Indonesian anti-curruption authorities have arrested Papua Governor Lukas Enembe on allegations of bribery.
The Jakarta Globe called the arrest by the Corruption Eradication Commission in a restaurant in the provincial capital Jayapura yesterday as “dramatic” saying it came four months after he had been named a suspect.
The arrest led to his supporters attacking a police Mobile Brigade Unit where he was being held prior to being flown to Jakarta on a chartered flight.
Governor Lukas Enembe … his arrest led to his supporters attacking a police Mobile Brigade Unit. Image: West Papua Today
The newspaper said the two-term governor is accused of taking billions of rupiah in bribes from businessmen but has resisted arrest since the commission named him a suspect in September.
Indonesia’s Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre alleged Enembe made payments, amounting to US$39 million dollars, to overseas casinos.
Indonesia’s Chief Security Minister Mohammad Mahfud said in October that the central government had channelled billions of dollars in what was dubbed “autonomy funding” to Papua since 2001, with about half of that amount disbursed during Enembe’s term.
He claimed “nothing happened: the people remain poor and the officials continue their lavish lifestyle”.
Pacific Media Watch reports that Papua province is at the heart of the indigenous self-determination struggle in West Papua.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) has condemned the phenomena of former corruption convicts becoming active again in political parties after serving their sentences.
However, it says this is not a new phenomenon in the world of politics.
ICW coordinator Agus Sunaryanto revealed several names of people who were caught up in corruption cases and who were now active again in political parties.
He cited names such as Andi Mallarangeng from the Democrat Party, who was indicted in the Hambalang sports complex case and released from prison in 2017.
Nazaruddin, also from the Democrat Party, was indicted in two cases — the 4.6 billion rupiah (NZ$4.65 million) bribery case involving the Wisma Atlet (Athletes Village), as well as graft and money laundering.
The latest is former United Development Party (PPP) chairperson Muhammad Romahurmuziy (Romy) who was indicted over receiving bribes for selling posts in the Ministry of Religious Affairs in 2019.
After being released from prison, Romahurmuziy was appointed as chairperson of the PPP’s Advisory Board.
“So (the phenomena of ex-corruptors becoming active again in political parties) is not just happening in the PPP. The Democrats are also like that, Nazaruddin and Andi Mallarangeng for example,” Sunaryanto told journalists.
‘Internal problem’
Sunaryanto said he suspected there was an “internal problem” in the political parties so that in the end they accepted former corruption convicts rejoining the party.
He also gave a flashback over the actions by the political parties when their members were indicted in corruption cases.
Sunaryanto said that the parties “fall over themselves publicly” in taking stern measures against corrupt members, such as dismissing them.
But these dismissals were just a political gimmick because party members could easily rejoin after they had served their sentences.
“I think there is a problem in the political parties. The political parties actually take good steps when [members] are declared suspects. Before, the Democrats immediately dismissed them [Nazaruddin and Mallarangeng], but then after they’re released, they come back in again. This is simply a political gimmick,” he added.
Indonesian and United States military forces commenced their joint exercise CARAT 2022 on 7 December. According to the US Embassy “CARAT Indonesia is a bilateral exercise between Indonesia and the United States designed to promote regional security cooperation, maintain and strengthen the partnerships, and enhance interoperability.” This year the focus is on the conduct of […]
The Pacific year started with a ferocious eruption and global tsunami in Tonga, but by the year’s end several political upheavals had also shaken the region with a vengeance.
A razor’s edge election in Fiji blew away a long entrenched authoritarian regime with a breath of fresh air for the Pacific, two bitterly fought polls in Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu left their mark, and growing geopolitical rivalry with the US and Australia contesting China’s security encroachment in the Solomon Islands continues to spark convulsions for years to come.
It was ironical that the two major political players in Fiji were both former coup leaders and ex-military chiefs — the 1987 double culprit Sitiveni Rabuka, a retired major-general who is credited with introducing the “coup culture” to Fiji, and Voreqe Bainimarama, a former rear admiral who staged the “coup to end all coups” in 2006.
And pundits had been predicting that the 74-year-old Rabuka, a former prime minister in the 1990s, and his People’s Alliance-led coalition would win. However, after a week-long stand-off and uncertainty, Rabuka’s three-party coalition emerged victorious and Rabuka was elected PM by a single vote majority.
Fiji’s new guard leadership . . . Professor Biman Prasad (left), one of three deputy Prime Ministers, and Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka share a joke before the elections. Image: Jonacani Lalakobau/The Fiji Times
In Samoa the previous year, the change had been possibly even more dramatic when a former deputy prime minister in the ruling Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP), Fiamē Naomi Mata’afa, led her newly formed Fa’atuatua I le Atua Samoa ua Tasi (FAST) party to power to become the country’s first woman prime minister.
Overcoming a hung Parliament, Mata’afa ousted the incumbent Tuila’epa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi, who had been prime minister for 23 years and his party had been in power for four decades. But he refused to leave office, creating a constitutional crisis.
At one stage this desperate and humiliating cling to power by the incumbent looked set to be repeated in Fiji.
Yet this remarkable changing of the guard in Fiji got little press in New Zealand newspapers. The New Zealand Herald, for example, buried what could could have been an ominous news agency report on the military callout in Fiji in the middle-of the-paper world news section.
“Buried” news . . . a New Zealand Herald report about a last-ditched effort by the incumbent FijiFirst government to cling to power published on page A13 on 23 December 2022. Image: APR screenshot
Fiji
Although Bainimarama at first refused to concede defeat after being in power for 16 years, half of them as a military dictator, the kingmaker opposition party Sodelpa sided — twice — with the People’s Alliance (21 seats) and National Federation Party (5 seats) coalition.
Sodelpa’s critical three seats gave the 29-seat coalition a slender cushion over the 26 seats of Bainimarama’s FijiFirst party which had failed to win a majority for the first time since 2014 in the expanded 55-seat Parliament.
The ousted Attorney-General and Justice Minister Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum – popularly branded as the “Minister of Everything” with portfolios and extraordinary power in the hands of one man – is arguably the most hated person in Fiji.
Sayed-Khaiyum’s cynical “divisive” misrepresentation of Rabuka and the alliance in his last desperate attempt to cling to power led to a complaint being filed with Fiji police, accusing him of “inciting communal antagonism”.
He reportedly left Fiji for Australia on Boxing Day and the police issued a border alert for him while the Home Affairs Minister, Pio Tikoduadua, asked Police Commissioner Sitiveni Qiliho, a former military brigadier-general to resign over allegations of bias and lack of confidence. He refused so the new government will have to use the formal legal steps to remove him.
Just days earlier, Fiji lawyer Imrana Jalal, a human rights activist and a former Human Rights Commission member, had warned the people of Fiji in a social media post not to be tempted into “victimisation or targeted prosecutions” without genuine evidence as a result of independent investigations.
“If we do otherwise, then we are no better than the corrupt regime [that has been] in power for the last 16 years,” she added.
“We need to start off the right way or we are tainted from the beginning.”
However, the change of government unleashed demonstrations of support for the new leadership and fuelled hope for more people-responsive policies, democracy and transparency.
Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, academic Dr Sanjay Ramesh commented in an incisive analysis of Fiji politics: “With … Rabuka back at the helm, there is hope that the indigenous iTaukei population’s concerns on land and resources, including rampant poverty and unemployment, in their community will be finally addressed.”
He was also critical of the failure of the Mission Observer Group (MoG) under the co-chair of Australia to “see fundamental problems” with the electoral system and process which came close to derailing the alliance success.
“While the MoG was enjoying Fijian hospitality, opposition candidates were being threatened, intimidated, and harassed by FFP [FijiFirst Party] thugs. The counting of the votes was marred by a ‘glitch’ on 14 December 2022 . . . leaving many opposition parties questioning the integrity of the vote counting process.”
Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka and his wife Sulueti Rabuka with their great grandson, three-year-old Dallas Ligamamada Ropate Newman Wye, in front of their home at Namadi Heights in Suva. Image: Sophie Ralulu/The Fiji Times
“Our country is experiencing a great and joyful awakening,” he said. “It gladdens my heart to be a part of it. And I am reminded of the heavy responsibilities I now bear.”
The coalition wasted no time in embarking on its initial 100-day programme and signalled the fresh new ‘open” approach by announcing that Professor Pal Ahluwalia, the Samoa-based vice-chancellor of the regional University of the South Pacific — deported unjustifiably by the Bainimarama government — and the widow of banned late leading Fiji academic Dr Brij Lal were both free to return.
Paul Barker, director of the Institute of National Affairs, discussing why the 2022 PNG elections were so bad. Video: ABC News
Papua New Guinea
Earlier in the year, in August, Prime Minister James Marape was reelected as the country’s leader after what has been branded by many critics as the “worst ever” general election — it was marred by greater than ever violence, corruption and fraud.
As the incumbent, Marape gained the vote of 97 MPs — mostly from his ruling Pangu Pati that achieved the second-best election result ever of a PNG political party — in the expanded 118-seat Parliament. With an emasculated opposition, nobody voted against him and his predecessor, Peter O’Neill, walked out of the assembly in disgust
Papua New Guinea has a remarkable number of parties elected to Parliament — 23, not the most the assembly has had — and 17 of them backed Pangu’s Marape to continue as prime minister. Only two women were elected, including Governor Rufina Peter of Central Province.
However, while acknowledging the shortcomings, the analysts said that the actual results should not be “neglected”. Stressing how the PNG electoral system favours incumbents — the last four prime ministers have been reelected — they argued for change to the “incumbency bias”.
“If you can’t remove a PM through the electoral system, MPs will try all the harder to do so through a mid-term vote of no confidence,” they wrote.
“How to change this isn’t clear (Marape in his inaugural speech mooted a change to a presidential system), but something needs to be done — as it does about the meagre political representation of women.”
Gloria Julia King, first woman in the Vanuatu Parliament for a decade, with Ralph Regenvanu returning from a funeral on Ifira island in Port Vila. Image: Ralph Regenvanu/Twitter
Vanuatu
In Vanuatu in November, a surprise snap election ended the Vanua’aku Pati’s Bob Loughman prime ministership. Parliament was dissolved on the eve of a no-confidence vote called by opposition leader Ralph Regenvanu.
With no clear majority from any of the contesting parties, Loughman’s former deputy, lawyer and an ex-Attorney-General, Ishmael Kalsakau, leader of the Union of Moderate Parties, emerged as the compromise leader and was elected unopposed by the 52-seat Parliament.
A feature was the voting for Gloria Julia King, the first woman MP to be elected to Vanuatu’s Parliament in a decade. She received a “rapturous applause” when she stepped up to take the first oath of office.
RNZ Pacific staff journalist Lydia Lewis and Port Vila correspondent Hilaire Bule highlighted the huge challenges faced by polling officials and support staff in remote parts of Vanuatu, including the exploits of soldier Samuel Bani who “risked his life” wading through chest-high water carrying ballot boxes.
Tongan volcano-tsunami disaster
Tonga’s violent Hunga Ha’apai-Hunga Tonga volcano eruption on January 15 was the largest recorded globally since the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. It triggered tsunami waves of up to 15m, blanketed ash over 5 sq km — killing at least six people and injuring 19 — and sparked a massive multinational aid relief programme.
The crisis was complicated because much of the communication with island residents was crippled for a long time.
As Dale Dominey-Howes stressed in The Conversation, “in our modern, highly-connected world, more than 95 percent of global data transfer occurs along fibre-optic cables that criss-cross through the world’s oceans.
“Breakage or interruption to this critical infrastructure can have catastrophic local, regional and even global consequences.”
“This is exactly what has happened in Tonga following the volcano-tsunami disaster. But this isn’t the first time a natural disaster has cut off critical submarine cables, and it won’t be the last.”
Covid-19 in Pacific
While the impact of the global covid-19 pandemic receded in the Pacific during the year, new research from the University of the South Pacific provided insight into the impact on women working from home. While some women found the challenge enjoyable, others “felt isolated, had overwhelming mental challenges and some experienced domestic violence”.
“Women with young children had a lot to juggle, and those who rely on the internet for work had particular frustrations — some had to wait until after midnight to get a strong enough signal,” she said.
Around 30 percent of respondents reported having developed covid-19 during the Work From Home periods, and 57 percent had lost a family member or close friend to covid-19 as well as co-morbidities.
