The West Papuan liberation movement, Indonesian settler colonialism and Western imperialism from an international solidarity perspective

An article on West Papua  in the International Journal of Human Rights by Connor Woodman

  

The article gives a detailed historical overview of the Indonesian occupation and the West Papuan resistance movement, and examines the possible ways that Western organisers can work in solidarity with the struggle. 

  

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The International Journal of Human Rights

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The West Papuan liberation movement, Indonesian settler colonialism and Western imperialism from an international solidarity perspective

Connor Woodman

To cite this article: Connor Woodman (2022): The West Papuan liberation movement, Indonesian settler colonialism and Western imperialism from an international solidarity perspective, The International Journal of Human Rights, DOI: 10.1080/13642987.2022.2132235

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THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2022.2132235

The West Papuan liberation movement, Indonesian settler colonialism and Western imperialism from an international solidarity perspective

                   

Connor Woodman

ABSTRACT

Getting solidarity right, as West Papuans struggle against a colonial genocide, is crucial. Distilling a non-Papuan UK citizen’s experience of several years working with the West Papuan liberation movement, this article offers a historical, anti-imperialist framework for thought and action in solidarity with West Papua. Counter-posing its approach to the depoliticised framework of leading Western human rights organisations, the article places three terrains of the struggle – the Indonesian settler colonial state, the West Papuan liberation movement, and Western solidarity networks – in a global historical perspective, examining the dynamic interactions between them in order to unravel the ties that bind the Indonesian state to West Papua. The collaborations and connections between Indonesian elites and dominant Western sections are counter-posed to the possibility of an alliance between West Papuans and poorer Indonesians –but only if Western solidarity organisers are attentive to the role Western (neo)imperialism plays in structurally determining the genocidal form Indonesia’s colonisation takes.

Introduction

ARTICLE HISTORY

Received 28 July 2021 Accepted 26 September 2022

KEYWORDS

West Papua; Indonesia; imperialism; neo- imperialism; settler colonialism; genocide; racism; solidarity

   

The West Papuan liberation movement against Indonesian state colonisation is live and growing.1 West Papuans seek the assistance of various sectors in the Global North, hoping to bolster their struggle for self-determination: the ability to freely determine their own political, social and economic destiny. Indonesia invaded and seized control of West Papua in the 1960s through a rigged, UN-sanctioned ‘vote’, thwarting the Dutch decolonisation process.2 As such, self-determination as state independence remains the movement’s primary horizon. This article aims to provide a frame of thought and action for others in the Global North seeking to stand in effective solidarity with the West Papuan self-determination movement. This historical anti-imperialist fra- mework is posed in order both to enhance existing forms of solidarity with the West Papuan struggle, and to present an alternative to the depoliticised approach proffered by some Western NGOs and human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (see ‘Terrain 3: The Western solidarity movement’, below). Getting our solidarity right, as the Papuans struggle against a colonial ‘cold genocide’,3 is crucial.

CONTACT Connor Woodman gabrielalapu@protonmail.com © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

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The West Papuan liberation movement is a broad signifier for the individuals and organisations working within and without West Papua for the goal of self-determination and eventual independence from Indonesia. The heterogeneous ‘movement’ is hard to define organisationally, and its ultimate reference point is the will of the overwhelming majority of West Papuan people who harbour dreams of self-determination through their daily struggle for survival under colonial rule. Organisationally, the widest move- ment ecology can be considered roughly synonymous with the Papuan People’s Petition (PRP, Petisi Rakyak Papua), a unifying petition rejecting the Indonesian government’s renewal of the 2001 ‘Special Autonomy’ law and calling for true self-determination. As of July 2021, the petition had been reportedly signed by over 700,000 West Papuans – perhaps one half of the Indigenous population – and supported by 112 civil society organisations.4

The most significant West Papuan organisation is the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), formed in December 2014 in Vanuatu.5 The ULMWP com- prises the three largest independentist groupings – the West Papua National Coalition for Liberation, Federal Republic of West Papua and National Parliament of West Papua. Other major organisations on the ground include the West Papua National Committee (KNBP, Komite Nasional Papua Barat). Other civil society organisations can be con- sidered part of a wider milieu of sympathy for the explicitly pro-independence move- ment, such as the West Papua Council of Churches, an ecumenical Protestant forum that has become increasingly outspoken on the issues of self-determination and human rights.6 Civil society and advocacy groups such as Elsham, a West Papuan human rights organisation, tend to keep the formal independence movement at arm’s length for their own security.

Externally, an explicitly pro-independence solidarity network stretches across the globe. The autonomous nature of local and national groupings makes this external network hard to clearly denote, but the Free West Papua Campaign (FWPC) – founded in 2004 by UK-based Papuan leader, Benny Wenda – is a major hub, with an active wing in Australia.7 FWPC-aligned groupings take their direction from the exiled leadership of the ULMWP. Other solidarity groups, such as West Papua Action Aotearoa in New Zealand, work with multiple West Papuan organisations. West Papuan student and Indonesian solidarity groups now exist in several cities across the Indonesian archipelago, most prominently the Papuan Student Alliance (AMP, Aliansi Mahasiswa Papua) and Indonesian People’s Front for West Papua (FRI-WP, Front Rakyat Indonesia untuk West Papua). A broader array of external human rights and church organisations work with civil society inside West Papua, again keeping their dis- tance from the independence movement for political and operational reasons (see ‘Terrain 3’, below).

This article is in part a study of the historical role of Western imperialism in the West Papuan struggle, and what this history means for actors situated in the West seeking to assist the movement. West Papuans are connecting their current predicament to the past and present of Western racism and imperialism. Solidarity with the global Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 was expressed in Papua through a reworking of the movement mantle: ‘Papuan Lives Matter’.8 Images of West Papuans crushed under the boots of Indonesian police traced a global line between the death of George Floyd and the suffering of colonised West Papuans. As this article shows, the anti-Papuan racism

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rampant amongst Indonesian elites, security services and nationalist and Islamist militias (such as the Nusantara Group [Kelompok Nusantara], Red White Front [Barisan Merah Putih], Islamic Defenders Front and Islamic Jihad Front) –9 a racism spectacularly denounced and resisted in the huge 2019 West Papua Uprising – cannot be understood apart from the history of Western imperialism. We must consider both Indonesia’s pos- ition as a downwardly racialised former colony, and its appropriation of racial frames used by Europeans in the colonial Pacific, to understand the significance of race and racism in the West Papuan independence struggle today.

This article examines three non-exhaustive terrains of the Papuan struggle, tracing the tensions and dilemmas emerging from their interaction:10

(1) The Indonesian settler colonial state; (2) The West Papuan liberation movement; (3) The Western solidarity networks.

In the first terrain, the article will analyse the nature of the Indonesian state and its settler colonial project in West Papua. Indonesia’s position on the periphery of the world-system, as former colonised territory and victim of US-led neo-imperialism, is examined to explain both the determinants of its genocidal policies in West Papua and the particular colonial form of racism it mobilises against West Papuans. Indonesian modernity has been a contested terrain, and the Western powers have had a large role in forming the extractive economic development and aggressive security state of modern Indonesia. Many European colonial tools once used in the Dutch East Indies and wider Pacific – including systems of racialisation and even specific laws (see ‘Terrain 1: The Indonesian settler colonial state’) – have been repurposed by Indonesia in West Papua; and much as the Dutch project in the region was turned against itself by Indone- sian nationalists, Jakarta’s colonial project is laying the seeds of its own destabilisation today.

This examination of the settler colonial genocide being carried out by the Indonesian state sets up our exploration of the second terrain: the front-line resistance carried out by the West Papuan liberation movement. The movement takes its particular Indigenous form in the context of long-running currents of Black resistance in the South Pacific, or Oceania. European racial categories, imposed once more from above by the new Indo- nesian colonial power, are repurposed by West Papuans as radical Melanesian identities of resistance; international pressures brought to bear on the movement rub against alternative visions of modernity emanating from within the struggle itself.

The analysis of these two terrains is then used to examine the third, the Western soli- darity networks, and to offer lessons for strategic action. Four key lessons are proposed: the need to recognise why anti-imperialist and anti-Western discourse has purchase within Indonesia; the imperative to appeal to that discourse if Western organisers are to help solidify an alliance between West Papuans and progressive Indonesians; the role of the Western movement in opening up space for West Papuans to freely determine their future in the interstices of the world system; and the insufficiency of dominant Western human rights framings as a vehicle for solidarity.

These terrains have been selected because they cover three of the most important fields within the conflict. They are defined broadly, absorbing aspects of other relevant areas of

4 C. WOODMAN

the struggle within them (the Pacific solidarity movement, for example, is included as an essential backdrop to the culture of the West Papuan struggle). A fourth terrain, that of Western states and capital, is so crucial to the structuring of the conditions faced by the other three that it is incorporated into the analysis of each, rather than having its own distinct section. The spectre of Western imperialism, then, is omnipresent throughout the analysis. The historical interaction between these terrains determines the primary fea- tures of the struggle and sets the parameters within which actors – such as a solidarity organiser in the UK – can operate. At least two other major terrains with influence over the context and unfolding of the liberation movement, that of East and Southeast Asian capital, and international institutions such as the UN, are not included for lack of space, and because their importance is, in the history and present of the struggle, far more marginal than those analysed here.

Methodology

Much of the analysis offered below arises from the author’s six years of participation in the West Papuan solidarity movement, working for the ULMWP. That work has resulted in countless extensive conversations about the history and present of the independence movement with diasporic and travelling West Papuans, Western solidarity organisers, and Indonesians of all political persuasions in the UK, Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. This has given the author a ‘situated knowledge’ of the struggle’s political dynamics and the internal discussions, influences and strategies of the West Papuan liberation movement.11

The author has also kept up with the political, historical, legal, human rights, ecologi- cal, anthropological, journalistic and activist literatures on West Papua in that time, has carried out research on British foreign policy in West Papua at the UK National Archives,12 and undertaken a research project analysing the Wikileaks cables on West Papua released in 2010-11.13

This reading and research has been interwoven with personal engagement in the struggle. This approach is based on the belief, prominent in the ‘militant research’ para- digm, that praxis and epistemology are combined. As Russell describes it, militant research is ‘a combination of thought and action orientated towards understanding and changing collective praxis’,14 an attempt to overcome the division between organis- ing and academia. Analysis must be in the service of struggles for emancipation, but‘analysis becomes complete only through participation in struggles’, as Italian Marxist Autonomist Raniero Panzieri put it.15 There is no value-neutral analysis, and all intellec- tual work, regardless of the intentions of the author, becomes a tool in a power struggle between social forces, particularly when the analysis is directed towards a live political struggle like West Papua. Intellectual products should be created in the belief that accu- rate, unflinching analysis of complexity is an essential pre-requisite for efficacious politi- cal action.16

Framework

Those who do not define as ethnic Melanesian Papuans, but who seek to stand in soli- darity with those who do, particularly Indonesians and Western organisers, have

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adopted a variety of non-exclusive frames for interpreting the West Papuan struggle that provide a language and political practice for attempted solidarity. These frames include the discourse of human rights,17 the academic discipline of anthropology,18 and an acti- vist frame of ‘good’ West Papuans versus ‘bad’ Indonesians.19

This article proposes what might be termed a historical anti-imperialist framework. This approach conceptualises Indonesia’s presence in West Papua as a colonial one; that is, an issue of a state’s forcible military, cultural and economic domination of a foreign peoples for purposes of national pride, resource extraction, or labour exploita- tion. The framework is based on a combination of two compounds:8 a sub-discourse that sees West Papua through the lens of struggles against colonisation and neo-imperi- alism, and mid-twentieth century radical anti-colonial thought.

