Reviewing Biak massacre

Kel Dummett, Researcher, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

For the many human rights organizations and individual activists around the world concerned about ongoing human rights violations in the province of Papua, the announcement (The Jakarta Post, Jan. 10, 2003) that an ad hoc team with the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) will probe alleged gross violations of human rights in Papua, is great news.

For more than 40 years, the people of Papua have endured horrendous violence, including murder, rape, beatings, summary detention, forcible removal from villages and the burning of houses, schools, churches and health clinics.

And most of this has occurred hidden away from the view of the international community, or shamefully the international community has turned a blind eye to the violations. Amnesty International estimates that more than 100,000 people have been killed since Indonesia took over West Papua following the disputed Act of Free Choice in 1969.

However, it is a concern that Komnas HAM will only investigate two of the seven serious cases identified. One of the cases that will not be investigated is the 1998 massacre of more than 100 people, mostly women and children, on the tiny Papuan island of Biak.

I visited Biak in 2002, and although the island is visually a tropical paradise, the experience was disturbing. The scars of the horrific events that took place on July 6, five years ago, have not healed. Nor have the scars of 40 years of constant, and at times deadly, intimidation by the Indonesian police and military.

In Biak, perhaps more than any other place I visited in Papua, the fear of military intimidation and violence is palpable. As I traveled around Biak with my wife, I felt it was eerily unlike other places we had been. Teenage girls and young women did not engage us with their eyes or a smile. Fear and shame were written on their faces.

Details of the events of that day are not well known outside of Biak, as the massacre received little attention from the world's media. However, after talking to witnesses and survivors, mostly women, and reading a Papuan church report and articles in the Sydney Morning Herald and Sun Herald newspapers, including graphic accounts from two Australian aid workers, the picture of a cold-blooded and brutal attack on defenseless civilians unravels.

At 5 a.m. on July 6, 1998, the army allegedly opened fire on a crowd of sleeping young people at Biak harbor, who had been guarding their Morning Star flag, raised a few days earlier. The entire population of Biak town was rounded up at gunpoint and forced to the harbor area, where for the whole day they were subjected to physical and sexual abuses, including the young children.

More than 100 people -- mostly women, some with babies and young children -- were rounded up and forced on board two naval vessels, where they were stripped, killed and their bodies mutilated and dumped at sea.

No one knows the exact death toll, but a Biak church report documents the recovery of a total of 70 bodies, including those of young children, that either washed ashore or were recovered from fishing nets. The report claims many of the bodies were mutilated -- some with limbs cut off, women with breasts removed, men with penises cut off. The bodies of two women washed ashore on an outer island -- they were tied together at their legs and their vaginas had been crammed with newspaper.

What is most disturbing is the fact that a senior serving Australian military intelligence officer, Capt. Andrew Plunkett, claimed in the Sun Herald newspaper, that the Biak massacre "was a dress rehearsal for the TNI atrocities in East Timor".

Despite an official Australian government report confirming that the massacre took place, the Australian Government, according to Capt. Plunkett "turned a blind eye and did not raise an official public protest", thereby "giving a green light to the Indonesian military's subsequent atrocities in East Timor".

The details of this massacre are so horrendous that I and many other human rights watchers around the world, call on KomnasHam to include the Biak massacre in the cases to be investigated.

The writer is also a Director of the human rights watch organization, Global Justice Inc.