She also noted the impact of the “shadow pandemic” of domestic abuse. Only two USP’s 14 campuses in 12 Pacific countries avoided any covid-19 closures between 2020 and 2022.
Pacific Islands activists protest in a demand for climate action and loss and damage reparations at COP27 in Egypt. Image: Dominika Zarzycka/AFP/RNZ Pacific
COP27 climate progress
The results for the Pacific at the COP27 climate action deliberations at the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh were disappointing to say the least.
For more than three decades since Vanuatu had suggested the idea, developing nations have fought to establish an international fund to pay for the “loss and damage” they suffer as a result of climate change. Thanks partly to Pacific persistence, a breakthrough finally came — after the conference was abruptly extended by a day to thrash things out.
However, although this was clearly a historic moment, much of the critical details have yet to be finalised.
Professor Steven Ratuva, director of Canterbury University’s Macmillan Brown Pacific Studies Centre, says the increased frequency of natural disasters and land erosion, and rising ocean temperatures, means referring to “climate change” is outdated. It should be called “climate crisis”.
“Of course climate changes, it’s naturally induced seen through weather, but the situation now shows it’s not just changing, but we’re reaching a level of a crisis — the increasing number of category five cyclones, the droughts, the erosion, heating of the ocean, the coral reefs dying in the Pacific, and the impact on people’s lives,” he said.
“All these things are happening at a very fast pace.”
A Papuan protest . . . “there is a human rights emergency in West Papua.” Image: Tempo
Geopolitical rivalry and West Papua
The year saw intensifying rivalry between China and the US over the Pacific with ongoing regional fears about perceived ambitions of a possible Chinese base in the Solomon Islands — denied by Honiara — but the competition has fuelled a stronger interest from Washington in the Pacific.
The Biden administration released its Indo-Pacific Strategy in February, which broadly outlines policy priorities based on a “free and open” Pacific region. It cites China, covid-19 and climate change — “crisis”, rather — as core challenges for Washington.
Infrastructure is expected to be a key area of rivalry in future. Contrasting strongly with China, US policy is likely to support “soft areas” in the Pacific, such as women’s empowerment, anti-corruption, promotion of media freedom, civil society engagement and development.
The political and media scaremongering about China has prompted independent analysts such as the Development Policy Centre’s Terence Wood and Transform Aqorau to call for a “rethink” about Solomon Islands and Pacific security. Aqorau said Honiara’s leaked security agreement with China had “exacerbated existing unease” about China”.
However, the elephant in the room in geopolitical terms is really Indonesia and its brutal intransigency over its colonised Melanesian provinces — now expanded from two to three in a blatant militarist divide and rule ploy — and its refusal to constructively engage with Papuans or the Pacific over self-determination.
“2022 was a difficult year for West Papua. We lost great fighters and leaders like Filep Karma, Jonah Wenda, and Jacob Prai. Sixty-one years since the fraudulent Act of No Choice, our people continue to suffer under Indonesian’s colonial occupation,” reflected exiled West Papuan leader Benny Wenda in a Christmas message.
“Indonesia continues to kill West Papuans with impunity, as shown by the recent acquittal of the only suspect tried for the “Bloody Paniai’” massacre of 2014.
“Every corner of our country is now scarred by Indonesian militarisation . . . We continue to demand that Indonesia withdraw their military from West Papua in order to allow civilians to peacefully return to their homes.”
The rescue of hundreds of Rohingya refugees by fishers and local authorities in Indonesia’s Aceh province was praised Tuesday as “an act of humanity” by United Nations officials, while relatives of around 180 Rohingya on another vessel that’s been missing for weeks feared that all aboard had perished.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said that “Indonesia has helped to save 472 people in the past six weeks from four boats, showing its commitment and respect of basic humanitarian principles for people who face persecution and conflict.”
“We feel like we got a new world today… We could see their faces again. It’s really a moment of joy for all of us.”
“UNHCR urges other states to follow this example. Many others did not act despite numerous pleas and appeals for help,” the Geneva-based agency added. “States in the region must fulfill their legal obligations by saving people on boats in distress to avoid further misery and deaths.”
Ann Maymann, the UNHCR representative in Indonesia, said in a statement that “we welcome this act of humanity by local communities and authorities in Indonesia.”
“These actions help to save human lives from certain death, ending torturous ordeals for many desperate people,” she added.
\u201cPengungsi Muslim Rohingya Myanmar di Pantai Gampong Ujong Pi’e Muara Tiga Laweung Pidie @Aceh\u201d
The Syndey Morning Heraldreports residents of Ladong, a fishing village in Aceh, rushed to help 58 Malaysia-bound Rohingya men who arrived Sunday in a rickety wooden boat, many of them severely dehydrated and starving.
The following day, 174 more starving Rohingya men, women, and children, were helped ashore by local authorities and fishers after more than a month at sea.
Mohammed Rezuwan Khan, whose 27-year-old sister Hatamonesa was aboard the boat with her 5-year-old daughter, told Pakistan’s Arab News that “we feel like we got a new world today.”
“We could see their faces again. It’s really a moment of joy for all of us,” he said of his family. Speaking of his sister, he added that “she thought that she would die in the voyage at sea.”
\u201cStarvation, hunger and dehydration made them half. Rohingya betting their lives for survival by taking the dangerous journey via sea\u201d
Babar Baloch, the UNHCR regional spokesperson in Bangkok, stated that 26 people had died aboard the rescued vessel, which left Bangladesh a month ago.
“We were raising alarm about this boat in early December because we had information that it was in the regional waters at least at the end of November,” he said. “So when we first got reports that it was somewhere near the coast of Thailand, we approached authorities asking them to help, then when it was moving towards Indonesia and Malaysia we did the same.”
“After its engine failure and it was drifting in the sea, there were reports of this boat being spotted close to Indian waters and we approached and asked them as well and we were also in touch with authorities in Sri Lanka,” Baloch continued.
“Currently as we speak, the only countries in the region that have acted are Indonesia, in big numbers, and Sri Lanka as well.”
According to the BBC, the Indian navy appears to have towed the boat into Indonesian waters after giving its desperate passengers some food and water. The boat drifted for another six days before it was allowed to land.
“Currently as we speak, the only countries in the region that have acted are Indonesia, in big numbers, and Sri Lanka as well,” Baloch said. “It is an act in support of humanity, there’s no other way to describe it.”
Relatives of around 180 other Rohingya who left Bangladesh on December 2 said Tuesday that they fear the overcrowded vessel has sunk in the Andaman Sea. Mohammad Noman, a resident of a Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, toldThe Guardian that his sister was aboard the boat with her two daughters, who are 5 and 3 years old.
“Every day we called up the boat two or three times on the boatman’s satellite phone to find out if my sister and her two daughters were all right. Since December 8, I have failed to get access to that phone,” he said. “I know some other people in Cox’s Bazar who made phone calls to the boat every day and stayed in contact with their relatives there. None of them has succeeded to reach the phone after December 8.”
\u201cAt least 180 Rohingya feared dead says U.N. refugee agency. Countries in the region fail to assist in locating and rescuing those stranded, passing the buck despite risk of lives lost https://t.co/Pm0IzpVNiP\u201d
The captain of another vessel transporting Rohingya refugees said he saw the distressed boat swept up in stormy seas sometime during the second week of December.
“It was around 2:00 am when a strong wind began blowing and big waves surfaced on the sea. [Their] boat began swaying wildly, we could gauge from a flashlight they were pointing at us,” he told The Guardian. “After some time, we could not see the flashlight anymore. We believe the boat drowned then.”
More than a million Rohingya Muslims are crowded into squalid refugee camps in southern Bangladesh after having fled ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and other violence and repression in Rakhine state, Myanmar, which is ruled by a military dictatorship. Since 2020, thousands of Rohingya have fled the camps by sea.
\u201cWho are the #Rohingya\u201d
— Protect The Rohingya (@Protect The Rohingya)
1672070107
Hundreds have died during the perilous journey. If the sinking of the boat with 180 aboard is confirmed, it would make 2022 the deadliest year for Rohingya at sea, according to UNHCR.
UNHCR’s Baloch stressed that “countries and states in the region have international obligations to help desperate people.”
“We have been calling on states to go after people smugglers and human traffickers as they are responsible for putting people on those death-trap boats, but victims have to be saved and saving human life is the most important act,” he told the Morning Herald.
“The refugee issue and saving lives cannot just be left to one country, it has to be done collectively, together in the region,” he added.
Tun Khin, a Rohingya activist and refugee who now heads the Burmese Rohingya Organization U.K., took aim at regional power Australia, which has been criticized for decades over its abuse of desperate seaborne asylum-seekers, nearly all of whom are sent to dirty, crowded offshore processing centers on Manus Island and Nauru to await their fate.
“Australia has too often set a shameful example for the region through its treatment of refugees,” he told the Morning Herald.
“These people are facing genocide in Burma,” Khin added, using the former official name of Myanmar. “It is a hopeless situation for them in Bangladesh, there is no dignity of life there.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Submarine rescue vehicles (DSRVs) is the strongest, but not the least, capability on which JFD has built its reputation among naval and special forces. The underwater world is the Earth’s least explored geographical area, primarily because it is so difficult for people to operate under the waves with ease and for long periods. The majority […]
Due to the strength of their diverse indigenous traditions and the unique biodiversity of their lands, it is axiomatic for West Papuans that human life and nature are inseparable.
Now, the leaders of the province’s independence movement have a proposal to make it “Earth’s first green state”.
As Benny Wenda, exiled leader of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), told a conference at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) on 9 December: “The forest is our friend, our supermarket, our medical cabin. You cannot separate West Papua from our environment. We have always been at peace with nature.”
Unfortunately, the Indonesian government, which has maintained a bloody and brutal occupation of West Papua for almost 60 years, and the global corporations they invite to “develop” its lands, does not abide by such values.
West Papua, which is home to more than 250 tribes with their own languages and cultures, has the third-largest rainforest in the world. But it is imperiled by gold mines, logging companies, palm oil plantations, and many more forms of resource extraction that strip the land bare. Mine sedimentation kills off plants and natural life for hundreds of kilometers around.
“We have the solution to the global climate crisis. Indigenous people should be able to manage their lands as they have done for thousands of years.”
According to Lisa Tilley, a political ecologist at SOAS University of London, these ecological “dead zones” are a “paradise for pathogens”.
“Genetic diversity is usually the firewall which prevents pathogens spreading and making those zoonotic [animal-to-human] shifts,” Tilley says.
The Indonesian government claims to want to be part of an “Opec for the rainforests” – along with the Democratic Republic of Congo and Brazil – a rival to the club of oil-producing nations, promoting conservation rather than fossil fuels. But the reality on the ground is that rainforest destruction is ramping up.
A gold mine the size of Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, is being planned. In the ongoing construction of the Trans-Papua Highway, a forest area the size of Denmark could be cleared by 2036. The BBC reported in 2020 that Korean palm oil giant Korindo has cleared nearly 60,000 hectares of West Papuan forest, an area the size of Seoul.
An eco-revolution in West Papua, to protect this valuable landscape, is in all of our interests.
Wenda and the ULMWP have a plan for such a transformation. The Green State Vision is part of their program for independence.
“The Green State Vision is our offer to the world,” Wenda said. “We have the solution to the global climate crisis. Indigenous people should be able to manage their lands as they have done for thousands of years.”
The Green State Vision was developed based on the values of the indigenous Melanesian tribes of West Papua, where living in balance and harmony with nature are core values, and collectivity is emphasized over individualism. There are “three pillars” to the vision: environmental and social protection; customary guardianship; and democratic governance.
Measures would include making ecocide a serious criminal offense and compelling resource extraction companies to work within an ecologically sustainable framework. Guardianship of the forests, lands, and rivers will be restored to “customary authorities at family, clan and tribal level”.
The political model is an attempt to combine “the best features” of a liberal democratic state – a legislature, an independent judiciary, and so on – with approaches rooted in holistic indigenous practices that prioritize community-based decision-making and collective land rights. Could other parts of the world benefit from a similar approach?
Lessons for the rest of the world
As Joan Martinez-Alier, author of ‘Environmentalism for the Poor’, pointed out at the conference, while 5% of the world population is officially considered to be indigenous, they appear in 40% of known environmental justice disputes in the world.
The fact that indigenous communities tend to live off lands that hitherto have not been the object of ‘development’, and thus tend to be resource-rich, makes them targets for extractivist modes of capital accumulation. As such, environmental violence and resistance usually follow.
