“By way of transmigration … the different ethnic groups will in the long run disappear because of integration…and there will be one kind of man.”

– Martano, Indonesian Minister of Transmigration, March 1985

“Brigadier-General Ali Murtopo told us in 1969 that if we want to be independent we should write to the Americans and ask them if they would be good enough to find us a place on the moon.”

– West Papua People’s Front

Article courtesy of Julie Wark, first published in Counterpunch 22/11/24

Indonesia’s new president, war criminal Prabowo Subianto, couldn’t even wait to be sworn in. He established a “strategic initiative” of five “Vulnerable Area Buffer Infantry Battalions” in the Keerom, Sarmi, Boven Digoel, Merauke, and Sorong Regencies of West Papua to “enhance security” with an additional 5,000 troops as backup for the 25,000 already there. According to the Armed Forces Chief, General Agus Subiyanto, “the main goal of the new battalions is to assist the government in accelerating development and improving the prosperity of the Papuan people”. He didn’t mention a possible future presence of militias, which is Prabowo’s way of dealing with populations that resist military-improved prosperity. On 21 October, just one day after Prabowo’s inauguration, Muhammad Iftitah Sulaiman Suryanagara, Minister for Transmigration, announced plans to resume the government’s transmigration programme in West Papua. It was needed, he said “for enhancing unity and providing locals with welfare”. Prabowo himself hotfooted it to West Papua on 3 November to check out a programme aiming to create three million hectares (an area about as big as Belgium) of food estates across the country. Reuters calls this a “self-sufficiency drive”. Forest, wetland, and savannah will be turned into rice farms (in which Indonesia’s military has a major stake), sugarcane plantations, and other infrastructure, which would include military installations to guard the sequestered land. This “key food programme” is actually ecocide. In net terms, it will add approximately 392 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere.

For the past six decades, Indonesia has been an occupying colonial power in West Papua. The United Nations is responsible for this and its atrocious consequences, as John Saltford meticulously details in his account of the 1969 UN-orchestrated handover of West Papua to Indonesia in a so-called Act of Free Choice, which was nothing more than “a ridiculous and overtly manipulated denial of West Papuan rights”. Ever since, overt manipulation of the reality of the West Papuan people has been the order of the day in the international arena. The murderous farce is officially blessed as Indonesia has been a member of the UN Human Rights Council since 2006. The UN has refrained from confronting Indonesia about its refusal to allow an official visit to West Papua, although more than a hundred countries have demanded it. After all, investigating crimes against humanity committed by one of its leading human rights “defenders” might be awkward. “Universal” human rights law turns out to be for some but not for others. And “some” can kill and otherwise destroy “others” with impunity.

The transmigration equation is actually this: moving people in = moving people out. Whether they want to move in or want to move out. Some people don’t have the right to decide these things. That transmigration in West Papua comes with so many troops, that it is so highly secretive, is enough to suggest that “enhancing unity” and “providing welfare” are not the agenda at all. In both origin and destination, transmigration is not voluntary but more due to deceit and brute force, respectively. In itself, it’s another form of militarisation because there are many former military personnel secreted among transmigrants, especially in border areas. As the Free Papua Movement (OPM) leader James Nyaro warned, “Don’t think of these settlers as ordinary civilians. They are trained military personnel disguised as civilian settlers”.

Since West Papua with its torture mode of governance isn’t open to independent observers it’s almost impossible to get accurate figures of the numbers in the equation but a recent estimate puts the total number of internally displaced people at about 80,000. This displacement means denial of the basic rights needed for survival: food, shelter, health, freedom from suffering, torture, inhuman treatment, danger, and from fear, freedom of movement, liberty, and security. Genocide Watch reports that some 500,000 West Papuans have been killed since the Indonesian occupation began and, in 2015, the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization calculated that West Papua’s population was approximately 4.4 million, but only around two million were Indigenous West Papuans. The figures show that Indonesian settlers outnumber West Papuans by some 10% and that about 25% of the population has been murdered. In 2004, a Yale University study concluded that the evidence “… strongly suggests that the Indonesian government has committed proscribed acts with the intent to destroy the West Papuans as such, in violation of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the customary international law prohibition this Convention embodies.” Twenty years later, the evidence of genocide is even more compelling but even more hushed up.