The first is represented partly, thought not exclusively, by a group of activist-scholars associated with the West Papua Project at the University of Wollongong (formerly at the University of Sydney).20 These scholars unapologetically support the liberation move- ment, utilising participant-observer methodologies to generate intellectual work of use to the struggle.21

The second concerns the mid-twentieth century anti-colonial tradition of Franco- phone and Lusophone liberation movements, including Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Albert Memmi and Amílcar Cabral.22 Writers in these traditions were commenting on and engaged with resistance against European empires in Africa and the Caribbean, and often combined their thought and action with aspects of European philosophy and critical theory, including Marxism, psycho-analysis and existentialism. In line with this, the approach of this essay combines an engagement in and commitment to the lib- eration struggle with insights from European critical thought. British Marxism from the Communist Party of Great Britain to the journal New Left Review, Italian Autonomist Marxism, and Analytical Marxist scholarship help inform the analysis of the nature of Indonesian imperialism and the place of Indonesia within global political economic relations; Foucauldian constructivism and US race theory, heavily influenced by Marxism, helps illuminate the dialectical construction of West Papuan identity in conflict with a racialising Other. This tradition is appropriate thanks to its comprehen- sive integration of theory and practical activity, and its explicit reflection of the potential role of solidarity from progressive European citizens. This essay stands as an argument for this tradition, and offers a potential mooring point for the battleship of practical soli- darity with West Papuans.

Notably, this framework seeks to politicise the West Papuan conflict through interro- gating power relations that lie embedded within processes and histories that may appear neutral or apolitical.23 This framework seeks to place West Papua and Indonesia in the context of global power relations; rather than presenting a simple moralistic framework which asserts that Indonesia equals ‘bad’ and West Papua equals ‘good’, it seeks to unravel the material and ideological complexities of the struggle bound up with global structures and actors. As such, it is offered as an alternative to certain depoliticised dis- courses projected by large Western human rights groups.

To build solidarity implies solidarity is something to be worked towards – constructed through concrete action – rather than merely asserted or assumed to flow unhindered from the assertion of a human rights discourse. As David Roediger writes, ‘timing, spatial difference between groups, varied histories, and difference in the form oppression

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takes can make the achievement of unity a large and long task’.24 This article makes a small contribution to the process of examining what lies ahead for that ‘large and long task’ of solidarity with West Papua from a Western subject position.

Terrain 1: The Indonesian settler colonial state

Algeria is France.
Popular French colonial slogan25

Papua is Indonesia.
Teuku Faizasyah, Adviser to Indonesian Foreign Minister on political and security affairs,

201926
Deputy National Police chief Comr. Gen. Gatot Eddy Pramono, 202027

Indonesian and West Papuan nationalism: reworkings and appropriations

Indonesia’s own brand of nationalism was forged in the struggle to end Dutch rule in 1945-49. Indonesians appropriated the language of the Dutch in order to undermine their colonial master: what began as a slogan to denote the unity of the Dutch East Indies and crush rebellious Acehnese, ‘Van sabang tot merauke’ (‘from Sabang to Merauke’, the furthermost points east and west of the Dutch East Indies) became a rally- ing cry for Indonesian nationalists aspiring to independence.28 A tool of subjugation transformed into its opposite, a tool of liberation; when deployed by the independent Indonesian state, it was transformed back again. Today, West Papuans add their own twist, ‘from Sorong to Samarai’,29 asserting their resistance to Indonesia and hinting at desires for an eventual union with their fellow Melanesian inhabitants in independent Papua New Guinea (where Samarai sits). An instrument of nationalist-imperialist repres- sion, turned once more into its opposite.

The new Republic of Indonesia based itself on the founding national principles of Pan- casila, the Five Bases, one of which is ‘national unity’. This unity, spreading out from Java to encompass all 17,500 islands of the former Dutch East Indies, was imposed by force upon a diverse archipelago of over 700 ethnic groups,30 from the Acehnese to the Timor- ese. This nationalism has continually provoked ‘counter-nationalisms’ seeking their own nation-states in opposition to Indonesia (and in the case of East Timor, gaining indepen- dence in 2002).31

Indonesian rule in West Papua is promoting the conditions for its own counter- national contestation in concrete ways. As James Scott has argued, the imposition of a common language by colonial state authorities is a way of expanding the power of a central apparatus. The ‘illegibility’ posed by myriad forms of local languages can be slowly overcome, and demographic, tenure and tax information can be more readily standardised across vast territories.32 In West Papua, the Indonesian colonisation has intensified the take-up of Bahasa by the Indigenous population – particularly outside the coastal areas, where previous contact had already helped spread Malay – popularised through schooling, security forces and state documents, a process described as ‘Indone- sianization’.33 As Jenny Munro puts it in her study of Indonesian education among the

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Dani people of the Baliem Valley, Indonesian education ‘teaches and elevates the national language, Bahasa Indonesia, as the language of modernity’.34 While imposing such uni- formity upon the 250 linguistic groups in West Papua may assist the governability of the provinces, it also assists the emergence of a Papuan identity and common currency of communication between previously antagonistic tribes through their specifically Papua- nised version of Bahasa.35 As one anthropologist puts it, ‘Bahasa Papua (the Papuan dialect of Indonesian) has become ever more elaborated in mediating a pan-regional identity’.36 One can witness West Papuans from different areas of the territory conver- sing in Bahasa about how to break the coloniser’s stranglehold, a phenomenon noted as a recent development in a study of West Papuan refugees in Australia.37 Papuans have also claimed Indonesia’s anti-colonial rallying cry from the war of independence, merdeka (roughly: freedom/independence) for their own.38 Indeed, as Eben Kirksey has noted, ‘A “Papuan” ethnicity spanning these 250 groups can be seen as a creation of the movement for self-determination in West Papua’.39 The Papuan self has been forged in the struggle against Indonesian rule, and defined against the Indonesian nation.

Indonesian modernity – a contested history

Whilst encoded within the Republic from the start, Indonesia’s imperialist path was not set in cement. Fleetingly, it appeared the new nation might craft elements of a new pro- gressive modernity of the Global South. The journey from Dutch resource basin to impo- verished and expansionist state, integrated into unequal global commodity markets and environmentally scorched by primary agricultural exports, was not an unbroken path. There was, as Lisa Tilley writes, a ‘Third World interlude’, an attempt to ‘break from Western-centred structures and relations of extraction’ and ‘cultivate relational political and economic connections without the need to loop back through the old imperial centre’.40 This was the Indonesia of the Bandung Conference, the Non-Aligned Move- ment and the Conference of the New Emerging Forces, headed from 1945–65 by Presi- dent Sukarno.

How much this Third Worldism, as it played out in countries like Indonesia, was a truly liberatory project rather than a progressive veneer for a new developmentalist post- colonial elite is debated –41 and its material effects in terms of South-South economic connections were probably marginal.42 Despite this, the spirit of Bandung, the Non- Aligned Movement and Third Worldism did represent an attempt of sorts at breaking away from centuries of Western domination in the name of a more universal humanity, and opened up political space that had been and would be viciously slammed shut under alternative regimes. In Indonesia, Sukarno allowed the space for progressive, mass-based movements like the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI), the largest in the world outside China and the Soviet bloc, to flourish. The PKI, with a mem- bership rooted in millions of the poorest producers in Indonesia, took an increasingly active role in Indonesian social and political life, and a new national and global order unending the iniquities of colonialism was briefly visible.

In 1965-6, this alternative modernity was violently closed off in the slaughter of up to a million suspected members of the PKI, peasant organisers and trade unionists. Stoked up by anti-Communist propaganda beamed into Indonesia by the British Foreign Office,43 fanned with death lists handed over by the US Embassy and spread by Western-aligned

8 C. WOODMAN

elements in the Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI, Tentara Nasional Indonesia),44 the massacres instituted the rule of General Suharto. Foreshadowing the conflagration in 1970s post-coup Chile,45 Western economists were parachuted into the new regime,46 opening Indonesia up for foreign investment and solidifying the ‘New Order’, a blood- drenched capitalist dictatorship that would last until 1998. The ‘consolidation of an authoritarian regime committed to Western-oriented development’, historian Brad Simpson has demonstrated, was ‘very much the product of an international constellation of forces’.47 Western states, in short, have a large share of responsibility for the violent readjustment of Indonesia’s internal political economy, which rebounded on West Papua in brutal fashion.

Indonesian settler-colonialism and racist productivism

The Indonesian regime in West Papua has ended up resembling European colonialism, and a specifically settler-colonial variant at that. Lachlan McNamee, using publicly avail- able government documents, traces the state ‘transmigration’ policy of populating West Papua with Indonesian settlers from the rest of the archipelago. He found stong evidence that the dense periods of settlement in particular areas have tended to correlate with counter-insurgency operations to cleanse Indigenous Papuans from militarily- sensitive border areas, and with the presence of huge extractive resource projects like the Freeport McMoRan gold and copper mine.48 As a result, Indigenous West Papuans make up around 50% of the total population today, down from approximately 96% in 1971.49

The Indonesian state frequently draws upon the legacy institutions and laws of Dutch colonialism: Indonesian settlers are taken in on ships owned by a state firm once part of the Dutch East Indies company,50 as part of a programme of settlement begun by the Dutch. Indonesian courts regularly charge West Papuan independence leaders with a Dutch-era law, makar or treason: Amnesty International records at least 22 makar cases following the West Papua Uprising of August-September 2019.51

Similarly, the architecture of racism developed by Western anthropologists and colonial administrators and once used to distinguish the inferior brown Malays – like Indonesians – from sub-human ‘Oceanic Negroes’ – like Papuans – has been repurposed by Indonesian elites.52 Indonesian anti-HIV posters echo Western portrayals of Melane- sians as backward savages,53 ‘sexually voracious, promiscuous, out of control’.54 The Indonesian government rolls-out West Papuan children adorned in the red and white of the Indonesian national flag for international delegations, and brings stereotyped West Papuan ‘traditional’ dances to international events –55 aping a history of colonial human exhibition.56 It is not hard to see the historical resonances between images of West Papuans corralled onto all fours by Indonesian police for minor or imagined offences and that of Indians subjected to Reginald Dyer’s infamous ‘crawling order’ in the British Raj in 1919.57 As Budi Hernawan writes, ascriptions of ‘animality (monkey, pig, or dog), racial notions (black/ “hitam”) or the notion of underdevelopment (primi- tive, idiot or stone-age/ “zaman batu”)’, mastered by Western intellectuals and officials during their colonisation of the Pacific, are routinely imposed upon West Papuans by Indonesians from all walks of life.58 The 2019 Uprising was sparked by Indonesian secur- ity services hurling racial abuse at besieged West Papuan students in Surabaya.59

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As Banivanua-Mar has argued, the invocation of the ‘cannibalism’, ‘barbarism’ and ‘backwardness’ of Papuans functions precisely to conceal the real violence of a settler colonial ‘cold genocide’ being perpetrated against them by the Western-backed Indone- sian state.60 From classic European colonialism to tourist ‘cannibal tours’,61 travel guide books to Indonesian imperialism, Indigenous Pacific peoples have been thought of as outside of history, not of modernity, and therefore the legitimate recipients and benefi- ciaries of the imposed modernising force of some colonial power.62 As Tarcisius Kabu- taulaka puts it, Melanesians were represented by Europeans as ‘naturally trapped in a particular state-of-being and unchanging. These “ignoble savages” are therefore “back- ward” compared to the West [...] which is constantly changing and “progressing”’.63

Racist discourses on work, productivism and land lifted from the liberal-bourgeois Western tradition appear in Indonesia. The notion of the ‘lazy Javanese native’ originated in the 1830s as a handmaiden to the ‘Dutch Cultivation System of forced plantation labour’;64 today, the formerly colonised turn such mental architecture against their own racialised subjects. Colonial-Lockean themes emerge in the musings of Indonesian bour- geois tycoon,65 Arifin Panigoro: ‘Areas of 11 million hectares in south Papua’, he states, are ‘idle lands’, just waiting to be ‘touched by productive hands’ –66 as if Indigenous Papuans did not have their own complex means of managing and gaining sustenance from New Guinea’s environment. Such veneration of Western styles of modernity and domination – of both nature and the Indigenous – have long been present in a section of Indonesia’s nationalist elite. As Sutan Sjahrir, one of Indonesia’s founding fathers put it: ‘the West signifies a forceful, dynamic, and active life ... only by a utilisation of the dynamism of the West can the East be released from its slavery and subjugation ... the essence of the struggle’, he argued, is ‘man’s attempt to subdue nature and to rule it by his will’.67 This project to subdue Indonesia’s nature and all who stand in the way of modern development is being implemented in the crucible of contemporary West Papua.

