Further south, the border’s line has few markers or fences. People cross it along tracks worn by bare feet over thousands of years. Among them, from time to time, are armed rebels from the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM, Free Papua Movement), which opposes Indonesian rule over the western half of the island of New Guinea. There has been little to prevent them evading Indonesian army attacks or regrouping, and they find plenty of cover in the rugged terrain and thick jungle. A cross border raid in 1984 by a Kopassus unit, led by Prabowo Subianto, ended without result in a logistical debacle.
Thousands of civilians have also fled into Papua New Guinea over recent decades, escaping fierce sweeps by the Indonesian military. Over 10,000 remain in camps along the border between the central Star Mountains and the Torres Strait, and a smaller number around Vanimo near the north coast. The OPM still fights on, deep inside the Indonesian half of the island. The fiercest of four splinter groups is led by a man named Goliat Tabuni (after the Biblical giant, Goliath), who claims to be supreme commander of all.
When the cross border road was finished in 2006, Papuan New Guineans joked nervously about the “invasion highway.” Their consul general in Jayapura was confidentially briefing US diplomats that the Indonesian military was supporting illegal logging by two companies at Wewak (far from the border, including with unauthorized flights), that it was importing cannabis for distribution within Indonesia, and that it was selling “red cards,” the permits supposed to be restricted to local border communities.
Recently, though, the array of Indonesian troops along the border has looked more superfluous than ever. The Indonesian authorities have adopted a soft-power approach toward their Melanesian neighbors. An annual “fun run,” in which hundreds of young people from both sides compete in a ten-kilometer race across the border, started in 2011. Indonesia is offering to hook up Vanimo and other towns along Papua New Guinea’s north coast to its power grid, at rates presumably linked to its highly subsidized domestic energy prices, though the offer is being looked at warily as giving Jakarta too much leverage.
At the diplomatic level, the Indonesian foreign minister, Marty Natalegawa, initiated overtures in 2013 to the Melanesian Spearhead Group, a regional grouping in the southwest Pacific. The grouping and its members were being invited to visit Papua and see developments for themselves. Jakarta counts its two largest members, Papua New Guinea and Fiji, as being reconciled to Papua’s inclusion in Indonesia. Two smaller ones, Vanuatu and the Kanak representation from French-ruled New Caledonia, are sympathetic to the Papuan separatist cause, with Vanuatu the sole government in the world that is trying to put it back on the UN agenda. The Solomon Islands, the fifth member state, is seen as wavering, but in mid-2013 it sent a delegation on an all-expenses-paid inspection.
Yet the gates to Indonesia’s Papua are hardly being thrown open. Entry by foreigners is tightly controlled. A “clearinghouse” of officials from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Home Affairs and from the police and the intelligence agencies meets every Thursday in Jakarta to vet applications from diplomats, journalists, aid agencies, and activist groups to visit Papua. Some are repeatedly knocked back for years. Inside Papua, the BIN, the police, and the military command have agents tracking the meetings of such approved visitors, as well as looking out for unapproved reporters and investigators who might have slipped in among the smallish flow of adventure tourists. Officials weakly defend the policy as necessary because of journalists and activists who will report atrocities and “genocide,” regardless of what they actually see.
In 2006 this “intel” network quickly caught up with two Americans from an NGO called Land Is Life, who innocently came in on tourist visas after being invited at short notice to a conference held by an indigenous rights body, the Dewan Adat Papua (DAP, Papua Traditional Council). They were detained, taken back to Jakarta, and then expelled. As the then American ambassador, Lynn Pascoe, commented in a cable to Washington, rather than letting the pair attend the completely legal event and draw their own conclusions about the conditions in Papua, the Indonesian government had “reinforced its image as a repressive and paranoid regime, at least as far as Papua is concerned. We assume that the two Land Is Life staffers’ experiences will spread among Papua watchers in the NGO community and on Capitol Hill.” In October 2013, this writer gained approval for a four-day visit just to the Papuan provincial capital, Jayapura, but was denied clearance to visit the towns of Wamena, Merauke, and Timika for reasons that were not explained.
