2) West Papuan graduation parade turns violent after police object to Morning Star symbol
3) West Papua and Pity the Indigenous (Indonesia and Persecution)
4) An acid test of Indonesia's democracy
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Human Rights Monitor
https://humanrightsmonitor.org/reports/papua-monitor-q1-2026-no-de-escalation-as-military-operations-drive-new-displacement/
1) Papua Monitor Q1 2026: No de-escalation as military operations drive new displacement
Summary
Human rights
Conflict
Political developments
International developments
Kanako Mita, Noriko Watanabe, and Lee Jay Walker
Modern Tokyo Times
Spare more than a passing thought for the Indigenous Papuans, who for over six decades have endured systematic persecution in their own homeland under Indonesian rule. This is not merely neglect — it is an ongoing colonial project, sustained by foreign governments that continue to arm Jakarta and legitimised by the shameful silence of regional powers including Australia, China, Japan, and others who accept Indonesia’s authority without meaningful challenge.
President Benny Wenda of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) stated with devastating clarity: “We are murdered, tortured, and raped, and then our land is stolen for resource extraction and corporate profit when we flee.”
The Papuan people are overwhelmingly Christian and ethnically Melanesian — distinct from the Javanese elite that dominates Indonesia’s largely Muslim state. Yet for decades the international community has looked away while Papuans are massacred, their villages militarised, their culture marginalised, and their ancestral lands handed over to corporations. This is colonialism in plain sight.
Indonesia’s major trading partners — including the United States, China, Japan, India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Philippines — remain largely silent in the face of this human rights catastrophe. Australia, meanwhile, prioritises military cooperation and geopolitical convenience over justice, frequently turning a blind eye to Papuan suffering even while voicing outrage over abuses in distant conflicts such as Ukraine. The hypocrisy is glaring.
As The Guardian reports, West Papua occupies the western half of New Guinea, home to the world’s third-largest rainforest and vast reserves of gold, copper, gas, minerals, and timber. It is precisely this extraordinary wealth that fuels Jakarta’s grip on the territory.
West Papuans themselves say more than 500,000 of their people have been killed during six decades of occupation, while millions of acres of sacred ancestral land have been destroyed for corporate profit.
Papuan civilisation — its culture, ethnicity, spirituality, and history — bears little resemblance to that of the Indonesian state that continues to impose control. Without urgent international intervention, Papuans face not only continued repression but the slow erasure of their identity as an Indigenous people.
The people of West Papua are not asking for charity. They are demanding their fundamental right to self-determination — freedom from military occupation, freedom from resource plunder, and freedom from a system that treats them as expendable obstacles to profit.
As Benny Wenda puts it plainly: “Indonesia doesn’t want the West Papuan people — they only want our resources.”
The documentary Paradise Bombed by Kristo Langker lays bare this brutal reality, exposing villages targeted by Indonesian airstrikes and showing how food deprivation, displacement, and terror are deliberately used to crush resistance and break community spirit.
This is not a forgotten tragedy. It is a living one.
The continued silence of powerful nations makes them complicit. Justice for West Papua is long overdue — and every day of delay deepens the injustice.
MODERN TOKYO TIMES – MODERN TOKYO NEWS – please check https://moderntokyonews.com
Please check Modern Tokyo News at https://moderntokyonews.com for articles going back over 10 years. Sadly, Modern Tokyo Times got hacked and lost 14 years of articles…
Paradise Bombed – Video documenting the hidden West Papua (Important video to watch about West Papua)
https://www.ipwp.org The International Parliamentarians for West Papua (IPWP)
An acid attack by four Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI) soldiers on a human rights activist highlights growing tensions as President Prabowo reinstates military influence in Indonesia’s civilian administration.
Is Indonesia using state-sanctioned violence to crush critics of its administration of the world’s third-largest democracy? Since a revolution at the end of the last century, it claims to have thrown off a 32-year autocracy led by former general Soeharto. But the replacement government, now run by Soeharto’s former son-in-law, Prabowo Subianto, is a “flawed democracy” according to the London-based Economic Intelligence Unit.
Arousing most concern are laws to put the military (Tentara Nasional Indonesia, TNI) in control of systems and departments previously run by civilians. NGOs have been leading critics of this trend, with one prominent human rights advocate, Andrie Yunus, assaulted in an acid attack on 12 March 2026 as he left his Central Jakarta office around 11 pm. Yunus is the Deputy Coordinator of the Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence (KontraS) and has been an outspoken critic of the return to a military-run state. He had been receiving phone threats but had still been planning to release research into violence perpetrated by the security forces.
