1) Four New Papua Provinces’ Progress to Be Considered in Lifting Regional Expansion Moratorium

 

2) Time For (and With) Papua at Wereldmuseum Leiden

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1) Four New Papua Provinces’ Progress to Be Considered in Lifting Regional Expansion Moratorium

News Desk August 12, 2026

Merauke, Jubi – The performance of four newly established provinces in Tanah Papua will be among the factors considered by the Indonesian government in deciding whether to lift the moratorium on regional expansion, according to a member of the House of Representatives’ Commission II.

Indrajaya said around 374 proposals for new administrative regions had been
submitted to the government and the House of Representatives.

He said the performance of the four new provinces would therefore be important in assessing whether regional expansion had delivered the outcomes intended by the policy. “This will be one of the indicators for the President in deciding whether the moratorium should be lifted or not,” Indrajaya told journalists in Merauke, South Papua, on Tuesday (August 11, 2026).

He said Commission II had previously initiated discussions on amendments to the Regional Government Law, which he said needed to be updated to reflect current developments.

The proposed changes have drawn attention from regional governments because they could reopen the possibility of creating new administrative regions.

However, Indrajaya said the government should first assess the performance of the four new provinces — South Papua, Central Papua, Highland Papua and Southwest Papua — to determine whether the policy had accelerated development, improved access to public services and contributed to greater public welfare.

“The regional autonomy law is intended to ensure that development is distributed fairly and evenly, public services reach people more quickly and effectively, and ultimately that people’s welfare can improve faster,” he said.

South Papua is the first of the four new provinces to undergo the evaluation. The process will continue in Southwest Papua, Highland Papua and Central Papua. The evaluation of South Papua has been conducted over several days and concludes on Tuesday.

Merauke Regency is one of the four regencies within South Papua that has beenasked to provide data on government administration and the delivery of basic public services.

Indrajaya urged the South Papua provincial government and the four regencies under its jurisdiction to take the data collection process seriously.

The data will form part of a report submitted to the central government through the Ministry of Home Affairs before being presented to the President.

“We have asked the agencies and local governments present here to take this data collection seriously and work on it together,” he said.

Indrajaya also highlighted unresolved administrative boundary issues in South
Papua, including the boundaries between Merauke and Boven Digoel regencies and
between Merauke and Mappi regencies.

He encouraged the provincial and regency governments to resolve the disputes
through joint discussions.

“We need to sit down together and reach a common understanding so these issues
can be resolved directly,” he said.

Indrajaya stressed that the evaluation was not merely an administrative exercise but
part of the government’s oversight of the implementation of the mandate behind the
creation of the new provinces.

He said he hoped South Papua would be able to demonstrate tangible benefits from the regional expansion for local communities.

Meanwhile, Sumule Tumbo, Director of Regional Arrangement, Special Autonomy and the Special Autonomy Advisory Council at the Ministry of Home Affairs, said the 

three-year evaluation of new autonomous regions uses a set of performance indicators to assess the implementation of regional government.

According to Sumule, a score above 85 is classified as good, a score above 70 to 85
as adequate, while scores between 50 and 70 are considered poor. He said he hoped South Papua would achieve the highest category.

“We are working together as a team to improve performance and strengthen public
services,” Sumule said.

He stressed that the evaluation must reflect the actual conditions in South Papua. Local governments, therefore, should not simply report achievements but provide complete data based 

on the latest situation on the ground.

The assessment will cover a range of areas, including administrative boundaries,
spatial planning, regional budgets, the establishment of government agencies, civil
servant management, membership of the provincial legislature and the Papuan
People’s Assembly (MRP), grants, assets and official documents, as well as government facilities and infrastructure.

For financial management, local governments must submit their financial positions,
including audited revenue and expenditure reports from the Supreme Audit Agency
(BPK).

On civil servants, the government must provide information on staffing targets and
actual placements, the origins of civil servants, appointments to structural positions,
whether positions are permanent or still pending formal appointment, and employees’ educational qualifications.

The status of civil servants from regencies who are already working for the South Papua provincial government but have not yet been formally transferred must also be clarified.

Sumule warned that the issue needed to be resolved to prevent problems with the
payment of civil servants’ entitlements.

“They must not receive two salary entitlements, for example. That would certainly
become an issue during an audit,” he said. (*)

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https://metropolism.com/nl/recensie/time-for-and-with-papua-at-wereldmuseum-leiden/

2) Time For (and With) Papua at Wereldmuseum Leiden

Andy Fuller 12.08.2026 recensie

The new permanent exhibition at the Wereldmuseum in Amsterdam titled Our Colonial Heritage (Onze Koloniale Erfenis) brings Dutch ‘elsewhere histories’ to the fore, rupturing the primacy of the ‘happy stories’ the Netherlands prefers to tell about itself. At Wereldmuseum Leiden the exhibition Time for Papua (Tijd voor Papoea) turns the gaze to Papua, where visitors are invited to engage differently with time. Andy Fuller visits the exhibition in Leiden

A few years ago, the book Revolusi (2020) by Belgian author David van Reybrouck, 

created a storm due to the ‘home truths’ it brought to the Netherlands about the 

revolutionary era in Indonesia. These ‘elsewhere histories’ of uncomfortable realities

 were long written out of mainstream textbooks. Time for Papua is another vital iteration 

of this engagement with Dutch colonial heritage. Structuring of time is also a part 

of the colonial logic and this exhibition recalibrates how time is imagined through 

Papuan cultural practices.

