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, Co-Director of the Free West Papua Campaign



Green World (Winter/Spring 2007) [Journal of the UK Green Party]



IMAGINE A COUNTRY under military occupation: Palestine? A country whose occupiers deny its people the right to choose their own identity and culture: Tibet? Where the occupiers have murdered at least 10% of the population in an orgy of genocidal bloodshed: Armenia? Where the people are subjected to daily racist abuse, intimidation and violence: apartheid South Africa? Where a brutal military rules every aspect of daily life with an iron fist: Burma? Where indigenous civilisations and the species-rich rainforests they call home are being bulldozed by Western and Chinese greed for timber, gas, copper and gold: Brazil? And whose suffering the British, American and other Western governments shamefully choose to ignore to protect their own selfish interests: Chechnya?



Now imagine a country where all of this is true: West Papua.



Have you ever met a West Papuan? Probably not. Indonesia doesn’t want you to. Otherwise you may discover the bloody secrets of its 43 year long occupation. The generals in Jakarta who still wield the real power in Indonesia despite the façade of democracy which is the current civilian government, don’t want you to know the truth. They don’t want you to know the shameful way they annexed West Papua in the 1960’s by holding a sham referendum, cruelly named the “Act of Free Choice�, by hand-picking 1,026 Papuan “representatives� and telling them that if they voted for independence instead of rule by Indonesia they would have their tongues cut out. They don’t want you to know that their “glorious heroes�, the Indonesian military, have slaughtered at least 100,000 West Papuan women, men and children and raped and tortured countless others. And our Foreign & Commonwealth Office doesn’t want you to know that Britain not only actively colluded with Indonesia in the 1960’s to ensure that the “Act of Free Choice� was never challenged in the UN, but has supported Indonesia’s illegal occupation ever since. As one of Indonesia’s major foreign investors (BP is developing a natural gas field off the Papuan coast and Rio Tinto holds a share in the huge Freeport gold and copper mine in the Papuan Highlands), Britain knows when it is politic to keep silent.



To keep their secrets safe, the Indonesian Government bans foreign journalists and human rights observers from West Papua. Very few Papuans ever make it out. That is until now. Three years ago, for the first time ever, a West Papuan independence leader, Benny Wenda, escaped from an Indonesian prison, trekked for weeks through the jungle and eventually made it across the border into Papua New Guinea. From there, he flew to Heathrow to claim asylum and carry on the struggle for freedom from Britain. His predecessor as leader had not been as fortunate. Theys Eluay was strangled to death by Indonesian Special Forces in 2001.