Disparaging views of West Papuans, products of this colonial, Enlightenment- influenced ideology, find their way into private documents and discussions at all levels of the Indonesia state. A leaked report from the TNI’s special forces, Kopassus, argues that Papuans ‘lack the willingness to work and [...] make a better life, so their lives seem to be making no substantial progress’ – in contrast with Indonesian migrants in Papua, who have ‘high spirit and work ethic’.68 In discussion with the U.S. Ambassador in 2001, future Vice President of Indonesia Jusuf Kalla described Papuans as ‘less edu- cated and enjoying a relatively easy lifestyle’, comparing them unfavourably to ‘harder working migrants’.69

Such racism, however – directed at ‘governors, pro-independence activists or women selling fruit and vegetables in the markets’ –70 undermines the Indonesian state’s attempts to create a Papuan elite separated from the mass of discontent and pro-indepen- dence sentiment.71 The ‘Special Autonomy’ era, inaugurated in 2001, has channelled vast financial resources into the two Papuan provinces and created a layer of Indigenous bureaucrats and politicians who gain some material advantage from Indonesian rule. Their treatment as second-class citizens, however, has clearly made many in this new class sympathetic to independence, if only privately.72 The government-sponsored edu- cation of Papuan students in cities across Indonesia, part of this process of attempted co- optation and elite-formation, lies shipwrecked, dashed on the shores of the racist attack launched against Papuan students in Surabaya in August 2019: shortly after, around

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6,000 students returned to West Papua in an ‘exodus’ from Indonesia and from any chance of forming a stable pro-Indonesian native class.73

The structural determinants of genocide

Two structural determinants – in the sense of wider socio-economic forces that generate (non-inevitable) tendencies towards particular outcomes – combine to generate a par- ticularly brutal form of settler colonialism in occupied West Papua. Firstly, the Indone- sian state views the Indigenous inhabitants as a barrier to accessing natural resources, rather than a source of labour power, meaning the relation of the state to Papuans tends towards cleansing and extermination. Secondly, Indonesia’s peripheral status in the international system, as both coloniser and semi-neo-colony, gives West Papua’s resource base and prestige status an outsized importance for the Indonesian ruling class. Holding on to West Papua becomes an objective worth any amount of blood.

Sociologist Erik Olin Wright distinguished between ‘exploitative and nonexploitative oppression’. In the former, the labour of the dominated is required and appropriated by the dominating class. Such relations include those between workers and businessmen, or slaves and planters. In cases of nonexploitative oppression, the labour of the oppressed is not required to reproduce the material well-being of the rulers. Wright illustrates with the example of colonial North America:

because the settler population didn’t need Native Americans, they could adopt a strategy of genocide as a way of responding to the conflicts generated by the exclusion of indigenous people from the land. There is a morally abhorrent folk expression in US culture that reflects this quality of antagonism: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” No comparable expression exists for workers, slaves, or other exploited classes.74

As with colonial North America’s relation to Native Americans, the Indonesian state has little interest in exploiting the labour of West Papuans. Outside of the Freeport McMoRan-operated Grasberg mine – where the sizeable Papuan portion of its 30,000 employees and contractors have formed an Indigenous trade union, Tongoi Papua, and launched several substantial strike actions –75 there is little by way of a West Papuan working class. Similarly, little attempt to enslave West Papuan labour has been made by the Indonesian regime. Around two-thirds of West Papuans are small-time farmers, and Jakarta’s attempts to industrialise agriculture are likely to reduce the need for even this labour.76 The Indigenous ‘Special Autonomy’ elite occupy a slither of civil service jobs and political posts.77 Some highlanders and rural Papuans continue to live something of a traditional Indigenous mode of subsistence; many others eke out a living in the corners of colonial life, searching for scraps of gold in mining tailings or selling their hand-made wares at street markets.78

The Indigenous population is, to the Indonesian state, largely an obstacle to develop- ment that must be eliminated or marginalised by the train of historical progress. As one West Papuan woman put it recently, ‘They need the natural resources. But they don’t need the people of West Papua’,79 a fact confirmed by then Vice President B.J. Habibie in 1992: ‘the future of our nation is very much dependent on our ability to exploit the potential of Irian Jaya [West Papua]’.80 Habibie did not mean the labouring potential, but the natural resource potential. Indonesia’s equivalent expression to the

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American remark about ‘dead Indians’ is the TNI’s slogan during the Suharto era: ‘let the rats run into the jungle so that chickens can breed in the coop’ (Biar tikus lari kehutan, asal ayam piara dikandang),81 denoting in pithy style the cleansing of West Papuans to make way for Indonesian settlers.82

The second structural determinant of genocide in West Papua concerns Indonesia’s relatively peripheral position in the world system. Perry Anderson termed Portuguese rule in Africa ‘ultra-colonialism’.83 The first and last European colonial power, Portugal held on to Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Angola until 1974-5, fighting lengthy wars of decolonisation and imposing coercive systems of labour extraction that were notable for their extreme brutality. Whilst Indonesian rule in West Papua does not exactly match the Portuguese example – notably, ‘the Indonesian government does not need Papuan [...] labour to administer the territory’ –84 it shares certain features. Anderson noted that Portuguese colonialism’s particularly violent characteristics derived from Por- tugal’s then-position on the ‘semi-periphery’ of the global system. Britain and France could afford, in some instances, to rapidly grant their colonies independence, preserving informal patterns of economic domination. Portugal had no such luxury, itself largely agrarian and economically dependent on the north-western European core, without the state capacity and capital necessary to informally colonise its former territories through economic power alone. Instead, in alliance with Apartheid South Africa,85 Portugal held on to its African territories until the bitter end, paying with a revolution inside its borders in 1974.

Similarly, Indonesia is relatively peripheral to the global economy. The fourth-most populous country in the world, it remains dominated by foreign capital from the West and East Asia, with an under-funded military relying on fiefdoms of rentierism,86 indus- trial brothels and extortion to maintain itself. Indonesia’s plantation form of slash-and- burn agriculture,87 the cause of murderous environmental destruction,88 can be traced to Dutch colonial policies designed to integrate Indonesia into the bottom rung of global markets.89 This marginality makes West Papua all the more important to Indonesia: the Grasberg mine has long generated the Indonesian state’s largest single source of revenue,90 and West Papua makes up around a quarter of Indonesia’s landmass. The emotive implications of the archipelago’s unity, forged through struggle against the former Dutch colonisers, resonate all the more deeply with Indonesians as a result of being ‘trapped in the weakest position within global structural hierarchies’.91 Maintain- ing its hold on West Papua, no matter how much violence is required, is therefore seen as ‘non-negotiable’, in the recent words of Indonesia’s security chief.92

The intensity of the genocidal repression in West Papua lends the resistance move- ment an utter intensity – this is, for many Papuans, a question of their survival as a dis- tinct and flourishing people. The next section examines the West Papuan movement, its relation to the Indonesian colonial project, and the pressures of Western modernity it is forced to operate within.

Terrain 2: The West Papuan independence movement

West Papuan liberation – history and present

The West Papuan liberation movement stretches back to at least 1965, when the idea of the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM) was formed and an uprising against Indonesian

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administration launched in Manokwari.93 Since then, numerous organisations, leaders and factions have developed, collaborated and competed in the overarching struggle to rid themselves of Indonesian state domination. Arguably, the movement’s prior high- water mark of 1998–2001 – the ‘Papuan Spring’ that was undone by the machinations of Indonesian elites and brute repression –94 has been superseded over the last several years. In December 2014, three of the main independence factions signed the Saralana Declaration, forming the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP).95 The ULMWP has focused thus far on pushing for a referendum on independence to replace the fraudulent 1969 ‘Act of Free Choice’,96 and works through international organisations such as the Human Rights Council (HRC), Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) and sub-regional Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) to secure support for an eventual UN General Assembly resolution.

Naturally not without continuing divisions – many of them frantically worked at by the Indonesian state –97 the movement has since 2015 intensified its activities and suc- cesses internationally and on the ground in West Papua. Diplomatically, the ULMWP has formed an official alliance with the Republic of Vanuatu and succeeded in placing the issue on the agenda of the 18-nation Pacific Islands Forum and 79-nation Organis- ation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States.98 Prominently, the ULMWP delivered a petition calling for a referendum on independence to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva in January 2019.99 Internally, a mass civil disobedience cam- paign has bloomed under the direction of the KNPB and one of the biggest popular upris- ings in West Papuan history took place in August-September 2019.100 This ‘West Papua Uprising’, according to a detailed report by human rights organisation Tapol, involved 87 demonstrations and led to over 1,000 arrests, 120 years of cumulative prison sentences, and at least 61 deaths.101 The internal and external processes came to a head on Decem- ber 1, 2020, when all three factions within the ULMWP agreed to upgrade the organis- ation to the status of a ‘Provisional Government of West Papua’, with UK-based Benny Wenda as interim President.102

West Papuan nationalism, Melanesian solidarity, and the struggle over Pacific identity

The West Papuan independence movement emerges from a particular confluence of his- torical antecedents and conditions. On the one hand, the struggle is indelibly nationalist. The Morning Star flag, worn and hoisted as a symbol of identity and resistance across the territory, is one part of the national nomenclature – anthem, name, elected governing council – adopted by West Papuan leaders in 1961,103 on the never-completed path to decolonisation from Dutch rule.104

In this sense, the movement is in part a child of the nineteenth century European nationalist movements. The particular form of nationalism represented by the move- ment, however, chimes more closely with the mid-twentieth century anti-colonial nationalism that broke the back of the formal European empires. The twist is that West Papuan identity has developed largely in opposition to a leading product of those struggles: Indonesian nationalism, once a symbol of ‘non-aligned’ Third World solidarity and anti-imperialist resistance. In this, West Papuan nationalism constitutes part of a post-colonial wave of nationalism, formed in response to the aggressive

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ambitions of former European colonies. These new anti-imperialist movements can be analytically grouped as post-colonial self-determination struggles: Western Sahara against Morocco, Kashmir against India, Kurdistan against Turkey.

Mixing this triad of forebears – nineteenth century European nationalist, mid-twen- tieth century anti-imperialist and post-colonial self-determination movements – into its particular cultural form is the continuing history of mass struggle in the South Pacific – or what Tongan-Fijian writer Epeli Hau‘ofa insisted we call Oceania.105 Oceania remains the beating heart of solidarity with the West Papuans, who tend to define themselves as ‘Melanesian’, aligned with the Indigenous peoples of Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands and Fiji.

From US nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands to the Indonesian occupation of East Timor,106 continuing French rule in New Caledonia to PNG’s subjugation of Bougain- ville,107 the West Papuan struggle lives within a sub-continental past and present of (anti)colonialism.108 Seeing a shared history of racialisation by Europeans, some in Oceania have termed the region the ‘Black Pacific’,109 crafting a political resonance with Black liberationism in Africa, the US and the Caribbean.

