PT Len Industri (Persero) and Thales have signed an agreement on 30th May 2024, to launch a Joint Venture (JV) that will take Indonesia’s defence capabilities to the next level by reinforcing joint local industrial activities in manufacturing, engineering and services. A Centre of Excellence, first of its kind in Indonesia, will be established to initially […]
Bangkok, May 29, 2024—Proposed amendments to Indonesia’s broadcasting law represent a clear and present danger to press freedom and should be scrapped immediately to uphold and protect democracy, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Wednesday.
According to multiple pressreports citing a leaked draft of the broadcast bill, electronic and television broadcasts of “exclusive investigative journalism” would be restricted under the proposed changes, which are currently tabled for debate in the House of Representatives.
The bill, which also includes prohibitions on broadcasting LGBTQ content, does not provide details on how the proposed ban on investigative reporting would be implemented, Reuters reported, citing the leaked draft. Lawmakers who sit on Commission 1, the House committee overseeing the bill, have said the revisions are initial and still subject to change, the Reuters report said.
“Indonesian lawmakers should immediately scrap their wrongheaded amendments to the broadcasting law,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “Indonesia’s democracy works precisely because journalists can investigate and report freely on their findings. Any changes to the broadcasting law should protect, not imperil, press freedoms.”
Changes to the 2002 Broadcast Law were first deliberated by legislators in 2020, on the grounds that the law required updating, Reuters reported. If the proposed revisions are passed, they would apply to all content broadcast in the country, including via online streaming platforms, the Reuters report said.
The revised law could be passed as early as September, according to news reports. A discussion of the bill scheduled for Wednesday in the House of Representatives was postponed at the request of the Gerindra Party, a Tempo report said.
Indonesia’s democracy faces new challenges as it transitions from the outgoing President Joko Widodo to president-elect Prabowo Subianto, an ex-soldier linked to rights abuses, including the disappearances of activists in the late 1990s. Prabowo has variously denied and acknowledged the unresolved accusations.
Critics of the proposed amendments quoted in a South China Morning Post report suggested that both Widodo and Prabowo have incentives to curb the media’s ability to investigate their past actions.
Indonesia’s House of Representatives and Executive Office of the President did not immediately reply to CPJ’s emailed request for comment.
A West Papuan independence group has condemned French “modern-day colonialism in action” in Kanaky New Caledonia and urged indigenous leaders to “fight on”.
In a statement to the Kanak pro-independence leadership, exiled United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) president Benny Wenda said the proposed electoral changes being debated in the French Parliament would “fatally damage Kanaky’s right to self-determination”.
He said the ULMWP was following events closely and sent its deepest sympathy and support to the Kanak struggle.
“Never give up. Never surrender. Fight until you are free,” he said.
“Though the journey is long, one day our flags will be raised alongside one another on liberated Melanesian soil, and the people of West Papua and Kanaky will celebrate their independence together.”
“This crisis is one chapter in a long occupation and self-determination struggle going back hundreds of years,” Wenda said in his statement.
‘We are standing with you’
“You are not alone — the people of West Papua, Melanesia and the wider Pacific are standing with you.”
“I have always maintained that the Kanak struggle is the West Papuan struggle, and the West Papuan struggle is the Kanak struggle.
“Our bond is special because we share an experience that most colonised nations have already overcome. Colonialism may have ended in Africa and the Caribbean, but in the Pacific it still exists.”
“We are one Melanesian family, and I hope all Melanesian leaders will make clear statements of support for the FLNKS’ current struggle against France.
“I also hope that our brothers and sisters across the Pacific — Micronesia and Polynesia included — stand up and show solidarity for Kanaky in their time of need.
“The world is watching. Will the Pacific speak out with one unified voice against modern-day colonialism being inflicted on their neighbours?”
Integrated Surveillance and Defense (ISD) was awarded a contract by the U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD), for the Indonesia Navy (TNI-AL) Maritime Patrol Aircraft (MPA) mission systems upgrades, modifications, and related support program. Under the contract, ISD shall upgrade two CN-235 maritime patrol and modify one King Air 350i aircraft with proven […]
The Indonesian Air Force (TNI-AU) has taken delivery of its fifth and final Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules on order, the Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced on 16 May. The aircraft, with serial number A-1342, arrived at the Halim Perdanakusuma Air Base after a ferry flight that started from Lockheed Martin’s Marietta facility in Georgia […]
A New Zealand solidarity action group has called on the New Zealand government to back indigenous independence calls in the Pacific and press both France to grant Kanaks sovereignty and Indonesia to end its rule in West Papua.
Catherine Delahunty, a former Green Party MP and spokesperson for West Papua Action Aotearoa, said today it would be good timing to exert pressure on Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron visiting the New Caledonian capital Nouméa this week.
“France is not living up to its commitments under the Noumea Accord and not meeting its responsibilities towards a country listed on the UN Decolonisation Committee,” she said in a statement.
The West Papua Action Aotearoa network was standing in solidarity with the Kanak people who were struggling for independence from French rule, she said.
“The New Zealand government could show support for both the end of French rule in Kanaky and Indonesian rule in West Papua.
“Both these countries should withdraw their military and prepare to hand over executive power to the indigenous citizens of Kanaky and West Papua.”
Nouméa rioting ‘unsurprising’
Delahunty said that the rioting last week against the French authorities in Kanaky New Caledonia was “completely unsurprising” as the threats to an independent future by pushing through a a constitutional electoral bill to include more non-indigenous residents of Kanaky had caused outrage.
“Much like West Papua the colonial control of resources and government in Kanaky is oppressive and has created sustained resistance,” she said.
“Peace without justice maybe be temporarily restored but our government needs to call on France to do more than dialogue for the resumption of French control.
When I walked my seven-year-old twins to their school in the East Java city of Malang, we sometimes made a game of counting the cigarette ads we passed during our ten-minute journey. The day in 2016 when we tallied fifty-eight one way, they would have passed over a hundred cigarette ads round trip.
We spotted four-metre banners adorning shops, signs erected on poles, and more modestly sized stickers that I also counted. If cigarette companies made these stickers, hired people to post them, and paid taxes on them, then they were surely effective in recruiting smokers. Sticker ads often appear at young children’s eye level, and tobacco control scholars have documented how tobacco companies work across the global south—including Indonesia—to ensure that cigarettes are widely sold near schools.
A marketing contractor attaches cigarette ads to a stall (author photo)
The dominant position cigarette ads command in Indonesian public space raise questions of tobacco justice and labour that were central to my research on Indonesia’s cigarette market. This market—the world’s second largest—is striking for its size, unique product composition, and gender disparities. Before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Indonesians were smoking over 300 billion cigarettes a year. 95% of cigarettes sold in Indonesia are laced with cloves and called kretek, which onomatopoeically evokes the crackling sound they make when clove fragments ignite. So-called white cigarettes (rokok putih) without cloves make up only 5% of the market. In a country where about two out of three men smoke, boys and men experience social pressure to demonstrate adult masculinity by smoking. Girls and women are discouraged from smoking but exposed to environmental smoke in the majority of homes and workplaces.