“Indigenous people are defending their rights at the extraction frontiers, motivated by their own cultural values and interests – sacredness, identity, and livelihood – against coloniality and racism,” Martinez-Alier added.
But even in the non-indigenous world, where workers have long since been torn from the land and survive via the market, inspiration can be taken from the Green State Vision’s willingness to criminalize ecocide and challenge the apparently sacred ‘right’ of capital to ruthlessly exploit nature.
David Whyte, director of the Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice at QMUL, said struggles for environmental justice in West Papua and countries like the UK are more intimately connected than we might think.
“If we don’t protect the world’s major forests from predatory business investors, then we have no chance at all to prevent global warming,” he explained. “Without the Amazon, the Congo, and the New Guinea forests, the world stops breathing. London-based companies are major beneficiaries of this. The likes of BP and Unilever, heavily invested in West Papua, quite literally profit from our asphyxiation.
“The West Papuan Green State Vision offers us a way out of the predatory cycle. It offers the most viable way for us to keep us all breathing and to keep us all alive.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
As 2022 draws to a close, I would like to thank everyone who has supported the West Papuan struggle this year. To our worldwide solidarity groups, including those within Indonesia, to Alex Sobel and the International Parliamentarians for West Papua (IPWP), the International Lawyers for West Papua, to our friends in the Basque Country and Catalonia, the Pacific Conference of Churches, the government of Vanuatu and all our supporters in the Pacific: my deepest thanks.
The struggle for West Papuan liberation is a struggle for humanity, dignity, and fundamental rights. By supporting us, you are making history in the fight against modern day colonialism.
2022 was a difficult year for West Papua. We lost great fighters and leaders like Filep Karma, Jonah Wenda, and Jacob Prai. Sixty-one years since the fraudulent Act of No Choice, our people continue to suffer under Indonesian’s colonial occupation.
Indonesia continues to kill West Papuans with impunity, as shown by the recent acquittal of the only suspect tried for the “Bloody Paniai’” massacre of 2014.
Every corner of our country is now scarred by Indonesian militarisation. This month, nearly 100 West Papuans on Yapen Island were displaced from their villages by a sudden wave of military operations. Along with tens of thousands of West Papuans displaced since 2019, they will be forced to spend Christmas in the forest, as refugees in their own lands.
We continue to demand that Indonesia withdraw their military from West Papua in order to allow civilians to peacefully return to their homes.
In July, we signed an historic Memorandum of Understanding with our Melanesian brothers and sisters in Kanaky, strengthening the bonds of friendship and solidarity that have always connected our two movements.
In October, countries including Australia, Canada, and the US called for immediate investigation of rights abuses in West Papua at the UN, while the Marshall Islands called for West Papuan self-determination. Throughout the year, we have continued to build up our infrastructure on the ground.
We are ready to reclaim the sovereignty that was stolen from us and govern our own affairs.
To all West Papuans, whether in exile, prison, in the bush or the refugee camps, I say your day will come. Though the road to freedom is long and hard, we are making incredible progress at all levels.
One day soon we will celebrate Christmas in an independent West Papua. Until then, we must be strong and united in our struggle. As our national motto says, we are One People with One Soul.
To everyone around the world reading this message, I urge you to remain steadfast in your support for West Papua. Please pray for all West Papuans who cannot celebrate this Christmas, whether in Yapen Island, Nduga, Puncak Jaya, or elsewhere. Until we win our freedom, we need your solidarity.
On behalf of the ULMWP and the people of West Papua, thank you and Merry Christmas.
Benny Wenda Interim President ULMWP Provisional Government
United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) solidarity workers in London, United Kingdom. Image: ULMWP
A West Papua rights group claims Indonesian police and soldiers have carried out at least 72 extrajudicial killings over the past year.
The report by the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (KontraS) said the police were responsible for 50 of the unlawful killings, with the remainder committed by military personnel.
The latest report situated the unlawful killings in the context of a “narrowing of democratic space” and “massive violations of rights related to the basic principles of democracy” by President Joko Widodo’s administration.
“The widespread practice of extrajudicial killings throughout 2022 by security personnel shows that they are like wolves in sheep’s clothing who are ready to pounce when there’s an opportunity,” KontraS researcher Rozy Brilian told reporters, according to a report by Benar News.
The article quoted Rozy as saying that most of those allegedly killed by police were under criminal investigation and at least 12 of the cases involved torture.
While six Indonesian soldiers were arrested recently for their involvement in the deaths of four Papuans in Mimika regency in the unsettled Papua region, the report claims the security forces still enjoy a high degree of impunity for illegal behavior.
“This is a reminder of the considerable degree of continuity between Suharto’s military-backed New Order, in which the security forces enjoyed political prominence and vast power, and the democratic system that was established after the regime’s fall in 1998,” the authors said.
KontraS said far from investigating or prosecuting those responsible for past rights outrages, the Indonesian government has often promoted them to key positions in government.
In particular, KontraS pointed to the appointment of Major-General Untung Budiharto, the alleged perpetrator of enforced disappearances during the terminal crisis of the Suharto government in 1997 and 1998, as commander of the Greater Jakarta Command Area.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
“We are part of them and they are part of us,” declared politician Augustine Rapa, founder and president of the PNG Liberal Democratic Party, on the 61st anniversary of the struggle for West Papuan independence earlier this month.
Rapa’s statement of West Papua at Gerehu, Port Moresby, on December 1 was in response to Papua New Guinean police who arrived at the anniversary celebration and tried to prevent Papuans from the other side of the colonial border from commemorating this significant national day.
According to Rapa, the issue of West Papua’s plight for liberation should be at the top of the agenda in PNG. Rapa also urged PNG’s Foreign Affairs Minister Justin Tkatchenko to take the plight of West Papuans to the United Nations.
Frank Makanuey, a senior West Papuan representative, also appealed to the PNG government to alter its foreign policy and law so Papuans from the other side of the border could continue to freely express their opinions peacefully, akin to the opinions and rights inscribed in the UN Charter of Indigenous People.
According to Makanuey, 7000 West Papuans living in PNG will continue to fight for their freedom for as long as they live, and when they die will pass on the torch of resistance to their children.
On the day of the commemoration, Minister Tkatchenko appeared in a short video interview reiterating the same message as Rapa.
“These West Papuans are part of our family; part of our members and are part of Papua New Guinea. They are not strangers,” the minister reminded the crowd.
‘Separated by imaginary lines’
“We are separated only by imaginary lines, which is why I am here.”
He added: “I did not come here to fight, to yell, to scream, to dictate, but to reach a common understanding — to respect the law of Papua New Guinea and the sovereignty of Indonesia.”
Foreign Affairs Minister Justin Tkatchenko says PNG will “respect Indonesian sovereignty”. Video: EMTV Onlne
The minister then explained how West Papuans in PNG should be accommodated under PNG’s immigration law through an appropriate route.
A few days after this speech, the same minister attended bilateral meetings with countries and international organisations in the Pacific, including Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, Vanuatu along with the Director General of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), ahead of the Indonesia-Pacific Forum for Development (IPFD) in Bali on December 6.
Following a ministerial meeting with the Indonesian Foreign Minister, Retno Marsudi, Tkatchenko said: “As Papua New Guineans, we must support and respect Indonesia’s sovereignty.”
Tkatchenko said Port Moresby would work with Indonesia to resolve any issues that arose with West Papuans living in the country.
One of the most critical and concerning developments of this visit was the announcement of the defence cooperation agreement between Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.
“We are moving forward in the process of signing a defence cooperation agreement between PNG and Indonesia. We will work harder and partner on a common goal to achieve security along both countries’ borders,” Tkatchenko said.
Sllencing Melanesian leaders?
In January 2022, there was a meeting in Jakarta at the office of the state intelligence agency. It was intended to silence all Melanesian leaders who supported West Papua’s independence and bring them under Jakarta’s sphere of influence, with an allocation of roughly 450 billion rupiahs (about A$42.5 million).
A couple of months later, on March 30, the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea led a large delegation to Indonesia for bilateral discussions.
Forestry, Fisheries, Energy, Kumul companies, and the Investment Promotion Authority were among the key sectors represented in the delegation. Apparently, this 24 hour trip in an Air Niugini charter from Port Moresby to Jakarta cost K5 million kina (A$2 million).
Considering such a large sum of money was spent on such a brief visit; this must have been a significant expedition with a considerable agenda.
Visits of this kind are usually described with words such as, “trade and investment”, but the real purpose for spending so much money on such a brief trip before an election, are facts the public will never know.
In this case, the “public” is ordinary Papuans on both sides of the border, that the foreign minister himself stated were separated by “imaginary lines”.
It is those imaginary lines that have caused so much division, destruction, and dislocation of Papuans from both sides to become part of Western and Asian narratives of “civilising” primitive Papuans.
Imaginary to real lines
Could the proposed defence agreement remove these imaginary lines, or would it strengthen them to become real and solid lines that would further divide and eliminate Papuans from the border region?
A “colonisation” map of Papua New Guinea and West Papua. Image: File
Prime Minister Marape grew up in the interior Papuan Highlands region of Tari, of the proud Huli nation, which shares ancient kinship with other original nations such as Yali, Kimyal, Hubula, Dani and Lani on the West Papuan side of the border.
As a custodian of this region, the Prime Minister may have witnessed some of the most devastating, unreported, humanitarian crises instigated by ruthless Indonesian military in this area, in the name of sovereignty and border protection.
Why does his government in Port Moresby boast about signing a defence agreement in Jakarta? Is this a death wish agreement for Papuans — his people and ancestral land, specially on the border region?
Which entity poses an existential threat to Papuans? Is it China, Australia, Indonesia, or the Papuans themselves?
There is nothing unusual or uncommon about countries and nations making bilateral or multilateral agreements on any matter concerning their survival, no matter what their intentions may be. Especially when you share a direct border like Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, which has been stained by decades of protracted war waged against Papuans.
Why now for defence pact?
However, what is particularly interesting and concerning about the development between these two countries is, why now is the time to discuss a defence agreement after all these years?
What are the objectives of this initiative? Is it to serve the imperial agenda of Beijing, the United States, Jakarta, or is it to safeguard and protect the island of New Guinea? What is the purpose of a defence agreement, who is protected and who from?
Exactly like the past 500 years, when European vultures circled the island of New Guinea and sliced it up into pieces, new vultures are now encroaching upon us as the global hegemonic power structure shifts from West to East.
Responding to these developments, James Marape warned that his country would not be caught up in a geopolitical standoff with the US, Australia, or China, saying the global powers should “keep your fights to yourselves”.
But does the prime minister have a choice in this matter? Does he have the power to stop war if or when it breaks out in the Pacific like the past?
Let‘s be honest and ask ourselves, when did Papuans from both sides of this imaginary line have the power to say no to all kinds of brutal, exploitative behaviour exhibited by foreign powers?
From World War I to II, then to Pacific nuclear testing, and to foreign international bandits currently exploiting papua New Guinea’s natural resources?
Brutality of Indonesia
Since its independence, when has the PNG government been able to halt the brutality and onslaught of the Indonesians against their own people on the other side of these imaginary lines?
Why does PNG’s foreign affairs minister sit in Jakarta negotiating a defence deal with an entity that threatens to annihilate West Papuans, after he himself conveyed a heartfelt message to them on December 1?
Can both the prime minister and the foreign affairs minister avoid being caught in the middle of a looming war as the Pacific becomes yet another gift for strategic war space between the Imperial West and the Imperial East?
Benny Wenda, an international icon for the liberation of West Papua, made the following statement on his Facebook page in response to the defence agreement: “Let’s not make this happen, please, our PNG brothers and sisters open your eyes! Can’t you see they’re trying to take over our ancestors Land.”
While the PNG government gambles on West Papua’s fate with Jakarta, West Papuans are marginalised, chased, or hunted by establishing unlawful settler colonial administrative divisions across the heartland of New Guinea and direct military operations.
As Wenda warned in his latest report, “mass displacements are occurring in every corner of West Papua”.
Whatever the philosophical approach underlying Papua New Guinea’s foreign policies in relation to West Papua’s fate — realist or idealist, traditional or transcendental — what matters most to West Papuans is whether they will survive under Indonesian settler colonialism over the next 20 years.