The very concept of ‘Melanesia’ is the product of an ongoing contest between imperial histories and mass struggles. In 1832, the French explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville formed the tripartite division of Oceania – Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia – based on alleged socio-racial differences.110 Oceania’s inhabitants were ‘arranged on a socio-evolutionary scale’,111 with Melanesia, the ‘black people of Oceania’ – according to d’Urville, posses- sing ‘unpleasant features’ and close to a ‘barbaric state’ – placed at the bottom.112 The inhabitants of ‘New Guinea’, christened thus in order to denote their similarity, to the white coloniser, with the Africans of Guinea,113 lounged at the lower end of the already downwardly racialised category of Melanesia: ‘the lowest rung of civilisation’, in the words of a Dutch colonial official in 1911.114 This classification of ‘Papuans’, made in contradistinction to the lighter-skinned ‘Malays’ to the east and ‘Indians’ of the New World, was later lent on by the Dutch as a partial justification for their separ- ating West Papua from the Republic of Indonesia in 1949.115

As with other identities that began with a ‘labelling from above’ designed to classify, contain and control populations through pseudo-scientific knowledge production, the identity ‘Melanesian’ has been reshaped and appropriated ‘from below’ by those subject to the classification.116 Today, most Indigenous inhabitants of Oceania view themselves in part through d’Urville’s taxonomy, but have imbued it with meanings at odds with the derogatory connotations of the European gaze. The state-level grouping, the MSG, for example, has partly institutionalised the dignified ‘Melanesian Way’ of Papua New Guinea’s Bernard Narokobi.117

This struggle over meaning and identity continues to play out in the West Papua- Indonesia conflict. The ULMWP and Indonesia both claim to represent Indigenous Melanesian West Papuans at the MSG. The ULMWP questions whether a state that rou- tinely kills Melanesian Papuans ought to have a place at the table with other Melanesian governments. The Indonesian state, for its part, tries to recuperate Papuan Melanesians as constitutive of its national ‘Unity in Diversity’,118 projecting an exoticised image of Indigenous Papuans to an international audience through stage-managed cultural dis- plays (see above). Domestically, cultural expressions of Melanesian identity – dreadlocks, for example – are violently repressed by Indonesian occupation forces.119 Indonesia is

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trying to form a sanitised, non-threatening Melanesian identity in Papua amenable to its colonial aims – a shift, perhaps, from its previous goal of assimilating West Papuans into a Javanese-led ethnic project.120 Online pro-Indonesian ‘bot’ accounts, some linked to well-funded, Jakarta-based private communications companies, have also taken to pro- moting a ‘moderate’ Melanesian Papuan identity that calls for the implementation of ‘Special Autonomy’ rather than independence.121

Where once colonial powers sought to classify western New Guinea within Melanesia in order to suit imperial imperatives, today Western powers have reclassified it, keen to support the Indonesian state’s claims over West Papua. The 1965 Canberra Agreement, for example, redrew the boundaries of the South Pacific, imagining West Papua into South-East Asia at the drop of an imperial hat where before it had been considered firmly within Melanesia.122

Modernity, nationalism, and the ULMWP

‘The paradox of nationalism’, Eric Hobsbawm wrote, ‘was that in forming its own nation it automatically created the counter-nationalism of those whom it now forced into the choice between assimilation and inferiority’.123 A nationalism imposed upon dissident popu- lations – Algerians in the French Empire or Moros in the Philippines – generates a ‘counter-nationalism’ of resistance. Nationalisms do not follow the same contours in every context, but are ‘a key doctrinal arena in struggles for political power’.124 As Hobs- bawm wrote, nationalism in nineteenth century Europe took a particularly modern and bourgeois form. To be a nation meant to be ‘capable of developing a viable economy, tech- nology, state organisation and military force’.125 These nationalisms were, then, structures for organising the cataclysm of capitalist modernity that accelerated with exponential force in the nineteenth century – they sought to manage and order this new civilisation along ‘national’ lines. The national anti-colonial rebellions of the mid-twentieth century, which collapsed the formal European empires and redrew the political geography of the world, briefly posed an alternative modernity, and a different form of nationalism.126

Similar to the anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century, the West Papuan lib- eration movement faces immense pressures internationally to conform to a particular model of nationalism. In order to court support from international governments and institutions, Papuans are required to present and organise in certain ways. They must orient themselves towards international ‘audiences’,127 and require acceptance as a (pro- to)state, by other states. To succeed in the international realm, West Papuan representa- tives are forced to demonstrate that they are ‘capable of developing a viable economy, technology, state organisation and military force’. This pressure to conform to a bour- geois model of national independence formed in the nineteenth century comes from all quarters: international institutions can only be courted with the support of an already-independent government; observers scrutinise whether an independent West Papua would be a ‘failed state’,128 unable to live up to the demands of modern nation- hood; and the pressures of fighting against a violent and far-larger enemy generate a need for disciplined and hierarchical organising.

Thus, the West Papuan liberation movement is understandably concerned to project its viability as a governor of a modern state. The ULMWP justified the unification of the three West Papuan guerilla factions in July 2019 by stating that, ‘If we want to form an

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independent state, we have to form unified authorities capable of governing our terri- tory’.129 As Benny Wenda, Chair of the ULMWP, said in his global dispatch at the time, the liberation movement is ‘ready to take over our country’.130 Short of a radical transform- ation of the global political-economic context, the prevailing pressures of bourgeois nationhood are likely to play a significant role in the construction of any independent West Papua. In many of Oceania’s former colonies, an extractive model of environmen- tally-destructive development spurred by foreign investment – often from the former colo- nial power – has helped diminish the hopes many had after formal independence.131

Like the mid-twentieth century anti-colonial movements, however, these pressures operate against countervailing visions emanating from within the West Papuan move- ment.132 West Papuan notions of independence and merdeka include dreams of Indigen- ous self-governance and ‘the world’s first Green State’.133 In October 2020, a Provisional Constitution for the Republic of West Papua was proposed by groups on the ground. The constitution involves an amalgam of classic liberal ideals – a tripartite division of power, protections for individual freedom of expression – with alternative Indigenous notions – collective restrains on property rights, communal land arrangements and the inclusion of Papuan tribes as a political unit.134 If the trajectory of Indonesian modernity has been subject to struggles within which international forces have intervened, the future of an independent West Papuan state will be no different. The role of the Western solidarity movement in this dilemma is examined in the next section.

Terrain 3: The Western solidarity networks

Into this historical terrain steps a Western solidarity movement, courted by the West Papuan refugee and exile community. Four key lessons for the Western solidarity move- ment can be extracted from the above analysis:

• .  The history of Western colonialism and neo-imperialism in Indonesia is rawly remembered in Indonesian domestic life today, and the power of this anti-imperialist discourse must be recognised by Western organisers;

• .  West Papuans will need an alliance with progressive Indonesian sectors if they are to succeed – and Western organisers risk rupturing that alliance, and pushing Indone- sians into the arms of their government, if they don’t effectively appeal to the anti- imperialist currents within Indonesian politics;

• .  Due to the pressures the international system places on the West Papuan indepen- dence movement, the role of Western organisers is to try to open as much space as possible for West Papuans to freely determine their own fate, up to and beyond independence;

• .  Much of the ‘human rights’ framing offered by large international NGOs is insufficient to meet the challenges of the struggle.

  1. Nekolim and a history of Western designs on Indonesia

  Taking advantage of the seeming closeness of the West Papuan movement to Western organisers, the Indonesian elite has attempted to domestically delegitimise Papuan aspirations by presenting them as Western dupes seeking the break-up of Indonesia –

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Dutch imperialists returning in a human rights garb. Thus, a discourse of anti-imperial- ism is mobilised to justify colonial predations of a genocidal nature.135 This continues a long Indonesian tradition of associating the incorporation of West Papua with resistance to imperialism. As anthropologist Danilyn Rutherford writes, ‘Indonesian nationalism coalesced as a mass phenomenon in part around the goal of “freeing” the [Papuans] from Dutch chains’.136 Whilst clearly a cynical power play on the part of Indonesian elites (overlaid with the racist assumption that Papuans have no agency of their own), we ought to seriously examine why this discourse has any purchase when presented to the Indonesian populace.

The fact remains that Indonesia has been and is a victim of what in the country’s pol- itical discourse is termed neokolonialisme-imperialisme (Nekolim), stretching back to the early years of the Republic. In 1958, in what was at that point ‘the biggest covert operation the United States had ever carried out’,137 the CIA supported rebellions on the Indone- sian periphery to undermine Sukarno’s post-independence government.138 John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s interventionist Secretary of State, had written in 1953 that he would ‘prefer’ the ‘break up of that country [Indonesia] into racial or geographical units’ – a policy attempted in 1958.139 In 1965-66, the West had more than a hand in the military coup and political genocide that followed.140

The 1965-66 coup led to a large-scale reconfiguration of Indonesian economic, politi- cal and social life – a ‘return under corporate transnationalism to the mine and the plan- tation’, as Lisa Tilley puts it –141 directed by Berkeley-trained economists and the IMF, implementing ‘development’ plans cooked up in MIT and Cornell through Ford- and Rockefeller-funded research.142 The Suharto dictatorship, which helped cause the endemic contemporary problems of ‘economic instability, environmental degradation, state violence, corruption [and] religious conflict’,143 was largely a product of Western designs and was propped up by US support for over three decades. Structurally, Indone- sia remains mired in poverty caused in large part by its subordinate role in a neo-imperial global economy, with regions of the country forced to rely on the revenues of Western tourists whilst their own citizens are routinely barred from entering the West.

Not only this, but Indonesia’s cynicism regarding the Netherlands’ motives for keeping hold of West Papua in the 1940s is well-founded. The decision to maintain control of the vast territory until the 1960s was taken, as Rutherford has written, for reasons of imperial prestige, influenced by white fantasies of virgin lands ripe for settlement.144 Claims, some- times heard in the West Papuan independence movement, that the Dutch protected West Papua for benign motives, do not help us address and undercut the bases of the Indonesian elite’s dismissal of Papuan independence claims. As Rutherford puts it: ‘The Dutch viewed the Papuans as impressionable children. The Indonesians viewed them as imperial puppets. Neither party believed the Papuans were capable of acting in their own best interests’.145

Partly for these reasons, the legacy of anti-colonialism maintains a strong purchase among the Indonesian population. Symbols of resistance to the Dutch are littered throughout Indonesian popular life, from a newspaper named after a prominent resist- ance figure to monuments in Jakarta to the annual independence day celebrations.146 If we are to make effective alliances with sections of the Indonesian population – as is prob- ably required for the success of the Papuan struggle – we have to be able to tap into, and avoid alienating, the positive elements of this tradition.

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2. The promise of Indonesia-Papua solidarity

If we dismiss Indonesian concerns about foreign interference in Indonesia, we risk pushing the Indonesian population into the arms of their duplicitous ruling class – a class recently besieged by mass protest.147 Even lawyer Veronica Koman, an Indonesian supporter of the West Papuan independence movement, once believed the independence struggle to be little more than a US imperial scheme to break up Indonesia.148 Western activists must avoid inflaming such sentiments.

West Papuans form a tiny portion of the total population of Indonesia, so alliances with progressive sections within Indonesia will be vital for the realisation of West Papuan self-determination. Such an alliance is eminently possible: East Timor achieved its independence in 1999–2002 partly through its links to the pro-democracy movement within Indonesia.149 Promisingly, during massive demonstrations against proposed reforms to Indonesia’s legal code in September 2019, the fourth demand made by the protesters was to, ‘Halt repression in Papua [...] and release Papuan political prisoners immediately’ –150 an unprecedented display of solidarity from a sizeable part of the Indo- nesian public. In April 2020, the first non-Papuan Indonesian, Surya Anta, was convicted of treason for pro-independence activities.151 Indonesia-based solidarity groups like the Indonesian People’s Front for West Papua have formed, representing a growing senti- ment, particularly amongst the young, in favour of West Papuan claims. The racist attack in Surabaya in 2019 and the 2020 ‘Papuan Lives Matter’ movement have sparked a notable round of soul-searching in liberal metropolitan Indonesia, with Papuan voices suddenly, if briefly, elevated in a range of Indonesian publications.152

We must look to the progressive traditions within Indonesian society, and recognise their potentialities and dangers. Romanticising the ‘Bandung Spirit’ or the PKI’s legacy is unlikely to take us far: from a Papuan perspective, Sukarno, the PKI and the Indo- nesian ‘anti-colonial’ project was always intimately bound up with the colonisation of their land and the forced ‘modernisation’ of their people, long before General Suharto took over.153 Indeed, the late West Papuan leader Marcus Kaisieopo bemoaned that African and Asian governments remain ‘blinded by Bandung’,154 unwilling to offer concrete assistance to the West Papuan movement due to a misplaced memory of Indonesian non-aligned, anti-colonial leadership.155 We have to recognise the libera- tory potential of Indonesia’s alternative tradition of modernisation, whilst attending to its totalising and assimilating side.