My research focused on Sampoerna, Indonesia’s largest clove cigarette company, which was founded in 1913 by Liem Seeng Tee, a Chinese migrant. The company was primarily owned and operated by Liem’s descendants until Philip Morris International (PMI) acquired it in 2005. My recent book Kretek Capitalism shows that the cigarette industry in Indonesia is sustained through an extraordinary amount of paid and unpaid labour on the part of employees, contractors, retailers, community groups, artists, influencers, and consumers.
To understand the profoundly consequential relationship between Indonesians and these lethal commodities, I look beyond the “pull” of nicotine desire and addiction to examine the relentless “push” of predatory capitalism and the labour exploitation that undergirds it. I show that Sampoerna goes to great lengths to enlist and orchestrate this labour and to make it seem meaningful and fulfilling to those who perform it, even when its ultimate purpose is increasing company profits. Some of the jobs that kretek capitalism creates are stable, pay well, and offer opportunities for advancement and upward mobility in Indonesia’s difficult labour market. But a great deal of kretek capitalist labour is partial, seasonal, contract, low-paying, or unpaid.
Tobacco control versus commodity nationalism
From a public health perspective, the tobacco epidemic unleashes unnecessary and unjust suffering in Indonesia. Tobacco-related diseases claim an estimated 290,000 Indonesian lives each year, over 50,000 of which are attributable to second-hand smoke exposure. In Indonesian households where the father smokes, tobacco accounts for 22% of average weekly household expenditures, crowding out spending on food, education, and health care, contributing to high rates of child malnutrition and stunting, and diminishing health and economic life chances. People in Indonesia’s lowest income bracket smoke at twice the rate of Indonesians in the highest income bracket, implying that the poor bear the greatest burden of tobacco-related disease and risk of financial devastation due to chronic illness and the premature death of key household providers.
But Indonesia’s tobacco control advocates are resource-poor and politically weak compared to the wealthy, powerful, and entrenched industry, which insists that tobacco is a vital source of employment and tax revenue, overlooking government losses and expenditures as tobacco-related diseases diminish productivity and create high treatment costs in Indonesia’s single payer health system, BPJS Kesehatan.
Industry supporters often emphasise that kretek hold not only economic but also cultural significance. Because the commodity combines the New World crop of tobacco with cloves, indigenous to the “Spice Islands” of Maluku, and a brew of flavourants known as saus (sauce), proponents claim that it represents uniquely Indonesian cultural heritage. Commodity nationalists frame smoking kretek as a patriotic act that benefits the nation and links fellow citizen–consumers, creating national communion through consumption.
Coffee table books, industry- and government-sponsored kretek museums, and Netflix’s recent adaptation of Ratih Kumala’s novel Gadis Kretek, or Cigarette Girl, promote this perspective by romanticising and aestheticising the industry and soft-pedalling its harms. Kretek nationalist discourse and nostalgia focuses on the hand-rolled kretek and the women workers who make this charismatic commodity and figure as iconic and endangered by tobacco control. In the post-Suharto era of democratic transition and reformasi, it has become expedient for the industry to cultivate grassroots groups that purport to represent such workers alongside tobacco and clove farmers, vendors, and smokers who insist on the industry’s economic and cultural significance.
A diorama in the House of Sampoerna museum recalls the modest early years of family business (author photo)
The organisation Komunitas Kretek (Kretek Community or Komtek) cultivates a more militant kretek nationalism. Its website, social media, and downloadable books serve as a clearing house for product reviews and brand endorsements for the beginning smoker, odes to smoking rituals and to the “little people” whose livelihoods depend on the industry, challenges to the scientific consensus that tobacco is addictive and harmful, and claims that the kretek is not a cigarette and may cure rather than cause diseases like cancer.
Komtek associates the commodity with positive sentiments like love, affection, pleasure, and pride, but also mobilises negative sentiments including suspicion and hatred towards those who criticise the kretek industry. Komtek portrays domestic tobacco control activists, who have faced death threats, as national traitors and colonial lackeys. Foreign tobacco control organisations figure as neocolonial agents aiming to usurp Indonesian sovereignty and suppress indigenous industry, with Michael Bloomberg singled out for antisemitic depictions and accusations that his ulterior motive is selling nicotine replacement products. Komtek enhances commodity nationalism’s potency by pitching it as not only pro-kretek but also anti-colonial.
Kretek nationalist depictions of the industry typically gloss over its dominance by a small number of companies that achieved staggering market success by adopting global Big Tobacco technologies. The Indonesian cigarette market was dominated by white cigarettes through the 1960s. Over the 1970s and 1980s, the four largest kretek manufacturers—Bentoel, Gudang Garam, Djarum, and Sampoerna—imported European machines and mechanised kretek production. They marketed the new machine-rolled kretek as combining Indonesian taste (cloves and saus) alongside white cigarette features associated with modernity, prestige, and quality control that made them appear less harmful than unfiltered hand-rolled kretek, which were stigmatised as low class, coarse, dirty, and cheap.
By the 1990s, the four large kretek manufacturers, all of which were owned by ethnic Chinese Indonesian families, controlled around 80% of the industry and produced the majority of their cigarettes in mechanised factories. A number of Indonesia’s wealthiest billionaires and oligarchs made their fortunes in tobacco, including Putera Sampoerna, Djarum’s Hartono brothers, and Gudang Garam’s Susilo Wonowidjojo (Bentoel was part of Peter Sondakh’s Rajawali Corpora from 1991 until British American Tobacco acquired the company in 2009).
A vintage Bentoel ad promotes machine-rolled kretek as “cleaner” and “healthier” (author photo)
The success of Indonesian firms in marginalising white cigarette producers eventually led the latter to acquire kretek companies and “indigenise.” Tobacco control activists claim that Indonesia’s refusal to sign and ratify the World Health Organization’s 2003 Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) helped motivate PMI’s acquisition of Sampoerna. After British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco International followed suit by acquiring kretek firms, foreign firms assumed control over 40% of the Indonesian cigarette market.
Kretek companies drew on Big Tobacco’s deceptive product engineering (e.g. synthetic filters that turn brown when smoked and cigarettes that yield low tar and nicotine readings when machine evaluated) and marketing strategies (e.g. “light” or “mild” brand descriptors and pastel and pale metallic palettes) to make kretek appear safer and thereby perpetuate uptake and continuity of lethal commodity consumption. While producers have applied cutting-edge global technologies to the kretek, they have also relied on cultural heritage to market the industry as artisanal, traditional, and employment generating, working to ensure that the hand-rolled kretek, which claims only 20% of the market, looms large in the public imagination.
Labouring for kretek capitalism
The urge to protect employment opportunities in a country that suffers from un(der)employment and surplus labour is understandable. The Indonesian cigarette industry generates thousands of jobs and economic opportunities, especially in the tobacco producing and manufacturing regions of Java.
The industry’s drive to constantly mechanise and increase efficiency across the commodity chain, however, has the effect of reducing wage labour opportunities even when production levels are maintained or increased. European rolling machines that churn out 10,000 to 20,000 cigarettes a minute trivialise the feats of human cigarette rollers who make 300 to 600 an hour. Tobacco is mechanised both in the fields where it is grown and in the factories where it is processed, with stems and dust that would formerly have been waste converted into reconstituted tobacco (“recon”). Whereas hand-rolled kretek weigh two grams, machine-rolled kretek contain one gram or less and often incorporate puffed tobacco (made from leaves saturated with freon and ammonia gases and then freeze-dried) that enables producers to make more cigarettes with less tobacco.
