Reviewing Biak massacre

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.