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Human Rights Defender |
West Papua: Under the Indonesian Jackboot
Carmel Budiardjo*
Nearly thirty-five years ago, West Papua was incorporated into the Republic of Indonesia as its 26th province, without the consent of the people. These have been years of unbridled human rights abuses, killings, rapes, disappearances and the total suppression of freedom of expression. But it was not until the armed resistance, the Free Papua Movement (OPM), kidnapped a large group of people, including seven West Europeans, in January this year that the international community sat up and began to take notice.Before the kidnapping occurred, a series of grave human rights viol-ations were perpetrated against tribal people who have for years been resisting the operations of one of Indonesias leading foreign investors, the US-based company, Freeport McMoRan which has reaped phenomenal profits from its exploitation of copper and gold reserves buried beneath the rainforests of West Papua. To understand the kidnapping and the peoples resistance to the company, we must look first at the grave injustice inflicted on the people of West Papua back in 1963, with the endorsement of the United Nations.
The Past
The status of Dutch New Guinea, then known in Indonesia as West Irian, had been a matter of fierce dispute between Holland and Indonesia for years when Washington, fearing that open warfare might push Indonesia further into the embrace of the Soviet bloc, decided to exert pressure on its NATO ally to hand the territory over to Indonesia. The dispute was quickly resolved during bilateral talks held under the auspices of the UN, in a deal that was brokered by US diplomat, Elsworth Bunker. The New York Agreement, signed and sealed in August 1962, provided for the hand-over of West Papua to a temporary UN executive authority, to be followed seven months later, by its hand-over, lock, stock and barrel to Indonesia. Whatever the West Papuans may have thought about this shameful surrender to Jakarta was irrelevant for they were never consulted. Under the terms of the New York Agreement, allowance was made for some form of popular consultation to be held not later than six years after Indonesia took control so an Act of Free Choice was conducted in August 1969. During the intervening years, the Indonesian military exercised a tight grip over the territory, using brute force to crush any attempts to call for a properly-supervised referendum under UN auspices. Papuan parties were outlawed in 1963 and political activity was subjected to the same restrictions imposed throughout the Republic. In 1965, after a series of armed clashes with the Indonesian army, the OPM was born.The clashes intensified as the Act of Free Choice drew near and it was absolutely clear to UN observers who were in the territory to observe the Act that political opposition, armed as well as unarmed, to the continuation of Indonesia rule was widespread. This was evident in a report which the UN envoy, Ortiz Sanz, delivered to the UN General Assembly after the event.
The Act itself was a travesty of justice. Rejecting proposals from the UN for universal suffrage, the Indonesian forces of occupation dr-agooned a group of about a thous-and tribal chiefs to form a plebiscite council. Having been threatened at gunpoint with dire consequences if they voted the wrong way, the council decided unanimously in favour of remaining with Indonesia. Although the Ortiz Sanz report contained hardly a word of criticism about how the Act of Free Choice had been conducted, there was more than enough in the document to show that the result grossly misrepres-ented the views of a people who had lived under the Indonesian jackboot for more than six years.
The UN General Assembly, well aware of the unsatisfactory state of affairs, could not bring itself to endorse the results of the Act which is known in West Papua today as the Act of No Choice, and resolved only to take note of the event. The world body apparently thought it could keep its distance from this despicable event by being less than enthusiastic about what had happened, but for West Papua, such diplomatic semantics were meaningless and its fate was sealed. Although fifteen African states, among them Ghana whose representative condemned the Act as a travesty of democracy and justice, refused to support such a farce, the question of West Irian was swept under the carpet and ever since, the international community has turned a blind eye to the tragic events that have unfolded in Indonesias 26th province.