Westerners who ignore the histories above risk placing a strain on budding Papuan- Indonesian solidarity. We also risk bolstering the self-serving, faux-antagonistic relation between the Australian and Indonesian ruling classes, epitomised by their shared narra- tive over the history of East Timor: in the Australian rendition, East Timor was heroically saved by their neighbour to the south; in the Indonesian version, Australia worked tire- lessly to break away this chunk of the archipelago. In reality, Australia backed Indonesia’s genocide in East Timor to the hilt, intervening at the last possible moment, only once historical winds had become irresistible.156 Whilst the two sides may publicly clash over West Papuan refugees and Australians on death row,157 the supposed conflict is largely bluster for respective domestic consumption. Underlying it is a bedrock of cooperation on the issues that matter,158 like security collaboration to maintain Indone- sia’s effective occupation of West Papua.159 Complaints, sometimes made in the

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Australian solidarity movement, that the Australian government’s position on West Papua is a result of Jakarta’s hold over Canberra, do little to undermine this fraudulent charade.160

Despite Indonesian nationalist rhetoric, Western governments currently have little interest in an independent West Papua. Since the violent realignment of Indonesian poli- tics in the mid-1960s, Western ruling classes have been content for Indonesian military terror to protect the mines and gas fields of the UK, Australia and US.161 The real antag- onism that organising efforts ought to work at intensifying is between the West Papuans, oppressed Indonesian masses and progressive Western segments as against the collabor- ating Western and Indonesian ruling classes.

3. Navigating the world system

Westerners working with West Papuans seek, fundamentally, to increase the likelihood of a referendum on independence from Indonesia. There are, as outlined in the analysis of the second terrain, tremendous pressures from the international system which do and will influence the form of both the liberation movement and a future West Papuan republic. After possible independence, a new republic of West Papua will come under immense pressure: dominated by foreign expertise, lacking technical personnel, con- strained in its ability to prosper in a neo-imperial global economy, it will be in a weak position vis-à-vis international capital and Western states.

Western organisers must navigate this situation whilst avoiding two antipodal cre- vices. The first crevice is to aggravate these pressures by further pushing Papuans down a particular Western model of nationhood. Our role must be to place as much pressure on Western states and capital as possible to allow West Papuans to determine their own destiny, both in terms of achieving formal independence, and in terms of the future socio-economic structure they chose to construct. We must open up the space for the mass of the West Papuan population, as represented by the liberation move- ment, to choose alternative paths of modernity and development, free, as far as possible, from the weight of Western military imperialism and economic imperatives.

The second canyon to traverse involves dismissing West Papuan desires for nation- hood as mere Western imports. Compromises with international capital and imperialism will have to be made along the road of the struggle, both before and after independence. Whilst some self-determination movements have experimented with alternative forms of liberation – Kurdish Rojava, for example –162 we cannot be the ones to tell West Papuans how they should govern their future state, or dismiss the difficulties they will face in attempting to chart a course towards their primary goals. Rather, the rubric of self-deter- mination must guide our interactions: respect for the West Papuan leadership and an orientation towards the largest mass organisations, helping them achieve and implement their own ideas of liberation.

4. Human rights in practice

Lastly, Western organisers must realise that the depoliticised approach proffered by several major human rights organisations represents a dead end for the struggle. These organisations fail to address the core drivers of the conflict and rarely do more than

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shine a light on a restricted sub-set of abuses taking place on the ground. The historical anti-imperialist framework presented here stands in opposition to their approach, and, it is submitted, is a much more efficacious framework for acting in effective solidarity with West Papuans.

Some of the largest and most influential human rights organisations refuse to engage with the core of the struggle: the right to self-determination. Despite the right to self- determination being encoded in at least two major UN human rights treaties,163 and inte- grated into international law,164 these organisations profess a position of neutrality on the issue. ‘Human Rights Watch’, states the high-profile monitoring group, ‘takes no pos- ition on the right to self-determination’.165 A prominent report by Amnesty Inter- national is analysed here as an example of how this discourse depoliticises the struggle and shuts down avenues for effective solidarity.

One 2018 Amnesty International report on extra-judicial killings in the territory almost falls over itself to distance Amnesty from the self-determination movement, stating twice that, ‘Amnesty International takes no position whatsoever on the political status of any province of Indonesia, including calls for independence. Amnesty Interna- tional’s work is limited to human rights issues’.166 As already noted, the right to self- determination is a human right. But aside from semantics, the fact is that elsewhere in the report Amnesty does take a position on the ‘political status’ of West Papua. Amnesty ‘acknowledge[s] that there have been human rights abuses and incidents of vio- lence, including lethal violence, committed by non-state actors in Papua and recognize [...] the Indonesian government’s right and duty to protect its population, including police and other officials’.167 The report effectively asserts the illegitimacy of armed West Papuan resistance against what, according to most legal experts, is an illegal colo- nisation or occupation, and asserts the legitimacy of the colonising power’s brutal force in the face of this resistance. This is precisely to take a position on the status of West Papua. It is to implicitly recognise the legitimacy of Indonesian law in West Papua, and the illegitimacy of violent Papuan resistance – which could more readily be described as ‘self-defence’ in the face of a settler colonial genocide.

The report further confuses matters by making a hard-and-fast distinction between cases of ‘political’ extra-judicial execution, when the police or military kill an organiser due to their advocacy of independence, and killings ‘unrelated to political activities’,168 including those during strikes at the Freeport mine or instances of ‘public order and assembly’. As the above analysis has shown, the role of international capital’s operations in West Papua, the position of West Papuan workers, the repressive violence of the Indo- nesian colonial project and expressions of West Papuan public assembly are all interwo- ven with the history of West Papua’s integration into Indonesia. To parcel these elements out and declare neutrality on the core causes of the conflict is to offer a solution with less use than a second-hand plaster on a gaping wound.

When a West Papuan man nearly drowns and near-by Indonesian workers refuse to help transport him to a local hospital, leaving him to die, and crowds of West Papuans begin attacking the company and throwing stones at the Indonesian police in response, leading to one Papuan being shot dead – to take a case examined in the report – 169 this cannot be neatly contained under the category ‘non-political assembly’. The racism and marginalisation suffered in that moment – where a Papuan life can be considered unworthy of a simple car drive, and the local police forces intervene with lethal force

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against the protesting friends of the dead – carries with it the history of Western and Indonesian racialisation and imperialism analysed in this article. The evisceration of context in the Amnesty report is exemplary of the process of depoliticisation, the removal from analysis of vital power structures that create the object under examination. Whilst it would be understandable to refuse to take a position on independence per se, to support the right to self-determination is only to assert the right of West Papuans them- selves to make that choice. Through a pseudo-neutrality, the report takes a de facto pos- ition on the side of Indonesian rule, limiting itself to a criticism of that rule’s most overt expressions, expressions that are intrinsically connected with the settler colonial project itself. To really call for the end of extra-judicial executions – to say nothing of the viola- tions of cultural, social and economic rights usually ignored or downplayed by Western human rights groups – is to call for an end to the context which produces them: coloni- sation. As Benny Wenda, leader of the ULMWP, often says, ‘Do they want to just count the bodies of my people? Or do they want to end it?’ If the aim of organisations like Amnesty International is to reduce and eliminate the human rights abuses they docu- ment, the depoliticised approach taken in the case of West Papua will fail on its own terms – it cannot recognise, and therefore work to undermine, the true causes of those abuses.

Ultimately, Western human rights organisations tend to lack consciousness of the his- torical struggles that culminated in the establishment of the right to self-determination. As a Vice President of the International Court of Justice, Judge Fouad Ammoun, put it in 1971, ‘One is bound to recognize that the right of peoples to self-determination, before being written into charters that were not granted but won in bitter struggle, had first been written painfully, with the blood of the peoples, in the finally awakened conscience of humanity’.170 Organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, born in the heart of the colonising countries, have not lived this ‘bitter struggle’, and fail to see how deeply crucial this right is to redressing the interconnected harms and oppressions suffered by colonised people like West Papuans.

Conclusion

Papua’s unity [...] with the unitary state of the republic of Indonesia is final. There are no other paths, independence is non-negotiable.

Mahfud MD, Indonesian Coordinating Minister for Political, Legal, and Security Affairs, 2020171

The link is declared indissoluble in the very period when it is dissolving with a explosiveness which cannot be concealed.

Roland Barthes, 1957, on French colonialism in Algeria172

In 1976, a seminar of radical Black intellectuals and organisations gathered in Dakar, Senegal, and discussed the West Papuan liberation struggle. The resulting meeting state- ment ‘expressed Indonesia’s aggression from a perspective of class, power, and global economics. It considered Indonesia’s expansion to be driven by the greed and self-inter- est of Jakarta’s ruling class, which had also resulted in the deaths of the Indonesian people

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and was supported by global transnational companies that sought to loot Melanesia’s mineral resources’.173

Solidarity organisers across the world must rekindle and fan this perspective. The West Papuan issue is one of power, and a struggle by different social groups to change that balance of power. Viewing the West Papuan struggle as an anti-colonial one allows us to draw on the rich theoretical and practical history of anti-imperialist politics, a politics that successfully helped end formal Western rule across the majority of the world by 1974. This frame allows us to more precisely analyse which actors are our potential allies – the mass of the Indonesian population – and which are not – the domi- nant classes in Indonesia and their international elite supporters in Western states. It provides a solid anti-racist framework that seeks to strengthen and uplift the West Papuan movement without imposing its own prescriptions upon it. It brings into focus the broader global entanglements that coalesce in brute violence on the ground in West Papua, and begins to point the way to their unravelling. It predicts the high- pressured global position an independent West Papua will find itself in – and the need for solidarity and struggle to open up as much global space as possible for Indigenous West Papuans to finally chart their own course.

As the West Papuan movement grows stronger and a dissent section within Indonesia expands, Indonesian elites will further warp their tradition of anti-imperialism to ward off any latent sympathies ordinary Indonesians may have with struggling West Papuans. If they are not careful, Western actors may play into the hands of this strategy. Like any modern political movement, we must hold in tension the double edged sword of modernity,174 in the Indonesian variety as much as any other: as anti-colonial resistance and non-aligned Third Worldism as well as borderline fascist plutocracy and ravaged plantation field. Indonesia is a colonial power in West Papua, yes – but its position on the periphery of the global system, and its traditions of anti-imperialism and native com- munism, contain the seeds of something else. Links with progressive elements inside Indonesia much be cultivated, if we are to help these seeds grow. Our governments help maintain these global structures of inequality, so we, the West Papuans, and the majority of Indonesians have a common set of enemies. If the West Papuan liberation struggle is to succeed, in the face of such tremendous odds, we need a united front capable of challenging our opponents.

Notes

1. This article will use the term ‘West Papua’ to refer to the whole territory of the western half of the island of New Guinea – the same territory that the Indonesian state has divided into the ‘Papua’ and ‘West Papua’ provinces as a result of the early-2000s pemekaran policy of then President Megawati Sukarnoputri. Tapol, ‘Entrenched militarism, the “prosperity” approach and governance by exception in West Papua’, https://www.tapol.org/briefings/ entrenched-militarism-%E2%80%98prosperity%E2%80%99-approach-and-governance-exc eption-west-papua%C2%A0 (accessed January 4, 2021).

2. John Saltford, The United Nations and the Indonesian Takeover of West Papua, 1962-1969: The Anatomy of Betrayal (Oxon: Routledge, 2003).

3. Kjell Anderson, ‘Colonialism and Cold Genocide: The Case of West Papua’, Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 9, no.2 (2015): 9-25; Jim Elmslie and Camellia Webb-Gannon, ‘A slow-motion genocide: Indonesian rule in West Papua’, Griffith Journal of Law & Human Dignity 1, no. 2 (2014): 142-166; John E. McDonnell,

22

C. WOODMAN

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

‘The Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE): An Ecologically Induced Gen- ocide of the Malind Anim’, Journal of Genocide Research, (2020): 1–22.
CNN Indonesia, ‘714 Ribu Orang dan 112 Organisasi Diklaim Tolak Otsus Papua’, July 16, 2021, https://www.cnnindonesia.com/nasional/20210716190948-32-668829/714-ribu-oran g-dan-112-organisasi-diklaim-tolak-otsus-papua (accessed February 1, 2022).

United Liberation Movement for West Papua, ‘Saralana Declaration on West Papua Unity’, December 6, 2014, https://www.ulmwp.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Saralana-Declara tion_with-Witnesses.pdf (accessed November 25, 2020).
Radio New Zealand, ‘West Papuan churches call for UN to come to Papua’, Radio New Zealand, April 19, 2021, https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/440809/west- papuan-churches-call-for-un-to-come-to-papua (accessed January 9, 2022).