Amnesty International Indonesia collected 295 incidents of intimidation against human rights defenders and labelled 2025 as the Year of Living Dangerously for activists. (The title of the 1978 Christopher Koch book and Peter Weir’s 1982 film retains its relevance and potency.) Acid is often the weapon of choice. It doesn’t go bang and arouse security or upset body scanners; blokes carrying plastic drink bottles rarely arouse suspicion.
Yunus was critical of the TNI’s growing influence, largely through inserting officers into the leadership of government departments that had been handling civilian affairs for almost three decades, since the collapse of Soeharto’s New Order government. Prabowo is a former three-star general sacked in 1998 for allegedly disobeying orders while he was Commander of the Army Strategic Reserve Command_._ Now as President, he has even put TNI officers in charge of the government’s free-school meal program and its rice control and distribution agency_._
Yunus’s ambushers were four active-duty intelligence officers, who are on trial in a military court, where it is alleged they were motivated by personal revenge to splash his face and clothes with acid. Another version blames Yunus for causing distress in 2025 when he disrupted a hotel meeting of politicians and bureaucrats discussing the revision of the TNI Law. The defendants consider Yunus’s actions had insulted the military.
Researchers for Yunus’s defence have scrutinised security camera tapes of the incident and claim another 10 soldiers were involved as watchouts, making the attack a coordinated affair. A flask of the prepared acid mix was tossed in Yunus’s face, under his helmet and down his overclothes. He was thrown off his machine, screaming in agony, according to witnesses. Twenty per cent of his body is burnt and he will likely lose his right eye. He is still in hospital.
Prabowo has reportedly said: “This is terrorism, isn’t it? A barbaric act. We must pursue.” But KontraS is unimpressed by the pledge and angry about the prosecution being held in a military court, even if the proceedings are open to the media.
Yunus has written to the President:
In various cases involving civilians harmed by military personnel, including forced disappearances, killings, torture, and domestic violence, military courts have never delivered justice, accountability, or full institutional responsibility up to the chain of command. This only perpetuates a record of impunity.
This appeal was binned.
Jakarta Military Court chief Colonel Fredy Ferdian Isnartanto has tried to justify keeping the case in his jurisdiction. He told a press conference:
If this were handled in a civilian court, it would not be appropriate, and the legal process would not proceed. It could even be rejected by the district court.
The track record on prosecutions is not good. Ten years ago, a former policeman turned corruption investigator, Novel Baswedan, was walking home from his local mosque in North Jakarta when two men threw acid at his face. He lost an eye. After more than two years of investigation and a presidential order to find the assailants, the result was a disappointment. Two active police officers were convicted and jailed for a year. Novel’s supporters said they were scapegoats.
The stand-out in the business of removing government critics has to be the 2004 assassination of lawyer Munir Said Thalib, the founder of KontraS in 1998. He was poisoned on a Garuda flight while heading to Utrecht University to study for a master’s degree in international law and human rights. A post-mortem found arsenic in an orange drink. He died before landing. The then-President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (another former general) promised Munir’s widow, Suciwati, that the case would be thoroughly investigated. It wasn’t.
According to the nation’s leading daily, Kompas,
the shadow of the military’s return to dominance in civilian governance is now increasingly apparent. A total of 2,500 active TNI personnel have quietly taken up civilian positions, a figure that exceeds the limits set by law.
If the revision of the TNI Law currently being discussed by the DPR (Parliament) is passed, the last barrier to military involvement in civilian bureaucracy will collapse.
Not only that, but soldiers will also be given the opportunity to engage in business activities, blurring the clear line that has long separated the military from economic and political interests.
The California-based Asia Sentinel magazine has warned of “the darkening face of Indonesia’s democracy” with “reports of intimidation and terror directed at activists, legislative initiatives widely seen as constraining press freedom, and, perhaps most strikingly, the reactivation of military command structures at the regional level".
How does this affect Australia? Along with the US, in early 2000s, Australia banned Prabowo from visiting on the grounds of his alleged human rights record in Papua and Timor. But in politics, pragmatism usually smothers principles. Prabowo got his visa once he founded his right-wing populist Gerindra (Great Indonesia) party in 2008 and became its candidate for the presidency.
Earlier this year, PM Anthony Albanese visited Jakarta to sign a security deal between the TNI and the ADF, saying, “No country is more important to Australia — or to the prosperity, security and stability of the Indo-Pacific than Indonesia”. No mention of human rights, the rules of warfare and the sharing of values. Our soldiers mingling with theirs should beware of misunderstandings that could lead to criticisms and cool drink bottles with suspect contents.
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