Why is this horrible case of genocide, ecocide and, in the end, human species suicide (“unwitting suicide, causing one’s own death while pursuing other ends”) being ignored? One explanation comes from Edward S. Herman. There are “good and bad genocidists”. In the “first fine careless rapture” of Indonesia’s New Order (military dictatorship), its genocidal project and mechanisms were lauded and assisted by the World Bank, “development aid” bodies like the IGGI (Inter-governmental Group on Indonesia), and funded by World Food Program, the EEC, Asian Development Bank, Islamic Development Bank, West Germany, France, the Netherlands, the United States, and the UNDP. After throwing West Papua to wolves in New Order clothing, the “international community” has, by omission and commission, embraced this as a “good” genocide, perpetrated by our genocidists and it has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to stop it. Underlying this fact is racism, murderous, systemic racism.

Transmigration comes with a lot of baggage. You only have to look at the history of transmigration in West Papua to understand how transmigration, European and settler colonial in origin, belongs to the “good” genocide package. It began in Dutch colonial times, in the early nineteenth century, when poor settlers sent to the outer islands were forced to provide plantation labour, with very high mortality rates. The standard—a very low bar for the rights of some—was set. After independence, Sukarno continued the programme, now planning to transport millions of people from the islands of Java, Madura, Bali, and Lombok to less densely populated settlement areas in Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and West Papua. His original plan, announced in 1949, was to move 48 million people over 35 years, thereby reducing Java’s population from 54 million to 31 million. However, the targets of this immense social engineering endeavour (the World Bank’s “most irresponsible project” in the words of Survival International) were never achieved. Between 1979 and 1984, the peak transmigration years during Suharto’s New Order military regime, 535,000 families (almost 2.5 million people) were moved.

The rights of transmigrants themselves, many of them poor peasants who are either tricked or coerced into leaving their homes, are also violated, as transmigration is a matter of “national security”. They are moved to state- or privately-owned estates, where the company concerned, often a military asset, cultivates twenty percent of the land while the transmigrants, now a de facto coolie labour force, must cultivate the rest and sell the crops to the company. They are promised eventual ownership of 1.5 hectares of cultivable land and 0.5 hectares for a house and garden but, when crops are eventually produced some years later, they must pay for the land by reimbursing some the bank credit used for the company’s initial investment. They live in compounds far from the land they’re allocated, and are also in danger from attacks from the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) or displaced local people.

For West Papuans, the arrival of transmigrants was preceded by forced displacement as the rule in transmigrant areas was one Papuan family to nine non-Papuan families. By 1984, about 700,000 hectares of land had been confiscated (about a third of the size of Belgium, to stay with the earlier comparison) without any compensation. In 1981, the counterinsurgency “Operation Clean Sweep” (suggesting that West Papuans were rubbish to be cleared away, like their rainforest) came with the slogan Biar tikus lari kehutan, asal ayam piara dikandang (Let the rats flee to the jungle so the chickens can breed in the coop), which also says a lot about the almost captive status of transmigrants.

It’s been known for more than forty years that transmigration is a fiasco within its own framework of the benign “development project”. Costing an average of US$7,000 per family in the mid-1980s, it was an economic disaster that gobbled up almost 40% of the economic development budget of the outer islands. Rather than alleviating poverty there, transmigration aggravated it and spread it more widely. Most transmigrants were worse off after moving. Population pressure in Java wasn’t relieved. The environmental calamity it caused was clear from the start. Yet, with World Bank and Asian Development Bank loans, plus bilateral financial aid, transmigration kept expanding so that, from 1980 to 1990, ten times more people were moved than in the previous seven decades. By 1991 forest loss was estimated at 1.2 million hectares per annum.

