What the Indonesian military is doing is criminal and barbaric, writes Charlie Hill-Smith.
THE highest mountains between the Himalayas and the Andes
are the snow-topped crags of West Papua (4884 metres). A tropical
glacier pokes out of the sweltering green of Asia's largest rain
forests. This is the second largest island on earth, with 15 per cent of
all the world's languages, an encyclopaedic biodiversity and a new El
Dorado for our resource-hungry world.
Most of us know little about the shady goings-on inside
the giant forested island just to our north. But a constant trickle of
murders, disappearances, arrests, torture and a wave of mass civil
actions have raised the international volume of this previously silent
war.
In 1999, we caught a glimpse of the murderous behaviour
of the Indonesian military (TNI) as they butchered, raped and burnt the
civilian population of East Timor, and it is these same forces that now
run West Papua.
Despite great changes in Jakarta for democracy, human rights and
civilian rule, the TNI are still a law unto themselves in Indonesia's
far-flung provinces. Only 40 per cent of the TNI's military budget is
supplied by Jakarta. The rest is grafted from the locals and their land
in these rich, remote locations.
Although President Yudhoyono and Prime Minister Gillard
consistently defend the Indonesian security forces, a stream of
incriminating leaks shows their real form. Here's a snapshot:
- In August 2009, YouTube screened the torture and murder
of potato farmer Yawen Wayeni at Matembu village. TNI soldiers taunted
Yawen after disemboweling him and sitting around as he slowly died.
- In 2010, YouTube showed TNI soldiers torturing detainees, burning their genitals with burning sticks.
Last year, a surveillance report from Indonesian Special
Forces (Kopassus), ''Anatomy of Papuan Separatists'', was leaked. It
laid bare the TNI's repressive and pervasive strategies of spying on
and threatening every echelon of West Papuan society at home and abroad.
Jacob Rumbiak, a West Papuan exile now Australian citizen living in
Melbourne, is a major character in my documentary,
Strange Birds in Paradise - A West Papuan Story, and one of the ''targets'' detailed in the Kopassus report.
Things really heated up last September when thousands of
mine workers at the Freeport McMoran-Rio Tinto-owned Grasberg mine went
on a lengthy strike, closing the world's largest gold and copper mine,
Indonesia's biggest taxpayer. The stopwork cost the companies $US30
million dollars per day. So when the miners downed tools to demand pay
increases from a paltry $US1.50 an hour up to a lavish $US3 an hour, a
lot of rich and powerful people took notice.
A month later, on October 19, 200 language groups
from all over West Papua met in the capital, Jayapura, for the ''Third
Papuan People's Congress''. The group declared its independence from
Indonesia and elected a president and a prime minister and called for
United Nations monitors to be deployed.
As the congress wrapped up, the security forces moved in,
opened fire and arrested hundreds of peaceful delegates. Indonesia's
elite anti-terror squad, Densus 88, trained and supplied by Australia,
was pivotal in the violence. Six bodies have since turned up in sewers
and ditches around town.
Theys Eluay, elected President by the Congress in 2000, was subsequently strangled to death by Kopassus Special Forces.
Less than a month ago, on December 13, four
full-strength TNI combat battalions began a security ''sweeping
operation'' in the Paniai district of West Papua. Reports from local
human rights groups say that 27 villages were attacked, 75 houses burnt
down, six schools destroyed and at least 18 people murdered. Unconfirmed
reports state that helicopters machinegunned and threw gas grenades
into the village of Markas Eduda. It was reported that 10,800 people
fled to hide in the jungle, bringing back memories of the 1989-93
operations where the TNI were accused of torturing thousands of
innocent people and extrajudicial killings.
What part of ''psychotic, neocolonial uber-mafia''
doesn't the Australian government understand? This is not a well-groomed
fighting force, the quashers of the Dutch, the saviours of the
Indonesian people. This is a self-serving, armed corporate mafia. In
Jakarta, the TNI have been dragged into the 21st century by dedicated
democrats, but West Papua is a long way from there.
To make matters worse, the long-suffering Australian
Defence Forces have been forced to train these nasty bastards by
successive Australian governments.
It took shocking video of the infamous Santa Cruz
massacre in East Timor for the world to finally support the East
Timorese against the barbarity of the Indonesian military. The evidence
is in for West Papua and it is time for Australia to wake up and
realise this human rights disaster is not going away.
Charlie Hill-Smith is the writer and director of Strange Birds in Paradise: A West Papuan Story
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