West Papua: Will it become the next East Timor for Indonesia?<\/p>\n
By Gwynne Dyer<\/p>\n
LONDON (JP): The biggest single taxpayer in Indonesia is the
\nU.S. firm Freeport McMoran. The money comes mostly from its
\nGrasberg mine in the mountains of West Papua, which sits on the
\nlargest gold deposit in the world. That is why Jakarta, which
\nused every dirty trick in the book to hang onto East Timor in
\n1999, will fight even harder to hang on to West Papua, the
\nwestern part of the great island of New Guinea.<\/p>\n
A grim hint of what that might mean came last week in the West
\nPapua town of Wamena, when Indonesian troops chopped down a
\nflagpole bearing the Morning Star flag of the Papuan separatists
\nand set off two days of rioting that cost 30 to 45 lives. It was
\nthe first big outbreak of political violence in the territory
\nsince Indonesia's first democratically elected president,
\nAbdurrahman Wahid, took power a year ago.<\/p>\n
Wahid's dilemma, as he strives to hold his sprawling island
\ncountry of 210 million people together, is that the 2.3 million
\nPapuans have a good case for independence, but he needs their
\nresources. He must also be careful about offending his still
\npowerful army -- and with other separatist movements on the rise
\nin Indonesia from oil-rich Aceh to the Moluccas, he doesn't want
\nanother precedent for successful separation like East Timor.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, in West Papua, we are seeing a pattern that is
\nfamiliar from East Timor, with newly created militias getting
\nweapons and lavish subsidies from Indonesian sources. Their job,
\nas in East Timor, is presumably to make any democratic choice for
\nindependence impossible, or if it should happen, to discredit and
\nnegate it by unleashing large-scale violence.<\/p>\n
By ugly coincidence, the vice-commander of the militia that
\nJakarta created two years ago to kill the people of East Timor if
\nthey voted for independence instead of autonomy within Indonesia,
\nNemecio Lopez de Carvalho, has just been spilling the beans in
\nWest Timor.<\/p>\n
Sensing that the new regime was about to throw him to the war
\ncrimes investigators, he declared: \"(Former President B.J.)
\nHabibie said to us, 'I give the order to you that if autonomy
\nloses, your job is to clean East Timor from East to West and
\nleave nothing alive but ants.' The Indonesian government used us
\nlike killing machines....The machine did not gain its aims and
\n(now) they are blaming us.\"<\/p>\n
President Habibie is gone, but the army is still there, and
\nstill playing the same games in order to destabilize democracy
\nand preserve its privileges. The planned genocide in East Timor
\nwas halted early by prompt foreign intervention, but could West
\nPapua count on the same response if it is needed?<\/p>\n
Like East Timor (a former Portuguese colony that was invaded
\nand annexed by Indonesia in 1975), West Papua was not part of the
\noriginal Indonesia that won its independence from the Dutch in
\n1947. As part of the Dutch empire in Asia, it had been ruled from
\nJakarta, but it had few historical, ethnic, linguistic or
\nreligious links with the Indonesian archipelago.<\/p>\n
About one-quarter of all the world's surviving languages are
\nspoken by the 6 million people of New Guinea. The mountainous
\nterrain has divided them into hundreds of different tribes and
\nbands, but most of them, whether in West Papua or in the nation
\nof Papua New Guinea that occupies the rest of the island, belong
\nto the same basic ethnic group -- which is more closely related
\nto Australian aborigines than to the peoples of Indonesia.<\/p>\n
The Dutch held on to West Papua after 1947, preparing it for
\nan independent future, but Indonesia under the dictator Sukarno
\nwas a neo-imperialist power. Sukarno's war to wrest northern
\nBorneo from the new federation of Malaysia failed, but his
\nparallel campaign to seize western New Guinea from the
\nNetherlands succeeded. The Dutch pulled out in 1961, and the
