriminatory laws.

She described Indonesia’s clothing regulations as ‘part of a broader attack by conservative religious forces on gender equality and the ability of women and girls to exercise their rights to an education, a livelihood, and social benefits.’

First they must convince themselves that heading outside sans scarf won’t lead to the pit of perdition.  That journey’s maybe a mite easier with stories of tough trekkers like Ifa Hanifah Misbach helping guide the fearful.

First published in Pearls & Irritations, 31 March 2012: 
https://johnmenadue.com/the-jilbab-human-rights-in-indonesia/

 

VIOLENT INDONESIA EXPOSED

A troubling tour through a pained land                                         

Visiting outlying islands in this sprawling archipelago reveals the unease felt about Java, ‘the denominator of Indonesia’.  From Aceh to West Papua live citizens who see the nation’s largest ethnic group as oppressive colonialists.

First President Soekarno used a common language, universal education and the non-denominational Pancasila philosophy to create the ‘unitary state’.

When these haven’t worked persuasion has turned to force.  Human rights activist Andreas Harsono’s new book Race, Islam and Power shows the damage caused to ‘wonderful Indonesia’ by violence.

This was never meant to be a jolly travelogue; the author quotes West Sumatran poet Leon Agusta (1938-2015): ‘They’re the two most dangerous words in Indonesia: Islam and Java’.  To which Harsono adds: ‘Muslim majority and Javanese dominance’.

Despite the best efforts of people like the author, in this year’s election campaign human rights issues were largely a yawn.

Perhaps some electors voted against Prabowo Subianto because questions haunt the former general about his actions in the army. Others might have rejected Joko Widodo, reasoning he’s dodged confronting the post-1965 pogroms, despite earlier promising to open debate.

 Little has happened to reconcile the state with the survivors and the families of the real or imagined Communist victims who were never charged under the law.  The guilty still control.

(Dealing with unresolved shame isn’t an exclusive Indonesian problem.  Australians are grappling with a new understanding of their nation’s past as historians reveal massacres of Aborigines right into last century.)

Consider the continuing cruelties: In Aceh men who love each other and unmarried women who love men get whipped in medieval public rituals, smartphoned for kicks.  People who’ve made mild comments about faith are behind bars for blasphemy.

Across the country hate fermented against gays is brewed by religious leaders. Ahmadiyah sectarians get persecuted, as do followers of minority mainstream faiths.

Indonesians love the outsider-imposed label of tolerance, but this fine quality is continually threatened; robust analysis mainly comes from without - foreign academics, safe on campuses far away.

At last a critic with credibility from within. As a local Harsono risks confrontations. In pre-independence East Timor a soldier demanded: ‘Are you red and white?’ (A nationalist). Harsono said he was an impartial journalist.  Fortunately only his visit was terminated.

Born in 1965 he was given the Chinese curse / journalist’s blessing: ‘May you be born in interesting times.’ During Soeharto’s authoritarian New Order government this Indonesian with ethnic Chinese heritage would have understood discrimination is pervasive.

In Salatiga’s Satya Wacana Christian University (Central Java) he followed lectures by the late George Aditjondro.  The sociologist and author was such a powerful critic of Soeharto (he likened the president to an octopus) that he fled to Australia to avoid arrest.

His teachings and writings pricked questions about Indonesia’s governance and the nature of Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined community’. The late US scholar also quashed the view that only Westerners can be colonialists.  Harsono has become torchbearer for the freedoms they championed.

Although he enrolled in electronic engineering, writing for student unions revealed a talent for journalism.  After a year with this newspaper he became Jakarta correspondent for Bangkok’s The Nation English language daily.

He also won a prestigious Nieman Fellowship to study journalism at Harvard.

Through reporting he’s seen far more of his country than most; along the way he realized daily reporting was inadequate for the world to understand Indonesia. 

The result is this ‘political travelogue’ subtitled Ethnic and Religious Violence in post-Soeharto Indonesia. The title is clumsy, the cover drab.  There’s no index, but a handy list of sources. The prose is excellent.

This is a discomforting read for anyone who cares for the moral development of this nation. It’s also a counterweight to the glossy mags promoting Indonesia as a land fit for hedonists.

This is sweaty and edgy journalism. It can also be dangerous. In 2004 activist Munir Said Thalib was assassinated on a Garuda flight to Europe.  The case remains unsolved.

For 15 years Harsono has been where the pain is raw, where the wee folk live, work, travel and get jailed, hearing their authentic stories of discrimination and repression, their anger and puzzlement: Was this the land our heroes promised in 1945?

 ‘What they learned at school was totally different from what they saw in their real life,’ he writes. ‘I hear this over and over throughout Indonesia.’

Race, Islam and Power has been published in Australia in English, the language Harsono used, ‘trying to speak to an international audience about violence in Indonesia …especially policy makers, academics, opinion leaders.’ 

No local press would handle the typescript proving the author’s point about fear of confronting the past; yet society’s betterment depends on its citizenry knowing their state’s real history.

Harsono’s work aims to build a better nation by exposing truths.  Those cheering George W Bush’s snarl ‘you’re either with us or against us’ might rank the author a traitor; yet critics can be finer patriots than jingoists – and more effective.  

Harsono has been a Jakarta-based researcher since 2008 with the international NGO Human Rights Watch and often its spokesman.  His statements are measured and fact based – as they are in this book.

This is important because villainy thrives when far from public view.  When atrocities are revealed, doubt dampens outrage if accusations are shrill and facts vague.  Could these gentle friendly folk really be so brutal – and if so, why?

Sadly, tragically, yes.  There’s been slaughter and dispossession from Sabang to Merauke, the route Harsono has traveled and meticulously recorded.  Much has been contrived for base reasons.

Democracy is ‘people power’ though not for losing politicians trying to force their interests through street protests.  They tread a dangerous track.

Likewise those howling religious hate.  This book shows these roads will never lead to the respected nation the founders imagined and the people desire.

Race, Islam and Power by Andreas Harsono.                                                                                                Monash University Press, 2019.                                                                                          (First published in The Jakarta Post 5 May 2019)