A reverse situation
What if the situation is reversed, where Papuans in PNG were being slaughtered by Australian settler colonial rule, while the government of West Papua continues to sneak out across the border to Canberra to keep making agreements that threaten to annihilate PNG?
Papuans face a serious existential threat under Indonesia settler colonial rule, and the PNG government must be very careful in its dealings with Jakarta. Every single visit and action taken by both Papua New Guinea and Indonesia will leave a permanent mark on the wounded soul of West Papua.
The only question is will these actions destroy Papuans or rescue them?
The government and people of Papua New Guinea must consider who their neighbours will be in 100 years from now. Will they be a majority of Muslim Indonesians or a majority of Christian West Papuans?
It is a critical existential question that will determine the fate of the island, country, nation, as well as languages, culture and existence itself in its entirety.
Will the government and the people of Papua New Guinea view West Papuans as their brothers and sisters and restructure their collective worldview in the spirit of Rapa’s words, “we are part of them, and they are part of us”, or will they continue to sign agreements and treaties with Jakarta and send their secret police and army to chase and threaten West Papuans seeking protection anywhere on New Guinea’s soil?
West Papua is bleeding. The last thing West Papua needs is for the PNG government apparatus and forces to harass and chase them as they seek refuge under your roof.
Papua New Guinea is not the enemy of West Papua; the enemy of PNG is not West Papua.
The enemies are those who divide the island into pieces, exploit its resources and sign defence agreements to further solidify imaginary lines while leaving its original custodians of the land stranded on the streets and slums like beggars.
Papuans have lived in this ancient and timeless land from Sorong to Samarai for thousands of years. The actions we take today will determine whether the descendants of these archaic autochthons will survive in the next thousands of years to come.
Yamin Kogoya is a West Papuan academic who has a Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development from the Australian National University and who contributes to Asia Pacific Report. From the Lani tribe in the Papuan Highlands, he is currently living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
As an Indonesian lawyer living in exile in Australia, I find it deeply troubling that the changes to the Indonesian Criminal Code are seen through the lens that touchy tourists will be denied their freedom to fornicate on holiday in Bali.
What the far-reaching amendments will actually mean is that hundreds of millions of Indonesians will not be able to criticise any government officials, including the president, police and military.
You can be assured that the implementation of the Criminal Code will not affect the lucrative tourism industry which the Indonesian government depends on – it will affect ordinary people in what is the world’s third largest democracy.
With just 18 out of 575 parliamentarians physically attending the plenary session, Indonesia passed the problematic revised Criminal Code last week. It’s a death knell to democracy in Indonesia.
I live here as an exile because of my work on the armed conflict in West Papua. The United Nations has repeatedly asked Indonesia to drop the politicised charges against me. One of the six laws used against me, about “distributing fake news”, is now incorporated into the Criminal Code.
In West Papua, any other version of events that are different to the statement of police and military, are often labelled “fake news”. In 2019, a piece from independent news agency Reuters was called a hoax by the Indonesian armed forces.
Now, the authors of that article can be charged under the new Criminal Code which will effectively silence journalists and human rights defenders.
Same-sex couples marginalised
Moreover, the ban on sex outside marriage is heteronormative and effectively further marginalises same-sex couples because they can’t marry under Indonesian law.
The law requires as little as a complaint from a relative of someone in a same sex relationship to be enforced, meaning LGBTQIA+ people would live in fear of their disapproving family members weaponising their identity against them.
Meanwhile, technically speaking, the heteronormative cohabitation clause exempts same-sex couples. However, based on existing practice, LGBTQIA+ people would be disproportionately targeted now that people have the moral licence to do it.
The criminal code has predictably sparked Islamophobic commentary from the international community but, for us, this is about the continued erosion of democracy under President Joko Widodo. This is about consolidated power of the oligarchs including the conservatives shrinking the civic space.
Back when I was still able to live in my home country, it was acceptable to notify the police a day prior, or even on the day of a protest. About six years ago, police started to treat the notification as if it was a permit and made the requirements much stricter.
The new Criminal Code makes snap protests illegal, violating international human rights law.
Under the new code, any discussion about Marxism and Communism is illegal. Indonesia is still trapped in the past without any truth-telling about the crimes against humanity that occurred in 1965-66. At least 500,000 Communists and people accused of being communists were killed.
Justice never served
Justice has never been served despite time running out because the remaining survivors are getting older.
It will be West Papuans rather than frisky Australian tourists who bear the brunt of the updated criminal code. The repression there, which I have seen first hand, is beyond anything I’ve seen anywhere else in the country.
Treason charges which normally carry life imprisonment are often abused to silence West Papuans. Just last week, three West Papuans were charged with treason for peacefully flying the symbol of West Papuan independence — the Morning Star flag. The new treason law comes with the death penalty.
It’s shameful that Australia just awarded the chief of Indonesian armed forces the Order of Australia, given that his institution is the main perpetrator of human rights abuses in West Papua.
The new Criminal Code will take effect in three years. There is a window open for the international community, including Australia, to help safeguard the world’s third largest democracy.
Indonesians need you to raise your voice and not just because you’re worried about your trip to Bali.
Veronica Koman is an Indonesian human rights lawyer in exile and a campaigner at Amnesty International Australia. This article was first published by The Sydney Morning Herald and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.
Amnesty International Indonesia and Amnesty International Australia have condemned the repression used against the people in West Papua when they were commemorating Human Rights Day yesterday — December 10, which marks the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Indonesian authorities made 116 arrests and injured at least 17 people during multiple forced dispersals of rallies in the lead up to and during December 10 in four regencies across West Papua.
“We are appalled to hear about these mass arrests. Many were arrested when the rally had not even started,” Amnesty International Indonesia executive director Usman Hamid said.
“This shows Indonesian authorities’ utter disregard of West Papuans’ right to peaceful assembly.
“Criminalising them for simply peacefully exercising such right will only breed further resentment and distrust. That discriminatory treatment against them has to stop,” said Hamid.
“People all over the globe commemorated Human Rights Day. The fact that West Papuan people could not enjoy the same right, shows that there is a human rights emergency in West Papua.”
Amnesty International Australia national director Sam Klintworth said: “Australia needs to demand accountability from Indonesian authorities, especially as they are recipients of so much Australian aid.”
23 arrested in Wamena
On December 8, 23 people in Wamena were arrested for several hours when they were distributing leaflets for people to join the Human Rights Day rally.
On December 10, forced dispersals and mass arrests took place in Wamena and Jayapura.
In Jayapura, 56 people were arrested and at least 16 people were known to be injured during forced dispersals in multiple locations.
In Wamena, 37 people were arrested and at least one person was injured when the multiple rallies were forcibly dispersed.
Also on December 10, a rally in Sorong was forcibly dispersed, and the protest in Manokwari was blocked by police.
Most of the protesters were members of the West Papua National Committee (Komite Nasional Papua Barat – KNPB), a peaceful grassroots organisation campaigning for the right to self-determination.
Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which Indonesia has ratified through Law No. 12/2005, explicitly guarantees the right of any person to hold opinions without interference.
Freedom of peaceful assembly is also guaranteed under Article 21 of the ICCPR.
Amnesty International does not take any position regarding political status within Indonesia, including calls for independence.
However, the organisation believes that the right to freedom of expression includes the right to peacefully advocate for independence referenda, or other political positions.
Civil society organisations which make up the National Alliance for Criminal Code Reform have slammed the decision by the Indonesian government and the House of Representatives (DPR) to ratify the Draft Criminal Code (RKUHP) which is seen as still containing a number of controversial articles, reports CNN Indonesia.
Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation (YLBHI) chairperson Muhammad Isnur criticised the DPR and the government because the enactment of the law was rushed and did not involve public participation.
According to Isnur, a number of articles in the RKUHP will take Indonesian society into a period of being “colonised” by its own government.
“Indeed the latest version of this draft regulation was only published on November 30, 2022, and still contained a series of problematic articles which have been opposed by the public because it will carry Indonesian society into an era of being colonised by its own government,” said Isnur in a statement.
The Civil Coalition, as conveyed by Isnur, has highlighted a number of articles in the RKUHP which are anti-democratic, perpetuate corruption, silence press freedom, obstruct academic freedom and regulate the public’s private lives.
According to Isnur, these articles will only be “sharp below but blunt above”, meaning they will come down hard on the poor but go easy on the rich, and it would make it difficult to prosecute crimes committed by corporations against the people.
“Once again this will be a regulation which is sharp below, blunt above, because it will be difficult to prosecute criminal corporations that violate the rights of communities and workers,” he said.
Criminalised over ideas The Coalition for example highlighted Article 188 which criminalises anyone who spreads communist, Marxist or Leninist ideas, or other ideas which conflict with the state ideology of Pancasila.
According to Isnur, the article is ambiguous because it does not contain an explanation on who has the authority to determine if an idea conflicts with Pancasila.
According to Isnur, Article 188 has the potential to criminalise anyone, particularly government opponents, because it does not contain an explanation about which ideas conflict with Pancasila.
“This is a rubber [catchall] article and could revive the concept of crimes of subversion as occurred in the New Order era [of former president Suharto],” he said.
Then there are Articles 240 and 241 on insulting the government and state institutions.
He believes that these articles also have the potential to be “rubber” articles because they do not provide a definition of an insult. He is also concerned that the articles will be used to silence criticism against the government or state institutions.
The Coalition believes that there are still at least 14 problematic articles in the RKUHP. Aside from the spreading of communist ideas and insulting state institutions, there are several other articles such as those on morality, cohabitation and criminalising parades and protest actions.
Law ‘confusing’
The DPR earlier passed the RKUHP into law during a plenary meeting. A number of parties believe that the new law is confusing and contains problematic articles. These include the articles on insulting the president, makar (treason, subversion, rebellion), insulting state institutions, adultery and cohabitation and “fake news”.
Justice and Human Rights Minister Yasonna H. Laoly has invited members of the public to challenge the law in the Constitutional Court if they feel that there are articles that conflict with the constitution.
“So we must go through constitutional mechanisms, right. So we’re more civilised, be better at obeying the constitution, the law. So if it’s ratified into law the most correct mechanism is a judicial review,” said Laoly earlier.
Deputy Justice and Prosperity Minister Edward Omar Sharif Hiariej, meanwhile, is asking those who consider the law to be problematic or rushed to come and debate the issue with the ministry.
“You try answering yourself, yeah, is 59 years rushed? If it is said that many oppose it, how many? What is the substance? Come and debate it with us, we’re ready and we are truly convinced that if its tested it will be rejected,” said Hiariej.
After years of debate, protest, and delay, the Indonesian parliament passed a new criminal code (Undang Undang Kitab Hukum Pidana, or KUHP) that gives the state new tools to punish a wide range of ideological, moral and political offences. International attention has focused on those passages of the law that ban sex outside of marriage. But the KUHP’s real power lies in provisions that threaten political dissent with prison sentences and have the potential to muzzle public debate about the purview of the state in citizens’ private and political lives. Here we examine the divergent interests that coalesced to pass the most regressive provisions of the new criminal code, and consider their implications for Indonesian democracy.
A compromise between two illiberal agendas
Indonesia’s old criminal code was inherited from the Dutch colonial state and included a range of outdated provisions. The effort to revise the law began in the 1980s under the New Order regime but went nowhere after several fully formed drafts were discarded. After the democratic transition in 1998, attempts to revamp the code became entangled in ideological battles between nationalist parliamentary factions who sought to purge Dutch influence, and religious conservatives who saw the revisions as an opportunity to push for a greater role for the state in regulating public morality.
The new KUHP, passed unanimously by all parties on 6 December, represents a compromise between these two factions. Nationalists, led by PDI–P, drove provisions that not only retain existing criminal charges for expressions of support for “Communist/Marxist-Leninist” thought, but also ban expression of “ideas that contradict Pancasila”, the state’s pluralist ideology. Legal activists in Indonesia believe these provisions smack of the Sukarno-eraAnti-Subversion Law, a vaguely-worded statute that was used to great effect by the Suharto regime to repress and intimidate dissidents.
At the same time, the new law, which bans all sexual relations outside of marriage, also represents a major victory for Islamist groups. The Islamist PKS party has long championed efforts to regulate public morality through its proposed Family Resilience bill. The draft of this law was brought up for discussion in the parliament several times but failed to garner broader support because of its extreme provisions — which among other things regulated sleeping arrangements of siblings within households and compelled family members to report homosexual relatives to state authorities. The new KUHP, which designates sex outside of marriage and cohabitation between unmarried couples as jailable offences, if reported by close relatives, incorporates watered-down versions of passages in the Family Resilience bill.
