In a statement, West Papua Action Ōtepoti co-conveners Ms Frame and Suzanne Menzies-Culling said the demonstration was part of an international effort to mark West Papua being "illegally occupied" by Indonesia since the 1960s.
"Human rights there are largely disregarded, and owning or raising the flag can lead to lengthy prison terms," they said.
The flag of West Papua was raised around the world on Monday for West Papuan National Flag Day, including at Leichhardt Town Hall in Sydney.
In 1961 the Morning Star flag, representing the West Papuan nation, officially flew for the first time - in what was then the Dutch colony of Netherlands New Guinea.
Supporters of self-determination for West Papua joined together on Monday for the annual Morning Star flag raising at Leichhardt Town Hall; the 19th year in a row that the West Papuan flag was raised above the historic building in Sydney's Inner West on Gadigal Country.
Australia West Papua Association (Sydney) said in a statement that "all through West Papua, across the Pacific island nations and in many countries around the world, West Papuans and their supporters rise the Morning Star flag on this day".
"In Indonesian-occupied West Papua, the brave people who raise the flag will be risking arrest, beatings and even death for this act," they said.
West Papuan Jack Warisyu, who raised the flag in Sydney, told the gathering: "West Papua is on our doorstep, only 200 miles from the Australian border, and it is very sad that the Albanese government keeps on denying the our fight against injustice, against discrimination, against human rights abuse just for our right to self-determination."
The Australia West Papua Association said "the human rights abuses" in West Papua "continue today.
"The situation in the territory continues to deteriorate. There are ongoing clashes between the security forces and the TPNPB, with casualties on both sides. West Papuans continue to be arrested, intimated and killed by the security forces. A number of military operations have taken place in the past few years. During these operations house are burned causing villagers to flee, traumatised and in fear for their lives," the Association said.
Looking back at the first time the Morning Star flew in 1961, the Association noted: "As the Dutch prepared to give the West Papuan people their freedom, it is one of the great tragedies that at their moment of freedom it was cruelly crushed and West Papua was basically handed over to Indonesia in 1963 by the international community".
"A betrayal of a whole people. Sixty-four years later, the West Papuan people are still struggling for their right to self-determination," their statement said.
Netherlands New Guinea (also known as Dutch New Guinea) was part of the Dutch East Indies until the independence of Indonesia in 1949. The Dutch argued through the United Nations and other channels that the indigenous population of Dutch/Netherlands New Guinea represented a separate ethnonational group from the people of Indonesia and should not be absorbed into the Indonesian state. It became a distinct entity.
Elections were held in January 1961 and the New Guinea Council took office on 5 April 1961, to prepare for full independence by the end of the decade. The Council selected a new national anthem and the Morning Star as the new national flag on 1 December, 1961.
On 19 December that same year, Indonesian dictator Sukarno issued the Tri Komando Rakjat (People's Triple Command), calling the Indonesian people to defeat the formation of an independent state of West Papua, raise the Indonesian flag in that country, and be ready for mobilisation at any time.
On 15 January, 1962, Indonesian forces attacked West Papua but were repelled by the Dutch. In March, the Indonesian government sent paratroopers and special forces into West Papua covertly, but they were again defeated by the Dutch with support from the indigenous West Papuan population.
Ultimately, facing mounting international diplomatic pressure - including from the United States - and the prospect of a full scale Indonesian invasion, the Dutch re-entered negotiations and agreed to a proposal on 28 July 1962 for a staged transition from Dutch to Indonesian control via UN administration, on the condition that a plebiscite would be held on the future of the territory.
Indonesia took control of West Papua in May 1963, subsequently holding - under new leader Suharto in 1969 - a plebiscite called the "Act of Free Choice"; conducted under immense pressure by Indonesian military forces. For the vote, the Indonesian military selected just over 1,000 Melanesian men and women out of an estimated population of 800,000 as the Western New Guinea / West Papua representatives for the vote, which "unanimously" voted to join Indonesia. The vote is referred to as the "Act of No Choice" by supporters of West Papuan sovereignty.
Successive Australian federal governments have supported the Indonesian occupation of West Papua, just as they supported the Indonesian occupation of Timor-Leste (East Timor) until the establishment of the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor in 1999, which led to the country's full independence on 20 May, 2002.
As activist groups around the world observe December 1 — flag-raising “independence” day for West Papua today marking when the Morning Star flag was flown in 1961 for the first time — Kristo Langker reports from the Highlands about how the Indonesian military is raising the stakes.
SPECIAL REPORT: By Kristo Langker in Kiwirok, West Papua
While DropSite News usually reports on, and from, parts of the world where the US war machine operates, in this story, the weaponry in question is made by a multinational French weapons manufacturer and Chinese manufacturer.