Beyond the industry’s drive to increase efficiency and reduce labour inputs, my research raised questions about the nature and conditions of kretek industry labour and how it reinforces gender and class inequalities. Both tobacco and clove labour tend to be part-time and seasonal and are often compensated below minimum wage. Women, who often make up the bulk of the tobacco workforce, are typically paid significantly lower wages than men. Tobacco labour exposes workers to toxic pesticides, the “suckercides” used to control tobacco plants’ growth, and nicotine (which can result in poisoning known as Green Tobacco Sickness). The masculine labour of clove picking is better compensated but seasonal and intermittent, and pickers who scale 25 to 40 feet trees on precarious ladders risk disabling or lethal falls.
I encountered widespread ambivalence among tobacco and clove farmers over whether their crops were sufficiently profitable to justify ongoing investment, and all were engaged in additional enterprises and crop production to make ends meet. World Bank studies have found high levels of poverty, poor housing, food insecurity, and reliance on government benefits among tobacco and clove farmers, and they attribute Indonesia’s import of 30–40% of the tobacco it consumes to the fact that farming is an insufficiently lucrative endeavour. In tobacco-growing regions cigarette companies primarily market budget brands—except during harvest when they briefly hawk expensive (“premium”) brands to rapidly relieve farmers of their newfound cash.
Women workers hoe a farmer’s tobacco field (author photo)
Sampoerna jobs in both hand-rolled and machine-rolled factories are coveted for their relatively high salaries and benefits, but the work itself is physically and mentally demanding and beset by tensions over contracting. Feminised hand-rolling factory workers are subject to punishing piecework quotas that produce stress and cumulative injuries. Workers with limited access to formal education and job opportunities appreciate high levels of take-home pay when factories require overtime but quickly find their household finances precarious in its absence.
Over the past three decades, Sampoerna has increasingly relied on contractors in lower minimum wage regions where workers must meet higher quotas for lower pay. Since 2014, Sampoerna has closed three of its own hand rolling factories, laid off thousands of workers, and reduced the contracts of its 38 “Third Party Operators.” Mechanised factories offer competitive salaries, benefits, and training opportunities but also subject their workers—who are hierarchised as contractors, daily workers, and monthly workers—to draining around-the-clock shift schedules, noise exposure and other factory hazards, and relentless pressure to “continuously improve” their quantity, quality, and safety performance.
Cigarette companies also recruit a considerable amount of labour—some of which is uncompensated—to promote their products and collect data on potential consumers. Sampoerna circumvents restrictions on directly promoting cigarettes through social media by hiring event organisers, influencers, and brand ambassadors to create hashtags, irresistible selfie walls, and competitions with prizes that require participants to register (yielding personal data including identity card, mobile phone number, social media accounts, and favourite cigarette brands) and post relevant content on platforms like Instagram. These efforts are particularly focused on youth and work through campus hobby groups, café and bar sponsorships, and amateur and professional music and art events.
A cigarette Sales Promotion Girl interacts with a potential customer (author photo)
Sampoerna’s marketing staff and contractors also extract shelf and advertising space and labour from the millions of independent retailers who reach into urban kampungs and remote highlands with commodities like instant noodles, soap, and cigarettes. Cigarette companies incentivise independent retailers to sell and advertise their products with “free” packs and competitions that prod them to create large pack displays or sell single sticks, all of which helps create the advertising-saturated and tobacco-friendly environment I described at the outset. Sampoerna has recruited over 243,000 independent retailers as “Sampoerna Retail Community” (SRC) partners that it encourages to modernise and promote its product. The company took advantage of the Covid-era demand for contactless shopping to expand the SRC “digital business ecosystem”, which is meant to generate more retail traffic and consumer data.
A Sampoerna Retail Community shop strategically located near a university (author photo)
Conclusion
Sampoerna remains Indonesia’s largest cigarette producer, although the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent government tax policies have weakened its market position. Indonesia’s cigarette market has rebounded considerably from its initial Covid decline (from almost 306 billion sticks in 2019 to 276 billion in 2020), but Sampoerna’s market share has fallen from 32.2% in 2019 to around 28% as smokers switched to lower-priced brands in the face of lower income and government excise tax hikes on the largest cigarette producers.
With Sampoerna, Philip Morris International has maintained its dominance over the white cigarette, “low-tar” machine-rolled kretek, and hand-rolled kretek market sectors, while also setting its sights on controlling the nascent “reduced-risk” nicotine product sector. In late 2022, the company began producing “smoke-free” HEETS tobacco products at its new $186 million plant in Karawang, and it has been marketing these heat-rather-than-combust products along with the IQOS device in Indonesia.
Public health researchers have expressed concern that new nicotine-containing products, like “light” cigarettes in the past, contain hidden health risks, are used to recruit youth consumers rather than facilitate smoking cessation, and perpetuate addiction among “dual users.” Juul, whose potent nicotine salt formula and aggressive youth marketing on social media led to a teen vaping epidemic in the United States and inspired Philip Morris’ parent company Altria to acquire a 35% stake in the company for US$12.8 billion, stands as a stark cautionary tale. But for now, the reduced-risk sector remains a thin slice of the industry, especially in low- and middle-income countries like Indonesia.
Indonesians live neither in the fictionalised and romanticised past depicted by kretek nationalists nor in the equally imaginative and deceptive smoke-free future that the tobacco industry itself promises to deliver. In contemporary, actually existing kretek capitalism, a significant share of the industry is controlled by foreign firms, kretek are mostly machine-rolled, the poorest smoke the most, and tobacco control activists struggle for influence in a context where policy decisions are shaped by patriarchal sympathy with male smokers and friendly relations between industry and government.
Here Haris Azhar shares how and why he believes the law can be used as a powerful tool to deal with repression of democratic voices and their rights. Read more from our In My Own Words series here.
My name is Haris Azhar. I would say I’ve been working, in general terms, on human rights issues for the last 25 years. I work across the country in Indonesia on some human rights, issues or situations, and in some conflict areas such as in Papua.
I have been working for and dealing with some vulnerable groups such as labour groups, as well as the indigenous people and victims from the violence as well. These days I practise as a lawyer, I do pro bono and also professional for-profit work where I use the profits work to subsidise the pro bono and public interest legal work. I have also joined some organisations, and I was director for two human rights organisations. So that’s why I’ve been very human rights focused.
In early 2024 me and my friend Fatia were brought to court. We won, and we got a good decision from the court. But this is not the final one, because the attorney general has appealed to the Supreme Court. I think this whole process was meant to serve as an example.
The whole process, especially last year, was intended to be intimidation. The litigation or the pre-trial process was intended to intimidate me [and] not to not say more about the practice of business oligarchs in this country. But myself, lawyers, and groups here said, we would not say sorry. We would not stop speaking, and that those in power could continue their judicial harassment of us and that we would fight them.
And during the fight, a lot of things happened [such as] intimidations, negative accusations and campaigns. They accused us of hoax stories, but actually they did the hoax stories. They took over and intercepted my mobile phone as well. These are the lengths and practices of intimidation in place.
However, the process of the court for people like us, we pretty much don’t really care about the final decisions. We can see the shadow of the prisons, because what the government thinks is important for them is for us to not have democratic voices. There aremany cases by politicians and by business groups that aim to criminalise decent voices, and it has become a [common] practice. There are even consultants that can help you if you would like to know how to criminalise decent/democratic voices.