Transmigrasi has strategic and economic (cash crop) goals other than the mostly stated aim of reducing population pressure. In 1987, the Department of Transmigration was fairly honest for once: ‘‘the frontier regions of Kalimantan, Irian Jaya, East Timor have the priority for migrating military people for the purpose of Defense and Security’’. The idea was to seed active and retired military personnel into transmigration settlements and administration to create buffer zones in “trouble spots”. When he headed the Cendrawasih/ XVII Regional Command in West Papua, Brigadier-General Sembiring Meliala referred to ‘‘The Basic Pattern of Territorial Management Specific to Irian Jaya, Employing the Method of Community Development Centers.’’ By this he meant camps to which the Indigenous peoples of West Papua would be moved after being ejected from their traditional villages, where they were to be “Javanised” with special courses of ‘‘guidance and instruction.’’ In fact, transmigrasi is a depraved plan that aims to strengthen “national defence and security” (read: military benefits) by means of mass murder and at the price of global warming with all its planet-wide consequences: après moi le déluge.

Propaganda is another important aspect. Posters distributed by an organism whose name declares that West Papuans are aliens—Project for the Guidance of Alien Societies of the Directorate General for Social Guidance (Projekt Pembinaan Kemasyarakatan Suku-Suku Terasing)—and text books that were distributed in the early 1980s, by which time twenty-four major transmigration sites had been established on 700,000 hectares of appropriated land, show West Papuans as primitive, dirty and lazy and, depicted beside them, Javanese as neat, clean, civilised, and hardworking. The term Papuan was generally expunged, or Papua and Maluku were lumped together as one geographical, ethnic, and cultural entity. Information like the following was disseminated: “The inhabitants of Maluku and Irian both come from the same ethnic stock: Irianese. … [T]he countryside of Irian has not yet been cultivated because of the lack of people. Even their staple food, sago, just grows wild in the jungle.” The government still refers to transmigration in abandoned land.

This is all part of what settler colonialism scholar Patrick Wolfe calls the “logic of elimination”, whereby Indigenous populations are obliterated to gain control of land and resources. “The deployment of five new battalions in Merauke is best understood in terms of Wolfe’s logic of elimination.” In another word, genocide. But it’s not just a local genocide that the Indonesian military hopes to tuck away behind restricted access to West Papua and a sweeping press ban, because it’s also ecocide. And this affects the whole world.

So far, the results in Merauke, for example, are that Papuans number less than 40% of the population, life expectancy is 35 years for men and 38 for women, and HIV rates are extremely (and suspiciously) high. The Indonesian government, boasting about how it’s strengthening environmental standards, plans to take two million hectares of land in this region for a sugarcane project of five consortiums of Indonesian and foreign companies. Since this—“the world’s biggest deforestation project”—is designated a project of “strategic national importance”, Indonesian law allows the government to expel Indigenous communities from their land. President Prabowo Subianto’s first official visit to “West Papua” wasn’t to West Papua, but to the Merauke food estate, the National Strategic Project, to what, for him, was a part of Indonesia that needs the protection of heavily armed troops against the local Malind people who are protesting the seizure and destruction of their land, customary forests, and villages, without any prior warning, let alone consultation. Destruction of their very lives. West Papuans are fighting back, not only as an organised National Liberation Army but also as groups and individuals armed with bows and arrows or weapons acquired on the black market from low-ranking Indonesian soldiers whose welfare is neglected. Stripped of their identity as ancestral keepers of the land and forest by acts of capitalist violence, in which the agribusiness crops are in themselves part of the destructive machinery, Indigenous people become “terrorists” threatening Indonesia’s national security, and therefore exterminable.