Why did a compromise become possible when the governing coalition is ostensibly dominated by religiously “pluralist” parties that could have mustered the votes to pass the new code without accommodating Islamist demands?
Since Indonesia’s deeply polarising presidential elections in 2019, Jokowi’s government has imposed a “repressive pluralist” agenda to counter political opposition by banning Islamist groups and purging state agencies of religiously conservative civil servants. But neither Jokowi nor his allies in parliament can afford to isolate conservative Muslim groups more broadly, especially as the 2024 elections approach. This consideration became even more important when the morality provisions in the KUHP bill gained endorsement from mainstream Islamic organisations, including Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah, who are also under pressure to guard their conservative flanks in the wake of the 212 movement’s bringing divergent views about the role of Islam in public life to a head. This is evident from NU and Muhammadiyah’s conservative stance on recent issues concerning morality, especially their opposition to using a consent-based definition of rape in the Sexual Violence Law passed earlier in 2022. Placating religious conservatives with policy concessions in the social domain has thus become an expedient way of containing the potential fallout from subduing their opposition in the political arena.
Apart from striking these compromises, the new KUHP also serves the goals of political elites across ideological divides of curbing the role of civil society in the policy-making processes. Over the past few years the government has been subject to mounting public criticism for passing legislation that is seen as protecting interests of powerful oligarchs and reducing accountability. Changes to legislation governing the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) in 2019, which effectively dismantled the popular anti-graft body, prompted the largest pro-democracy protests since the student mobilisations of the late 1990s that toppled the New Order regime. In 2020, the rushed passage of the Omnibus Law on Jobs Creation—which reduced labour protections, dismantled environmental safeguards and expedited forcible land acquisition by the government, with the aim of attracting foreign investment—also galvanised widespread protests.
The new KUHP makes these expressions of opposition high-risk. Citizens can now be jailed for up to three years for making comments about the president and vice president that the latter deem derogatory. It also contains provisions for punishing anyone who circulates derogatory material about government institutions more broadly, including government ministries, the courts or the parliament. When it was passed into law in a sparsely-attended plenary session of parliament, the PKS representative staged a walk-out to protest these “insult” provisions, and its fellow opposition party Partai Demokrat offered a perfunctory warning of the risks to free speech, perhaps to save face with their constituents. But both had already formally endorsed the final version of the law in the committee that drafted it.
Government reassurances fall flat
In the face of widespread criticism of the KUHP, government officials have been quick to defend the new criminal code by urging the public to celebrate the fact that Indonesia has finally managed to shake off its colonial legacy. These platitudes offer cold comfort to the journalists and activists who are most likely to be targeted by the law and have repeatedly pointed out that it actually retains and repurposes the most repressive aspects of the original version inherited from the Dutch.
For example, provisions for punishing insult to the president that were part of the old KUHP were annulled by the Constitutional Court in 2006, which ruled that general defamation laws were sufficient to protect holders of public office from personal attacks. The new law reinserts these provisions and expands their scope to cover other state institutions, with two alterations. First, it makes them complaint-based offences, meaning they can only be applied if the “insulted party” reports them. Second, it stipulates that criticisms that are made in the public interest will be exempt from prosecution. Lawmakers claim that these limitations offer a safeguard against potential misuse of the law, which they argue is not meant to forbid dissent but reasonably regulate it.
Such arguments presume that powerholders will exercise restraint. But in reality several litigious ministers within Jokowi’s cabinet already have a track record of suing critics. The new KUHP’s provisions on insulting the government give such actors a greater incentive to go after activists, who will now bear the additional burden of proving their innocence for the obvious reason that there is no clear or explicitly defined difference between an ‘insult’ and a critique of the state or heads of government.
Another reason activists don’t trust the government line is that these revisions follow years of relentless state harassment of activists using existing regulations, especially the anti-“defamation” provisions of the Electronic Transactions Law (UU ITE) and the authorities’ increasingly unrestrained use of force against demonstrators, as seen during the student protests of 2019–2020. The chilling effects of this trend can be seen in the fact that while the protests against the previous attempt to pass a new KUHP in 2019 were massive, this time the streets are relatively empty. Additional provisions in the new code that increase criminal penalties for organising protests without prior notice to authorities are likely to reinforce these trends.
Regardless of whether and how these rules are applied, legal experts in Indonesia have pointed out that they have no place in a democracy. Indonesia is not the only country that has laws to protect heads of state from wilful defamation, but these regulations are generally rooted in a history of monarchy, where sovereigns are considered sanctified entities. When applied in a representative democracy like Indonesia, these provisions have the potential to transform the role of government officials from public servants, who are subject to criticism from the citizens who elect them, to entitled rulers who ought not be defied.
When it comes to the law’s morality provisions, proponents claim that they codify Indonesia’s shared moral values and increasing the role of state authorities in enforcing them will prevent vigilantes from taking the law into their own hands. The evidence suggests the opposite might be the outcome: we know that in Aceh province — which enforces the strictest public morality regulations in the country, punishing fornication, adultery and homosexuality with public canning — the incidence of mob violence to punish moral offences is three times higher than the Indonesian average.
Lawmakers have sought to address concerns about vigilantism in the final draft of the KUHP by stipulating that criminal charges against sexual offences can only be brought against individuals who are reported to the authorities by close family members, specifically by parents, children and spouses. But far from solving the problem, these provisions are likely to encourage vigilantes to pressure state officials and victims’ families into doing their bidding.
Finally, proponents argue that dissatisfied citizens are free to critique and even challenge the law. Indeed, the government has developed a template response to public opposition to its legislative agenda: “just take your complaint to the Constitutional Court”. This phrase is routinely dropped by ministers, party leaders, and the president himself.
But even this avenue for recourse is closing fast. Over the past two years, the government has led a systematic effort to undermine judicial oversight of the legislative process. In September 2020, the parliament voted to extend the tenure of Constitutional Court judges from 5 to 15 years, which was criticised by legal experts as a bid to incentivise a favourable ruling on the judicial review of the Omnibus Law. Following the Court’s conditional annulment of that legislation, however, the government is now mounting a more direct attack on judicial independence. In November 2022, lawmakers removed Justice Aswanto from the Constitutional Court for voting to strike down the Omnibus Law, and replaced him with a new judge who they claim would defend the parliament’s interests.
A nail in the coffin?
The new KUHP’s implementation is on hold for three years. And once it is implemented we are unlikely see an immediate widespread crackdown against dissidents of the sort seen in places like Turkey or Thailand. The code’s vague, nebulous provisions will probably be applied selectively and inconsistently. But this is precisely the point: uncertainty invokes fears and stifles dissent. The code’s provisions can be thought of as warning shots, designed to compel critics to adjust their behaviour.
There is no doubt this law resurrects elements of Indonesia’s authoritarian past. Democracy has been under extraordinary strain here for the past decade. The resilience of its civil society and parts of the media have helped to thwart some of the most brazen attempts to roll back democracy, like the 2014 proposal to end direct elections and Jokowi’s attempt to extend presidential term limits.
But aside from preserving the institution of elections, all of Indonesia’s other democratic norms and institutions are now under attack. The new criminal code is not the final nail in democracy’s coffin—but it gives a hammer to anyone who wants to drive one in.
We’d like to hear from people living in or who are planning to visit Indonesia what their views are on the country’s new controversial legislation outlawing extramarital sex
The new code, which will apply to Indonesians and visiting foreigners alike and has prompted alarm from human rights campaigners, will also prohibit cohabitation between unmarried couples.
Rights groups say amended criminal code underscores shift towards fundamentalism
Indonesia’s parliament has overhauled the country’s criminal code to outlaw sex outside marriage and curtail free speech, in a dramatic setback to freedoms in the world’s third-largest democracy.
Passed with support from all political parties, the draconian legislation has shocked not only rights activists but also the country’s booming tourism sector, which relies on a stream of visitors to its tropical islands.
A new report by Green Queen Media argues that while plant-based meat sales may be flat in the US and Europe, in Asia Pacific, the alternative protein industry is booming.
Green Queen Media has published the 2022 edition of its award-winning APAC Alternative Protein Industry Report today, titled The Future is Asian and presented by plant-based chicken leader TiNDLE. The 150-page report, now in its third year, is the result of over 14 months of original reporting and dozens of first-hand interviews, as well as featuring expertise and insights from over 30 ecosystem insiders and sector investors.
Both the 2020 and 2021 editions grabbed the top prize in the category of Special Awards for best Global Report at the Hallbars Sustainability Reports Awards in Sweden. Hallbars is an organization that recognizes the best climate-forward publications around the world.
Representation matters
It’s been a challenging year for alternative protein, particularly for plant-based meats, with flat sales in the US and some European markets, a challenging environment for public plant-based companies like Beyond Meat and Oatly, and constant media attacks by pro-meat and pro-dairy lobbies. However, these headlines belie the global picture. “Across the Asia Pacific region, alternative protein companies have been going from strength to strength, hitting major milestones, attracting significant government support and raising record funding rounds,” said Sonalie Figueiras, the report publisher and Green Queen Media’s founder and editor-in-chief, in a statement. “Our report illustrates the importance of reporting and media representation. Western-centric media would have you believe that alternative protein is an industry in trouble. In reality, the sector is headed for boom times in Asia and beyond.”
“What is perhaps obvious to some, but became incredibly clear upon writing the report and working with our industry experts, is just how differently the various countries within APAC approach alternative proteins, both in terms of technology and consumer behaviour,” said Nicola Spalding, the report author.
The future is Asian
Where the 2020 report focused on examining making the case for why alternative protein was necessary in a region that boasts 60% of the world’s population but only 20% of the world’s agricultural land, and the 2021 report provided an exhaustive look at the industry in APAC and dug deep into the three technology pillars, the 2022 edition highlights the 10 most important growth stories and historic firsts that the industry has achieved, as well as the unique products created to serve consumers with vastly different food traditions, culinary tastes and dining preferences.
On the funding front, record-breaking rounds made headlines across the globe, as APAC was home to both the largest cultivated meat Series A ever and the largest plant-based meat Series A ever. The report chronicles every round raised in 2022, with an emphasis on the 10 biggest.
In addition, precision fermentation, which in 2021 was a fledging sector in Asia, experienced real traction this past year, with China’s first animal-free dairy company coming out of stealth and the launch of the region’s first animal-free dairy milk onto supermarket shelves amongst many other announcements.
Several APAC cultivated meat players celebrated major product firsts, from the first cultivated pork belly to the first cultivated duck breast to the first cultivated fishball to the first cultivated Dokdo shrimp- huge leaps, especially given how young the sector is.
The Future is Asian features extensive interviews with 10 local ecosystem insiders from Japan to Taiwan to India, and spotlights the insights of the top venture capitalists investing in the region’s startups.
For the first time, the report authors provided recommendations aimed at the many players of the region’s ecosystem on the road ahead amidst a changing global landscape fraught with supply chain disruption, the ongoing Ukraine war, rising food inflation and the looming threat of a worldwide recession, on top of a worsening climate crisis.
In-depth: APAC’s alt protein pioneers
After years of ecosystem building, the region now boasts hundreds of startups working towards a future of food that promises to feed over three billion people sustainably, safely, and ethically.
The report showcases a range of in-depth case studies spotlighting some of the region’s most exciting players such as South Korean cultivated meat and seafood startup CellMEAT, Singaporean plant-based chicken and seafood player Growthwell Foods, US-Australian animal-free casein maker Change Foods, global fats leader AAK, specialty distributor Classic Fine Foods, Californian precision fermentation company Perfect Day and Hong Kong-based foodtech accelerator Brinc.
Also included are greater China-based plant-based pork and dumpling brand Plant Sifu, US whole-cut fermentation-based seafood pioneer Aqua Cultured Foods, Singaporean cultivated seafood startup Umami Meats and Swiss flavor manufacturer Givaudan.
The climate crisis presents a clear and present danger for Asian countries. The region will feel the brunt of many of the worst tolls of environmental degradation from worsening air pollution to mass climate migration to declining food security. As Figueiras writes in the report’s introduction, “Alternative protein is an important part of the future food toolbox if we are to build a stronger, more resilient regional food system that will face water shortages, land degradation, and more frequent climate-related weather events, amongst many other challenges.”