Free West Papua Campaign, ‘About Us’, Free West Papua Campaign, https://www. freewestpapua.org/info/about-the-campaign/ (accessed January 9, 2022).
Amy Gunia, ‘A Racial Justice Campaign Brought New Attention to Indonesia’s Poorest Region. Will It Translate to Support for Independence?’, Time, December 15, 2020, https://time.com/5919228/west-papua-lives-matter-independence/ (accessed March 7, 2022).

Organisations that called for jihad or attacked anti-racism protesters in West Papua during the 2019 uprising. Damien Kingsbury, ‘Increasing inroads and growing anger in West Papua’, New Mandala, https://www.newmandala.org/increasing-inroads-in-west-papua/ (accessed January 9, 2022); International Coalition for Papua, ‘Human Rights Update West Papua – October 2019’, ICP, December 6, 2019, https://humanrightspapua.org/hrreport/quarterly- reports/human-rights-update-west-papua-3rd-quarter-2019-2/ (accessed February 8, 2022). Similarly, Eban Kirksey breaks down different ‘worlds’ – reformists, guerillas, Indonesian security forces, international capital – in his Freedom in Entangled Worlds: West Papua and the Architecture of Global Power (Durham: Duke University Press: 2012), and tries to understand the interactions between them structuring each.

Donna Haraway, ‘Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’ Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99.
Connor Woodman, Supporting the Architecture of Occupation: British foreign and corporate policy in West Papua, (Undergrad diss., University of Warwick, 2016).

Connor Woodman, ‘U.S. Foreign Policy in Indonesian-occupied West Papua through the lens of Wikileaks’ “Cablegate” releases’, IATL, University of Warwick (unpublished). Bertie Russell, ‘Beyond activism/academia: militant research and the radical climate and climate justice movement(s)’, Area 47, no. 3 (2015): 223.

Quoted in Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Books, 2017), 19.‘Accurateintelligenceoftheenemyisworthmorethanbulletinstoboostdoubtfulmorale.A resistance that dispenses with consolations is always stronger than one which relies on them.’ Perry Anderson, ‘The Vanquished Left: Eric Hobsbawm,’ in Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (London: Verso Books, 2007), 320.

This discourse is split into two wings. One wing, associated with prominent international NGOs, avoids confronting the issue of the right to self-determination. See: Amnesty Inter- national Indonesia, "Don’t Bother, Just Let Him Die": Killing With Impunity In Papua (Jakarta: Amnesty International Indonesia, 2018); Human Rights Watch, Something to Hide? Indonesia’s Restrictions on Media Freedom and Rights Monitoring in Papua (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2015); Human Rights Watch, “What Did I Do Wrong?” Papuans in Merauke Face Abuses by Indonesian Special Forces (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2009). Another wing, associated with smaller human rights and church groups, seeks to examine more closely violations of cultural and social rights and, in particular, the right to self-determination at the heart of the conflict. See, for example: ELSHAM (Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy), Writing for Rights: Human Rights Documentation from the Land of Papua Series I (ELSHAM, 2017); Veronica Koman, The 2019 West Papua Uprising: Full Report (London: Tapol, 2020); World Council of Churches

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Executive Committee, ‘The WCC Executive Committee Statement: Concern and Solidarity for West Papua’, World Council of Churches, https://www.oikoumene.org/resources/ documents/the-wcc-executive-committee-statement-concern-and-solidarity-for-west- papua (accessed November 23, 2020).

18. Some anthropology is more interested in using West Papuan for insight into Indigenous customs and society, and for reflections on the theoretical problems of anthropology, than on commentary on the liberation struggle. The BBC documentary ‘My Year With the Tribe’, for example, deals in an original manner with the West Papuan relation with the Western gaze and popular anthropological reporting, but manages to do so without once mentioning the dispute over Indonesian sovereignty. The documentary purports to be about the impact of a euphemistic ‘modern world’ on West Papua, without dealing with the actual carrier of that modernity – Indonesian colonialism. See also Danilyn Rutherford, Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012); Danilyn Rutherford, ‘Lessons for a New Anthropology,’ in Living In the Stone Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 125–64. This discourse has, however, regularly found itself drawn towards sympathy with the West Papuan cause, and has sometimes commented on the ambiguities of the anthropologist’s political responsibil- ities in light of this. See inter alia, Kirksey, ‘Don’t use your data as a pillow,’ in Freedom in Entangled Worlds, 125–37; Eben Kirksey and Andreas Harsono, ‘Criminal collaborations? Antonius Wamang and the Indonesian military in Timika’, South East Asia Research 16, no. 2 (2008): 165–97; Jenny Munro, ‘Indigenous Masculinities and the "Refined Politics" of Alcohol and Racialization in West Papua’, The Contemporary Pacific 31, no. 1 (2019): 36–63.

19. These discourses are not all mutually exclusive: anthropology, awareness of global power structures and sympathy for the West Papuan movement are all entwined, for example, in Kirksey’s Freedom in Entangled Worlds.

20. Jim Elmslie, Irian Jaya Under the Gun: Indonesian Economic Development Versus West Papuan Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002); Peter King, West Papua and Indonesia Since Suharto: Independence, Autonomy or Chaos? (Sydney: Uni- versity of New South Wales Press, 2004); Peter King, Jim Elmslie and Camellia Webb- Gannon, eds., Comprehending West Papua (Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 2011); Jason MacLeod, Merdeka and the Morning Star: Civil Resistance in West Papua (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2015); Camellia Webb-Gannon, Morning Star Rising: The Politics of Decolonization in West Papua (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2021).

21. For examples outside of the West Papua Project, see: Lisa Tilley, ‘Extractive investibility in historical colonial perspective: the emerging market and its antecedents in Indonesia’, Review of International Political Economy (2020); Anderson, ‘Colonialism and Cold Genocide’; International Indigenous Peoples Movement for Self Determination and Liberation (IPMSDL), Merdeka! A Study Conference on West Papua Self-Determination & Liberation (Davao City: IPMSDL, 2017); Sam Rua-Nimetz, Belonging to Violence: West Papua & Radical Politics (MA thesis, University of Brighton, n.d.).

22. Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin Books, 2001); Aimé Césaire, Dis- course on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972); Albert Memmi, The Colo- nizer and the Colonized (London: Souvenir Press, 1965); Amilcar Cabral, Resistance and Decolonization (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016).

23. Jonathan Matthew Smucker, Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals, (Chico: AK Press, 2017): 109–12.

24. David Roediger, ‘Making Solidarity Uneasy: Cautions on a Keyword from Black Lives Matter to the Past,’ in Class, Race, and Marxism (London: Verso Books, 2017), 165.

25. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonisation: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (New York: Cornell University Press, 2006), 8.

26. Teuku Faizasyah, ‘Weaving tapestry of hope for Papua’, Jakarta Post, September 11, 2019, https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2019/09/11/weaving-tapestry-hope-papua. html (accessed December 1, 2020).

24 C. WOODMAN

27. Republika, ‘Polri akan Tindak Tegas Benny Wenda’, Republika, December 3, 2020, https:// republika.co.id/berita/qkrc1s428/polri-akan-tindak-tegas-benny-wenda (accessed January 4, 2021).

28. David Webster, ‘From Sabang to Merauke: nationalist secession movements in Indonesia,’ Asia Pacific Viewpoint 48, no. 1 (2007): 85.

29. Benny Wenda, ‘ULMWP Chairman: Don’t celebrate Indonesian independence – we are mourning for Nduga’, United Liberation Movement for West Papua, news release, August 10, 2019, https://www.ulmwp.org/ulmwp-chairman-dont-celebrate-indonesian- independence-we-are-mourning-for-nduga (accessed November 27, 2020).

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36. Sarah Richards, ‘Hip Hop in Manokwari: Pleasures, Contestations and the Changing Face of

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37. Susan Rees, & Derrick Silove, ‘Sakit Hati: A state of chronic mental distress related to resent- ment and anger amongst West Papuan refugees exposed to persecution’, Social Science & Medicine 73, no. 1 (2011): 109.

38. Camellia Webb-Gannon, ‘Merdeka in West Papua: Peace, Justice and Political Indepen- dence’, Anthropologica 56, no. 2 (2014): 353–67.

39. S. Eben Kirksey and J. A. D. Roemajauw, ‘The Wild Terrorist Gang: The Semantics of Violence and Self-determination in West Papua’, Oxford Development Studies 30, no. 2 (2002), 191.

40. Tilley, ‘Extractive investability’, 7.

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44. Kai M. Thaler, ‘US Action and Inaction in the Massacre of Communists and Alleged Com- munists in Indonesia (1965–1966),’ in Dirty Hands and Vicious Deeds: The US Government’s Complicity in Crimes against Humanity and Genocide, ed. Samuel Totten (Toronto: Univer- sity of Toronto Press, 2018), 43–4; Jess Melvin, ‘Remembering Indonesia’s bloody October’, Al Jazeera, October 7, 2013, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/10/ remembering-indonesia-bloody-october-2013102102543946665.html (accessed December 1, 2020).

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47. Bradley R. Simpson, ‘Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indone- sian Relations, 1960-1968’ (lecture, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, November 14, 2008).

48. Lachlan McNamee, ‘Indonesian Settler Colonialism in West Papua’, in Unsettled Frontiers: The Rise and Fall of Settler Colonialism (forthcoming), available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/ abstract=3601528 (accessed November 27, 2020).

49. Jim Elmslie, ‘The Great Divide: West Papuan Demographics Revisited; Settlers Dominate Coastal Regions but the Highlands Still Overwhelmingly Papuan’, The Asia-Pacific Journal – Japan Focus 15, no. 2 (2017).

50. Andreas Harsono, Race, Islam and Power: Ethnic and Religious Violence in Post-Suharto Indonesia (Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2019), 201.

51. Usman Hamid, ’Open Letter on the Increasing Use of Makar Charges Against Papuan Activists to Stifle Freedom of Expression’, Amnesty International, October 2, 2019, https://www.amnesty. org/download/Documents/ASA2111082019ENGLISH.pdf (accessed December 1, 2020).

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53. Michael Gillard, ‘SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: BP In West Papua – Slow Motion Genocide, High Speed Profit’, New Matilda, November 5, 2018, https://newmatilda.com/2018/11/05/ special-investigation-bp-west-papua-slow-motion-genocide-high-speed-profit/ (accessed December 1, 2020).

54. Leslie Butt, ‘“Lipstick girls” and “fallen women”: AIDS and conspiratorial thinking in Papua, Indonesia’, Cultural Anthropology 20, no. 3 (2005): 421.

55. To greet, for example, a delegation of the World Council of Churches in February 2019. See: Jimmy Sormin WWC, ’School of Yoboi village Sentiani Lake welcomming [sic] WCC Del- egation’, photo, February 25, 2019, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dxicWeyrMOkEhd LNuRAt8rbqFKoTajmg/view (accessed December 1, 2020).

56. Pamela Newkirk, ‘The Man Who Was Caged in a Zoo’, Guardian, June 3, 2015, https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/03/the-man-who-was-caged-in-a-zoo (accessed December 1, 2020). During the 2019 ‘Pacific Exposition’, an event organised by the Indone- sian Embassy in Auckland and funded by a range of international states, banks and corpor- ations, the Indonesian ambassador reportedly ordered his officials hailing from Papua and eastern Indonesia to stand up during a speech. ‘Look at them’, he said to the Pacific audi- ence, ‘They 100 per cent look like you’. He then ordered them to sit down. MacKenzie Smith, ‘Indonesia’s “Pacific Elevation”: Step up or power play?’, Radio New Zealand, July 15, 2019, https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/394434/indonesia-s-pacific- elevation-step-up-or-power-play (accessed December 1, 2020).

57. In May 2020 an image appeared on Twitter from Wamena of West Papuans being forced to do push-ups by Indonesian police for alleged breaches of Covid-19 regulations. Veronika Koman, Twitter, May 26, 2020, https://twitter.com/veronicakoman/status/126522737 5316365314 (accessed January 9, 2022).