Alien monocrops, affecting both natural forests and peatlands, significantly increase carbon emissions as well as the direct devastation they cause. Rainforests are often described as Earth’s oldest living ecosystems. Some have existed in their present form for at least 70 million years. For example, the Amazon rainforest probably appeared some 55 million years ago during the Eocene era. Rainforests cover only 6% of the Earth’s surface but contain more than half its plant and animal species, so they’re extraordinarily dense with all kinds of flora and fauna which, since they also help to regulate climate, are essential to human wellbeing. They are usually structured in four layers: emergent (top layer, up to 60 metres high); canopy (about five metres thick, forming a roof over the two remaining layers, creating a humid, dark environment below, and protecting topsoil); understory (dark, still, and damp); and forest floor (where decomposers like slugs, termites, worms, and fungi thrive, breaking decaying fallen organic matter into nutrients). Although each layer, with different levels of sunlight, water, and air circulation, has its own characteristics, they belong to an interdependent system. When a tree is cut down, at least four different whole ecosystems are destroyed. And every single species that disappears has knock-on effects on other species including, eventually, humans. In this sense, a single tree can represent the whole forest. The rainforest is many worlds that are unknown to the marauding species—the humans that come to cut them down—who see only cash crops where whole cosmologies have thrived since human time began.

It’s no coincidence that Prabowo has announced a new transmigration programme at the same time as his ecocidal deforestation regime intensifies. These conjoined twins of his agenda are the two sides of Indonesian colonialism in West Papua: exploitation and settlement by dispossession. Benny Wenda, Interim President of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua tells it from his people’s perspective: “Indonesia only wants West Papua’s resources; they do not want our people. The wealth of West Papua—gas from Bintuni Bay, copper and gold from the Grasberg mine, palm oil from Merauke—has been sucked out of our land for six decades, while our people are replaced with Javanese settlers loyal to Jakarta.”

Although Rafael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide”, was greatly concerned about colonial genocides, he is generally and mistakenly seen as having a more limited understanding of the word, in “the wake of the Holocaust in order reflect its features as a state-organized and ideologically-driven program of mass murder”. Israel’s present, horrific genocide in Palestine, a moral wound inflicted on all humanity, has laid bare the deep colonial, racist roots of the Westphalian world order, supposedly of equal sovereign states. Rather, it is an order of “unequal subjects; sovereigns and colonized; and of states, empires, settlers, and colonies”. As such, it normalises mass shredding of defenceless people, especially children, and their debasement to unidentifiable body parts in plastic bags. The fact that its victims tend to be dark-skinned is part of an ongoing colonial legacy arising from the destructive forces of European capitalism. The results in terms of international law, including genocide law, are visible in the power of veto used by the United States to block proposals put before the UN Security Council ordering Israel to stop the genocide in Gaza. “The right to veto is not only a privilege of the victors in WW2; it is an advantage given to themselves by the same vanquishers that simultaneously happened to be at the time former and new empires.”

If the international legal system is dominated by old imperial powers and newer transnational companies, every aspect of exploitation, subjugation, and even genocide in former colonies will be ignored, disguised and, in some cases, encouraged. In West Papua, hiding behind innocuous terms like development, enhancing unity, welfare, and sustainability are the facts that directly affect the other people, the original peoples of West Papua.

1) The causes of political and social unrest in West Papua extend far beyond the question of self-determination; the people are not just “rebels” as they’re often depicted but are threatened with extermination.

2) They’re not a “primitive” lesser or alien species but wise human kin who know how to live in harmony with nature and who, protecting their environment (and hence that of everyone), are said to stand in the way of progress (read: destruction).

3) They have no rights as people or as individuals as the international legal order doesn’t protect them, but lets the genocide happen.

4) They’re frontline victims of the civilising lie which, now taking the form of global warming, is telling us what civilisation has done to this planet, humanity’s habitat.