It’s become an industry against freedom of expression, to show that, “This is what happens if you are against us.” They wanted to show they could bring me to court so the warning was that anyone who becomes the client of Haris should be aware. It was symbolic, and that’s what I mean it is a message to intimidate and to intimidate vulnerable groups especially.
Widespread engagement on human rights, working through organisations, has developed not only my knowledge, my skill, but also my networks. This has also developed my interest in what some of the ways we (as a nation) would like to put on the table with regards to issues of human rights.
As a practising lawyer, we have always believed here that we can use the law [to achieve justice]. However the movement here is not like in South Africa, as an example, where at one point in South Africa there was no real equality. There was no legal institution that could be used to secure fairness. We don’t have that kind of situation here [in Indonesia], but we are still looking for the formalisation of equality and fairness.
We like to use the legal debate, space, and discourse as a way to combat evil, because the law provides the kind of tools or ammunition to attack evil. Those in power hide behind the law and therefore here in Indonesia, most of the battle and discourse always has an element of legality.
I believe that the law is one of the crucial things that need to be handled, in addition to other advocacy issues. Because we know that the law or legal mechanisms are [also] being used by the bad guys, by the oligarchs to justify and legalise their plans and to do their own business. Those in power always say that they have complied with the law, that they uphold the rule of law, but actually we know that the law they comply with is their own creation. It is their own definition. That’s why we [as legal practitioners] need to step in, even though it’s not the popular action to do so.
If those in, and adjacent to, power cannot be left to create what is good and not good within the framework of law. We need to bring in the voices from the ground. We need to bring the voices from the indigenous people. We need to bring the voices from the labour groups, from the students, from the women’s groups, and many other vulnerable groups who are connected to the issues.
This is instead of the politicians and the business groups alone making their own arguments and developing their own definitions. We cannot let them be, and let them take over in that kind of way. Rule of law and legislation, has to be accompanied and coloured by the vulnerable voices and interests. This is why we insist that a part of the campaign, part of the research, is that we take the legal action as well.
The gap between the haves and the political groups on the ground is huge. This has been happening year on year, and it is getting worse every year. The new regulations and legislations that we have here, which very much comply with the interests of the business groups which belong to some politicians, create more loose protection of rights of workers and women. For the youth and the students, they are getting fewer protections for their education and freedom.
There’s no freedom on campus for students anymore, [because of] intervention from the government and the police on campuses. It’s getting obvious these days. So I think we need at least two things. First, figuring out how to protect vulnerable groups, because why they were attacked or would be attacked is because they found irregularities, and problematic issues behind the policies of the government, or the law.
These issues have led to economic issues, social issues, business issues and so the vulnerable groups make a choice where they complain or protest, but they get attacked by police, government and intelligence. That is why we need more collaborations with vulnerable groups.
We also need more friends — lawyers, international advocates, researchers — coming down into the rural areas, and into the urban areas to capture what is happening and make a noise, to campaign. That’s why we need to have the first group that I mentioned before. We need not to deal with the substance of the problem, but with the second layer of the problem, [which is] the attacks of the participation, the effects to the participation. For this we need to have a lot of groups [working on] how to deal with this kind of shrinking space.
We just had the 2024 elections where we campaigned around the threat to our freedoms of speech and expression. Some of the candidates responded very well, but the one that was supported by the current regime didn’t have a strong resonance with what we are saying. In addition to the campaign, along with my criminalisation, myself, some friends and organisations submitted a complaint to the Constitutional Court.
Our complaint was regarding some legal articles which were being used against me and against some journalists. We won the case in the Constitutional Court earlier this year, and an article which had been used to criminalise a lot of people has now been dropped. But this win is very short [lived] because we have some articles within certain laws which allow the police to criminalise speech.
When I said we won, that’s regarding just one article in our criminal code. But in the next year and a half we will have a new criminal code implemented and new articles to criminalise speeches. We will need to challenge those articles in the next two years. It’s like Tom and Jerry, where we play hide and seek. It seems politicians and business need a shield to protect themselves from the public, hence these situations but we keep fighting them using the same law.
Legal institutions are not our institutions yet. They are still their institutions [meaning the powerful]. However to a certain degree, the legal space is an open stage for you to perform, to have a say. I think if we don’t fill the space, it will be filled by those who are not supportive of freedom of speech or freedom of expression.
These are the reasons why I think we have to join legal action. So as to not give space for evil to come in and occupy. Also, legal action is not the only type of work needed. It has to be one among others. For instance there is advocacy work too. But law cannot be neglected and that’s why this current situation (and the coming situations), require more than just focusing on the legal system. It has to be about a collaborative methodology and approach.
A Filipino civilian convoy called “Atin Ito” claims to have breached China’s blockade around the Huangyan Dao, also known as Scarborough Shoal, in the South China Sea. The convoy reportedly aimed to resupply Filipino fishermen but stopped 50 nautical miles from the shoal. The Philippine Coast Guard and Navy monitored the mission. What are the real goals behind it? Are the fishermen being exploited, and are there other forces at play? Join us as we uncover the real story behind this high-stakes maritime drama.
SME Ordnance (SMEO), a subsidiary company of National Aerospace and Defence Industries Sdn. Bhd is proud to announce two more strategic partnerships that were forged during DSA Malaysia 2024 aimed at advancing small arms ammunition production and distribution in both local and international markets. Firstly, SMEO has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with SAC […]
Starbucks buys 3% of all coffee in the world – so its responsibility to safeguard the future of the industry, which is being ravaged by climate change, can’t be understated. Here’s how it’s helping coffee farmers adapt and thrive.
It’s been nearly a decade since the world’s largest coffee company opened its Farmer Support Centre in North Sumatra, a three-hour drive from the region’s capital, Medan. It was the company’s eighth such facility – there are a total of 10 spread across the world – where its agronomists work with local farmers to find solutions to climate change, enhance the yield and quality of their crops, and increase profitability.
The FSC in Sumatra supports farming communities across the Aceh province, alongside other regions like Flores, Sulawesi, west and east Java, and Bali. If you’ve ever been to a Starbucks Reserve store, you may have seen coffees from these origins served at the bar. The company has been sourcing its coffee from Sumatra ever since it was founded in 1971, and is today the largest buyer of coffee in Indonesia, which itself is the world’s fourth-largest producer of the crop.
But coffee faces a difficult future, with climate change and extreme weather events affecting yields, quality and prices, and endangering 60% of all coffee species grown. This will affect not just smallholder farms and coffee suppliers, but even speciality coffee roasters and big chains like Starbucks, which purchases 3% of the world’s coffee.
There’s a very real possibility that 60 years from now, arabica coffee may not exist – or at least not in its current form anyway. Something needs to change, and for a company that exclusively deals with arabica, Starbucks knows that. I had the chance to visit the FSC in North Sumatra earlier this month, where I learnt exactly what the coffee chain is doing to secure the industry’s future. The answer? A heck of a lot.
Shifting plantation patterns for greater productivity
As you enter the FSC, you’re greeted with a gorgeous piece of artwork encapsulating the region’s women-led coffee community, created by Australian multidisciplinary artist Leia Sidery. There are three layers: one shows a mother and a child looking out at the busy women who work a coffee farm, another pans back over the surrounding landscape, and the outermost layer pays homage to the region’s rainforest and biodiversity.
