Scholar Opinion: The Struggle for West Papuan Independence
New Guinea, the world’s second largest island, sits on the Pacific Rim, a few degrees south of the equator and approximately 150km north of Australia. Originally connected to the mainland of Australia, this island for over a thousand years was home to hundreds of groups of Melanesian and Austronesian people. In 1885, the island and its people were divided by a partition agreement between the Dutch, English, and German colonial governments. This partition split the island into Papua New Guinea (in the east) and Indonesian-occupied West Papua (in the west), and it remains so even to this day. Among the many problems that indigenous Papuans are currently facing are that Indonesia, with the help of multinational corporations, has been extracting the natural resources of the land rapaciously without any benefit ensuing for the people in terms of improving their standard of living. Many of the leaders who have been involved in peaceful campaigns for freedom for West Papua have either died in prison or now live in exile. Despite the Indonesian occupation, enforced by the military for over fifty years in what has been a no-go zone to the international community, the people of this forgotten land have been struggling for freedom from oppression and they have confidence that the moral and legal injustice of their country’s theft will be eventually overturned.
Like other nations, Papuans search for democracy, justice, and equality, but West Papua continues to be haunted by what has been called a "memoria passionis," or a collective ‘memory of suffering.’ On one hand, this refers to the complexities of the suffering experiences of the West Papuans under the control of the Indonesian government. On the other hand, the Memoria Passionis is a theological term referring to the redemptive sufferings of Jesus. This faith-construct imbues many West Papuans with a sense of identity, purpose, and meaning in a life of afflictions and subjugation. In that sense, it is analogous to the early black American experience of slavery in America, finding cultural expression in their spirituality. An example is the notion that “nobody knows the trouble I have seen, nobody knows but Jesus.” This has enabled them to celebrate ‘life in the midst of death’ and transform defeat into hope of victory, hate into love, violence into peace and the inhuman dispensing of wrong into commitment to justice. The ongoing conflict, as such, inspires West Papuans to endeavor to solve their ‘memoria passionis’ through non-violence.
In 1962, the Kennedy administration devised the New York Agreement, signed between the Netherlands, Indonesia, and the United Nations, whereby the Indonesian governance replaced a relatively benign Dutch-colonial administration. The Papuans themselves had no say in this decision, which satiated President Sukarno’s appetite for more land (416,000 square kilometers), pacified President Kennedy’s fear of communism, and allowed American business interests to initiate the Freeport-McMoran gold and copper mine. During this transition period from Dutch colonial administration to Indonesian administration there were approximately 700,000 indigenous West Papuans and around 300 tribes, speaking at least 250 languages. Under Indonesian rule, the Papuan population has threatened to be overwhelmed by non-Papuans, mostly government-sponsored internal transmigrants and free settlers. A demographic study in 2010 titled “Slow motion genocide or not?” showed the indigenous population at 48%, down from 96.09% in 1971, with an annual growth rate of only 1.84%, compared to a non-Papuan rate of 10.82%. A statistic that increases the motivation of the independence activists is the projection that by 2020, West Papuans will be “a small and rapidly dwindling minority,” the Melanesian proportion constituting, at most, 28% of the total population.
From the beginning of the Indonesian soldiers marching in, the West Papuans endured a harsh and authoritarian rule under President Suharto. Large scale atrocities were carried out, particularly in the highlands where there were low level military resistance. In the 1980’s, arrests and incarceration of nonviolent political prisoners continued, where some leaders were sent to lengthy prison sentences of ten and twelve years. More recently, on October 19, 2011, over three hundred civilians were arrested at the conclusion of the Third West Papuan National Congress, including Edison Waromi and Forkorus Yaboisembut, the appointed Prime Minister and President, respectively. Waromi and Yaboisembut are two of over fifty political prisoners currently in West Papuan gaols. Despite this re-run of suppression of their aspirations, this will not deter Melanesians from nonviolent struggle until self-determination within a democratic framework is achieved, and recognition, respect, and support from the international community is gained. Although West Papua was granted the “Special Autonomy for the Province of Papua in the form of a Separate Government” in 2001, little has changed. Special Autonomy was touted to the international community as a “decentralization” program, but after more than a decade, the level of hardship in relation to sickness, maternal deaths, poverty, and education in Papua are still the worst in Indonesia. This is largely the result of embezzlement and corruption by Indonesian government officials. The Indonesian Forum for Budget Transparency claims that $US9m allocated for the development of public facilities —schools, health centers, bridges, hospitals, irrigation networks — has been embezzled. The elected representative body of Papuans rejected Special Autonomy in 2010. Various schemes have been put up since to try and ‘solve the Papuan problem’ and the Papuan people have met the current proposal for a Special Autonomy Plus with scepticism and indifference. Indonesia’s colonization and military occupation of West Papua was achieved by, and still continues, thanks to the governments of the UK, Australia and the US, and it is facilitated by the world’s largest copper and gold mine owned by Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold, Inc., a US corporation.
In addition, for more than 50 years, some of the world's largest transnational mining corporations have been exploiting West Papua's oil and minerals, including Union Oil, Amoco, Agip, Conoco, Phillips, Esso, Texaco, Mobil, Shell, Petromer Trend Exploration, Atlantic Richfield, Sun Oil and Freeport, Oppenheimer, Total SA, Ingold, Marathon Oil, Bird’s Head Peninsula, Dominion Mining; Aneka Tambang, BHP, Cudgen RZ, and Rio Tinto (formerly RTZ-CRA). The exploitation of natural resources by extractive industries has a history of resulting in catastrophic damage to human and environmental health and local ways of life. Mystifyingly, the mainstream global media has, with occasional exceptions, virtually ignored the military and corporate injustices perpetrated upon the indigenous population of West Papua.
West Papuans have resisted the Indonesian occupation since the 1960s, but resistance and self-determination were taken to a new level when 5,000 academics, church leaders, and senior tribal leaders established the Federal Republic of West Papua (FRWP) on 19 October 2011. During a four-day congress, registered representatives and thousands who had not registered flocked to participate in the debates and processes. The organization of an independent West Papuan political force was an integral and courageous step in a long and costly liberation struggle.
The Indonesian government responded predictably: military and police, many in armored vehicles, as well as snipers, hidden up in trees around the field, opened fire. Four students and two PETAPA (Guardians of the Land of Papua, a civil guard organization) were assassinated. Participants, including the executives of the new state, were kicked and beaten with batons, bamboo sticks, and rifle butts; then tortured into leaping, like frogs, across the oval. 800 were arrested and 300 detained. Indonesian intelligence’s notorious interrogation techniques resulted in at least twelve fractured skulls. President Yaboisembut, Prime Minister Waromi, and three organizers of the congress, had committed treason under Article 106 Article of the Indonesian Criminal Code , and were incarcerated for three years (2012—2015).
Since then, more activists and journalists have been tortured, assassinated, and thrown into jails, where they are denied access to medical and legal services and rarely allowed to exercise or shower more than once a week. After the Sydney Morning Herald published its investigation, "They're taking our children; West Papua's youth removed to Islamic religious schools in Java for re-education” (4 May 2013), President Yudhoyono offered to release all fifty Papuan political prisoners (rather than launch an enquiry into the stolen children). The offer of release has been rejected by the prisoners, including the now famous long-term detainee Filip Karma, yet the hopes for independence of the thirty political prisoners in Abepura Prison are not dashed. They have demanded instead that “the whole of Papua be released.”