5) West Papua rainforest custodians are subjected to an alien military mindset or, in practice, everyday brutality and devastation. In a detailed study, Yezid Sayigh spells out the scary reality of what military-managed “sustainability” means in Egypt, and the comparison with the Indonesian regime is relevant because the Indonesian military is also heavily involved in extractive sector business.

6) The West Papua people are clearly subject to the “logic of elimination” by occupying forces seeking to gain control of land and resources.

7) Not all genocides are highly organised, high-tech mass killing projects. Genocide can be achieved through gradual dispossession, destruction, and small-scale but constantly repeated killing, as is happening in West Papua, and also against many other Indigenous peoples.

8) As genocide scholar Kjell Anderson asks, if West Papuans “do not regard themselves as Indonesians and are not regarded as such by other Indonesians”, how can they survive as a people in the militarised, hegemonic state of Indonesia?

9) The UN is still dodging its responsibility for the genocide in West Papua even though its own human rights experts express “serious concerns about the deteriorating human rights situation … citing shocking abuses against indigenous Papuans, including child killings, disappearances, torture and mass displacement of people”.

Rafael Lemkin understood genocide as aiming at the annihilation of essential elements of a group’s conditions of life: political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, and moral. Whatever the group and wherever it was. All of these elements were assaulted in European colonial projects around the world, and are being destroyed by Indonesia’s colonial project in West Papua, most recently by the revival of transmigration and deliberate destruction of Indigenous cultures and ways of life. As philosopher Imge Oranlı observes, genocide denial “is a peculiar phenomenon that speaks to the ontology of evil. Here, the evilness of an evil event is not readily evident to the public because the evil in question was socially and politically produced by the same ideology that continues to shape the collective social imagination of that very public.” The western collective and social imagination is shaped by the deeds and ideology that enabled a good part of European “civilisation”. So, some genocides are more acceptable than others. Once again, think of Belgium: what if a European country of about the same size as the recent land appropriation in West Papua was subjected to the same genocidal project. Would the “international community” remain passive and silent?

“Good” or “bad” genocide, the issues are inescapably the same: genocide (humans kill others of their own nature)→ecocide (as part of this project, humans kill nature) and, in the end→suicide (humans kill themselves).

By Warief Djajanto Basorie 

Nov 20, 2024

Power is the proverbial drug that leaders find hard to quit.

After ten years as Indonesia’s president, Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has passed the baton to Prabowo Subianto October 20.

However, Jokowi is no lame duck. He has made moves that can still allow his influence to be felt.

Jokowi’s stay-in-power thoughts and done deals could match the power precepts of Niccolo Machiavelli, a public official in 16th Century Florence, a major principality under the autocratic rule of Lorenzo de Medici. Machiavelli was imprisoned and tortured by de Medici.

A ruler can act unethically and immorally to hold on to power. He or she can exercise any means to that end.

This is a key postulate Machiavelli (1469-1527) underscored in his 1513 treatise, Il Principe, The Prince.

Another principle is “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”.

Machiavelli maintains that leaders should always mask their true intentions. For sure, Jokowi never stated outright his intentions. But his subtle steps were detectable.

Jokowi’s post-presidential influence is noted in Prabowo’s cabinet lineup the new president announced the night after his inauguration. Jokowi had 34 ministers. Prabowo announced 48 ministers and 56 deputy ministers.

Prabowo retained 18 ministers from Jokowi’s cabinet. They include respected finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati to calm world investors, state-owned enterprises minister Erick Thohir, home affairs minister Tito Karnavian, and energy and natural resources minister Bahlil Lahadalia.

Beginnings

Jokowi, 63, was a small furniture businessman who became mayor of his hometown, Solo, in 2005 and later as governor of Jakarta in 2012. In 2014 Jokowi successfully ran to be president as a common man candidate opposite strongman retired General Prabowo Subianto who hails from the political elite.

