1) The People Are Isolated. Their Cause Is Not

1) The People Are Isolated. Their Cause Is Not

2) Benny Wenda  interviewed by Free Speech Radio News 

3) Emerging Indonesia and its global posture

4) NGO Report Links Indonesia to CIA Operations

-------------------------------------------------------

http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/reverb/2013/02/the_people_are_isolated_their.php

Duff McKagan

1) The People Are Isolated. Their Cause Is Not

By Duff McKagan Thu., Feb. 7 2013 at 8:00 AMCategories: Duff McKagan

 Video

Duff McKagan is the founding bassist of Guns N' Roses and the leader of Seattle's Loaded.His column runs every Thursday on Reverb.

With the Sundance Film Festival sounding as the starting bell, the season for new independent films and documentaries is upon us.

My wife Susan has been involved with the Surfrider Foundation ever since I met her in 1997. She grew up near the beach in San Diego where she saw first-hand how mankind's effluvia and manifest destiny have slowly impinged on our shorelines. Care for our beaches and oceans is just one of the many things that Surfrider focuses on.

Last summer, Susan hosted the International Surfing Day web-a-thon. When she came back from the event, she told me of a group of surfers who had gone to Papua, New Guinea to make a documentary about an un-surfed wave somewhere in the far-reaches of the backside of that huge island. They came back with a different story.

Susan and I went to the Santa Barbara Film Festival last week to see the debut of this documentary Isolated, and I came away with a whole lot more than I had bargained for.

This international cast of pro-surfers (Travis Potter, Jenny Useldinger, Andrew Mooney, Jimmy Rotherham, and Josh Fuller), simply set out on a pretty innocent mission of finding a surf break that they could only assume existed in an exceedingly remote part of the already remote island. Movie cameras, for the most part, hadn't captured any images of this locale since World War II. The Indonesian military has a pretty tight grip on what they want tourists to see down there, so these surfers and the documentary crew decided to forego a guided trip from the military-this was the only way that they hoped of really finding this beach that they assumed was there. It was in a sort of military-enforced tourism no-man's land.

Indonesia has governed the land that was once home to the indigenous Papauan people since the second half of the 1960,. Since the fairly recent discovery of gold and copper in Papau, a new level of commerce has been extracted from these remote and previously untouched mountains. The bad guys are the Indonesian military and a U.S. mining concern that feeds money to this arm of the Indonesian military to protect these literal gold mines.

A systematic genocide and rape of the Papuan people has seemingly been in effect now for decades. The rest of the world has been mostly hidden from the horrors down there. The Indonesian military has done their best to rid the land of the indigenous people that, it seems, they may think have some claim to the riches in these parts.

Journalism and freedom of speech in West Papau, New Guinea have been met with the penalty of death. This story is meant to stay hidden.

These unsuspecting surfers run headlong into all of this (illegal camera's in hand!), and are as stunned and taken aback as the viewer of Isolated is. Initially informed of all of this by a village chief of a tribe living on the beach, the "surf" documentary turns geo-political activism in the blink of an eye.

Producer Geoff Clark and actor Ryan Phillipe have taken up the cause of this little-known but horrible scenario in Papua, New Guinea. They are now in the process of getting enough signatures to take this to the White House, so that at least the genocide and atrocities get recognized by the U.S.

Take a peek here http://isolated.tv/takeaction.html

Take a look at the movie. It'll get you enraged for sure.

<< Previous Page | 1 | 2

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://fsrn.org/audio/killings-continue-west-papua-amid-indonesian-military-multinational-corporations-resource-rich

2) Benny Wenda  interviewed by Free Speech Radio News 

Killings continue in West Papua amid Indonesian military, multinational corporations in resource-rich region

• NEWS SEGMENTS
 

WED, 02/06/2013 - 14:55

• Year: 2013
• Length: 6:22 minutes (5.83 MB)
• Format: MP3 Mono 44kHz 128Kbps (CBR)

One of the longest-running conflicts continues in West Papua, where an independence movement has faced arrests, killings and abuse. The Indonesian government, which claims the area, blames factions among the Papuan movement for some of the violence. The region is rich in natural resources, including gold and other minerals and vast stretches of rainforest. Benny Wenda is a West Papuan tribal leader. He served as a special representative to both the British Parliament and the United Nations. FSRN sat down with Wenda in Washington, DC, during a rare visit to the US.

----------------------------------------------------

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2013/02/07/emerging-indonesia-and-its-global-posture.html

3) Emerging Indonesia and its global posture

Awidya Santikajaya, Canberra | Opinion | Thu, February 07 2013, 10:08 AM

A- A A+

Paper Edition | Page: 6

At a recent ANZ seminar in Melbourne, Australia, president director of McKinsey & Company Indonesia, Arif Budiman, said Indonesia was the most stable among the world’s major economies. McKinsey predicts that Indonesia, currently the world’s 16th-largest economy by gross domestic product (GDP), will become the seventh-largest by 2030.

Many scholars, lawmakers, private companies and the media have billed Indonesia as “emerging”, “a rising middle power”, “the next member of the BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa]” and other such titles. An interesting question is how the (perceived) rise of Indonesia will, and should, impact upon its foreign policy posture.

At the beginning of the 21st century the world order has been shaped by a changing balance of global economic power, signaled by the rise of “emerging powers”, which were previously perceived just as “developing countries”.

As one of the emerging powers, Indonesia has strong modalities to play an important role in addressing global issues.

Amid the global financial crisis the World Bank projects Indonesia’s economy to grow by 6.6 percent in 2013, better that of other emerging powers. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has cut its growth prediction for Brazil from 4.6 percent to 4 percent, while Moody’s Analytics predicts India’s GDP growth rate to be at a level of 6 percent.