Despite some visible successes in stonewalling and dissipating the pro-independence “Papuan Spring” that had flowered after Suharto’s fall, the ten-year presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was ending with only slightly increased confidence about the loyalty of Papuans to Indonesia. Indonesians, or at least the political class in Jakarta, still seemed unwilling or unable to apply the lessons of their own independence struggle to the Papuans: their knowledge that a deep sense of subordination and historical injustice can’t be bought off easily with lectures about lagging capabilities or economic promises and ornamental political institutions.
The fire is still smoldering, says Neles Tebay, a widely respected Catholic priest in Jayapura who has been urging a dialogue to address these fundamental grievances. “The call for independence is like smoke from a fire,” he says, sitting in the garden of the theological college he runs close to Papua’s Cenderawasih (Bird of Paradise) University, a perennial hot spot of protest against Indonesian rule; the slogan “Free West Papua” is daubed on several walls. “To dispel the smoke, you have to kill the fire.”
The fire was lit in 1944 when the Dutch regained control over Western New Guinea in the wake of General Douglas MacArthur’s island-hopping campaign toward the Philippines. As the historian Pieter Drooglever has recounted (in a book commissioned by the Dutch government in 2000, as Papua’s accession to Indonesia came under intense challenge), the modern world came late to the territory. Its fringes had been touched sporadically by traders, explorers, and scientists. The Netherlands’ East Indies government set up its first administrative centers around the coast in 1898, not having much hope of economic return. The idea was guardianship, the goal to “turn savages into people,” as one of the first resident commissioners put it. The work proceeded steadily, augmented by intensified missionary work by Protestant churches along the north coast and by Catholics in the south.
Then came the cataclysm of the Japanese sweep through the island in 1942, leaving the Dutch and their allies with only a toehold around Merauke in the southwest. Unlike in many other parts of the Indies, the Japanese found no friendly nationalist movement to foster. When they freed a restive local leader named Stephanus Simopyaref from a Dutch jail in Biak, he set up a movement called Amerika-Babo (New America) under a flag similar to the Stars and Stripes: a single star on a red field, adjacent to horizontal blue and white stripes. The Japanese killed Simopyaref, but his flag eventually became the emblem of Papuan resistance, known as the Bintang Kejora (Morning Star).
Then came the Americans themselves, who used many local workers to build vast bases in the main town, Hollandia (as Jayapura was then named), and a long airstrip on Biak island. They accidentally penetrated the highlands when a joyriding flight of twenty-four airmen and nurses in May 1945 crashed in the Baliem valley. The three survivors were plucked out of the valley in a glider, which was retrieved in a “live capture” by a low-flying tug aircraft. The Americans, and the Japanese before them, were a stunning vision of modernity and power for those Papuans who saw them. The sight of African Americans in technical roles showed that this modernity did not necessarily exclude them.
A strong-willed Dutch commissioner, greatly taken with the Melanesian world, persuaded his political masters to make an exceptional case of New Guinea as they fought and negotiated with the Indonesian nationalists between 1945 and 1949. They were persuaded by the argument that the Papuans had a very low level of d
evelopment, an entirely different “national character” from the Indonesians, and little or no Indonesian nationalistic sentiment; indeed, the Papuans were suspicious of the “Amberi,” as they referred to the Malay race, even though the Malay language was becoming the territory’s lingua franca. “A supplementary argument,” wrote Drooglever, “was that the Indonesia-born Dutch would be able to have their own place in the tropical sun here, even after the Dutch flag had ceased to fly over the rest of the archipelago.”
The territory was put to the side when the final transfer of power over the rest of the Indies came in December 1949, its disposition to be decided by negotiation within a year. Talks got nowhere. The Dutch felt they had agreement on transitional rule until western New Guinea was ready to decide its future under UN auspices. While the Papuans felt no tug of Indonesian nationalism, the pre-1942 exile of so many of their freedom fighters to Boven Digul and an even harsher prison camp at Tanah Merah reinforced the idea of an Indonesia that stretched “from Sabang to Merauke”—in other words, from the northern tip of Sumatra to the farthest corner of western New Guinea—as a central one for the Indonesian leadership. The idea of cultural difference cut no ice: Indonesia already had plenty of part Melanesians in places such as Ambon and Timor. “Unity in Diversity” allowed respectful space for all. The option of a halfway house within Indonesia had all but vanished when the nation dumped its Dutch-inspired federal structure six months after the 1949 transfer of sovereignty.