\nUnited Nations (under heavy U.S. pressure) ratified the
\nIndonesian conquest in a shamefully rigged \"Act of Free Choice\"
\nvote in 1969.<\/p>\n
Theys Eluay, then one of the 1,025 community leaders hand-
\npicked by the Indonesian army to vote for everybody else,
\nrecalls: \"If we had not voted for integration (with Indonesia),
\nour houses would have been burned and our families slaughtered.\"
\nAbandoned by the world, the 1,025 voted obediently for the
\nIndonesian take-over. Ever since, there has been a low-level
\ninsurgency, but it was easily controlled by ruthless Indonesian
\narmy and police units.<\/p>\n
Eluay now heads the Papuan Presidium Council, representing all
\n254 indigenous tribes, that voted for immediate independence from
\nIndonesia last June. They see it as urgent because Jakarta's
\npolicy remains to \"Asianise\" the territory by settling 10,000
\nfamilies from Indonesia there each year, with the ultimate goal
\nof reducing real West Papuans to minority status. But men like
\nEluay who have lived their lives under foreign occupation are
\ninevitably compromised persons, and there are disturbing aspects
\nto the militia group he leads.<\/p>\n
Eluay's 7,000-strong, black-clad \"Satgas\" (Task-Force) militia
\nclaims to be pro-independence, but its main source of money,
\nstrangely, is Yorris Raweyai, the deputy leader of an Indonesian
\n\"youth organization\" that used to act as anonymous, deniable
\n\"enforcers\" for the dictator Soeharto. There are also reports of
\nrival \"red and white\" militias (the colors of the Indonesian
\nflag) being set up in various West Papua towns.<\/p>\n
A suspicious mind might conclude that certain Indonesian
\nquarters are creating a scenario for a \"spontaneous\" outburst of
\ninternecine violence in West Papua, with lots of spectacular
\natrocities, in order to redefine a legitimate independence
\nmovement as a civil war. President Wahid is probably not in on
\nthe plot, but given his poor health and short attention span, he
\nmay not be able to stop it.<\/p>\n
Wahid's instincts are good. He let West Papua revert to its
\nreal name last December (Soeharto had renamed it \"Irian Jaya\").
\nHe set up an independent commission to investigate past human
\nrights abuses there. After the West Papuans' declaration last
\nJune that they had been legally independent since the Dutch left
\nin 1961, he even said that they could fly their Morning Star flag
\nbeside (though slightly below) the Indonesian flag.<\/p>\n
But he did not accept their assertion that the 1969 \"Act of
\nFree Choice\" was invalid because it was \"conducted to the
\naccompaniment of threats, intimidation, sadistic killing,
\nmilitary violence, and amoral deeds that gravely violated
\nhumanitarian principles.\" Nor did he agree that West Papua is in
\nthe same category as East Timor -- never legally part of
\nIndonesia at all -- and so can be set free without creating a
\nprecedent that other regions could follow.<\/p>\n
Wahid is trying to hold a complicated country together, and
\nhold off a cynical, corrupt, power-hungry army, and foster a
\ndemocratic culture, all at the same time. He doesn't have any
\nroom to be reasonable over West Papua. So there may be a
\nhumanitarian calamity there, engineered by the Indonesian army
\nwith the aim of discrediting the independence movement.<\/p>\n
It would be nice to believe that the foreign reaction would be
\nas swift and effective as it was in East Timor, but there will be
\nno UN-supervised referendum in West Papua, with foreign TV crews
\non the spot. Equally important, West Papua has had nobody to
\nraise public consciousness about the West's responsibility for
\nits plight, as Noam Chomsky so effectively did about the U.S.
\nrole in selling East Timor down the river.<\/p>\n
If there is great deal of violence in West Papua soon, the
\nrest of the world will pretend it's none of their business.
\nNobody knows how it will come out in the end but then, nobody
\neven knows if democracy will survive in Indonesia itself.<\/p>",
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