In his first five-year term, Jokowi scored high public approval ratings for building toll-roads, developing public transport and delivering social benefits like the costly but highly favoured BPJS program in universal health care.

In the start of his second and final five-year term in 2019, Jokowi announced what was to be his signature legacy, a new US$33 billion capital named Nusantara (Archipelago) in the Borneo jungle.

However, the world-wide onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic impaired the construction of this planned carbon-neutral, environment-friendly, hi-tech cyber city.

Jokowi realised that by the end of his presidency he could not yet move the capital from flood-fraught, pollution and traffic-jam-prone Jakarta to Nusantara, 1260 km to Jakarta’s northeast in East Kalimantan province.

To finish incomplete programs, Jokowi quietly sought to amend the Constitution to allow him a third term but failed to get parliamentary traction.

Jokowi’s alternative course was how to exercise power indirectly after he leaves office.

House call

Jokowi won his first and second terms by trouncing Prabowo, a former special forces Army commander. Prabowo took defeat vindictively. Knowing this, Jokowi acted to assuage that spite.

Jokowi called on Prabowo’s residence. The incumbent caught Prabowo unaware by inviting him to join his Cabinet as defence minister. This is the victor respecting and reverting the loser to be his ally. Prabowo accepted this invite arguing it was for national unity.

In public statements, Prabowo would profusely praise Jokowi’s character and policies including the building of the new capital.

Meanwhile, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, Jokowi’s first son, has been elected mayor of Solo in 2021.

Jokowi’s thinking was to have Gibran stand for Central Java governor. Subnational elections for governors, mayors and regents are scheduled for Nov 27 this year.

However, in the year before the Feb 14 2024 presidential and legislative voting, Prabowo sought permission from Jokowi to have Gibran as his vice presidential running mate.

Prabowo, 73, has publicly stated Indonesia’s future is in the hands of young leaders. He declared he wanted to be the bridge to the next generation.

Given that Jokowi has enjoyed consistently high approval ratings, Prabowo judged that having Gibran on his ticket and his father’s endorsement would be a double benefit.

Age was a conditional issue. Under Indonesia’s election law, Indonesians running for president and vice president must be at least 40 years old. Gibran is 37.

Coercion

Jokowi’s brother-in-law who was then the chief justice of the Constitutional Court cut the Gordian knot for Gibran. The Constitutional Court ruled the 40-year-old age limit remains but younger candidates who already hold elected public office can also run.

A public outcry ensued. Academics and rights activists accuse Jokowi of building a political dynasty.

Prabowo was pitted against two other tickets: former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan and former Central Java governor Ganjar Pranowo. Prabowo vanquished them, capturing 58.6% of the vote. A ballot distance of more than 30% to either of his opponents ruled out a second round of voting.

No manipulation in vote counting was reported in the Feb 14 election. However, in the campaign, pre-election coercion and intervention profited the Prabowo/Gibran ticket.

Jokowi deployed the military and police in the provinces to pressure grassroots leaders like village heads to get their population to vote for Prabowo-Gibran.

The president would also visit vote-rich districts in the central island of Java and distribute 10 kilo sacks of rice to low income residents as one form of social assistance. Java has 56% of Indonesia’s population of 280 million people.

Jokowi also commanded sway on eight of the nine political parties with seats in parliament. The lone out-of-the-ring party was the Islam-based PKS that rejected Jokowi’s new capital scheme.

Further, in August energy minister Bahlil Lahadalia got to become general chair of the influential Golkar party that has the second most seats in the newly elected parliament. Golkar was the political vehicle that kept authoritarian president Soeharto in power from 1966 to 1998.

Bahlil is a Jokowi loyalist who undertook the failed lobbying to get parliamentary approval for a third term for Jokowi.

Democracy in decline

In its July 29, 2024 edition on ten years as president, the Jakarta-based news weekly Tempo viewed in a strident editorial that Jokowi has “pulled back the progress of democracy”.