Overlooking the painting is a long table set up with tons of coffee and cups for a tasting session (cupping, as it’s called in the industry). Outside, it’s all green, with model coffee plantations, shade trees and cash crops, a greenhouse, and a barn with farm animals all thriving in the ecosystem.
Courtesy: Starbucks
Indonesia, a former Dutch colony, has adopted its coffee plantation system from the Netherlands. But this is labour-intensive, and Starbucks agronomists are promoting Central American farm systems, which feature high-density plantations dotted with shade trees in an intercropping pattern that protects the forest, allows for higher production, and adapts to the local climate.
This is why it’s not just coffee trees you see in its facility – there’s cinnamon, areca nuts, betel leaf and vanilla too. In the old and existing system, the coffee trees are quite short, but this leaves a lot of empty space. To make things more compact and efficient, Starbucks is introducing taller trees and shifting the pattern from squares to rows – whether those are parallel or in a zig-zag pattern.
This allows farmers to grow considerably more trees. A local farmer who is part of Starbucks’ network tells us that after changing plantation patterns to the one recommended by the FSC, the number of trees on her farm tripled. She has already seen her yield double, and expects more trees to begin producing next year. Intercropping also allows farmers to grow other cash crops like cabbage, potatoes, aubergines and chillies as they wait for the coffee trees to mature or cherries to harvest, providing them with an additional source of income.
Another measure Starbucks has taken to adapt to climate change is the introduction of greenhouses. After coffee cherries are picked, they need to be dried. While this was not a problem years ago in the dry season, more erratic rainfall patterns have made this a tricky process, often damaging the coffee cherries and leaving them open to defects. Greenhouses, though, can retain heat for drying coffee, mitigating the impact of irregular rainfall.
Relying on model farms and open-source agronomy
To help smallholder farmers see the benefits of these modern farming practices, Starbucks relies on what it calls “model farms”, which act as a benchmark for effective coffee production in their specific regions. Elliot Bentzen, director of trade and traffic at Starbucks, outlines that theoretical education can only go so far. “There’s no better lesson than going to the field and seeing it firsthand,” he explains.
The best way to set up a model farm, he adds, is to find local producers who are willing to change and adapt their practices, and help them equip their farm with the best system possible. The idea is for neighbouring farmers to see it for themselves and become inspired by the efficiency, yield and income potential.
But this isn’t just for farmers who sell to Starbucks, or are part of its Coffee and Farmer Equity (CAFE) Practices network – this is its own verification programme for ethical, transparent and sustainable coffee productio.. The company promotes the principle of open-source agronomy, enabling knowledge-sharing and enlisting support for any farmer who wants it. “At the end of the day, without farmers, without coffee, Starbucks wouldn’t be here,” says Bentzen. “So we need them, and we want to make sure they’re sustainable and there is a future.”
Courtesy: Anay Mridul/Green Queen
As part of this industry-wide approach, it is offering seedlings of shade trees to farmers for free, and has donated 560,000 coffee tree seeds to farming communities across Indonesia. Additionally, it has committed to providing 100 million climate-resilient coffee trees globally by 2025 – as of February, this was at 80 million, and the company remains on track for this goal. This strategy helps Starbucks expand the implementation of CAFE Practices too.
Bentzen explains that while all of the coffee sold by Starbucks is ethically sourced (since it can be traced back to its origin), 99% is verified by CAFE Practices. The remaining 1% involves farmers who aren’t yet verified by the programme, but can be integrated over a longer period. Because their supply chains can be complex, Starbucks offers to buy their harvests to help them convert their practices.
Climate change also has an effect on the price of coffee – from what farmers are paid for their crops to what consumers pay for their lattes. Known as ‘C price’ in the trade, these have been volatile over the last decade. While farmers are currently earning a good premium, the cost structure is cyclical. Starbucks pays farmers differentials based on the C price on the day of delivery, instead of a fixed rate.
But even when shelling out higher differentials, the company realised that farmers were often getting paid below the cost of production – essentially, they’re making a loss. To bridge that gap, it initiated an Emergency Relief Fund, paying an extra $20M to support farmers, highlighting its commitment to the coffee community.
Novel futureproof coffee varietals to fight leaf rust
Given that arabica is an endangered species of coffee, I ask Bentzen if Starbucks would ever consider using robusta, the other main species. Robusta contains twice the caffeine content, can be grown at lower altitudes and thus in larger quantities, and is cheaper to produce – but that’s also why it’s attached to an inferior reputation that promotes quantity over quality.
While he is adamant that the conversation shouldn’t be as binary as “arabica good, robusta bad”, and is more just about taste preferences, he says: “I would hope that we would not need to go to Robusta one day, because I’m positive about the future of arabica.”
Courtesy: Anay Mridul/Green Queen
Last year, Starbucks announced it had developed six “climate-resilient” arabica varietals – and as an extension of its open-source approach, it would be giving these breeds to suppliers and farmers for free. Developed over 10 years, the company is exploring what varietals can sustain harder climates, with efforts being led from its Hacienda Alsacia farm in Costa Rica.
“Coffee usually takes about three years to produce a cherry. It’s an investment, you have to plant a tree, and you’re not going to get any income from that tree for three years,” explains Bentzen. “Well, how can we change that? How can we get new trees that can start producing after 18 months?”
One of the most devastating diseases affecting coffee is leaf rust, a type of fungus that decimates crops and has previously become an epidemic that has strained the global supply. There’s a reason why Sri Lanka, which used to be the third-largest producer of coffee in the late 19th century, is now known for tea – and it’s leaf rust.
While the disease usually affected crops at the bottom of farms, climate change has meant leaf rust has begun creeping up mountains, and that is a problem. The fungus mutates as well, so trees that are resistant today may not be so a decade later. Bentzen describes arabica as a finicky species susceptible to disease and pests, which is why Starbucks is experimenting with these new varietals. It’s also exploring arabica trees that need less water and fewer fertilisers.
“Climate change is an issue. We’re all aware of it, and we have to face it. It’s something that’s very dear and near to Starbucks’ heart,” says Bentzen. “We’re going to have to change the way we do things… I’m positive about the future that we have the technology, resources, engineers, agronomists and researchers to do the work to make sure we have coffee in the future.”
Courtesy: Anay Mridul/Green Queen
However, any new varietal would also need to paste the palate test – if it doesn’t taste good, there’s no point. “If the quality is not there, we believe that is not sustainable,” explains Sergio Alvarez, Starbucks’ global coffee development lead. The company is currently conducting trials with producers to see how these new seeds fair – if the climate resistance and flavour quality are indeed what’s expected, you may see these new varietals make their way onto the Starbucks menu.
Inspiring the next generation of farmers
Starbucks’ agronomists in Indonesia are also hoping to educate farmers about the importance of pruning the shade trees, which prevents volatility and enables stable production. It also makes picking the coffee cherries off the trees much easier.
But what does it do with the waste generated? There’s a circularity aspect at play here, as the pruned bits are used as feed for the goats, sheep and chickens at the FSC, which in turn produce manure for the crops. Starbucks calls this “integrated farming”, and confirms that the animals aren’t raised for any other purposes but to support the farm.
