1) ’It’s genocide’: Many Papuans reject new provinces. Here’s why.

2) Find effective ways to crush Papua rebels: MPR tells TNI, police  

3) Colonial-type genocide in West Papua: living in constant fear

4) Another armed conflict occurs in Intan Jaya, this time killing an Indonesia soldier

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https://en.jubi.co.id/genocide-papua-new-provinces/

1) ’It’s genocide’: Many Papuans reject new provinces. Here’s why.

 News Desk February 16, 2021 12:04 pm

The map of Papua Land's customary territories.

A wave of rejections against Jakarta’s plan to establish new provinces in West Papua has emerged in Papua Land. Papuan students outside their home have also risen to the occasion and rejected the plan.

 

One of the citizens who rejected the plan, Marius Goo, said there were several reasons native Papuans should reject the new provinces. Goo, who is an activist in Meepago customary territory, said it was “genocide” because he accused that the new provinces would bring more non-Papuans to Papua Land, sidelining native Papuans and in a long term, decimating them.

Read also: Hundreds of students reject new provinces in Papua Land

In his opinion piece published in Jubi in September 2020, Socratez S. Yoman, the president of West Papua Baptist Churches Association, expressed the same concerns. He said that the population in Papua Land, based on the 2010 census by Statistics Indonesia, was less than 4.4 million people. If the number was divided by five, each “puppet” province would have an average of 878,404 people.

 

The latest census, in 2020, released on Jan. 21, 2021, showed that in Papua province alone the population was 4.3 million people while in West Papua province, the population was 1.13 million. Combined, the population in Papua Land according to the 2020 census was 5.43 million. Divided by five provinces, the number would reach less than 1.1 million people per province on average.

 

For native Papuans, this was a concern because data from Statistics Indonesia showed that native Papuans in Papua province had been smaller in number compared to the non-native since 2010.

 

Data from Papua Legislative Council showed that Melanesian Papuans were a minority in many legislative councils in regencies for 2019-2024, something Yoman called “the robbing of Papuan political rights”. In Boven Digoel Regency, for example, the legislative council had 16 nonnative councilors and only four natives, in Sorong Regency 17 seats went to nonnative and only three to natives. In Jayapura municipality, the provincial capital and the biggest, most developed region in Papua province, the legislative council had 27 seats to nonnative and 13 to native Papuans.

Both provincial legislative council also had fewer Melanesian Papuans compared to the non-Melanesians.

 

Read also: Proposed New Villages Increase in Province West Papua

 

Native Papuans had felt they were a minority in their own land in many aspects, not just numbers. Yoman and Goo believed that the central government would send outsiders to the new provinces to build three new military commands, three new regional police precincts, dozens of district military commands, and resort police precincts.

 

The outsiders would further make native Papuans a minority on their own land, many Papuans argued.

 

“This Melanesian land would become home to the military, the police, and Indonesian Malays,” Yoman wrote.

 

Yoman believed native Papuans’ land would be grabbed to build office buildings, military commands, and police precincts.

 

“The people would be sidelined, made poor, landless and futureless, even killed and extinguished like animals, using common or uncommon methods we have witnessed so far,” Yoman wrote.

 

Goo, who held a master’s degree in humanity, said the new provinces opened jobs for outsiders because the native Papuan population was not ready to take up the government jobs. “Outsiders would come, bearing slogans like ‘helping, serving, educating’ etc,” Goo said.

 

Goo also raised concerns about land grabbing and the presence of more military personnel. For many native Papuans, Goo said, military personnel had a track record of bringing “sorrow” to the native Papuans.

 

“Native Papuans see the new province, not as a development acceleration attempt, but more a genocide of native Papuans on their own land,” Goo told Jubi.

 

The head of the Regional Customary Council in Meepago, Oktopianus Marko Pekei, accused Jakarta of collusion with their “minions”, who were native Papuans who were “pro-Indonesia”.

 

Pekei said the native Papuan population was not ready “mentally and intellectually” to fill the jobs the new provinces would bring. Pekei also pointed out that any development done in the name of the Republic of Indonesia would harm native Papuans.

 

“The native Papuans who asked for new provinces said they wanted development. But if we look farther and more critically, they are not wholesome human beings or ‘manusia kaleng-kaleng’,” Pekei went on. Those people, he said, were “a little amoral”.