Download The APAC Alternative Protein Industry Report 2022 – The Future is Asian now.
Activists have protested at Indonesia’s Ternate Police headquarters in North Maluku demanding that the security forces release eight people arrested while commemorating West Papua Independence Day on December 1.
December 1 marked 61 years since the first raising of West Papua’s symbol of independence, the Morning Star flag.
Tabloid Jubi reports Anton Trisno of the Indonesian People’s Front for West Papua (FRI-WP) saying the demonstration where the group was arrested was a peaceful one.
“We expressed our aspirations peacefully. Some ojek (motorcycle taxi) drivers infiltrated the crowd to disperse the protesters. This is a violation to our freedom of speech,” he said.
Trisno asked the police to immediately release eight of his colleagues.
“We urge the Ternate police chief to immediately release the eight activists who are still detained. We demand the police release them unconditionally,” he said.
Different tactic
Meanwhile, an activist group has reported a different tactic used by the security forces, which it says is concerning.
“The Papuan People’s Petition Action (PRP) in commemoration of the 61st anniversary of the ‘West Papua Declaration of Independence’ received escort and security unlike usual actions from the Indonesian Security (colonial military),” a statement said.
“Apart from vehicles such as patrol cars, dalmas, combat tactical vehicles, sniffer dogs, intelligence/bin, bais, and tear gas launchers or other weapons.
“There is also security in the form of hidden security, such as a [sniper] placed on the balcony of Ramayana Mall and Hotel Sahit Mariat which are near the location or point of action.
“This certainly shows that there is something planned to actually push back and close the democratic space for the people and resistance movements in the Land of Papua, especially in the city of Sorong.”
In Port Vila, Vanuatu’s Minister of Climate Change and a long-time supporter of the West Papua people, Ralph Regenvanu, attended the West Papua flag-raising day.
In line with Vanuatu’s stand in support of West Papua freedom, the Morning Star flag was raised to fly alongside the Vanuatu flag outside the West Papua International Office.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
In solidarity with West Papua, the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC) has called for a boycott of all Indonesian products and programmess by the Indonesian government.
The Fiji-based PCC said this should be done until Indonesia facilitated a visit by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to investigate alleged human rights abuses in West Papua, which included torture, extrajudicial killings, and systemic police and military violence.
General secretary Reverend James Bhagwan said the call for a boycott came in response to the lack of political will by the Indonesian government to honour its commitment to the visit, which had been made four years ago.
“Our Pacific church leaders are deeply concerned that the urge by our Pacific Island states through the Pacific Islands Forum has been ignored,” he said.
“We are also concerned that Indonesia is using ‘cheque-book diplomacy’ to silence some Pacific states on this issue. Our only option in the face of this to apply our own financial pressure to this cause.
“We know that the Pacific is a market for Indonesian products and we hope that this mobilisation of consumers will show that Pacific people stand in solidarity with our sisters and brothers of Tanah Papua.”
On Thursday, the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre (FWCC) held a flag-raising ceremony to mark 61 years since the Morning Star, the West Papuan national flag, was first raised.
Women, girls suffered
FWCC coordinator Shamima Ali said as part of the 16 Days of Activism campaign, FWCC remembered the people of West Papua, particularly women and girls, who suffered due to the increased militarisation of the province by the Indonesian government.
“We also remember those women, girls, men and children who have died and those who are still suffering from state violence perpetrated on them and the violence and struggle within their own religious, cultural and societal settings,” she said.
Ali said Pacific islanders should not be quiet about the issue.
“Fiji has been too silent on the issue of West Papua and the ignorance needs to stop,” she said.
“Keeping quiet is not the answer when our own people are suffering.”
Shayal Deviis a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.
On 30 June 2022, the Indonesian Parliament in Jakarta passed legislation to split West Papua into three more pieces.
The Papuan people’s unifying name for their independence struggle — “West Papua” — is now being shattered by Jakarta’s draconian policies. Under this new legislation, the two existing provinces have been divided into five, which include South Papua, Central Papua, and Highland Papua.
Indonesia’s Vice-President, Ma’ruf Amin said while addressing an audience at the Special Autonomy Law Change in Jayapura, Papua’s capital, on Tuesday, 29 November 2022, “right now, we are building Papua better”, reported the Indonesian news agency Antara.
“Changes to special autonomy are a natural thing and are in the process of the national policy cycle to make things even better,” continued the Vice-President.
The day is significant and historic because it was on 19 October 1961 that the first New Guinea Council, known as Nieuw Guinea Raad, named West Papua as the name of a new modern nation-state — the Papuan Independent State was founded.
It was before Papua New Guinea (PNG) gained independence in 1975 from Australia.
Papuans were subjected to all kinds of abuse and violations due to how this island of New Guinea was named and described in colonial literature.
Foreign reinventions
Foreign powers continue to dissect West Papua, renaming it, creating new identities, and reinventing new definitions by making it merely an outpost of foreign imperialism in the periphery where abundant food and minerals are extracted and stolen, without penalty or consequence.
Papuans do not appear to give up their sacred ancestral land without a fight.
The name “West Papua”, however, remains a burning flame in the hearts of all living beings who yearn for freedom and justice. The name was chosen 61 years ago because of this reason. This is the name of a newborn nation-state.
After Indonesia invaded West Papua on May 1, 1963, the name West Papua was changed to Irian Jaya. West Papua had been called The Netherlands New Guinea up to the point of the first New Guinea Council in 1961.
The year 2000 marked another significant period in the history of West Papua. The former Indonesian president, Abdurrahman Wahid — famously known as Gusdur — renamed it from Irian Jaya to Papua, a move that etched a special place in the hearts of Papuans for Gusdur.
In 2003, not only did West Papua’s name change. But West Papua was split in half — Papua and West Papua. This fragmentation was achieved by Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of the first Indonesian president, Sukarno, the man responsible for 60 years of Papuan bloodshed.
She violated a provision of the Special Autonomy Law 2001, which was based on the idea that Papua remain a single territory. As prescribed by law, any division would need to be approved by the Papuan provincial legislature and local Papuan cultural assembly.
Tragic turning point
They were institutions set up by Jakarta itself to safeguard Papuan people, language, and culture.
One significant aspect of the first Special Autonomy Law was, any new policy introduced by the central government in relation to changing, adjusting, or creating a new identity of the region (West Papua) must be approved by the Papuan People’s Assembly (MRP). But this has never happened to date.
The year 2022 marks another tragic turning point in the fate of West Papua. West Papua is being divided again this year under President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, in the same manner that Jakarta did 20 years ago.
It is common for Jakarta elites to act inconsistently with their own laws when dealing with West Papua. Jakarta violated both the UN Charter and the New York Agreement, which they themselves agreed to and signed.
For example, chapters 11 (XI), 12 (XII), and 13 (XIII) of the UN Charter governing decolonisation and Papua’s right to self-determination, as specified in the New York Agreement’s Articles 18 (XVII), 19 (XIX), 20 (XX), 21 (XXI), and 22 (XXII) have not been followed. The words, texts and practices all contradict each other — demonstrating possible psychological disturbance — traumatising Papuans by being administered by such a pathological entity.
The disdain and demeaning behaviour shown by Indonesian governments towards Papuans in West Papua over the past 61 years are unforgivable and stained permanently in the soul of every living being in West Papua and New Guinea island.
“Right now, we are building Papua better,” declared Indonesia’s Vice-President, a narcissistic utterance from the highest office of the country, and this illustrates Jakarta’s complete disconnect from West Papua.
Morning Star flag-waving images from West Papua Independence Day 2022. Images: Papua Voulken
What led to this tragic situation?
West Papua has endured a lot for more than half a century, having been renamed and re-described numerous times by foreign invaders, from “IIha de papo” and “o’ Papuas” to “Isla de Oro”, or “Island of Gold”, to New Guinea, and New Guinea to Netherlands, English and German Papua and New Guinea. From this emerged Papua New Guinea, West Papua and Irian Jaya, and from Irian Jaya to Papua and West Papua.
As a result of renaming and colonial descriptions of Papuans as unintelligent pygmies, cannibals, and pagan savages; people without value, different foreign colonial intruders were able to enter West Papua and exploit and treat the Papuan people and their land, in accordance with the myth they created based on these names.
In addition to fostering a racist mindset, this depiction misrepresented reality as it was experienced and understood by Papuans over thousands of years.
The Jakarta settler colonial government continues to engage with West Papua with these profoundly misconstrued ideas. Hence the total disregard for what Papuans want or feel regarding their fate is a result of colonial renaming and accounts.
Now the eastern half remains under one name: Papua New Guinea. Jakarta’s settler colonial rulers just created five more settler provinces on the Western side of the island: South Papua Province, Central Papua Province, and Central Highlands Papua Province.
All these new settler colonial provinces are in the heart of New Guinea. Looking at West Papua’s history, we see so many marks and bruises of abuse and torture on her sacred body. In the future, West Papua is likely to suffer yet another grim fate of more torture with such dishonest words from Indonesia’s Vice-President.
Another sacred day
Today, December 1, marks yet another sacred day where we hold West Papua in our hearts and rally to her defence as her enemy marches to cut her into pieces on the settler colonial’s bed of Procrustes.
Let us remember and give glory to West Papua with the following words:
West Papua is an ancient and original particle, an atom of light and hope. It is a story about survival, resistance, betrayal, destruction, genocide, and survival against the odds. It is the last frontier where humanity’s greatness and wickedness are tested, where tragedy, aspiration, and hope are revealed. Papua is an innocent sacrificial lamb, a peace broker among the planet’s monsters, but no one knows her story — hidden deep beneath the earth – supporting sacred treaties between savages and warlords. West Papua is the home of the last original magic, the magic of nature. West Papua is the home of our original ancestors, the archaic Autochthons, the spiritual ancestors of our dream-time spiritual warriors — the pioneers of nature — the first voyageur across dangerous seas and land — the first agriculturalist — the most authentic, the original — we are the past and we are the future. West Papua is the original dream that has yet to be realised — a dream in the process of restoration to its original glory.
This is where West Papua is now. You cut me into pieces millions of times in millions of years, I will rebuild West Papua with these pieces a million times over again.
Happy West Papua Independence Day!
Yamin Kogoya is a West Papuan academic who has a Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development from the Australian National University and who contributes to Asia Pacific Report. From the Lani tribe in the Papuan Highlands, he is currently living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
Today marks 1 December 1961 when the West Papuan national flag, the Morning Star was first raised and the date has been honoured across the world ever since. The flag was raised by West Papuan legislators who had been promised independence by then-colonial ruler, the Netherlands, but this hope was dashed by Indonesian annexation in 1969. Today marks the 61st anniversary of that first flag-raising. West Papuans raising the flag risk prison sentences of up to 15 years. The following article from Tabloid Jubi newspaper in the Papuan capital Jayapura is part of a five-part series exposing the cruel and inhumane treatment of flag-raisers by Indonesian authorities.
Seven West Papuan makar — “treason” — convicts who were found guilty of raising the Morning Star flag were released on September 27 this year after completing their prison term of 10 months.
Until today, Papua activist and treason convict Melvin Yobe still does not know the result of his medical check-up at Dian Harapan Hospital earlier this year on February 16.
Maksimus Simon Petrus You also doesn’t know what punishment was given to the prison guard who brutally beat him.
Even more disturbing, however, is the fate of Zode Hilapok. He was unable to stand trial as his health continued to deteriorate due to tuberculosis. Zode Hilapok died while undergoing treatment at Yowari Regional General Hospital in Jayapura Regency on October 22.
Since detaining Zode Hilapok on December 2, 2021, law enforcement officials at all levels failed to provide adequate health services for his recovery and he was never put on trial.
Melvin Yobe and his friends when they were released from Abepura Prison on 27 September 2022. Image: Theo Kelen/Tabloid Jubi
Violating human rights A law faculty lecturer at Cenderawasih University, Melkias Hetharia, says treason charges against Papuan activists violated human rights — namely the right to freedom of speech and expression. He argues the treason law enforced against Melvin Yobe and his seven friends was enacted by the Dutch colonial government to punish coups and revolutions and was based on the experience of the Russian revolution.
Hetharia told Jubi that the enforcement of the Dutch East Indies’ Criminal Code did not consider the social, cultural and philosophical aspects of the Indonesian nation.