Exploitation
Dispossession of their forests and ancestral lands has been the fate of the West Papuan people under Indonesian rule. Logging companies have run riot with easily-acquired concessions. Ten years ago, West Papua accounted for nearly ten per cent of the worlds remaining rainforests, second only to Brazil, but the stock has been falling fast. The best documented case of exploitation both of trees and the forest dwellers occurred in the Asmat region in the south-east, home to the 70,000 Asmat people, for whom trees are central to their culture. Widely admired for their ornate carvings which have attracted tourists, Asmat villagers were subjected to a reign of terror and forced into virtual slave labour to work for a Jakarta-based logging company which enjoyed the protection of the local military.When these practices were exposed in an Indonesian newspaper in 1982, environmentalists warned that the Asmat people were on the brink of cultural extinction after a decade of enforced ironwood logging. They stated: Supported by local author-ities, the timber companies operating in the Asmat region have turned these proud, feared and artistic peop-le into underpaid timber workers... To facilitate exploitation, local communities were relocated from the interior to the river mouth, closer to prospective ironwood loading places and closer to government superv-ision. Today, the Asmat region is accessible to the outsider only with special permission from Jayapura.
Huge tracts of land have been grabbed with little or no compens-ation and converted into transmigr-ation sites for landless peasants from Java and other parts of the Republic.
Under Indonesian law, traditional rights to ancestral lands take second place to claims by the state when it decides to use land for economic development. In West Papua, resisting orders to vacate land for such purposes is tantamount to an act of subversion and results in being labelled as GPK or security disruptor gangs, the term used by the military regime in its ideological battle to brand the OPM as terrorists. Under the false assumption that vast swathes of land in West Papua are under-used and under-populated and that the tribal people are too primitive to till the land productivly, Jakarta is engaged in a policy of overwhelming the native population with people who can be relied on to remain loyal to the Republic, with its centre of power on Java. Thus, transmigration serves a dual purpose: going some way towards solving Javas over-population and the chronic shortage of land and making the 26th province less of a security risk.
But it is the plunder of mineral resources that has been at the root of the gravest human rights violations. Underlying the struggle for control of this vast territory was the knowledge to which only a tiny band of mining experts in the Netherlands and the US were privy, that West Papua contained huge deposits of minerals and other natural resources, which an Amungme tribal chief has recently described as the curse on our people. Less than two years after General Suharto seized power in Indonesia and within weeks of the enactment of a new foreign investment law offering attractive terms which Sukarno in his day had been unwilling to contemplate, Freeport Suphur, as it was then known, won a contract for the extraction of copper and gold. So new was the foreign investment law that the company was literally able to write its own contract.
The company was granted an 11,000 hectare concession to mine Erstberg Mountain, which is the spiritual centre and home for the Amungme tribal people. Freeport proceeded to build a large modern town called Tembagapura with luxury amenities for an ex-patriot work-force; the mountain has been ravaged, decapitated and turned into a colossal crater. The tribal people were never consulted about plans to transform their ancestral home into an industr-ial desert and when talks took place in 1974 between the company and tribal leaders to discuss ways to compensate the tribe for their loss, the Amungme had no conception of the damage that would be inflicted. The people were forced to leave their mountain villages and resettle in the coastal area, living in totally alien conditions. Money made available for the construction of health centres, schools and administrative offices has not compensated for the tribal peoples loss of their very identity and lifestyle. Gradually, tribal acq-uiescence to what was happening turned into angry protest and in 1977, the OPM staged a major attack on the pipes built to transport the oredown to the coast, inflicting millions of dollars worth of damage.
Retribution by the military was harsh. The armed forces brought in OV-10 Broncos to bomb Amungme villages in the district of Akimuga and Ilaga sub-district in the district of Paniai further north. These bombers were also used earlier in 1977 in Jayawijaya, farther to the east, against the Dani people, following mass protests against enforced participation in the Indonesian general elections in April that year. No investigation of the consequences of these assaults on defenceless civilians was ever carried out. Local people believe that two to three thousand people may have died. The memory of those barbarous attacks still lives on in the region where today, people fear a devastating military backlash after the current hostages crisis has been resolved.