However, you will see the structure is the same — the Indonesian government using drones and helicopters to terrorise and displace the people of West Papua, while the historical reason imperial interests loom over the region stems from a US mining project in the 1960s.
The videos in this story are well worth watching — exclusive interviews with the guerilla group fighting off the drones and airplanes with bows and arrows.
ndonesia had established three new military posts in the Star Mountains region in the past year, according to NGO Human Rights Monitor, with sources on the ground telling Drop Site News that nearby civilian houses and facilities — including a church, schools, and a health clinic — had been forcibly occupied in support of the military build-up.
5 Indonesian soldiers shot
Despite being severely outgunned, the command shot five Indonesian soldiers, killing one, while suffering no casualties themselves, according to Taplo and other members of his group.
The raids continued for three more days. The command shot the fuselage of a helicopter and burned five buildings that Taplo’s group claimed were occupied by Indonesian security forces.
Taplo was killed less than three weeks later by an apparent drone strike. During an October 13 interview a week before his death, Taplo, a former teacher himself, told Drop Site why TPNPB targeted a school:
“IT’S BECAUSE THEY (INDONESIAN MILITARY) USED IT AS THEIR BASE. THERE’S NO TEACHER — ONLY INDONESIANS. I KNOW, BECAUSE I WAS THE TEACHER THERE, TOO . . . INDONESIA SENT ‘TEACHERS’. HOWEVER, THEY’RE ACTUALLY MILITARY INTELLIGENCE.”
Indonesia has laid claim to the western half of New Guinea island since the 1960s with the backing of the US. For the past year, the Indonesian military has ramped up its indiscriminate attacks on subsistence farming villages, especially those that deny Indonesian rule.
The military presence has been growing exponentially after the October 2024 inauguration of President Prabowo Subianto, who is implicated in historic massacres in Papua from his time as commander of Indonesia’s special forces — called Komando Pasukan Khusus or “Kopassus”.
According to witnesses interviewed in Kiwirok and its surrounding hamlets, and documented in videos, there are now snipers stationed along walking tracks, and civilians have been shot and killed attempting to retrieve their pigs.
Indonesian retaliated
Indonesia immediately retaliated against TPNPB’s September attacks by sending two consumer-grade DJI Mavic drones, rigged with servo motors, to drop Pindad-manufactured hand grenades.
One drone targeted a hut that Taplo claimed did not house TPNPB but belonged to civilians.
No one was killed as the grenade bounced off the sheet metal roof and exploded a few meters away. The other drone flew over a group of TPNPB raising the Morning Star flag of West Papua but was taken down by the guerrillas before a grenade could be dropped.
Ngalum Kupel TPNPB celebrating the capture of a drone. September 28, 2025.
Holding the downed drone and grenade, Taplo likened the ordeal to Moses parting the Red Sea for the escaping Israelites: “It’s like Firaun and Moses . . . It was a miracle.”
Then joking: “The bomb (grenade) was caught since it’s like the cucumber we eat.”
Over the next few weeks, a series of heavier aerial bombardments followed.
Video evidence
Videos taken by Taplo show two Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano turboprop aircraft darting through the air, followed by the thunderous sound of ordnance hitting the mountains.
Despite the fact that thousands of West Papuans have been killed in bombings like these since the 1970s, Taplo’s videos are the first to ever capture an aerial bombardment from the ground in West Papua, owing to the extreme isolation of the interior.
In fact, many highland West Papuans’ first contact with the outside world was with Indonesian military campaigns.
Ostensibly a counter-insurgency operation against a guerrilla independence movement, these bombings are primarily hitting civilians — tribal communities of subsistence farmers.
The few fighters Indonesia is targeting are poorly armed lacking bullets, let alone bombs — and live on ancestral land with their families. The most ubiquitous weapon among these groups remains the bow and arrow.
Taplo told Drop Site the bombings began on Monday, October 6.
“Firstly they (Indonesia) did an unorganised attack: they dropped the bomb randomly . . . they just dropped it everywhere. You can see where the smoke was coming from.
“Even though it was an Indonesian military house, they just dropped it on there anyway. That was the first one; then they came back. The first place bombed after was a civilian house; the second was our base.”
Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano bombing and strafing the mountains. October 6, 2025
Former Dutch colony
West Papua was a Dutch colony until 1962, when Indonesia, after a bitter dispute with the Netherlands, secured Washington’s backing to take over the territory.
Just three years after Washington tipped the scales in favour of Indonesia in their dispute with the Netherlands, the nationalist Indonesian President Sukarno was ousted in a US-backed military coup in 1965.