One issue facing the industry transcends coffee itself. The agricultural sector is dealing with an ageing population – in Indonesia, 80% of farmers are aged 45 and over, despite the median age of the overall population being under 30. Concerns about the future of food are growing as younger generations become dissuaded from farming in search of an urban livelihood.
Bentzen explains that usually, if younger generations don’t want to get into farming, a neighbouring farmer would buy the farm. And since most coffee is smallholder-farmed, buying these plantations would only help them. But if there’s a complete shift and nobody’s taking over these fields, that’s an issue. He notes that people shouldn’t feel obliged to farm, of course, but it’s important to show that it could mean a happy life as well. “It shouldn’t be a burden to take over a coffee farm, it should be an opportunity,” he says.
Courtesy: Starbucks
The local farmer we speak to says that’s exactly what she’s down with her daughter, who has been enlightened by the productivity and income potential of coffee production. But she adds that the FSC were key in helping her get here, before which there was no guidance on how to adapt to extreme weather – heavy rainfall meant tree leaves would fall and flowers that were meant to blossom wouldn’t survive. Apart from the agronomic expertise, Starbucks also provided her with seedlings for shade trees, which helped improve yields and income.
Deforestation, beanless coffee and cascara on Starbucks’ radar
In the food tech world, some startups are coming up with solutions like beanless coffee, which entails using agricultural sidestreams and other ingredients that are fermented and processed in a way that replicates the flavour of coffee. It’s essentially the plant-based meat of the coffee world.
The benefits are obvious – you’re saving a lot of land, water and emissions, plus using up surplus food to combat waste. However, beanless coffee also has its critics, particularly within the coffee community, which has raised concerns about what this would mean for the 125 million people who depend on coffee for their livelihoods.
While Alvarez recognises the climate impact and says Starbucks is looking closely at this industry, it is still a coffee company. He also questioned the amount of resources and monoculture required to produce alternatives that require byproducts. “Ultimately, the value of coffee is not to produce a liquid that tastes like coffee, but what happens from the tree all the way down to the cup and what happens in between,” he suggests. “So I don’t know if I’d ever be enamoured or thrilled or curious enough to be like: ‘Okay, some scientists boiled it down to a cup of coffee!’”
Courtesy: Starbucks
Some other startups are working on cell-based coffee or developing perennial coffee crops using molecular biology and crop genetics. Unlike bean-free alternatives, this really is coffee, just produced in a different way. Both Alvarez and Bentzen recognise the potential and say they’re curious to try it – however, they highlight that it bypasses all the communities we’re helping, and add that a lot of the work they’re doing would no longer exist. They reiterate that Starbucks will always focus on farmers and coffee communities, but again acknowledge addressing climate change and supply chain impacts is vital.
When coffee beans are separated from their cherries, the outer husks (called cascara) are usually discarded. But these can be brewed into a fruity tea, and are sometimes sold by specialty coffee companies and local producers. Starbucks, which has previously used Indian cherries for a cascara syrup, currently sources some from Colombia for a tea blend in its Tokyo roastery – and Alvarez says the chain is exploring if it can introduce this at scale, which would amp up its food waste credentials too.
But there is a more urgent issue for Starbucks to contend with. Starting next year, all deforestation-linked coffee will be banned in the EU (alongside cocoa and other crops). Similar regulations are expected in the US and the UK (though coffee isn’t included in the latter, despite calls from campaigners to add the crop to the list).
Bentzen recognises that this is a trend that will only grow, and eventually become part of legislator frameworks across the world. “It’s the right thing to do, we’re totally on board,” he says. But he adds that there’s a lot of grey area in the EU Deforestation Regulation, which doesn’t properly outline the changes that need to be implemented. Businesses have to prove every farm is deforestation-free, and the EU wants GPS coordinates for traceability, but he argues that these changes have happened too quickly and left companies scrambling and anxious.
Courtesy: Starbucks
“We’re freaking out a bit. Everyone is freaking out,” Bentzen says, suggesting that the EU “bit off more than it can chew”. But this is a major priority for Starbucks now. “We’re going to do everything we can to be compliant.”
It highlights the breadth of challenges being faced by the coffee industry – whether that’s climate change, ageing farmers, crop diseases, volatile prices, or legislative pressure. As Alvarez puts it. “We have to educate customers and partners that we cannot take coffee for granted.”
South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) announced in early May a plan to fund the development of a single-seat variant of Korea Aerospace Industries’ (KAI) successful FA-50 light trainer and attack aircraft. The single-seat KAI FA-50 project aims to replace the current design’s backseat and install a 300-gallon auxiliary fuel tank in […]
A West Papuan resistance leader has condemned the United Nations role in allowing Indonesia to “integrate” the Melanesian Pacific region in what is claimed to be an “egregious act of inhumanity” on 1 May 1963.
In an open letter to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, Organisasi Papua Merdeka-OPM (Free Papua Organisation) leader Jeffrey P Bomanak has also claimed that this was the “beginning of genocide” that could only have happened through the failure of the global body to “legally uphold its decolonisation responsibilities in accordance with the UN Charter”.
Bomanak says in the letter dated yesterday that the UN failed to confront the “relentless barbarity of the Indonesian invasion force and expose the lie of the fraudulent 1969 gun-barrel ‘Act of No Choice’”.
The open letter follows one released on the eve of Anzac Day last month which strongly criticised the role of Australia and the United States, accusing both countries of “betrayal” in Papuan aspirations for independence.
According to RNZ News today, an Australian statement in response to the earlier OPM letter said the federal government “unreservedly recognises Indonesia’s territorial integrity and sovereignty over the Papua provinces”.
The White House has not responded.
The OPM says it has compiled a “prima facie pictorial ‘integration’ history” of Indonesia’s actions in integrating the Pacific region into an Asian nation. It plans to present this evidence of “six decades of crimes against humanity” to Secretary-General Guterres and new Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto.
I am addressing you in an open letter which I will be releasing to media and governments because I have previously brought to your attention the history of the illegal annexation of West Papua on May 1st, 1963, and the role of your office in the fraudulent UN referendum in 1969, called an Act of Free Choice and I have never received a reply.
Part of the opening page of the five-page OPM open letter to the United Nations. Image” Screenshot APR
After six decades of OPM letters and Papuan appeals to the UN Secretariat, I am providing the transparency and accountability of an “open letter”, so that historians of the future can investigate the moral and ethical credibility of the UN Secretariat.
May 1st is a day of mourning for Papuans. A day of grief over the illegal annexation of our ancestral Melanesian homeland by a violent occupation force from Southeast Asia.
An invasion and an illegal annexation not unlike Nazi Germany’s annexation in 1938 of its neighbouring country, Austria. The difference for Papuans is that the UN and the USA were co-conspirators in preventing our right to determine a future that was our right to have under the UN decolonisation process: independence and nation-state sovereignty.
A very chilling contradiction — the Allies we fought alongside, nursed back to life, and died with during WWII had joined forces with a mass-murderer not unlike Hitler — the Indonesian president Suharto (see Photo collage #2: Axis of Evil).
Some scholars have called the May 1, 1963 annexation “Indonesia’s Anschluss”. Suharto and the conspirators goal of colonial invasion and conquest had been achieved through the illegal annexation of my people’s ancestral homeland, my homeland.