Opposition
Opposition to the presence of the copper and gold mine has simmered ever since not only because the local tribes lost their land and sacred mountain but also because of the loss of sago stands which provide the people with their staple food, and the heavy pollution of the river Aykwa into which the company dumps well over a hundred thous-and tons of tailings (the wastage from their operations) daily.The simmering anger burst into the open again in 1994, after it was announced that Freeport had been granted concession rights for 2.6 million hectares of land to carry out new exploration for copper and gold. The area, larger than the size of Switzerland, goes along the highlands right to the border with PNG. Soon after, it was reported that the giant London-based mining comp-any, RTZ, had bought up twelve per cent of shares in Freeport to help it with cash-flow problems to finance its expansion of operations as a result of the huge increase in concessionary rights to land from the Indonesian government.
Actions by villagers and flag-raising ceremonies by the OPM were stepped up in the vicinity of Tembagapura and the whole region down to the coastal company-town of Timika. What has happened since reveals the extent to which the Indonesian army is now functioning as the paid protector of the company. From December 1994 until May 1995, there were numerous arrests and disappearances, with distressing accounts of maltreatment and torture. Some of the detainees were held in cargo containers supplied by Freeport/RTZ; many of the arrests occurred at company security posts and the vehicles used were all supplied by the company.
During the year, two major reports were published, one in April by Australian Council for Overseas Aid (ACFOA), followed three months later by a report from the Bishop of Jayapura, Bishop Munninghoff. Both confirmed that 37 people had been killed or had disappeared, and that several hundred villagers had fled into the forest because of the heightened tension between the armed forces and the OPM. The Bishops report also revealed that a massacre had occurred in the village of Hoea on 31 May when soldiers opened fire on a large group of people at prayer, as they met todecide on whether to remain in the forest or return to their villages. Eleven people were shot dead, including two children and the Protestant Minister who was leading the prayers.
This well-documented evidence of grave abuses in West Papua forced the issue into the public domain in Indonesia for the first time, with the result that the semi-official agency, the National Commission on Human Rights dispatched a team to conduct its own on-the-spot investigations in Timika. It confirmed that there had been killings and many other abuses but made no attempt to examine the crucial issue of the mining comp-anys involvement in these atrocities, despite clear evidence implicating the company in the abuses contained in the Bishops report.
The conflict with the company which is by far the most profitable of all foreign investors in Indonesia has placed the local tribal people in the firing line. The OPMs decision to kidnap a large group of people, including seven foreigners, in January was clearly provoked by a sense of anger and frustration at the way the international community has turned its back on the West Papuan people. Several close rel-atives of the regional OPM commander, Kelly Kwalik, were among the casualties that fell victim to abuses perpetrated during the course of 1995.
It may still take time before the kidnap crisis is resolved but however things develop, there are bound to be grave consequences for the local population. Once the hostages are released - as is likely to happen soon - and the international community resumes its indifference towards West Papua, villagers in the region fear that once again, they will fall victim to the Indonesian armys thirst for revenge.
West Papua is one of the most glaring examples of betrayal by the United Nations of the principles endorsed by the General Assembly when it adopted the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in 1960. Had these principles been firmly adhered to, the UN would never have allowed itself to be associated with the New York Agreement in 1962, still less endorse the fraudulent Act of Free Choice in 1969.
Difficult as it has been over all these years to get the United Nations to press for an act of self-determination in East Timor, getting the UN to act on West Papua is certain to be an even more intractable problem. Crucially, at present, the UNs Human Rights Commission and Sub-Commission must be made to realise that the events of the past few years have created a global awar-eness of the sufferings of the people of West Papua.
Alongside East Timor, West Papua looks set to become yet another thorn in the side of the Indonesian regime.
*Carmel Budiardjo is the author of Surviving Indonesias Gulag, a prison memoir, published by Cassell of London in January 1996. Carmel spent three years as an untried political prisoner in Indonesia from 1968 to 1971. The Australian distributor is: Astam Books, 57 - 61 John Street, Leichhardt, Sydney NSW 2040.n
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