Australia West Papua Association (Sydney)
AWPA statement- 21 August 2024
West Papuan people betrayed again. Australia-Indonesia upgrade Defence Pact
In a statement from Department of Defence,
the Hon Richard Marles MP, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence of Australia and his counterpart His Excellency Prabowo Subianto, Minister for Defence of the Republic of Indonesia, announced the conclusion of negotiations to upgrade the Australia-Indonesia Defence Cooperation Arrangement to a treaty level agreement at a meeting in Canberra on 20 August 2024.
Joe Collins of the Australia West Papua Association (AWPA) said,
"yet again we have let the West Papuan people down by ignoring the ongoing human rights abuses they suffer under Indonesian rule”.
In various hyperbolic statements from our PM and Defence Minister such as "It will be a vital plank for our two countries to support each other's security, which is vital to both countries, but also to the stability of the region that we share”,
"there are no statements about human rights, an issue Australians care very much about or about the elephant in the room in Australian Indonesian relations, the issue of West Papua”.
There are numerous reports about the human rights abuses in West Papua. Below is an extract from Human Rights Monitor’s Quarterly report on Papua.
Papua Quarterly Report Q2 2024
"As of early June 2024, over 76,919 people remained internally displaced due to the armed conflict in West Papua, with no humanitarian access. This number increased to more than 80,000 after more than 5,000 indigenous Papuans fled their homes following a raid by security forces in the Bibida District, Paniai Regency, on 14 June 2024. Updated figures show a total of 7,900 internally displaced persons (IDPs). In another development, security forces helped around 1,200 IDPs who were staying at the Salib Suci Parish in Madi to return to their villages………..
No mention of the fact that
Prabowo was dismissed from the Indonesian army in 1998 for kidnapping student activists or that he had been indicted for the Kraras massacre in East Timor in 1983 but failed to answer a summons from the UN Special Prosecutor’s Office in Dili. An UN-sponsored report on East Timor accused him of commanding massacres that resulted in the deaths of as many as 200 Timorese men, accusations that Prabowo denied.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/08/19/australia-raise-rights-concerns-indonesia-meetings
Joe Collins said, “instead of upgrading our defence relationship with Indonesia , we should be distancing ourselves from the Indonesian military".
Australia should also at the upcoming Pacific Islands Forum Leaders meeting in Tonga next week, join with the other PIF leaders in strongly urging Jakarta to follow up on its commitment to invite the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) to visit Papua and see the conditions in the Indonesian province
Ends
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Joint media statement From Canberra
Transcript
Parliament House, Canberra
https://www.pm.gov.au/media/joint-media-statement-australia-indonesia-meeting
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