 

“They said they wanted development, but their brain was full of greed. They wanted the new provinces only for power and self-serving motivation,” he said.

 

Editor: Kristianto Galuwo, Evi Mariani

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https://en.antaranews.com/news/168249/find-effective-ways-to-crush-papua-rebels-mpr-tells-tni-police

2) Find effective ways to crush Papua rebels: MPR tells TNI, police  

6 hours ago

Jakarta (ANTARA) - The Indonesian People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR) has appealed to the Defence Ministry, National Defence Forces, and Police to seek effective measures to crush armed Papuan groups responsible for acts of terror in the province.

 

The prolonged conflicts with the notorious armed groups in Papua have claimed many lives and created unease among local communities, MPR Speaker Bambang Soesatyo said here on Tuesday while commenting on a soldier's death in a recent gunfight.

 

Private-2 Ginanjar from the 400/BR Infantry Battalion was killed in a gunfight with armed rebels in Mamba village, Sugapa sub-district, Intan Jaya district, Papua province, on Monday morning.

 

Soesatyo expressed deep condolences over the demise of the “brave soldier” who was killed in the line of duty, defending the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia.

 

To hunt down and enforce the law against those committing crimes against security personnel and civilians in the eastern province, the TNI and National Police will need to work closely with the State Intelligence Agency (BIN), he said.

 

Security personnel stationed in Papua also need to intensify routine patrols to secure vital objects, protect locals from acts of terror, and clamp down on criminals' movements, he added.

 

The Indonesian province of Papua has borne witness to a spate of violence, with armed Papuan groups in the districts of Intan Jaya, Nduga, and Puncak targeting civilians and security personnel over the past two years.

 

The armed groups often employ hit-and-run tactics against Indonesian security personnel, while they unleash acts of terror against civilians to create fear among the public.

 

On February 9, 2021, a motorcycle taxi (ojek) driver was stabbed to death by six armed Papuans.

 

The 40-year-old driver, identified as Rusman HR alias Aco, was reportedly stabbed on a street near Ilambet village in Ilaga sub-district, Puncak district.

 

He sustained serious stab wounds on the back while trying to escape his attackers and died of exsanguination, according to local police.

 

On February 8, 2021, an armed rebel reportedly shot a 32-year-old man at close range in Bilogai village, Sugapa sub-district, Puncak district.

 

The victim, identified by his initials as RNR, sustained gunshot wounds on the face and right shoulder and was taken to the Timika Public Hospital in Mimika district on February 9. (INE)


Related news: TNI, police ready to tackle head-on armed Papuan criminal's challenge

Related news: Papua: Armed group targets PT Palapa Ring, burns down property

EDITED BY INE

Reporter: Zuhdiar L, Rahmad Nasution

Editor: Fardah Assegaf

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https://johnmenadue.com/the-colonisation-of-west-papua-living-in-constant-fear-but-who-cares/

3) Colonial-type genocide in West Papua: living in constant fear

By STUART REES | On 16 February 2021

West Papuans are Indigenous people, easily ignored, their natural resources exploited, their homes and cultures destroyed, hundreds tortured, hundreds of thousands killed.  Our media reports endlessly about genocide in remote Xinjiang but not about genocide in neighbouring West Papua. Why?

Not far from Australian shores, a colonial-type genocide prompts silence.  Commercial and military interests plus preoccupation with a global virus ensure that colonisation continues, and human rights are ignored. Who cares?

On December 1 2020, from his exiled home in the UK, Indigenous leader Benny Wenda announced a Papuan provisional government and insisted his people take over their territory and no longer bow to Indonesian rule.

Sixty years earlier in Jayapura, an elected Papuan Council raised their Morning Star flag. At the end of 2020, Wenda reminisced,

‘We do not have the freedom to raise our flag, if we do, we’ll be killed or imprisoned… We are treated like animals and endure apartheid like military occupation. Almost every day people are arrested without reason, tortured and killed at the hands of Indonesian forces.’

In frustration that decades of effort to achieve independence or autonomy had failed, Wenda recalls a history of colonization beginning in 1962 when Netherlands New Guinea was transferred to Indonesia. That possession was compounded in the 1969 Act of Free Choice when the Indonesian military selected 1,025 men and women to vote for the integration of West Papua into Indonesia.