Hundreds of thousands of Indonesian leftists (or suspected leftists) were killed in just a few months by the new regime led by General Suharto.
Indonesia’s acquisition of West Papua is often treated as an event peripheral to this coup, yet both events held a symbiotic relationship that would become the impetus for many of the mass killings perpetrated by Indonesia in West Papua.
Forbes Wilson, the former vice-president of US mining giant Freeport, visited Indonesia in June 1966, and in his book, The Conquest of Copper Mountain, he boasts that he and several other Freeport executives were among the first foreigners to visit Indonesia after the events of 1965.
Wilson was there to negotiate with the new business friendly Suharto regime, particularly regarding the terms of Freeport’s Ertsberg mine, which was set to be located under Puncak Jaya — the tallest mountain in Oceania.
This mine eventually became the world’s largest gold and copper mine and Indonesia’s largest single taxpayer. The mine’s existence was one of the primary reasons Indonesia gained international backing to launch a vicious Malanesian frontier war against the native and then-largely uncontacted Papuan highlanders.
The “war” continues to this day, though it is largely unlike other modern conflicts.
Like frontier ‘wars’
Instead, the concerted Indonesian attacks are most comparable to the US and Australian frontier wars. Indonesia, one of the world’s largest and most well-armed militaries, is steadily wiping out some of the world’s last pre-industrial indigenous cultures and people.
West Papuans have fought back, forming the Free Papua Movement (Organisasi Papua Merdeka, or OPM) and its various splinter armed wings, whose most prominent one is the TPNPB.
Due to the impenetrable terrain of the mountain highlands, the Indonesian military has difficulty fighting the TPNPB on the ground, often instead resorting to indiscriminate aerial bombardments.
The TPNPB’s fight is as much about West Papuan independence as it is an effort by localised tribal communities and landowners using whatever means to prevent Indonesian massacres and land theft.
“No army has ever come to protect the people. I live with the people, because there’s no military to protect my people,” Taplo said in a video sent just before his death.
“From 2021 until this year 2025, I have not left my land; I have not left the land of my birth.”
In October 2021, the Indonesian military launched one of these bombing campaigns in the remote Kiwirok district and its surrounding hamlets in the Star Mountains — deep in the heart of the island of New Guinea.
Little information
Because of this isolation, very little information about these bombings trickled out of the mountains — save for a few images of unexploded mortars and burning huts.
Only a handful journalists, including the author of this article, have been able to visit the area, and it took years and multiple visits to the Star Mountains for the full scale of the 2021 attacks to be reported.
It was eventually revealed that the Indonesian assaults included the use of most likely Airbus helicopters that shoot FZ-68 2.75-inch rockets, designed by French multinational defence contractor Thales, and reinforced by Blowfish A3 drones manufactured by the Chinese company Ziyan.
These drones boast an artificial intelligence driven swarm function by which they litter villagers’ subsistence farms and huts with mortars improvised with proximity fuzes manufactured by the Serbian company Krušik.
A largely remote, open-source investigation by German NGO Human Rights Monitor revealed that hundreds of huts and buildings were destroyed in this attack. More than 2000 villagers were displaced, and they still hide in makeshift jungle camps.
“The systematic nature of these attacks prompts questions of crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute,” the report noted. Additionally, witnesses interviewed by this author gave the names of hundreds who died of starvation and illness after the bombings.
With little food, shelter, weapons, or even internet to connect them to the outside world, many of the thousands of Ngalum-Kupel people displaced since 2021 are displaced again — likely to die without anyone knowing — mirroring countless Indonesian campaigns to depopulate the mountains to make way for resource projects.
Long-term effects
The impact of the latest wave of attacks in October 2025 is likely to be felt for years, as the bombs destroyed food gardens and shelters and displaced people who were already living in nothing more than crowded tarpaulins held up by branches, while having already been forced to hide in the jungle after the 2021 bombings.
“It is the same situation with Palestine and Israel — people are now living without their home,” said Taplo.
On 6 October 2025, Indonesia retaliated further, deploying two aircraft that aviation sources confirmed to be Brazilian-made Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano turboprops. These planes were filmed bombing and strafing the mountains.
Drop Site confirmed that some of the shrapnel collected after these attacks is from Thales’s FZ 2.75-inch rockets — the same rockets used in the 2021 attacks.
In January this year, Thales’s Belgium and state-owned defence company, Indonesian Aerospace, put out a press release titled: “Indonesian Aerospace and Thales Belgium Reactivate Rocket Production Partnership,” which boasted the integration of Thales designed FZ 2.75-inch rockets with the Embraer Supertucano aircraft.