“Indonesia is now afflicted with the four characteristics of democratic reversal: a legal system that is not impartial, a bureaucracy that is not neutral, excessive executive power, and media that is not independent,” the editorial exclaimed.

The magazine reported Jokowi has committed 18 sins in his 10 years in power that turn back the 1998 reform drive after the 32-year rule of General Soeharto. Tempo detailed each sin in up to six pages.

These anti-democracy moves include political dynasty and oligarchy building, weakening of democratic institutions, and debilitating the erstwhile independent Corruption Eradication Commission, KPK, making its officers into government employees.

In his second term, Jokowi did not hide his pro-business drive. He pushed policies that allowed investors laxity of environment protection regulations and KPK scrutiny.

Tempo’s serious fault-finding, however, did not slacken favourable polling of Jokowi’s work performance. The nonpartisan daily Kompas gave Jokowi an approval rating of 75.6% in June 2024, up from 73.5% in December 2023.

More recently, pollster Indikator Politik Indonesia gave Jokowi a 75% favourable rating based on a Sept 22-29 survey with 1200 respondents in 11 of the most populated provinces.

The nation’s elite, however, may not share that poll-based sentiment. On October 1, newly elected and returned legislators of the 580-member House of Representatives were sworn in.

When the House Speaker acknowledged the presence of President Joko Widodo, the vast chamber fell silent. When the Speaker stated the name of president-elect Prabowo Subianto, House members gave rousing applause.

What are Jokowi’s sources of power? Australian National University’s annual Indonesia Update conference Sept 13-14 2024 notes three points: popularity, coercion, and power sharing with elites.

Delivery matters

Apparently voters are more into what a leader can deliver. They are indifferent to dynasty formation that is also found at the subnational level.

When Jokowi stepped down on October 20, one question is how he can influence matters of state.

Through Gibran, his son and even Prabowo, Jokowi can get access to cabinet deliberations. Jokowi also maintains links to the parties that endorse Prabowo, particularly Golkar.

It is Jokowi’s intent that his unfinished programs stay on track. This includes the Nusantara national capital where he has taken office in the capacious presidential palace the past month. Another is down streaming industries turning raw minerals like nickel and bauxite into manufactured goods. Also plantation crops like oil palm converted to biofuel.

But the key determinant would be the new president. Prabowo has his own signature programs. One is providing free nutritional lunches to Indonesian school kids. Another is to boost the annual economic growth rate to 8% from the present 5%. Prabowo has the closing call.

 By APR editor –  November 19, 2024

By Duncan Graham

An alleged plot involving firearms and threatening the life of New Zealand pilot Philip Mehrtenswhen held hostage in Papua this year is being investigated by the Australian Federal Police.

The case involves “advancing a political cause by the separation of West Papua from Indonesia . . . with the intention of coercing by intimidation the governments of New Zealand and Indonesia”.

Named in the AFP search warrant seen by MWM is research scholar Julian King, 63, who has studied and written extensively about West Papuan affairs.

He has told others his home in Coffs Harbour, Queensland, was raided violently earlier this month by police using a stun grenade and smashing a door.

During the search, the police seized phones, computers and documents about alleged contacts with the West Papua rebel group Organisasi Papua Merdeka, OPM (Free Papua Organisation) and a bid to seek weapons and ammunition.

However, no arrests are understood to have been made or charges laid.

King, a former geologist and now a PhD student at Wollongong University, has been studying Papuan reaction to the Indonesian takeover since 1963. He has written in a research paper titled “A soul divided: The UN’s misconduct over West Papua” that West Papuans:

‘LIVE UNDER A MILITARY DICTATORSHIP DESCRIBED BY LEGAL SCHOLARS AND HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCATES AS SYSTEMIC TERROR AND ALLEGED GENOCIDE.’