58. Budi Hernawan, ‘Torture as a mode of governance: Reflections on the phenomenon of torture in Papua, Indonesia,’ in ‘Stone Age’ to ‘Real-Time’: Exploring Papuan Temporalities, Mobilities, and Religiosities, eds. Martin Slama and Jenny Munro (Canberra: ANU Press, 2015), 202; Gemma Holliani Cahya and Benny Mawel, ‘“They label us with degrading prejudices”: How Papuan students deal with everyday racism’, Jakarta Post, August 24, 2019, https:// www.thejakartapost.com/news/2019/08/23/they-label-us-with-degrading-prejudices-how- papuan-students-deal-with-everyday-racism.html (accessed December 1, 2020).

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60. Tracey Banivanua-Mar ‘“A thousand miles of cannibal lands”: imagining away genocide in the re-colonization of West Papua’, Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 4 (2008): 583–602; Anderson, ‘Colonialism and Cold Genocide’.

61. Cannibal Tours. Directed by Dennis O’Rourke. Australia, 1988.

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64. Tilley, ‘Extractive investability’, 5.

65. On John Locke and colonialism, see: Onur Ince, ‘In The Beginning, All The World Was

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67. Quoted in Westad, Global Cold War, 77. For the Western enlightenment, ‘What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings.’ Max Horkeimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1-2.

68. Tom Allard, ‘Under the long arm of Indonesian intelligence’, Sydney Morning Herald, August 13, 2011, https://www.smh.com.au/world/under-the-long-arm-of-indonesian- intelligence-20110812-1iqtj.html (accessed December 1, 2020).

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71. Another strategy taken partly from the Dutch colonial play-book: the Netherlands helped form today’s plutocratic Java-centric Indonesian elite through its 19th century policy of Priyayi, governing through a native proxy class. Kingsbury (2003), Power Politics and the Indonesian Military, 13.

72. One article in Third World Quarterly argues that the Special Autonomy process has co- opted the local Papuan elite and successfully forestalled the formation of any large-scale insurgency. The article over-estimates the extent of elite Papuan co-optation, and underes- timates other factors – such as the immense military power differential between Indonesia and Papua, Papua’s sparse population and insurgents’ lack of weapons – determining the relative weakness of the armed insurgency, which is nonetheless increasing in strength and activity. Chris Wilson and Shahzad Akhtar, ‘Repression, co-optation and insurgency: Pakistan’s FATA, Southern Thailand and Papua, Indonesia’, Third World Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2019): 710–726; MacLeod, Merdeka and the Morning Star, 167–91; John Martinkus, The Road: Uprising in West Papua (Carlton: Black Inc. Books, 2020), 55–8.

73. Tapol, West Papua Uprising, 7.

74. Erik Olin Wright, Understanding Class (London: Verso Book, 2015), 86.

75. Jakarta Post, ‘Freeport to fully operate 500-km underground mine in Papua’, Jakarta Post,

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THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 27

Papua Project, University of Sydney, November 3-4, 2016); MacLeod, Merdeka and the

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76. A report from Indonesia’s Ministry of National Development Planning describes how

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77. Positions in public service in Papua increased from 37,000 in 2000 to 114,419 in 2013, many of which are staffed by non-Papuan Indonesians. Chris Wilson and Shahzad Akhtar,

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81. Anderson, ‘Colonialism and Cold Genocide’: 15.

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86. Kingsbury, Power Politics, 9; Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (London:

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    last rainforests’, BBC, November 12, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-54798452

    (accessed December 2, 2020).

88. Shannon N. Koplitz et al. ‘Public health impacts of the severe haze in Equatorial Asia in Septem-

    ber–October 2015: demonstration of a new framework for informing fire management strat-

    egies to reduce downwind smoke exposure’, Environmental Research Letters 11, no. 9 (2016).

89. Tilley, ‘Extractive investability’.

90. Macleod, Merdeka and the Morning Star, 62.

91. Tilley, ‘Extractive investability’: 14.

92. Egi Adyatama, ‘Mahfud MD: Papua as Part of Indonesia is Non-negotiable’, Tempo, October

    1, 2020, https://en.tempo.co/read/1391934/mahfud-md-papua-as-part-of-indonesia-is-

    non-negotiable (accessed December 1, 2020).

93. The exact date of the formation of organised resistance to Indonesia is disputed. The OPM is

    more of an ‘idea’ because, despite the mistakes of various commentators, there is no one organisation called the ‘OPM’. The OPM is more of ‘a cultural world view’, an identity com- mitted to resistance to Indonesia and the independence of West Papua. It is a label that any number of individuals and groups can and have taken up since 1965. Kirksey and Roema- jauw, ‘The Wild Terrorist Gang’: 189-203.

94. Land of the Morning Star. Directed by Mark Worth. ABC, 2004; Richard Chauvel, Construct- ing Papuan Nationalism: History, Ethnicity, and Adaptation (Washington D.C.: East-West Center Washington, 2005), 80-1.

95. United Liberation Movement for West Papua, ‘Saralana Declaration’.

96. Thomas D. Musgrave, ‘An analysis of the 1969 Act of Free Choice in West Papua,’ in Sover- eignty, Statehood and State Responsibility: Essays in Honour of James Crawford, eds. Chris-

tine Chinkin and Freya Baetens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 209-28.

28 C. WOODMAN

97. Leaked documents from the Indonesian intelligence agency, the BIN, list as the aims of intel- ligence operations in West Papua: ‘Draw out the movement’, ‘Suppress the movement’, ‘Divide and rule the movement’, and ‘Divide and fragment movement opinion’. Jewel Topsfield, ‘Indonesia’s secret dossier to suppress Papuan independence movement’, Sydney Morning Herald, February 4, 2016, https://www.smh.com.au/world/indonesias-secret- dossier-to-suppress-papuan-independence-movement-20160203-gmkkbr.html (accessed December 2, 2020).

98. Formerly the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP). Kate Lyons and Ben Doherty, ‘West Papua: Pacific leaders urge UN visit to region’s “festering human rights sore”’, Guardian, August 16, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/16/ west-papua-pacific-leaders-urge-un-visit-to-regions-festering-human-rights-sore (accessed November 25, 2019); Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, ‘Pacific Islands Forum Chair Reaffirms Support for Open, Constructive Dialogues, Human Rights Mission to West Papua (Papua)’, news release, October 8, 2020, https://www.forumsec.org/2020/10/08/ pacific-islands-forum-chair-reaffirms-support-for-open-constructive-dialogues-human-rig hts-mission-to-west-papua-papua/ (accessed November 25, 2020); Radio New Zealand, ‘Africa Caribbean Pacific group seeks action on Papua rights abuses’, December 16, 2019, https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/405595/africa-caribbean-pacific-group- seeks-action-on-papua-rights-abuses (accessed November 25, 2020).

99. Stephen Wright, ‘Papuans get independence petition to UN despite obstacles’, Associated Press, January 31, 2019, https://apnews.com/2c648a8e04a34c4b9f6c0a6e2d42e2ea (accessed November 25, 2020).

100. Kate Lamb, ‘“An earthquake”: racism, rage and rising calls for freedom in Papua’, Guardian, August 31, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/31/an-earthquake-racism- rage-and-rising-calls-for-freedom-in-papua (accessed November 25, 2020).

101. Koman, West Papua Uprising, 7, 30.

102. Agustinus Beo Da Costa, ‘Papuans rally for independence from Indonesia as group declares

     government in exile’, Reuters, December 1, 2020, https://uk.reuters.com/article/us- indonesia-papua/papuans-rally-for-independence-from-indonesia-as-group-declares-gover nment-in-exile-idUSKBN28B48Q (accessed December 1, 2020).

103. Pieter Drooglever, An Act of Free Choice: Decolonization and the Right to Self-Determination in West Papua (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2009), 555-8.

104. Indonesia was given effective control in 1963, following a brief period of UN administration/ trusteeship. Julian McKinlay King and Andrew Johnson, ‘West Papua Exposed: An Aban- doned Non-Self-Governing or Trust Territory’, Griffith Journal of Law & Human Dignity 6, no. 2 (2019): 70-106.

105. Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘Our sea of islands’, The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 147–161.

106. Julian Borger, ‘Marshall Islands sues nine nuclear powers over failure to disarm’, Guardian, April 24, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/24/marshall-islands-sues- nine-nuclear-powers-failure-disarm (accessed November 26, 2020); John G. Taylor, Indone-

     sia’s Forgotten War: The Hidden History of East Timor (London: Zed Books, 1991).

107. Nic Maclellan, ‘“We Lost on the Numbers, But for Us It’s a Victory”: New Caledonia’s 2018 Referendum on Self-Determination’, The Journal of Pacific History 54, no. 2 (2019): 224-252; Jonathan Barrett, ‘Former rebel commander to be next president of Bougainville, lead inde- pendence talks’, Reuters, September 23, 2020 https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-papua-

     bougainville-election-idUKKCN26E010 (accessed November 26, 2020).

108. Zohl Dé Ishtar, ed., Pacific Women Speak Out For Independence and Denuclearisation

     (Aotearoa: Pacific Connections, 1998).

109. Robbie Shilliam, The Black Pacific: Anti-colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections

     (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

110. Other Europeans contributed to the synthetic development of the conceptual division.

     D’Urville’sclassicarticleistranslatedinJules-SeB́astien-CeŚar,Dumontd’Urvilleetal.

     ‘On the Islands of the Great Ocean’, The Journal of Pacific History 38, no. 2 (2003): 163-174.

111. Geoffrey Clark, ‘Dumont d’Urville’s Oceania’, The Journal of Pacific History 38, no. 2 (2003): 157.

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 29

112. D’Urville, ‘Islands of the Great Ocean’, 169.

113. Jan Pouwer, ‘The colonisation, decolonisation and recolonisation of West New Guinea’, The

     Journal of Pacific History 34, no. 2 (1999): 159.

114. Ibid: 157.

115. Rutherford, Laughing at Leviathan, 86-7.

116. Philosopher Ian Hacking termed this process ‘dynamic nominalism’. Ian Hacking, ‘Making

     Up People’, in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in

     Western Thought, ed. Heller, T. C. et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 222.

117. Stephanie Lawson, ‘West Papua, Indonesia and the Melanesian Spearhead Group: compet- ing logics in regional and international politics’, Australian Journal of International Affairs

     70, no. 5 (2016): 506.

118. The Indonesian national motto. Greg Acciaoli, ‘“Archipelagic culture” as an exclusionary

     government discourse in Indonesia’, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 2, no. 1

     (2001): 19.

119. ‘On 16 March 2006 in Jayapura, everyone who had dreadlocks was arrested and their hair

     was cut. This continued for a fortnight [...] It was not just about hair. We have dreadlocks not because we like reggae or Rasta, but as an ideology. Dreadlocks are my identity. A lot of my friends with dreadlocks feel the same. Dreadlocks have become a symbol of resistance and of a free West Papua, a challenge to what we were taught by the Indonesian state.’ Rosa Moiwend, quoted in Veronica Koman, ‘West Papuan voices from the ground’, New Internationalist, May 1, 2017, https://newint.org/features/2017/05/01/west-papuans-speak (accessed November 27, 2020).

120. Indonesian Minister for Transmigration, Martono, in 1985: ‘by way of transmigration we will try to realise what has been pledged, to integrate all ethnic groups into one nation, the Indonesian nation. The different ethnic groups will in the long run disappear because of integration, and there will be one kind of man’. Quoted in Taylor, Indonesia’s Forgotten War, 192. One of the earliest Indonesian military operations, launched in 1971, Operasi Koteka, sought to stamp out the wearing of traditional penis sheaths in West Papua. Then Indonesian foreign minister apparently described the aim of the operation thus: ‘to get [the Papuans] down from the trees even if we have to pull them down’. Leslie Butt, ‘KB kills: Political violence, birth control, and the Baliem Valley Dani’, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 2, no. 1 (2001): 66; Rutherford, Living in the Stone Age, 22.

121. Benjamin Strick and Elise Thomas, Investigating Information Operations in West Papua: A Digital Forensic Case Study Of Cross-Platform Network (Bellingcat, 2019), https://www. bellingcat.com/app/uploads/2019/10/Investigating_Information_Operations_in_West_ Papua.pdf (accessed November 27, 2020); Benjamin Strick, ‘West Papua: New Online Influence Operation Attempts to Sway Independence Debate’, Bellingcat, November 11,

2020, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/11/11/west-papua-new-online-influence- operation-attempts-to-sway-independence-debate/ (accessed November 27, 2020).