The title of the exhibition is rather poetically ambiguous. It suggests that ‘it is 

time to give attention to Papua’, rather than a separate ‘elsewhere’. But it is also 

an inquiry into what time means in Papua. The exhibition engages with the varying 

ways in which regimes of time are constructed, enforced, negotiated, and subverted. 

The curatorial notes frame the theme by stating: ‘Whereas museums preserve objects, 

in Papua, ideas about time are dynamic and circular—with room for renewal through 

loss and decay. What does it mean when objects are removed from that cycle and 

preserved “forever” elsewhere?’ Through the exhibition, us visitors experience an

 ‘elsewhere’. We have to consider our own subjectivity, rather than projecting our 

conceptions of time on that ‘somewhere else.’

Throughout the darkened rooms, I encounter works that invite visitors to think across 

these varying senses of time. I’m attracted to the ‘noisy’ art works of Udeido 

Collective and Kevin van Braak, rather than artefacts. The curious case of Papua I

s that it has been subject to the colonial presence of both the Netherlands and 

Indonesia. The collaborative works of Udeido Collective and van Braak speak 

back to this in particular. Their works are almost ‘messy’; not putting their hope 

in a singularly articulated image of what contrasting realities can mean. In a linear 

sense of time ‘the past’ is unreachable; something subject to forgetting that 

forever falls into the distance. Here, I see how people have a continual dialogue 

with their ancestors and the stories they have told them.

Time for Papua (Tijd voor Papoea) is on show until the 3rd of January 2027 

Andy Fuller is a co-founder of Reading Sideways Press. He lives in Leiden. 

The terms ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ feel inadequate for describing the complexities at play in the works, 

yet they are the labels most easily applied to the encounters between the Papuan and the Global North. 

Notably, Indonesia’s intrusion into Papua casts it as a modernizing ally of the West; as a textbook 

modernist nation-state, Indonesia has long projected an image of ‘backwardness’ onto Papua to justify 

its colonization and the extraction of its resources.

A tension between the local and the distant is also present outside the museum walls. Along the streets 

of Leiden, I see billboards promoting Tijd voor Papoea. The image depicts a running figure. whose 

face remains unseen, enclosed in woven clothing, adorned with thick textures and sandals. Here, T

ime for Papua entices us for a momentary leave from our busy lives, soaked in our usual obligations, 

to consider something distant. But once inside the exhibition, the sense of distance becomes bumpy 

as viewers see the intertwined histories of the Netherlands and Papua. It turns out that what is ‘distant’ is a 

part of local histories.

The ‘how’ of these distant objects’ journeys into Dutch institutions remains subject to critical interrogation. 

The museum acknowledges that the 50,000 items in their collection arrived via explorers, missionaries, 

and civil servants, and is continuing to investigate their origins. The lens of ‘worlding’ contests a Eurocentric 

gaze and re-situates the histories of these objects. Perhaps there is some kind of discomfort with the 

abundance of these objects: they are a part of a heritage which is both subject to critical inquiry and to 

being re-presented. While the institution has rebranded as Wereldmuseum, it still carries the atmosphere 

of a traditional ethnographic museum: darkened rooms, glass-protected objects, and clinical notes. 

 find myself struggling with the weighting of the display; there is a lack of context regarding what the ‘Papuas’ 

invoked through these objects actually are like today. This may be another reason for my orientation towards 

the works where the makers are clearly acknowledged, rather than the artefacts coming from more generally 

acknowledged places.

The works that facilitate this connection most effectively are those by contemporary artists and documentary 

filmmakers. The audio narratives of the Dutch-based Papuan diaspora are particularly meaningful, as they 

bridge the colonial past with present-day realities. The works of the Udeido Collective and van Braak t

ransform the exhibition from an old-school ethnographic collection into a critical act of worlding. 

These works recontextualize Papuan imagery within the context of ongoing colonization and environmental destruction.

In one of their most striking collaborations, teeth are depicted as bullets. One bullet rests at the 

end of a lawmaker’s gavel. The word bubar, meaning ‘dismantle’, is graffitied across the Indonesian 

national motto, Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (Unity in Diversity). By spreading these large-scale (approximately 1.5m x 2m) 

works throughout the exhibition rather than clumping them together, the curators allow the contemporarypieces

 to stay in a constant, provocative dialogue with the historical objects nearby. Another striking work,

 Bhim (between 2018-2025), features a mask placed atop a collage of Dutch newspaper articles. 

Here, Udeido Collective and van Braak practice the postcolonial art of ‘speaking back to empire.’ 

In an era of digital saturation, they remind us of the tactile history of the press, where headlines l

ike ‘primitieve Papoea-cultuur gedoemd te verdwijnen’ (primitive Papuan culture is doomed to disappear) 

served to justify erasure.

I have been back and forth to the museum to see this exhibition. Each time I go, I feel I respond differently. 

 feel the multiplicity of images and materials enable various readings of ‘time’ for Papua. The curatorial I

ntention of worlding disrupts the essentialist gaze and acknowledges the intersections of industry, 

capitalism, and colonialism. Through the exhibition, we see more than just artefacts; we see the material 

and discursive resistance to the co-option of Papuan lives, objects and environment.

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