Diplomatically, Indonesia has also gained a prominent position in the global arena in recent years by becoming a member of the G20 and co-chairing the UN High-Level Panel on the Post 2015 Development Agenda. Indonesia is clearly more than just “a fractured belt of comets orbiting China”, as incorrectly suggested by Parag Khana (2009, 291).

Having said that, the nature and style of Indonesian foreign policy differs from other emerging powers. The BRICS are more assertive and tend to become revisionists of the global status quo. Brazil, India and South Africa, for instance, consistently ask for permanent seats in the UN Security Council.

In the area of development cooperation, most emerging powers already have Official Development Assistance (ODA) bodies. India inaugurated the Development Partnership Administration (DPA) last year, while Brazil and South Africa have set up similar bodies a few years ago. BRICS nations also agreed a plan to set up a “development bank” at last year’s BRICS Summit in New Delhi. The bank will become sort of an antithesis of a traditional donor scheme, which is dominated by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations.

Indonesia, on the other hand, does not have an ODA body yet and in the short run, it will not follow the BRICS’ path to expand its strategic influence by providing aid to less-developed nations. Indonesia, of course, has its own consideration and situation to act differently from the BRICS. From a domestic point of view, Indonesia has interminable development problems, such as a high poverty rate, increasing income inequality and rampant corruption that could constrain an assertive foreign policy.

Nonetheless, why do India, South Africa and even China — which are subject to the same, or perhaps even more serious, domestic pressures — confidently pursue more aggressive, coercive foreign policies?

Foreign policy construction is greatly influenced by the complex combination of state capacity, the dynamics of domestic politics, values and identity. In relations with its Southeast Asian neighbors, for instance, Indonesia’s assertiveness is not constrained fully by a lack of absolute advantage over other nations — unlike Brazil, India and Russia, which are far more dominant than their peers in their respective regions.

More importantly, despite some interventionist proposals in ASEAN, such as the establishment of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR), Indonesia chooses to respect regional consensus norms that prioritize peace and stability as basis for common prosperity in the region, a stance that is different from India’s arms races with Pakistan or China’s firm behavior toward its neighbors on territorial disputes.

For the emerging Indonesia, the existing guidelines of its foreign policy, which places an importance on ASEAN and acts as a “constructive builder” amid global uncertainty, are still much preferable than unilateralism or a “go it alone” policy. In the next couple of years, those postulates will be increasingly carried out in tandem with ideas of deepening bilateral cooperation with selected “strategic partners”.

Although there is no need to leave its commitments to ASEAN and redirect its concrete contributions to a broad range of global issues, Indonesia has to restrengthen its regional leadership in Southeast Asia as a basis to serve its rise in the region. It should go beyond the normal assumption that Indonesia is a primus inter pares (first among equals).

Indonesia needs to focus on developing a more substantive, rather than abstract, leadership in the region. For this reason, significantly enhancing its bilateral relations with other Southeast Asian nations is pivotal.

Business players should be encouraged and facilitated to expand economic activities in other
Southeast Asian nations.

For years, Indonesia devoted much political and diplomatic energy to help resolve conflicts in Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar, but it has not brought many economic benefits from those countries once the conflicts ended. Indonesia’s investment in Myanmar, for instance, is much less than the investment of Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, despite Indonesia’s diplomatic engagement and initiative that contributed to Naypydaw’s political reform. There is no direct Jakarta-Phnom Penh flight although Indonesia built up some outstanding diplomatic credentials in Cambodia during the 1980s-1990s crisis.

Indonesia should also send more people, especially students, with the government’s funding, to learn about the cultures and languages of other Southeast Asian countries and get to know these countries. This effort is crucial to tighten long-term emotional and intellectual linkages between Indonesians and their Southeast Asian fellows.

For strategic purposes, Indonesia also needs to establish more institutes/centers that are dedicated to Southeast Asian studies. Institutes or centers related to international affairs could potentially encourage people to develop outward-looking mindsets that are critical to bridge gaps between foreign policy and
domestic aspirations.

The new status as an emerging middle power provides Indonesia more foreign policy alternatives. Reevaluating Southeast Asia as a strategic and more substantive asset could be the most beneficial option.

The writer is a foreign policy observer.

------------------------------------------------------

http://www.tempointeractive.com/hg/nasional/2013/02/07/brk,20130207-459751,uk.html

4) NGO Report Links Indonesia to CIA Operations
Thursday, 07 February, 2013 | 14:58 WIB

TEMPO Interactive, New York: A report by a human rights and democracy advocacy group cites Indonesia as one of the countries collaborating with the US Central Intelligence Agency campaign against worldwide terrorism, which includes the use of kidnapping, extra rendition, torture and detention of suspected terrorists.

In its report titled Globalizing Torture: CIA Extraordinary Rendition and Secret Detention, launched on Tuesday, Feb. 5, the Open Society Foundation (OSF), a human rights and democracy advocacy group, named Indonesia as one 54 countries linked to CIA's campaign on extraordinary rendition or the transfer of individuals without legal process.

The report highlights the CIA's rendition and secret detention program that began shortly after 9/11 which included secret detention, interrogation, and torture of alleged extremists.

OSF's report claimed that at least 136 people became victims of this operation. The actual number could be more, but it will remain unknown until the United States and its partners disclose this information. This study's focus on the program excluded those at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The report also called for accountability of the US and the 54 countries for violating human rights and international law. Thus far, only Canada had apologized for its role while Australia, the UK and Sweden had offered compensation to individuals that became victims of the campaign.

A spokesperson for Indonesia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Michael Tene, has yet to provide any comment as well. Michael, who is in Cairo, Egypt, was unable to be contacted.