Though these were not the only ordnance deployed, some of the impact zones measured over 20m, and the shrapnel found in these craters was far heavier and larger than that from the Thales rockets.
Shrapnel ‘no joke’
“It’s no joke. It was long and big. It could destroy a village . . . ” said Taplo before picking up a piece of shrapnel around 20cm long.
“This is five kilograms,” he said, weighing the remnants.
Inspecting Impact zone from bombings on 6 October 2025.
A former Australian Defence Force air-to-ground specialist told Drop Site that the large size of the shrapnel and nature of the scarring and cratering indicate that the bomb was not a modern style munition. It was most likely an MK-81 RI Live, a variant of the 110kg MK-81 developed and manufactured by Indonesian state-owned defence contractor Pindad.
“This weapon system is unguided, and given the steep terrain, it is unlikely that a dive attack could easily be used, providing the enhanced risk of collateral damage or indiscriminate targeting given the weapons envelope,” the specialist said. Pindad did not respond to Drop Site’s request for comment.
A week later, Indonesia hit again. At around 3am, on October 12, a reconnaissance aircraft flew over the camp where Taplo’s command and their families were sleeping, waking them just in time to evacuate before another round of bombs were dropped == again, most likely the MK-81 RI Live.
Bomb strike on video
Taplo captured the bomb’s strike and aftermath on video. Clearly shaken, he makes an appeal for help, saying “UN peacekeeping forces quickly come to Kiwirok to give us freedom, because our life is traumatic . . .
“Even the kids are traumatised; they live in the forest, and seek help from their parents, ‘Dad help me. Indonesia dropped the bomb on the place I lived in.’”
On the morning of October 19, a drone dropped a bomb on a hut near where Taplo was staying. Initially, the bomb didn’t detonate, leaving enough time for civilians to evacuate the area.
After the evacuation, Taplo and three men returned to remove the ordnance, which then detonated and instantly killed Lamek Taplo and three others — Nalson Uopmabin, 17; Benim Kalakmabin, 20; and Ike Taplo, 22.
Speaking to Drop Site just hours after Taplo was killed, eyewitnesses say the drone was larger than the DJI Mavics deployed earlier and were similar in size to the Ziyan drones from 2021.
Photos taken of the remnants of the bomb show the tail of what was most likely an 81mm mortar.
“The presence of drones — similar to that of DJI quadcopters and [with] improvised fins for aerial guidance — have been employed [just as] ISIS used those weapons systems in Syria,” the former Australian Defence Force air-to-ground specialist told Drop Site.
Plea to Pacific nations
On October 26, civilians in Kiwirok sent an appeal to the government of Papua New Guinea and other Pacific Island nations. So far, there has been no response, despite these bombings occurring on Papua New Guinea’s border.
The last communication Drop Site received from Kiwirok indicated that the bombings were continuing and the mountains still swarmed with drones — limiting any chance of escape.
Pictures posted on social media in November by members of Indonesian security forces, those stationed in Kiwirok, give some insight into the level of zeal with which Indonesia is fighting this campaign.
An Indonesian soldier can be seen wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a skull wearing night vision goggles, a gun, and a lightning bolt forming a cross behind it. The caption reads “Black Zone Kiwirok.”
Another photo shows soldiers sitting in front of a banner which reads “Kompi Tempur Rajawali 431 Pemburu” — a reference to the elite “Eagle Hunter” units set up in the mid 1990s by then-General Prabowo Subianto to hunt down Falantil guerillas in Timor Leste.
As there has been no record of these units being deployed in Papua — nor of an “Eagle Hunter” unit made up of soldiers from the 431st Infantry Battalion — it is unclear whether these banners are just Suharto-era nationalism on display, or if they signify that these units have been revived.
On his final phone call with the outside world, just before the signal cut out, Taplo vowed to continue the TPNPB’s fight: “We will fight for hundreds of days . . .
“We will fight . . . This war is by God. We have asked for power; we have prayed for nature’s power. This is our culture.”
Republished from DropSite News.
On the 1st of December 1961, the Morning Star flag of West Papua was first raised - a powerful emblem of hope for freedom and independence.
In the decades that have followed, the region of West Papua has seen an ongoing conflict between Papuan separatists and the Indonesian military.
Nesia Daily took a listen back to interviews with independent musicians, Ronny Kareni and Ukam Maran, as well as Cyndi Makabory and Mariana Korwa from the youth project, Kal Angam-Kal.
And Australia's favourite toko, Havea676 took out the top prize at the TikTok Awards in Sydney last week. He spoke with Nesia Daily about what this win means to him, the family, and of course the culture.
FInally, Sose Fuamoli stopped by for a preview of this week's On The Record episode with Troy Kingi.