The two sides were set on a collision course. For seventeen years from 1945, the Dutch put effort and funds into training Papuans as administrators, teachers, medical staff, and technicians, and eventually about 4,000 were employed in middle- and low-ranking government jobs. “The Papuan world of 1962 differed radically from that of 1950, let alone 1900,” Drooglever summarized. “Broad development had taken place and a small but high calibre upper class had been formed, who would, if given the chance, be able to lead society as a whole in the long term.”
Meanwhile, the breakdown of talks in 1956 led Sukarno to step up his anticolonialism crusade, with the appropriation of Dutch property throughout the archipelago. The point of no return came in 1961 when the Dutch foreign minister, Joseph Luns, proposed a UN-supervised plebiscite in 1970. A legislature, the New Guinea Council, was installed, and on December 1 that year, the Bintang Kejora flag and an anthem were made the territory’s emblems. The “Luns Plan” won a majority vote at the UN General Assembly, but not the two-thirds required for it to become a ruling. Nevertheless, it was promptly approved by the new Papuan legislature.
Sukarno responded that same December by setting up a trikora (threefold) command: to thwart the creation of a “puppet state,” to plant the red and white flag in Papua, and to prepare for national mobilization. General Suharto was appointed to lead the campaign. Within a month, a significant naval clash occurred, with the Dutch sinking Indonesian torpedo boats that were heading for the territory, and in 1962 small Indonesian paratroop units were dropped into the jungles—although they didn’t encounter any of the popular support they expected. The arrival of the Dutch navy’s aircraft carrier meant that, for the time being, the Indonesians were outgunned.
Drooglever’s archival searches unearthed a gloomy intelligence assessment that the arrival of massive Soviet and American military equipment for the Indonesia forces meant Jakarta would soon have the capability to land large forces in New Guinea. The new US administration of John F. Kennedy also saw itself on the losing side of Cold War competition for influence in Jakarta, if Washington continued to support the Dutch. The US diplomat Elsworth Bunker pulled the rug from under The Hague, and allies, such as Australia, duly stepped back. In an agreement signed in New York in August 1962, the Dutch agreed to a UN interregnum of seven months, starting on October 1 that year, with the territory to be handed over to Indonesian administration on May 1, 1963. However, they won the inclusion of an article providing for an act of self-determination—“in accordance with international practice”—in which all adult Papuans had the right to participate. Further provisions required UN officials to remain in New Guinea to prepare for an act of self-determination by the end of 1969, and Indonesia to guarantee freedom of speech, movement, and assembly for the Papuans.
Almost all these stipulations were abused, a British researcher, John Saltford, found in his own archival exploration in 2003. Indonesia refused to allow UN officials to remain; as the UN eventually reported, the Indonesian administration “exercised at all times a tight political control over the population.” Infused with a sense of triumph, Indonesian military personnel were the dominating component of the new occupation of a territory renamed Irian Jaya (meaning “Victorious Irian”; the origins of the name “Irian” are unclear). As Drooglever told the US Congress in 2010:
In the beginning at least, they enjoyed taking over a comfortable colonial administration. The typewriters, the hospital equipment, and other elements of the basic infrastructure were taken away. Jobs of the Papuan elite were taken over, the education system graded down, and the civil society of West Papua slipped down the road toward greater misery. After General Soeharto became president of Indonesia, the new minister of foreign affairs, Adam Malik, visited the territory. Malik was shocked by the desolation he found there. The Javanese civil servants had robbed the country blind. Embitterment reigned everywhere, in the words of this Indonesian minister on his return to Jakarta.
The displaced Papuan elite seethed with a sense of betrayal by the world community, which was worsened by the arrogant and harsh treatment meted out by Indonesian soldiers and officials. Several Papuans went into exile, including Nicholas Jouwe, the vice chairman of the former New Guinea Council.