General and president-in-waiting Suharto signed a contract in 1967 with American mining giant Freeport, another company associated with David Rockefeller, two years before we were to determine our future through the aforementioned gun-barrel UN referendum project-managed by a brutal occupation force. Our future had already been determined by Suharto, David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, and Suharto’s friend, UN secretary-General U Thant. U Thant had succeeded Dag Hammarskjöld who had been assassinated for his controversial view that human rights and freedom were absolutely universal and should not be subjected to the criminal whims of either tyrants like Suharto or a resource industry with views on human rights and freedom that resembled Suharto’s.
I do not need to give you a blow-by-blow history for your edification — you already know the entire history and the victim tally — 350,000 adults and 150,000 children and babies. And rising. You are, after all, a man of some principle — Portugal’s former prime minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002, as well as a member of the Portuguese Socialist Party. And presiding as Portuguese prime minster during the final years of Fretilin’s war of liberation in East Timor, a former Portuguese colony invaded by Indonesia in 1975 with anywhere up to 250,000 victims of genocide. Please explain to me the difference between the Indonesia’s invasion and “integration” of East Timor and Indonesia’s invasion and “integration” of my homeland, Western New Guinea (West Papua).
Apart from the oil in the Timor Gap and the gold and copper all over my homeland — the wealth of someone else’s resources promoting the “integration” policies pictured over these pages.
As a member of a socialist party, you might be attending May Day ceremonies today. I will be counselling victims and the families of loved ones who have been “integrated” today. Yes, the freedom-loving Papuans are holding rallies to protest the annexation of our homeland . . . to protest the failure — your failure — to apply justice and to end this nightmare.
The cost of the UN-approved annexation to Papuans in pain and suffering: massacres, torture, systemic rape by TNI and Polri, mutilation and dismemberment as a signature of your barbarity. Relentless barbarity causing six decades of physical and cultural genocide, ethnocide, infanticide, and wave after wave of ethnic cleansing.
The cost to Papuans in the theft and plunder of our natural resources: genocide by starvation and famine.
The cost to Papuans from the foreign resource industry plundering our natural resources: the devastation of pristine environments, whole ecosystems poisoned by the resource industry’s chemical toxicity, called tailings, released into rivers thereby destroying whole riverine catchments along with food sources from fishing and farming — catchment rivers and nearby farming lands contaminated by Freeport, and other’s. A failure to apply any international standards for risk management to prevent the associated birth defects in villages now living in contaminated catchments.
That we would choose to become part of any nation so brutal defies credibility. That the UN approved integration should have been impossible based on the evidence of the ever-increasing numbers of defence and security forces landing in West Papua and undertaking military campaigns that include ever-increasing victims and internally displaced Papuans, the bombing of central highland villages a current example? Such courage! Why are foreign media not allowed into my people’s homeland?
Secretary-General Guterres, future historians will judge the efficacy of the United Nations. The integrity. West Papua will feature as a part the UN Secretariat’s legacy. To this endeavour, as the leader of Organisasi Papua Merdeka, I ask, and demand that you comply with your obligations under article 85 part 2 and sundry articles of your Charter of United Nations which requires that you inform the Trusteeship Council about your General Assembly resolution 1752, with which you are subjugating our people and homelands of West New Guinea which we call West Papua.
The agreement which your resolution 1752 is authorising, begins with the words “The Republic of Indonesia and the Kingdom of the Netherlands, having in mind the interests and welfare of the people of the territory of West New Guinea (West Irian)”
Your agreement is clearly a trusteeship agreement written according to your rules of Chapter XII of your Charter of the United Nations.
The West Papuan people have always opposed your use of United Nations military to make our people’s human rights subject to the whim of your two administrators, UNTEA and from 1st May 1963 the Republic of Indonesia that is your current administrator.
We refer to your organisation’s last official record about West Papua which still suffers your ongoing unjust administration managed by UNTEA and Indonesia:
Because you also used article 81 and Chapter XII of your Charter to seize control of our homelands when you created your General Assembly resolution 1752, the Netherlands was excused by article 73(e), “to transmit regularly to the Secretary-General for information purposes, subject to such limitation as security and constitutional considerations may require, statistical and other information of a technical nature relating to economic, social, and educational conditions in the territories for which they are respectively responsible other than those territories to which Chapters XII and XIII apply”, from transmitting further reports about our people and the extrajudicial killings that your new administrators began using to silence our demands for our liberty and independence.
We therefore demand your Trusteeship Council begin its unfinished duty of preparing your United Nations reports as articles 85 part 2, 87 and 88 of your Charter requires.
West Papua is entitled to independence, and article 76 requires you assist. It is illegal for Indonesia to invade us and to impede our independence, and to subsequently subject us to six decades of every classification for crimes against humanity listed by the International Criminal Court.
We know this trusteeship agreement was first proposed by the American lawyer John Henderson in 1959, and was discussed with Indonesian officials in 1961 six months before the death of your Dag Hammarskjöld. We think it is shameful that you then elected Indonesia’s friend U Thant as Secretary-General, and we demand that you permit the Secretariat to perform its proper duty of revealing your current annexation of West Papua (Resolution 1752) to your Trusteeship Council.
I look forward to your reply.
Yours sincerely,
Jeffrey P Bomanak Chairman-Commander OPM Markas Victoria, May 1, 2024
The West Papuan resistance OPM leader has condemned Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and US President Joe Biden, accusing their countries of “six decades of treachery” over Papuan independence.
The open letter was released today by OPM chairman Jeffrey P Bomanak on the eve of ANZAC Day 2024.
Praising the courage and determination of Papuans against the Japanese Imperial Forces in World War Two, Bomanak said: “There were no colonial borders in this war — we served Allied Pacific Theatre campaigns across the entire island of New Guinea.
Bomanak’s open letter, addressed to Prime Minister Albanese and President Biden, declared:
“If you cannot stand by those who stood by you, then your idea of ‘loyalty’ and ‘remembrance’ being something special is a myth, a fairy tale.
“There is nothing special in treachery. Six decades of treachery following the Republic of Indonesia’s invasion and fraudulent annexation, always knowing that we were being massacred, tortured, and raped. Our resources, your intention all along.
“When the Japanese Imperial Forces came to our island, you chose our homes to be your defensive line. We fed and nursed you. We formed the Papuan Infantry Brigade. We became your Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels.
“We even fought alongside you and shared the pain and suffering of hardship and loss.
“There were no colonial borders in this war — we served Allied Pacific Theatre campaigns across the entire island of New Guinea. Our island! From Sorong to Samurai!
OPM leader Jeffrey Bomanak . . . his open letter condemns Australia and the US leadership for preventing decolonisation of West Papua. Image: OPM
“Your war became our war. Your graves, our graves. The photos [in the open letter] are from the Australian War Memorial. The part of the legend always ringing true — my people — Papuans! – with your WWII defence forces.
“My message is to you, not ANZAC veterans. We salute the ANZACs. Your unprincipled greed divided our island. Exploitation, no matter what the cost.
“West Papua is filled with Indonesia’s barbarity and the blood and guts of 500,000 Papuans — men, women, and children. Torture, slaughter, and rape of my people in our ancestral homes led by your betrayal.
“In 1969, to help prevent our decolonisation, you placed two of our leaders on Manus Island instead of allowing them to reach the United Nations in New York — an act of shameless appeasement as a criminal accomplice to a mass-murderer (Suharto) that would have made Hideki Tojo proud.