“The formation of treason articles in the Criminal Code did not consider aspects of human rights, therefore it is oppressive and injures a sense of justice,” Hetharia said.
He said the term “treason” as regulated in articles 104, 106, 107, 108 and 110 of the Criminal Code had been interpreted very broadly and was not in line with the meaning of aanslag as intended in Dutch, which means “attack”. An attack in that sense was using full force in an attempt to seize power.
“If the term treason in the articles is interpreted not as aanslag or attack, then the articles on treason are indeed contrary to human rights guaranteed and protected in the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia,” he said.
In fact, Melvin Yobe, Zode Hilapok, and their six friends are not the only Papuan activists who peacefully protested but have been charged with treason.
An infographic of Papuan activists who were charged with treason at the Jayapura District Court, Central Jakarta District Court, and Balikpapan District Court during 2013-2022. Graphic: Leon/Tabloid Jubi
From 2013 to 2022, at least 44 Papuan activists have been charged with treason. Among them — from Jayapura District Court data — from 2013 to 2022 there were 31 people, while in Balikpapan District Court in 2020 seven people and in the Central Jakarta Court in 2019 six people.
Treason ‘structural criminalisation’ Emanuel Gobay, director of the Papua Legal Aid Institute (LBH Papua), who is also the legal counsel for Melvin Yobe and his friends, believes the treason charges against Papuan activists are part of a systematic and structural criminalisation.
“The majority of those accused of treason are human rights activists and political activists,” Gobay told Jubi.
Gobay said the Morning Star flag was a cultural symbol of the Papuan people. According to Gobay, these cultural symbols are guaranteed under Papua Special Autonomy Law No, 21/2001.
Gobay said the raising of the Morning Star by Melvin Yobe and other Papuan activists was part of the demand for the government to resolve Papua’s political problems.
“They are asking the state to immediately implement the Special Autonomy Law,” said Gobay.
On that basis, Gobay considered the use of the treason article against Papuan activists as a form of criminalisation. He also emphasised that the raising of the Morning Star flag did not automatically make Papua independent from Indonesia, therefore the element of treason was not fulfilled.
Apart from the controversy on the use of treason legal articles for Papuan activists, the discriminative treatment received by prisoners of treason cases is also inappropriate, argues Gobay.
Prisoners treated badly
Gobay, who often provides legal assistance to Papuan activists suspected or charged with treason, said his clients were often treated badly.
Zode Hilapok’s health condition was the worst of all, said Gobay. During his detention in Abepura Prison, Hilapok’s health condition deteriorated and he lost weight rapidly.
Gobay said Abepura Prison was not suitable for detainees with a history of tuberculosis, such as Melvin Yobe and Zode Hilapok.
“After we surveyed and compared the condition of the prison with the guidelines on handling tuberculosis patients, the prison is not suitable for accommodating prisoners with tuberculosis,” he said.
Minister of Health Regulation No. 67/2016 on Tuberculosis Patient Treatment Guideline states that the treatment centre for tuberculosis patients must be open and have good air circulation and sunlight.
Gobay said the regulation also stipulated that local health offices and hospitals provide special units to treat tuberculosis patients.
“We hope that judges, prosecutors, and hospitals can implement the regulation,” he said.
This report is supported by Transparency International Indonesia (TII), The European Union and the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) in the Anticorruption Residency programme “Reporting Legal Journalism”. It is the final article in a five-part series in Tabloid Jubi and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
The Indonesian Ministry of Defense (MoD) revealed that it has conducted developmental testing of an indigenous air-launched smart munition in a social media post on 17 November. The Smart Bomb Development (SDB) is aimed at the medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) being developed by a local consortium of state-owned and public companies (PTTA […]
My research focuses on women entrepreneurs in Halmahera, Moluccas, in positioning themselves within the local cultural perspective, and their positive contribution as initiators supporting tourism development. Within a male-dominated social structure, they face challenges running their businesses, but persist in spite of marginalising geographical, economic and cultural conditions. Preliminary data reveals that the patriarchal culture in North Halmahera remain strong but does not eliminate the desire of women entrepreneurs to run their businesses, even though the results are still limited. In addition, they can still position themselves both as entrepreneurs and housewives. Through small businesses initiatives women entrepreneurs contribute to their local community.
This publication was supported by an ANU Gender Institute grant which provided funds for New Mandala and Connecting Designs to run a series of workshops supporting early career academics investigating issues of gender and sexuality in Southeast Asia to develop their audio-visual research communication skills.
Airbus, Bell, Leonardo and Sikorsky participated in an AMR survey to gauge their perspectives of business opportunities within the Asia-Pacific military rotorcraft market over the next few years. Military rotorcraft sales face several challenges in the Asian Pacific market. Predominantly there is a lack on requirement among potential customers to place large orders that could […]
Citarum River in West Java province is dubbed one of the dirtiest river in the world, and cleaning it up is an almost unmanageable job. The government has to deal with more than 3000 businesses along the river bank, with a large portion of them being multinationals. That excludes the tens of millions of households depending on water from the river. My research fieldwork, conducted in West Java from March to May 2022, attempted to verify what the authorities have applied to revitalise the river, and their types of relations. Apparently, massive financial and technological resources have been poured into the Citarum Watershed, including from overseas. Citarum is one of the most strategic rivers in Indonesia, and historically attractive for investors and foreign aid donors.
Cikapundung River in Bandung in March 2022. Image supplied by the author.
The armed forces, police, lawyers, and private businesses have been tasked with preventing the river from excessive pollution, and the mobilisation of scrutinising powers have created a situation where the river clean-up is politically motivated. Practices of subcontracting government aid projects are evident, as well as alleged collusion between district commandants and factory owners.
There are contending concepts of Citarum River between policy planners, the actors and their respective roles in the execution, and on the reframing of pollution management politics in the Citarum Watershed. My fieldwork followed Citarum sub-streams along Majalaya, Bojongsoang, Dayeuhkolot, City of Bandung, and City of Bekasi. The pollution level is more precarious mid-stream and downstream. As Citarum spans 297 kilometres, only very selective site visits and interviews were conducted.
A protest banner in a local community opposing the Ministry of Public Works and Housing, which they claim has under compensated them for land transfer contracts for drinking water projects in Bekasi. March 2022. Image supplied by the author.
After President Joko Widodo issued Presidential Regulation no. 15 in 2018 on Acceleration of Pollution and Damage Control on Citarum Watershed, Special Task Force (Satgas PPK Citarum) was founded. Currently, there are 23 sectors of Citarum watershed, with each sector having a commandant, often called Dansektor (acronym of Komandan Sektor or Sectoral Commandant) from Military Command III Siliwangi in West Java. In an interview with one of the chiefs of the Task force in South Bandung, I was told there are different opinions about territorial divisions of Citarum for more effective execution. The government’s action plan sanctions greater discretion and observation of ecological features of the watershed. Nevertheless, the plan has repeatedly failed to come into force. This was due to lack of facilitators, lack of state expenditure, and relatively low bargaining power with business owners. Moreover, my source said that the original Presidential Regulation was legislated in a rush without proper academic reviews.
Military perspectives divided Citarum based on military territorial operations. From originally just a few, it has expanded into 23 areas, regardless of each of the sub-streams’ ecological function. River clean-up activities include regular garbage cleaning in the river with communities and NGOs, mainly based in “kelurahan” (villages). The military and police officers also inspect the waste management systems regularly, often with surprise visits. However, my observations show that one command post was located just outside the gate of a textile factory in Dayeuhkolot, raising a question about neutrality.
About IDR 200 billion (approx. AUD 19,815,000) has been allocated for the armed forces from the budget of The Ministry of Public Works and Housing. A local environment activist commented that the military role was exaggerated. He implied that long before the military came, local environmental champions have been campaigning and working on the pollution issues. Moreover, he claimed that dispatching the army just meant more cost for the state instead of allocating the funds for civilian initiatives. However, according to a foreign project consultant, inviting the army into river rehabilitation program is one of the best decisions. It had not been done prior to 2018 and according to him, the army could expedite the clean-up to just a few years.
At UNFCCC COP 26 Summit in Glasgow, UK, Governor of West Java, Ridwan Kamil presented the progress of the rehabilitation of the Citarum, claiming that the the river has progressed from a state of “heavily polluted” to “lightly polluted”. One of the objectives of this presentation was to attract additional investment in Indonesia by repairing its environmental image on the global stage.
Polluted water flowing through a weir in the Bekasi River, March, 2022. Image supplied by the author.
Industrial waste management in Indonesia can be political. It is toxic and overflowing. In the case of Citarum particularly, it is also become exorbitantly expensive. Not only state expenditure, but also programs from overseas, such as the Asian Development Bank’s Integrated Citarum Water Resources Management Investment Program (ICWRMIP),attend to the pollution. Savings and Loans Cooperatives (KSP) in West Java also provide loans for wastewater management. However, the costs are not only generated from neutralising heavy metal hazard from the river, but also in cleaning up the costly bureaucracy and execution of the policy.
Andir Retention Pool prevents flooding in Andir, Bandung, by modifying water flow in Citarum River. May 2022. Image supplied by the author.
Fixing the “pollution” of resource misallocation begins with the planning process. Currently there are two key Citarum plan documents, one from National Planning Agency (Bappenas) and one from the Ministry of Public Works and Housing. Despite the existence of the Presidential regulation, the Citarum task force is not directly under the supervision of the president, so funding disbursement and power delegation become entwined. Operational divisions of the river should consider its natural segmentation and transboundary coordination among regions. Civil society initiatives and lawsuits, including from those who were a part of “anti-wastewater coalition,” are often ignored. Moreover, to keep the contamination level at bay by 2025 as planned, the government need to be extra vigilant in its execution. Another ambitious target is that by 2025, Citarum water can be filtered into drinking water supply. Yet, if current patterns continue and they are granted massive investment and technical assistance for such a short period of completion, the exercise will be prone to low accountability and resource capture.
All action plans have their limits. River pollution is not only a result of overwhelming waste, but a problem of resource capture across all levels of governance. However, in decentralised Indonesia, the integration of a Citarum clean-up campaign faces even broader political and administration challenges.
Earthquakes, much like lightning, can strike the same place again. This point was tragically driven home tragically in Cianjur in West Java struck by a deadly earthquake on 21 November 2022. The same area was heavily impacted by an earthquake on 28 March 1879. The same immediate region in West Java was again struck on 14 January 1900, impacting the nearby town of Sukabumi. Therefore, knowledge of where an earthquake has occurred in the past, and how large it was, is crucial. This forms a valuable input into modern seismic hazard maps. These help to determine how buildings and other critical infrastructure need to be safely constructed in a particular region. Reliable records of past earthquakes for the purpose of seismic hazard can be acquired from instrumental records. But on a geological time scale, the length of the instrumental record is short (~120yrs). It is, therefore, supplemented by evidence of earthquakes that occurred before instruments were available that are preserved in the geological and/or written historical record.
Damage in the Chinese district of Cianjur as a result of an earthquake on 28 March, 1879. (CCL in the Southeast Asian and Carribean Images Collection of KITLV)
Such inputs are vital to understand seismic hazard in Indonesia. It is among the world’s most densely populated countries and is also very tectonically active. This makes it particularly vulnerable to frequent earthquakes that can have major socioeconomic impacts, as we saw in Palu on Sulawesi in 2018. While the instrumental and geological record has been and continues to be investigated in Indonesia, little work has been done to systematically re-evaluate historical earthquakes in the archipelago for close to three decades. This includes locating and analysing written descriptions of shaking effects during earthquakes.
For these reasons, my co-authors Phil Cummins, Aron Meltzner, and I explored the historical earthquake catalogue for Indonesia in our recent study published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. We called our database the Gempa Nusantara database (also available via GitHub) which is collection of felt shaking intensity, or macroseismic intensity, observations for 1,200 earthquakes in the region of Indonesia spanning four centuries from 1546 until 1950. The name of our database which means “Earthquakes of the Indonesian Archipelago” in Bahasa Indonesia is derived from a combination of the Indonesian words for “earthquake” (gempa bumi, shortened colloquially to gempa) and “archipelago” (nusantara).
Figure 1: Colour filled circles display each of the 7380 macroseismic observations in Gempa Nusantara with colour bar indicating severity of shaking (inset: location of Indonesia in red).