Also named in the warrant alongside King is Amatus Dounemee Douw, confirmed by MWMcontacts to be Australian citizen Akouboo Amatus Douw, who chairs the West Papua Diplomatic and Foreign Affairs Council, an NGO that states it seeks to settle disputes peacefully.

Risk to Australia-Indonesia relations
The allegations threaten to fragment relations between Indonesia and Australia.

It is widely believed that human rights activists and church organisations are helping Papuan dissidents despite Canberra’s regular insistence that it officially backs Jakarta.

Earlier this year, Deputy PM Richard Marles publicly stressed: “We, Australia, fully recognise Indonesia’s territorial sovereignty. We do not endorse any independence movement.”

In August, Douw alleged Indonesian troops shot Kiwi Glen Conning on August 5 in Central Papua. The government version claims that the pilot was killed by “an armed criminal group” after landing his helicopter, ferrying local people who fled unharmed.

When seized by armed OPM pro-independence fighters in February last year, Mehrtens was flying a light plane for an Indonesian transport company.

He was released unharmed in September after being held for 593 days by the West Papua National Liberation Army (Tentara Pembebasan Nasional Papua Barat – TPNPB), the military wing of the OPM.

Designated ‘terrorist’ group, journalists banned
OPM is designated as a terrorist organisation in Indonesia but isn’t on the Australian list of proscribed groups. Jakarta bans foreign journalists from Papua, so little impartial information is reported.

After Mehrtens was freed, TPNPB spokesman Sebby Sambom alleged that a local politician had paid a bribe, a charge denied by the NZ government.

However, West Papua Action Aotearoa spokesperson Catherine Delahunty told Radio NZ the bribe was “an internal political situation that has nothing to do with our government’s negotiations.”

Sambom, who has spent time in Indonesian jails for taking part in demonstrations, now operates out of adjacent Papua New Guinea — a separate independent country.

Australia was largely absent from the talks to free Mehrtens that were handled by NZ diplomats and the Indonesian military. The AFP’s current involvement raises the worry that information garnered under the search warrants will show the Indonesian government where the Kiwi was hidden so that locations can be attacked from the air.

AT ONE STAGE DURING HIS CAPTIVITY, MEHRTENS APPEALED TO THE INDONESIAN MILITARY NOT TO BOMB VILLAGES.

It is believed Mehrtens was held in Nduga, a district with the lowest development index in the Republic, a measure of how citizens can access education, health, and income. Yet Papua is the richest province in the archipelago — the Grasberg mine is the world’s biggest deposit of gold and copper.

OPM was founded in December 1963 as a spiritual movement rejecting development while blending traditional and Christian beliefs. It then started working with international human rights agencies for support.

Indigenous Papuans are mainly Christian, while almost 90 percent of Indonesians follow Islam.

Chief independence lobbyist Benny Wenda lives in exile in Oxford. In 2003 he was given political asylum by the UK government after fleeing from an Indonesian jail.  He has addressed the UN and European and British Parliaments, but Jakarta has so far resisted international pressure to allow any form of self-determination.

Questions for new President Prabowo
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto is in the UK this week, where Papuans have been drumming up opposition to the official visit. In a statement, Wenda said:

‘PRABOWO HAS ALSO RESTARTED THE TRANSMIGRATION SETTLEMENT PROGRAMME THAT HAS MADE US A MINORITY IN OUR OWN LAND.’

“For West Papuans, the ghost of (second president) Suharto has returned — (his) New Order regime still exists, it has just changed its clothes.”

Pleas for recognition of Papuan’s concerns get minimal backing in Indonesia; fears of balkanisation and Western nations taking over a splintered country are well entrenched in the 17,000-island archipelago of 1300 ethnic groups where “unity” is considered the Republic’s foundation stone.

Duncan Graham has a Walkley Award, two Human Rights Commission awards and other prizes for his radio, TV and print journalism in Australia. He now lives in Indonesia. He has been an occasional contributor to Asia Pacific Report and this article was first published by Michael West Media.