As a warning that Indonesian takeover would be enforced, the Brigadier in charge of the ‘free choice’ vote, threatened anyone who did not vote for integration ‘would have their accursed tongues cut out.’ In response to Wenda’s 2020 declaration, the Indonesian government says that anyone attempting to separate themselves from Indonesia will be met with ‘firm actions’, including mass arrests.

Slow-moving Genocide

‘Firm actions’ is an understatement disguise of a history of abuse. A citizens’ tribunal held in Sydney in 1998 reported on hundreds of Papuans murdered on Biak Island. Violence to suppress any signs of pro-independence activities was documented in a subsequent report from the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at Sydney University, ‘Anatomy of an Occupation: the Indonesian Military in West Papua.’

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch confirmed the Sydney findings and a corresponding conclusion from Griffith University researchers that in the previous 50 years, the killing of half a million West Papuans amounted to ‘a slow-moving genocide’.

Violence in Indonesian military operations also forces people to flee their villages, go into hiding and in many cases starve to death. A political prisoner has described bombings, shootings, kidnapping, murder, forced disappearances, detention, imprisonment, torture, rape, theft of domestic livestock, destruction of crops and vegetable gardens, burning homes to the ground, burning churches, killing by poisoning of food and water.

The veracity of this prisoner’s account was confirmed by the conventional state technique of denying that cruelties occur so they may continue. In a holier than thou, pure as the driven snow stance, the Indonesian Embassy in the UK says, ‘We categorically reject allegations concerning genocide’ and despite evidence that West Papuans’ rights to freedom of speech and assembly are suppressed, Jakarta insists that promotion and protection of human rights remain an important feature of Indonesian government.

The Indonesian government perceived East Timor as only a pebble in a shoe which they could afford to lose, but West Papua is one fifth of the Indonesian land mass and one of the richest provinces. A poetic tribute, Colonial Edge, to a brave West Papuan freedom fighter, the late Otto Ondawame, pictured why corporations feed greedily from his country’s natural resources.

Your country looks so rich,
I’ll take whatever I need
…my big overseas friends
don’t want to be weaned off
their attraction to gold, oil, copper,
your land and labour, fish and trees.’ 

Other features of Colonisation 

Racist stigmatizing of Indigenous peoples also explains a non-remorseful exploitation of land and people. In 1969, President Suharto proposed to transfer 200,000 children of ‘backward and primitive Papuans still living in the stone age’ to Indonesia for education. From nationalist Indonesian perspectives and apparently in the minds of soldiers facing threats from the West Papuan OPM forces (Organisasi Papua Merdeka), local people can be removed, tortured, and killed.

Fear permeates life in West Papua and is another catalyst for murder. In 2008, following OPM fighters’ killing Indonesian road workers, large scale military operations polarized police and soldiers against Papuans and vice versa.

Colonization by fear is also pursued by flooding an invaded country with people of different ethnic background and religion. In the 1970s, Indigenous Papuans represented more than 90% of the population but are now under 50%. Motivated by jobs in palm oil development and the logging industry, Javanese migrants are Asian and Muslim, Indigenous Papuans Melanesian and mostly Christian.

Islamization of West Papua has become a variant of the colonization virus. Research reports record the trafficking of West Papuan children to hardline Islamic schools in Jakarta, and locals express alarm about the presence of radicalized Muslim organizations such as Hizb ut-Tahir.

Consistent with the policy of all colonizers, Indonesia claims that economic development brings economic prosperity, but major developments such as the Trans-Papua Highway have cut through significant areas of land and biodiversity. They also destroy villages and forests, a source of Indigenous peoples’ livelihoods.

Answering the Who Cares Question

In answer to the who cares question, Australia and Papua New Guinea walk a tightrope between at one end respect for the Melanesians of West Papua and at the other a need to effect alliances with Indonesia.

Peter O’Neill the former Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, supported Indonesian sovereignty over West Papua but recognized political risks if he failed to say anything about human rights violations.

Australia ducks and weaves as though wanting to appear principled without challenging Indonesian sovereignty or emphasizing West Papuans’ rights to self-determination. In 2006, in recognition of the importance of Indonesia to its own security interests, Australia signed the Lombok Treaty to respect Indonesian sovereignty and not support separatist movements.