In our study, we sought primary documentary sources from the colonial period in Indonesia. This was driven by the fact that many modern catalogues of historical earthquakes for Indonesia can be affected by inconsistencies that stem from a reliance on unvetted sources and/or the unwitting repetition of errors in earlier catalogues. In fact, many of these catalogues are by-products of a multi-lingual historical earthquake catalogue compiled by a German earth scientist, Arthur Wichmann. His work covers two periods: prior to 1857 and from 1858 to 1877. But these modern catalogues often fail to consult the primary sources used by Arthur Wichmann, nor do they add new information from unused primary sources such as historical newspapers.
The documental material we examined included those available to Arthur Wichmann such as colonial Dutch journals and official reports of post-earthquake damage reconnaissance. We added to this collection, new information gathered from other previously unused sources such as colonial Dutch newspapers and transcriptions of official correspondence by the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC (also known as the Dutch East India Company). Like the Wichmann compilation, and all modern catalogues derived from it, the sources for our study are largely derived from colonial sources, with one exception. Information on earthquakes from such sources diminish greatly during World War II, when Indonesia was occupied by Japan. However, we were able to fill this gap by searching archives of local Indonesian newspapers from this period.
To classify the severity of shaking during earthquakes in the absence of instruments we use an intensity scale called the European Macroseismic Scale (EMS-98). This allowed us to convert the descriptive observations we collected to numeric data. The EMS-98 scale is similar to the relatively well-known Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) scale. The different colour-coded circles displayed in Figure 1 indicate weak (cool colours) versus strong (warm colours) shaking for all 1,200 earthquakes in the Gempa Nusantara database. Very damaging shaking is displayed as darkening reds.
Given that Indonesia is prone to very large magnitude earthquakes and that it covers a region comparable to the east-west extent of Europe, it was surprising that reports of damaging shaking were few, accounting for barely 2% of all 7,380 macroseismic observations. Yet a handful of extreme observations exist such as for an earthquake in Ambon in 1898 which literally threw people several metres and even shifted heavy cannons. In other cases, the original materials we sought also helped bring about clarity. For example, an inaccurate translation from German to Dutch by Arthur Wichmann misled his contemporaries that an earthquake in 1820 in the Flores Sea made cannons “bounce” upon their gun carriages at Bulukumbu in southern Sulawesi. Material we found showed this to be factually incorrect. While the earthquake shook the cannons in questions, it did not produce as violent vertical shaking as was previously assumed.
Figure 2: Chronological differences in the completeness of macroseismic data for Indonesia.
The historical record is known to be influenced by geopolitics and socioeconomics. Given that our source materials were largely in European languages, and almost entirely from the Dutch, it was no surprise that the chronologically longest written records of felt earthquakes are from regions where the VOC established trading posts, that is, in western Java and in the Maluku region as can be seen in Figure 2. Observations from these regions increase after political control shifted into the hands of the Dutch. This contrasts with the written record of felt earthquakes in regions known to be very seismically active such as Papua which remained outside the Dutch sphere of interest until the early 20th century.
In the Gempa Nusantara database, we documented 1,200 earthquakes. This is a significantly greater number in comparison to those known previously. In three rare cases, we could discriminate the causative fault lines that were responsible for historical earthquakes in Sulawesi in 1909 and on Sumatra in 1892 and 1933. We also uncovered evidence for an undated tsunami in the region of Palu Bay in the 1800s. A particularly unexpected find was the discovery of severe liquefaction in rice fields near Batukarang on Sumatra in 1936. These press accounts from Sumatra were reminiscent in both description and spatial extent of the catastrophic liquefaction observed in the Palu region in 2018. We were also able to show for the first time that paleoseismic markers examined by paleoseismologists in coral microatolls along Sumatra’s west coast (Figure 3) preserve only the largest megathrust earthquakes. Smaller events known only from the historical record can often be hidden depending on the location of their source zones or are overwritten by larger climate signals also preserved in coral microatolls.
Figure 3: Locations of historical earthquakes ruptures on the Sunda Megathrust and on the Sumatran Fault (SFZ) along with coral microatolls (white and coloured circles) examined in the past by paleoseismologists.
Crucially, our dataset of numerical observations allowed a simple evaluation of the latest version of the 2017 Indonesian seismic hazard map (Figure 4). Using observations from out dataset, we calculated how often a certain level of intensity occurred in any given year in 12 Indonesian cities. This was compared with independent models from the 2017 Indonesian seismic hazard map to predict the same information for those same cities. The correspondence between observations and the hazard curves was good for some cities such as Surabaya. But for others such as Yogyakarta, it appears that damaging shaking occurs more frequently than the modern hazard curves suggest. We speculate a number of reasons for this ranging from, but not limited to, yet-to-be mapped faults and to the poorly known rates at which mapped faults move. It is not uncommon for future seismic hazard maps to be updated as newer, more accurate data becomes available and we believe the Indonesian hazard map will be the same.
Figure 4: The 2017 National Seismic Hazard map for Indonesia.
The well-known naturalist James Hutton stated, “that from what has actually been, we have data for concluding with regard to that which is to happen hereafter.” This applies broadly to research in general but also to the collection, curation and collation of written documentary materials pertinent to the study of historical earthquakes. Much work remains to be done on the historical earthquake catalogue for Indonesia that taps non-European sources, both local and regional, on the lines of recent historical investigations of Indonesian manuscripts. Our work on Gempa Nusantara demonstrates how a carefully vetted and well-documented historical record not only complements studies of seismic hazard but is itself an important standalone tool for the study of earthquake hazards. We hope it will ignite further research and policy conversations about seismic hazard in Indonesia.
Indonesia has areas devoted to production purposes, one of which is in Semarang Regency, Central Java. This special zone consists of a glut of mostly garment factories. The majority of workers in this production are women, because this work is considered to require the rigor that is identified with women. Engels’ “The Condition of the Working Class in England” is still relevant in reflecting the conditions of this labor, by extension drawing attention to the well-being of women workers as important figures in the process of capital production.
Amid the rush of women leaving work one evening, I encountered two women waiting for public transport. Atun (34), is a vocational high school graduate who has been a garment worker for the past three years. She has three children, two from her first marriage, and one from her second marriage. The eldest is in the 6th grade of elementary school, the second child is three years old, and the youngest is one. Her husband now works as a hotel employee and sometimes moonlights as an electronic device technician and driver. During her work, Atun entrusts her children to her mother.
Atun has to work an eight hour shift each day because of their urgent economic conditions. She finds the work environment very sensitive. Even getting caught a little off guard can bring problems because colleagues are always looking for mistakes. There, fellow workers are perceived as rivals, not as a group of equals.
After work, there is no rest; there is housework to be done. Even then, it doesn’t end there. In order to supplement her income, she took sells food to her colleagues in the factory. So, after all the housework is done, she cooks meals for sale the next day. Usually, she takes orders for food and drinks in between breaks, so that she doesn’t have to hawk her wares like other vendors. On top of this, she takes a primary role in caring for her son at night, giving up her sleeping hours when he is restless.
Meanwhile, Choli (22) has had a slightly different experience. She works in a factory not far from Atun’s factory. She has an undergraduate degree and is classified as a new worker because she has only been there a few months. In position, she is not much different from Atun. But she is not married and is trying a build working career. Like Atun, she also perceives a sensitive work environment. There are no friends at work.
Often Choli has to work beyond the allotted time. In the applicable regulations, she should only work eight hours a day. In fact, she often works nine to ten hours and does not count overtime. She often cries with tiredness. The factory requires staff to arrive 15 minutes before business hours with penalties for arriving late and no paid overtime. This is her factory’s way of extending the service life of a day.
Sometimes, her break time is inconsistent. All is adapted to the production process. Often the break-times are reduced and the day extended, making working hours much longer.
Neither Atun nor Choli can do anything other than be grateful. This is better than not working at all, especially in a culture that is thick with patriarchal practices, being able to work is something to be grateful for. This is what makes them accept every burdensome aspect of their work. Furthermore, it also leaves them powerless when they are admonished by their superiors for trivial reasons.
The absence of associations among workers exacerbates the problem. Instead of being able to unite on the basis of a shared burden, they are suspicious of and competitive with each other. According to Choli and Atun, workers prefer to curry favor with superiors, even if it means knocking down fellow workers. Labor unions are never a point of discussion.
Their only relief is to be able go home after work and immediately be free from that torturous job. But ironically, the house that should offer them rest actually increases their workload, as Atun experiences. There is no real freedom for a woman like herself, and her situation makes the factory and its organs of power stronger. Increased factory profits is the priority, and workers’ rights to rest, set hours and clear tasks are not protected.
The conditions of the workers are not at all a priority for these businesses. The conditions of women workers should be a serious concern for the government and human rights activists. Herstory has shown them vulnerable to being used and abused for the benefit of production.
The solidarity group West Papua Action Aotearoa has criticised New Zealand for not “being stronger” over growing global concern about Indonesian human rights violations in West Papua, and contrasted this with Vanuatu’s leadership.
“Eight countries raised issues about human rights in West Papua and it is good to see our government among them,” said Catherine Delahunty, spokesperson for West Papua Action Aotearoa, in a statement.
New Zealand called for Indonesia to uphold, respect and promote human rights obligations in West Papua, but did not call for Indonesia to immediately allow the visit of the UN Commissioner for Human Rights.
Of the eight countries raising the issues only Vanuatu and the Marshall Islands made direct statements calling for the visit and Australia “made a better statement” than New Zealand, calling for Indonesia to “ensure access, including by credible, independent observers”.
“In the light of recent events including the concerns around the death of Filep Karma and the attacks on demonstrators in West Papua by the state, just calling for human rights to be upheld is clearly not enough,” said Delahunty.
“We need our government to speak out strongly in all UN Forums in support of the UN Commissioner of Human Rights proposed visit to West Papua.
“The Pacific Island Forum (PIF) has supported this call and our Foreign Minister has told our group that she supports it. However the UNHR review was an opportunity missed.
“Our foreign policy position should support the position of Vanuatu whose clear, sustained challenge to the violent colonisation of West Papua by Indonesia is admirable.
“Human rights will never be upheld when a regime occupies a country against the will of the people, and other Pacific countries need to demand better, starting with greater transparency over human rights violations, opening the borders to the UN High Commissioner and all international journalists.”
Following the first-ever dairy-free festival in Jakarta, Indonesia-based Green Rebel Foods has launched into the plant-based dairy category.
Green Rebel is a leading producer of plant-based protein across Southeast Asia. Its new category launch, dubbed Creamy Crew, which includes cheese, sauces, and dressings, builds on its continuing innovation in the plant-based sector.
The new range is available now through the company’s website and select partners, and the company says it will begin shipping across other Asian markets early next year. The inaugural products in the dairy-free range include egg-free mayonnaise, a caesar-style dressing, and cheddar-style block cheese.
Plant-based alternatives for Asian communities
“While dairy and dairy products are not a traditional part of Asian cuisine, it is not uncommon for these products to be found and eaten in many Asian households due to globalisation and global trade,” Max Mandias, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Green Rebel Foods, said in a statement. “We at Green Rebel Foods have a vision of creating plant-based alternatives that suit Asian communities around the world, and this category, Creamy Crew, is a continuation of that promise.”
Green Rebel co-founders Max Mandias and Helga Angelina
The demand for dairy-free options in Asia is increasing as the prevalence of lactose intolerance is extremely high; more than 90 percent of Asian populations can’t tolerate dairy. A recent survey from Rakuten Insight found that plant-based milk is the leading plant-based category in Indonesia.
Dairy 2.0
Unlike other parts of the world where younger generations are embracing the alternatives, Indonesia’s largest demographic is the 40-54-year-old segment, driven in large part by concerns over diabetes as well as lactose intolerance.
Green Rebel debuts cheddar-style blocks | Courtesy
Like meat, conventional dairy is also a key contributor to climate change, with livestock responsible for about 60 percent of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions.
Green Rebel says its new dairy-free products contain less fat than the conventional and lower in calories.
“Through Creamy Crew, we continue to innovate to introduce plant-based products that are healthy and delicious,” Mandias said, helping consumers to enjoy their favorite variety of dishes even without milk and eggs.”
Indonesia’s PT Dahana has in early November signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Edge Group subsidiary Lahab Defence Systems for a possible joint venture in the construction of a TNT plant at the Dahana Energetic Material Center (EMC) area in Subang. The MoU also calls for co-operation in the production of several types of […]
