On May 6, Deris Kogoya was riding his motorbike when he was executed by an Indonesian rocket, bazooka, or mortar attack from a helicopter near Kelanungin village, Puncak Jaya regency, West Papua. The mangled human remains in the photo had been an eighteen-year-old youth just a few hours earlier. He was with his friend Jemi Walker who was seriously injured, but is being treated by traditional methods in secret because he is afraid of being killed if he goes to a hospital.

What kind of place is this where the lives of young people can be taken from them, leaving a mangled mess of tissue and bone behind, and where a hospital becomes a crime scene? It’s not something that a person in Barcelona, London, Oslo, Canberra, Washington … can even contemplate. What would happen if we were talking about a quiet Parisian Street, or a hospital in Stockholm? That’s a silly question because it’s impossible. These are places of white people. Therefore it can’t happen. I’m talking about something that’s routine in West Papua which, after a fraudulent UN-supervised “Act of Free Choice” in 1969, was formally frogmarched to become part of Indonesia. So, Indonesia is killing its own people? Not exactly. The so-called referendum is an officially blessed screen behind which the Indonesian regime claims its national right to do as it wishes with its “own” people, who aren’t really its own people because they’re Melanesians condemned by underhand United Nations politics to be stripped of their land so it could be annexed by an Asian country that would be friendly to the most destructive forms of resource extraction by its western allies. Well, that’s a cut-to-the-chase way of putting it.

How come almost nobody knows about this? It’s not just because journalists can’t report on what’s happening, or because visitors to West Papua are strictly monitored, or because a UN human rights mission has never happened, even after a petition demanding a real independence referendum signed by 1.8 million West Papuans was delivered to the UN Human Rights chief, Michele Bachelet in 2019. Now that petition, organised in conditions of genocide, was a referendum! The UN, needless to say, expresses “concern”. But a fat lot of use that “concern” is, at least to the West Papuans, though it sounds nicely compassionate in international forums. World leaders express “concern” about Palestine with hands on hearts as their other hands are sending weapons to Israel. For example, Australian Labor prime minister, Anthony Albanese (who even balks at recognising that genocide happened in Armenia) has expressed “deep concern” about the “situation” of Palestinians. For him, applying the word “genocide” is “not appropriate”. His foreign minister’s voting record shows where his government’s concern really lies and it’s not with the Palestinians. Anthony Albanese gives even less of a flying fuck about West Papua—and I’m deliberately using the squeamishly called f-word because I can’t think about this in polite terms. Australia is selling lots of weapons and military knowhow to Indonesia and, guess what, it signed the Lombok Treaty for “security cooperation” (when they hear the word security they reach for their gun) in 2006 which shields military cooperation with the deal that there will be no interference or comment on “internal” affairs, or “sovereignty”. This gag order is just one more reason why most people have no idea that a genocide is happening every single day in West Papua.

We’re being taught to live with one genocide that’s blaring out in headlines, accompanying our morning coffee with images of starving children—and yes you can easily count the ribs—or of headless bodies and bodiless heads, the stifled grief of flesh-and-blood humans emitted as “news” without real content or causes. The atrocity-level bar is being raised all the time and we’re being force-fed genocide as our daily bread. Now AI is thinking for us, but that’s OK because thinking might induce us to make moral choices, which we can’t do if we can’t think. The bottom line of this diet of atrocity is racism. Those people dying aren’t like “us” (and the bottom line of “us” is the likes of Trump, Netanyahu and their buddies). We need to relearn the meaning of “us”, a solidary, a communal, a friendly idea. If Deris Kogoya was a white youth who wouldn’t be accused of being a “separatist rebel”, if he was a white boy ripped apart in Idaho, there’d be headlines. But we know from Palestine that headlines make no difference if you’re dark skinned. And that’s because western countries—enriched by a long history of colonial plunder, which also meant removing human beings, mostly dark-skinned human beings who got in the way—are saturated with racist degeneracy at all levels of existence, from microaggressions in everyday situations through to state policy.

Indonesia is doing everything it can to hide its genocide in West Papua, aided and abetted by its western allies with (their own very secret) “security” concerns but that’s no excuse for ordinary people not to know that genocide has been happening there for a very long time. Reporting the murder of Deris Kogoya, the interim president of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), Benny Wenda, writes of his own experience almost fifty years ago:

[The] genocidal military operations in 1977-78, when Indonesian soldiers bombed, tortured and raped their way across the central highlands. Over 11,000 West Papuans were murdered then, including many members of my own family. I was forced to live in the bush for five years while soldiers occupied my village. When I see the image of Deris Kogoya’s mutilated body, it brings me back to those terrible years.

Benny Wenda, then, was also a wounded child who couldn’t be taken to a hospital. It was the same story then too, and it’s kept getting worse. Indonesia’s current president Prabowo Subianto is formally recognised as a war criminal. It’s not difficult to find out about his crimes and guess what he’ll do in the future. Spoiler: more genocide and ecocide in West Papua. It’s not difficult to find out what’s really happening in West Papua and who Indonesia’s outside supporters are and why. You can list them but lists of atrocities get covered with even more filth if they’re published in a moral cesspit. At most, some people hold their noses. Atrocities can be documented and explained in terms of colonial plunder, geopolitical concerns and, what they call security, so Indonesia listed the West Papuan resistance as a “terrorist” organisation. You fight for your life, or maybe you don’t even fight but you get called a terrorist, and that somehow makes their genocide easier because their democratic allies are all opposed to terrorism.

Yet, as well as documenting atrocities, there are other matters to be faced. I can’t stomach living in a world where genocide (with its conjoined twin ecocide), known and not known, is routine. It’s a moral wound and I don’t have words for it because all the old slogans like “never again” are empty. But I still want to ask why the civilised, democratic western culture, child of enlightenment, so proudly held up as a beacon to the world’s people, a civilisation that even came up with a universal human rights declaration, is so indifferent to genocide (of dark-skinned peoples). Learning directly through the cruelty inflicted on them, these are the people who take a moral stance on questions of rights and justice. They learn what they are in their absence. But is such suffering the only way western peoples will even be able to acquire this understanding? International legal scholar and writer Philippe Sands, who has fought many a good fight for justice, recently said in a public lecture in Barcelona that the international legal system is “fucked”. His word. If that is fucked so are we all. Someone told me once that Lévi-Strauss said that racism is more a moral question than a political one. Whether he said it exactly like that or not isn’t the point. He said it in many other ways in his writings.

Some human beings are suffering genocide. The misery of being in that situation (if you’re able to survive) of being unable to escape watching your family, friends, and neighbours being slaughtered must be more than unbearable, because watching them watching it, courtesy of mainstream media outlets, is already unbearable. Deris Kogoya represents millions of people who are treated like trash to be removed. In direct relationship with this, and unbearable in another way because this is being allowed and even encouraged to happen, is the moral crisis that affects everyone, although few people seem to realise it. We should all be weeping for Deris Kogoya, all the murdered people he represents, and what he represents, including general indifference to his death. The international system is fucked. The only way to unfuck it is from the grassroots, from ordinary people who still understand that the only way humans can live in society is ethically.

The post What Color Was He? The Killing of Deris Kogoya appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.