122. Lawson, ‘West Papua, Indonesia and the Melanesian Spearhead Group’: 511.

123. Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, 120.

124. Erica Benner, Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels

     (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 52, quoted in Mike Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas (London:

     Verso Books), 167.

125. Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, 107.

126. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth.

127. Rutherford, Laughing at Leviathan.

128. David Adam Scott, ‘Would an Independent West Papua be a Failing State?’, Asia-Pacific

     Journal – Japan Focus 9, no. 37 (2011).

129. Benny Wenda, ‘ULMWP Chairman: We are ready to peacefully reclaim our country from

     Indonesian colonialism’, United Liberation Movement for West Papua, news release, July 3, 2019, https://www.ulmwp.org/ulmwp-chairman-we-are-ready-to-peacefully-reclaim-our- country-from-indonesian-colonialism (accessed November 27, 2020).

30 C. WOODMAN

130. Helen Davidson, ‘West Papuan independence group says it is “ready to take over country”’, Guardian, July 2, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/03/west-papuan- independence-group-say-they-are-ready-to-take-over-country (accessed November 27, 2020).

131. ‘ThissortofexploitationinthePacificanditsimplicationsonhealthandtheenvironmentis not actually new and it’s not restricted to West Papua. It simply reflects a continuation of a long history of colonialism and resource exploitation in the region.’ Hilary Bambrick, paper presented at ‘At the Intersection: Pacific Climate Change and West Papua’, West Papua Project, University of Sydney, November 3-4, 2016.

132. ‘TheimaginationofWestPapuanintellectualshascertainlynotbeenlimitedbythemodels of the nation that were originally formulated abroad.’ Kirksey, Freedom in Entangled Worlds, 179.

133. Benny Wenda, ‘“We are ready”: why West Papuan independence isn’t just a dream’, New Internationalist, May 1, 2017, https://newint.org/features/2017/05/01/we-are-ready (accessed November 27, 2020); Ben Lewis, ‘West Papuan independence leaders sell their climate vision at COP26’, SBS, https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/west-papuan-independence- leaders-sell-their-climate-vision-at-cop26/hxih97p47 (accessed March 7, 2022).

134. Benny Wenda, ‘ULMWP Executive welcomes Legislative Council’s adoption of Provisional Constitution’, United Liberation Movement for West Papua, news release, October 20, 2020, https://www.ulmwp.org/ulmwp-executive-welcomes-legislative-councils-adoption-of- provisional-constitution (accessed November 27, 2020); Farid M. Ibrahim, ‘United Liber- ation Movement for West Papua Bentuk UUD Sementara Papua Merdeka’, ABC Indonesia, October 27, 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/indonesian/2020-10-27/gerakan-pembebasan- west-papua-bentuk-konstitusi-sementara/12818044 (accessed December 1, 2020).

135. Faizasyah, ‘Weaving tapestry of hope for Papua’.

136. Rutherford, Laughing at Leviathan, 29.

137. Westad, Global Cold War, 130.

138. Jim Mann, ‘CIA’s Covert Indonesia Operation in the 1950s Acknowledged by U.S.: Cold

     War: State Department publishes unprecedented 600-page history documenting anti-Com- munist program’, Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1994, https://www.latimes.com/archives/ la-xpm-1994-10-29-mn-56121-story.html (accessed December 1, 2020).

139. Westad, Global Cold War, 129.

140. Mark Curtis, ’Indonesia: Complicity in a million deaths,’ in Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real

     Role in the World (London: Vintage, 2003), 387-401; Nathaliel Mehr, ’Constructive Blood- bath,’ in Indonesia: The United States, Britain and the Mass Killings of 1965-66 (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 2009).

141. Tilley, ‘Extractive investibility’, 14.

142. Simpson, Economists with Guns, 18-23.

143. Ibid, 3.

144. Rutherford, ‘Trekking to New Guinea,’ in Laughing at Leviathan, 69-89.

145. Ibid, 186.

146. Tirto, an Indonesian newspaper founded in 2016, is named after anti-Dutch leader, Tirto

     Adhi Soerjo. On monuments, see Jakarta Post, ‘Weekly 5: Independence Day historic sites’, Jakarta Post, August 14, 2015, https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2015/08/14/ weekly-5-independence-day-historic-sites.html (accessed December 2, 2020).

147. Rohana Kuddis, ‘September Surprise: The Uprising in Indonesia’, New Left Review 120 (2019): 95-105.

148. Veronica Koman, interview with Miyuki Jokiranta, Earshot, ABC, March 7, 2020.

149. Claire Q. Smith, ‘Two similar civil wars; two different endings,’ in How Mass Atrocities End: Studies from Guatemala, Burundi, Indonesia, the Sudans, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Iraq, ed.

     Bridget Conley-Zilkic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 99.

150. Kuddis, ‘September Surprise’: 96.

151. Radio New Zealand, ‘West Papua activists found guilty of treason’, Radio New Zealand,

     April 25, 2020, https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/415128/west-papua- activists-found-guilty-of-treason (accessed December 1, 2020).

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 31

152. On September 2, 2019, Tempo, Indonesia’s respected print weekly, published a cover story, double-spread interview with Benny Wenda, Chair of the ULMWP. The Jakarta Post ran a front page cover of a West Papuan demonstrator holding the banned Morning Star flag outside the State Palace on August 29, 2019. The latter paper has run numerous articles cov- ering the racism and discrimination embedded in the daily lives of West Papuans. E.g. Cahya and Mawel, ‘They label us with degrading prejudices’; Evi Mariani, ‘Today’s Minkes: Racism at heart of Jakarta-Papua conflict’, Jakarta Post, August 19, 2019, https:// www.thejakartapost.com/academia/2019/08/19/todays-minkes-racism-at-heart-of-jakarta- papua-conflict.html (accessed December 1, 2020).

153. Against those in the movement who argue that there was a qualitative difference between Sukarno’s and Suharto’s designs on West Papua. E.g. Kurniawan Sabar, ‘Indonesia’s Policy in West Papua: History and Critique’ (paper presented at the Study Conference on West Papua Self-Determination and Liberation, Merdeka! Network, Davao City, Philip- pines, March 26-27, 2017).

154. Quoted in Quito Swan, ‘Blinded by Bandung? Illumining West Papua, Senegal, and the Black Pacific’, Radical History Review 131 (2018): 68.

155. Partly as a result of Sukarno’s role as anti-imperialist figurehead – and because of the huge Indonesian Communist Party’s influence and importance – many on the Western Left, including the Australian Communist Party, supported Sukarno’s endeavours in West Papua in the 1950s and early 1960s, and urged their governments to do the same. Domin- ique Tasevski, ‘The Australian left is known for backing Papuan independence – but it wasn’t always this way’, Indonesia at Melbourne, April 27, 2020, https:// indonesiaatmelbourne.unimelb.edu.au/the-australian-left-is-known-for-backing-papuan- independence-but-it-wasnt-always-this-way/ (accessed December 2, 2020).

156. Clinton Fernandes, ’Accomplice to mass atrocities: The international community and Indo- nesia’s invasion of east Timor’, Politics and Governance 3, no. 4 (2015): 1–11.

157. In the case of the Bali Nine, placed on Indonesian death row for smuggling heroin, the Aus- tralian Federal Police actually allowed the group to travel to Indonesia and tipped off the Indonesian police about their activities. Connor Woodman, ‘Silencing West Papuan inde- pendence supporters overseas’, Lacuna, April 18, 2016, https://lacuna.org.uk/politics/ silencing-west-papuan-independence-supporters-overseas/ (accessed December 1, 2020); Associated Press, ‘AFP’s Bali Nine actions “imported death penalty into Australia”’, Guar- dian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/04/afps-bali-nine-actions-imported- death-penalty-into-australia (accessed December 1, 2020).

158. Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot: ‘We are fair dinkum about doing what we can to help Indonesia in every way’. In his post-office Quadrant essay, he boasted how he ‘had West Papuan activists, who’d arrived in the Torres Strait claiming asylum, quietly returned to Papua New Guinea. A protest boat seeking to sail from Australia to Indonesian West Papua was prevailed upon never to leave’. Kristian Lasslett, ‘West Papuan human rights tragedy mocked by new Australian PM’, Al Jazeera, March 26, 2013, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/10/6/west-papuan-human-rights-tragedy- mocked-by-new-australian-pm/ (accessed December 1, 2020); Tony Abbot, ‘Abbott: I Was Right on National Security’, Quadrant, March 26, 2016, https://quadrant.org.au/ opinion/qed/2016/03/abbott-right-national-security/ (accessed December 1, 2020).

159. Detachment 88 (D88), an elite Indonesian police ‘anti-terrorism’ unit, is deployed against the West Papuan movement. The unit is almost entirely a creation of the Australian Federal Police, who continue to train D88 at the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation alongside police forces from the UK, US, Canada, New Zealand and the Netherlands. Marinella Capriati, Assessment Report on the Conflict in the West Papua Region of Indonesia: An Overview of the Issues and Recommendations for the UK and the International Community (Politics of Papua Project, University of Warwick, 2016), 34-5.

160. A video from the excellent Australian-based campaign, Make West Papua Safe, argues that Indonesia ‘pressured’ the Australian government into signing the 2006 Lombok Treaty, and

32 C. WOODMAN

shows Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono placing tape over the mouth of Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Whilst illustrating some of the surface-level pol- itical dynamics at play, such representation does not capture the underlying power imbal- ance between Indonesia and the Western powers. One opponent of West Papuan independence pulls up Australian solidarity-activists for falling into an ‘ethno-nationalist mythologising and demonisation of Indonesia’, which – whilst in the specific context of the article, probably exaggerated – is a risk to avoid. Make West Papua Safe, ‘Rip Up the Lombok Treaty’, YouTube, August 9, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 7rNmY85lK58&feature=youtu.be (accessed December 1, 2020); Edward Aspinal, ‘A Reply to Peter King’, Policy and Society 25, no.4 (2006): 141.

161. Connor Woodman, ‘Sacrifice Zone: BP, Freeport and the West Papuan independence struggle’, New Internationalist, May 1, 2017, https://newint.org/features/2017/05/01/ sacrifice-zone-west-papuan-independence-struggle (accessed December 1, 2020); Giacomo Grison, ‘The UK’s involvement in the Papuan crisis’, New Internationalist, Sep- tember 18, 2018, https://newint.org/features/2018/09/11/uks-involvement-papuan-crisis (accessed December 1, 2020).

162. David Graeber, ‘Why is the world ignoring the revolutionary Kurds in Syria?’, Guardian, October 8, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/08/why-world- ignoring-revolutionary-kurds-syria-isis (accessed November 27, 2020).

163. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Notably, the former is even referenced in the Amnesty International report discussed below as a justification for its condemnation of extra-judicial assassinations.

164. Through, among other things, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, adopted in General Assembly resolution 1514 (XV) on December 14, 1960.

165. Human Rights Watch, Something to Hide?, 12.

166. Amnesty International Indonesia, ‘Don’t Bother, Just Let Him Die’, 18.

167. Ibid, 8.

168. Ibid, 28.

169. Ibid, 31-2.

170. ‘SeparateOpinionofVicePresidentAmmoun’,LegalConsequencesforStatesoftheContin-

     ued Presence of South African in Namibia (South West Africa) Notwithstanding Security Council Resolution 276 (1970), 1971, http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/53/5601.pdf (accessed June 15, 2016), 62.

171. Egi Adyatama, ‘Papua as Part of Indonesia is Non-negotiable’.

172. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 155.

173. Quoted in Swan, ‘Blinded by Bandung?’, 75.

174. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London:

     Verso Books, 2010), 15–36.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to La’plume and John McDonnell for their helpful editorial comments, and to Koshka Duff, Safieh Kabir and Hal for looking at various stages of the draft. Special thanks to Benny Wenda, Maria Wenda, Oridek Ap and Raki Ap, and all diasporic West Papuans who have taught me much about the struggle and the possible role of Westerners in it.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 33

Notes on Contributor

Connor Woodman worked for the Office of the Chair of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua in the UK for three years. He is author of the Spycops in Context papers, published by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and the Amiel and Melburn Trust, and has written for a range of outlets and publishers, including Novara Media, Jacobin, Verso Books and Pluto Press.