In July 1965 rebellion broke out, with raisings of the Morning Star flag in several places and attacks on any Indonesian personnel who tried to prevent them. The newly formed OPM mounted its first big attack, with 400 fighters seizing an army barracks in Manokwari and taking control of the town for several days. The reaction was the first of several large-scale army sweeps, which intensified as the act of self-determination approached in 1969. One of the biggest was mounted after General Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, who had led the Special Forces in the massacres of communists across Java and Bali in 1965–66, became the regional commander in 1967, with the mission of securing a vote for Indonesia. According to a recent investigation by Jakarta’s own National Commission on Human Rights (known as Komnas-HAM), Operasi Wibawa (Operation Authority) saw 6,200 troops parachuted and landed into several inland regions, supported by strafing from the air, with “hundreds” of lives lost among the local peoples. A longer campaign called Operasi Tumpas (Operation Destroy) ran from 1967 to 1970 in three districts, resulting in “mass killings.”
With this reign of terror in the background, Suharto assigned the task of organizing the Act of Free Choice itself to his trusted assistant Ali Murtopo and his Opsus unit, after publicly warning that a vote to leave Indonesia would be “treason.” It was decided that because of the lack of political sophistication among the Papuans and logistical difficulties, a “one man, one vote” system would be inappropriate; indeed, the New York agreement did not contain the words “plebiscite” or “referendum.” Instead, the system chosen by Jakarta would be musyawarah, described as a “process of consultation” that would lead to the formation of consensus, although the New York agreement authorized this process only for the decision on the method of the self-determination act, in which all adult Papuans were to be able to take part.
The United Nations returned only a year before the ballot, with Bolivian diplomat Fernando Ortiz-Sanz and sixteen other officials deployed. Their efforts to hold a ballot at least in the coastal areas were pushed aside. In the event, between July 14 and August 4, 1969, while the world was transfixed by the first moon landing, the Opsus team chose 1,022 representatives from around the territory, who were rendered compliant by threats and bribery and kept in isolation while they
rehearsed their unanimous “acclamation” to stay with Indonesia. Ortiz-Sanz duly reported that the procedure had been carried out “in accordance with Indonesian practice” (rather than “international” or the United Nations’ own standards), a fudge that, despite the worries of some African member states, the General Assembly voted to approve. Only two years later, in 1971, Opsus was actively running the Papuan part of national elections—in which, miraculously, Papuans were now qualified and able to vote.
The OPM continued its resistance, as an amorphous organization that kept splintering and reforming under a succession of leaders, and encompassed both armed activities in remote areas and underground politics in the towns. Among the earliest of its military leaders was Seth Rumkoren, an educated man from Biak who had initially joined the Indonesian army before defecting to the jungle, where he made a unilateral declaration of independence in July 1971. With just a few score firearms, the OPM’s fighting wing managed only limited ambushes, kidnappings, and hit-and-run attacks, and mostly stayed close to the Papua New Guinea border. Even so, it provoked a series of nine major counterinsurgency and sweeping operations through to the end of the New Order, sending waves of refugees into Papua New Guinea.
The largest of these was Operation Koteka (named after the penis gourd worn by highland men) in 1977–78 under regional commander Imam Munandar, which saw thousands of troops deployed into the villages of the Baliem valley, the Jayawijaya mountains to the east, to the suspected OPM headquarters just south of Jayapura, and to the area around the Freeport mine (after an OPM group cut the slurry pipeline). The Komnas-HAM investigation found widespread killings of hundreds of suspected OPM supporters and other civilians, torture “without concern about sex or age,” and cases of Papuans being forced to dig their own graves before being shot. A Hong Kong–based volunteer organization, the Asian Human Rights Commission, said in October 2013 that it had identified 4,146 of those killed, in fourteen districts across the central highlands. Many had been killed by ground units after being rounded up and tortured, some by machine-gunning, rockets, or napalm bombs from OV-10 Bronco aircraft and helicopters. Further partial collaboration has come from the Baptist missions active in the region and from Australian Air Force personnel who were temporarily based at Wamena’s airport while conducting a mapping project.
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