Behind the shadow of Covid 19, and aware that information would fuel West Papuan protests and international criticism, the Indonesian government cuts the internet, forbids foreign journalists and refuses to allow any investigation by the UN Human Rights Commission.

Instead of principled reaction to evidence of carnage in West Papua, inhumanity is being taken for granted; and in his poem When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain, the poet playwright Bertolt Brecht explained indifference to such atrocities.

When Evil-Doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out ‘stop’.
When crimes begin to pile up, they become invisible.
When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard.  

The virus of racist-based colonization persists and needs a vaccine, such as a language for humanity, to ensure only respectful, life-enhancing alliances with Indigenous people. In such language, Australia can respond to Benny Wenda’s judgment, ‘In West Papua, the whole essence of our humanity is being reduced to nothing.’

A post-Covid world should promote value in far more than West Papuan gold and gas. An Indigenous people have shown courage in resisting brutalities and could teach others of their Melanesian traditions in ending conflicts through reconciliation.

In respect for a common humanity, it is not too late for the Australian and Indonesian government to acknowledge the violence of colonization and to concede that a socially just future depends on adherence to the rights of self-determination for all Indigenous peoples, in particular West Papuans.

Stuart Rees 

Stuart Rees OAM is Professor Emeritus, University of Sydney, recipient of the Jerusalem (Akl Quds) Peace Prize and author of the new book “Cruelty or Humanity”, Bristol: Policy Press. A human rights activist, poet, novelist, and Founder Director of the Sydney Peace Foundation.

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https://en.jubi.co.id/armed-conflict-intan-jaya-killing-ginanjar/

4) Another armed conflict occurs in Intan Jaya, this time killing an Indonesia soldier

 News Desk February 15, 2021 9:39 pm

West Papua No. 1 News Portal | Jubi

Jayapura, Jubi – Another armed conflict between the Indonesian Military (TNI) and West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) occurred in Intan Jaya Regency in Papua, this time killing an Indonesian soldier.

The armed altercation was the second reported incident since Feb. 12, when an armed civilian shot and injured a TNI soldier.

Antara, the government’s official news agency, reported on Monday, Feb. 15, that Second Pvt. Ginanjar died during an armed altercation in Kampung Mamba, Sugapa District, Intan Jaya. The attack happened when Cenderawasih Military Command chief, Maj. Gen. Ignatius Yogo Triyono visited Sugapa, the administrative center of Intan Jaya. The chief was accompanied by Military Resort 173 Commander Brig. Gen. Iwan Setiawan.

 

TPNPB’s spokesperson, Sebby Sambom, said TPNPB’s Defensive Territorial Command (Kodap) VIII took responsibility for the attack in Kampung Mamba. “The attack was led directly by the troop commander, O. Kogeya,” said Sambom in a release made available on Monday.

 

Read also: Armed civilian shoots an Indonesian soldier in Intan Jaya: TNI commander

 

Sambom said the armed altercation between TPNPB and TNI and the National Police personnel in Kampung Mamba began on Monday at 8 am local time. “In the armed altercation, TPNPB shot dead an Indonesian military member, Second Pvt. Ginanjar, from Yonif Raider 400,” Sambon said.

 

As the release was distributed, Sambom said, he still received a report that the altercation was still happening. He vowed that TPNPB “would not stop” attacking TNI and the police until Indonesian government “opened the door for negotiation”. “Indonesian government has to open to discussion on the same table with TPNPB leaders and all elements of the Papuan struggle to find a solution,” said Sambom.

 

According to the Antara report, Ginanjar was a TNI member sent to Papua from Diponegoro Military Command in Central Java. His body was sent to Mimika Regency, Antara reported. Antara had tried to confirm the information to the TNI, but as of the publication of the news in Antara, on Monday evening, TNI had yet to give any confirmation.

 

Earlier on Friday, Feb. 12, an armed civilian shot an Indonesian soldier, injuring him on his side temple. CNN Indonesia quoted chief Brig. Gen. Iwan Setiawan who said that the soldier, Chief Pvt. Hendra Sipayung, was shot when he was buying something at a stall in Kampung Mamba in Sugapa District.

 

Editor: Aryo Wisanggeni G, Evi Mariani

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