“RAAF Hercules transported 600 TNI [Indonesian military] to slaughter us on Biak Island in 1998. Australian and US subsidies, weapons and munitions to RI, provide logistics for slaughter and bombing of our highland villages. Still happening!
“You were silent about the 1998 roll of film depicting victims of the Biak Island massacre, and you destroyed this roll of film in March 2014 after the revelations from the Biak Massacre Citizens Tribunal were aired on the ABC’s 7:30 Report. (Grateful for the integrity of Edmund McWilliams, Political Counselor at the US Embassy in Jakarta, for his testimony.)
“Every single act and action of your betrayal contravenes Commonwealth and US Criminal Codes and violates the UN Charter, the Genocide Act, and the Torture Convention. The price of this cowardly servitude to assassins, rapists, torturers, and war criminals — from war criminal Suharto to war criminal Prabowo [current President of Indonesia] — complicity and collusion in genocide, ethnocide, infanticide, and wave after wave of ethnic cleansing.
“Friends, we will not forget you? You threw us into the gutter! As Australian and American leaders, your remembrance day is a commemoration of a tradition of loyalty and sacrifice that you have failed to honour.”
The OPM chairman and commander Bomanak concluded his open letter with the independence slogan “Papua Merdeka!” — Papua freedom.
An Australian author and advocate, Jim Aubrey, today led a national symbolic one minute’s silence to mark the “blood debt” owed to Papuan allies during the Second World War indigenous resistance against the invading Japanese forces.
“A promise to most people is a promise,” Aubrey said in his open letter marking the debt protest — “unless that promise is made by the Australian government.”
After the successes of Australian and US troops against the Japanese in New Guinea, the Allies continued the advance through what was then Dutch New Guinea then on to the Philippines.
The first landing was at Hollandia (now Jayapura) in April 1944, which involved the Australian navy and air force.
Aubrey said in his letter:
“The Australian government’s WWII remembrance oath to Papuan and Timorese allies by the RAAF in flyers dropped over East Timor and the island of New Guinea — ‘FRIENDS, WE WILL NEVER FORGET YOU!’ — is in reality one of history’s most heinous bastard acts in war
and diplomacy.
“Betrayal is the reality of this blood debt and includes consecutive Australian governments’ treachery and culpability as a criminal accomplice and accessory to six decades of the Indonesian government’s crimes against humanity.
“Barbarity that shames us! Genocide, ethnocide, infanticide, and relentless ethnic cleansing.
Aubrey, spokesperson for Genocide Rebellion and the Free West Papua International Coalition, said that he and supporters were commemorating the Second World War “Papuan sacrifice for us” — Australian and American servicemen and women — four days before ANZAC Day without inviting Prime Minister Anthony Albanese or any government minister [and] without inviting US President Biden.
“To have them with us on this special solemn occasion, while honouring the fact that many of us — children and grandchildren – would not be here if it were not for Papuan courage, loyalty, and sacrifice so steadfastly given to our forebears, would be dishonourable.
‘Heartless complicity’
“We condemn outright their heartless complicity and premeditated exploitation of Papuans in their time of peril. A blood debt not honoured by a single Australian government or US administration!
Author Jim Aubrey salutes the Morning Star flag of West Papuan independence earlier today . . . “A blood debt not honoured by a single Australian government or US administration.” Image: Genocide Rebellion
“Lest We Forget . . . six decades of providing the Republic of Indonesia with an environment of impunity for crimes against humanity — 500,000 victims in Western New Guinea, 250,000 in East Timor [now Timor-Leste after the 1999 liberation].
“Future historians will teach their undergraduates that Australian governments did forget! That Australian governments also contravened Commonwealth and State criminal codes by helping the Indonesian government prevent the legal decolonisation of Western New Guinea and achieve their subsequent unlawful annexation; and by concealing and destroying evidence of the 1998 Biak Island Massacre.
“It is not only a matter of honour and truth, it’s personal. I have only just discovered that my father and my uncle were Australian servicemen in the Pacific Theatre campaigns across New Guinea.
“Honourable Australians and Americans, however, only need to know our duty of care and our international obligations cannot be compromised for political and economic plunder. The victims of crimes against humanity deserve the support and the protection they are by law, by right, and decency entitled to.
“Pacific Island nations look to the East for a relationship of integrity in their international affairs. Who can blame them with Australian governments track record of treachery, dishonour, and their demeaning elitism and history in the genocide of indigenous peoples.”
Jakarta’s age-old problem of air pollution reached record heights in 2023, posing significant health risks to its residents. Rafsi Albar scrutinises the government’s response through a human rights lens.
The Indonesian public is appalled by the worsening air quality in Jakarta. The city has, for years, been plagued by worsening air quality. However, recent months have been the worst in city history. Recent reports by IQAir consistently rank Jakarta as one of the top 10 most polluted cities since May 2023, with June 14 and August 9 being the days it peaked as the world’s first most polluted city. This problem extends beyond the capital; at least seven cities in the neighbouring regions suffer from even worse fates due to wind patterns.
In response to the worsening situation, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo convened officials in an ad hoc meeting to find solutions. In concrete terms, the meeting resulted in the government ordering state apparatus to work from home (WFH) and creating a task force to handle the situation further. The Minister of Law and Human Rights affirmed the decision to implement WFH for its employees, citing health as a human right.
A hypocritical act of sympathy
In September 2021, Jakarta’s residents were declared victorious in a landmark citizen lawsuit against various government institutions including the Jakarta administration, several ministers, and even the president for their failure in tackling the city’s air pollution problem. The ruling was made after two years of citizens eagerly waiting for justice for the thousands of deaths attributable to the same.
The government attempted to appeal the decision. This was perceived to be a defensive move, revealing the government’s lack of cooperative action. In 2022, the Jakarta High Court earned praise for rejecting this appeal. The judges reaffirmed the lower court’s reasoning that “[they have] been negligent in not fulfilling their obligations in ensuring the right to good and healthy [living conditions], which has resulted in poor air quality in the Special Capital Region of Jakarta.”
Despite this ruling and the 2023 actions, the government has largely failed to address this issue and improve the quality of life for its citizens. The right to health, as quoted in both instances, are used largely as buzzwords to appease the public.
The right to health is one of the most fundamental forms of human rights. This is connected to the right to life itself as stipulated under Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This right is further elaborated by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; Article 12 stipulates the need for the highest attainable standards of physical and mental health. Indonesia ratified the ICCPR in 2005 alongside seven of eight other instruments under the UDHR regime, then extended at the regional level through the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration. Article 28 states that the right to adequate living standards takes multiple forms including a safe, clean, and sustainable environment.
While these voluntary pledges lack legal obligations, they remind the Indonesian government to address environmental issues like pollution promptly, preventing health crises and demonstrating a commitment to the well-being of their citizens. Yet the exact opposite is seen to be the case today. The government has not made meaningful progress in the past couple of years, and the proposed solutions are short-term – casting doubts over seriousness.
Steps to making real change
The government should first seek to understand the root causes of worsening air quality in Jakarta. They have claimed motorised vehicles and weather to be the combination that caused the event. In response, the government encouraged citizens to shift to using electric vehicles. Alas, this kind of proposition seems to be unrealistic at the present since the average price of EVs is still substantially higher than internal combustion vehicles. By extension, the government in this statement has failed to acknowledge the fact that coal is still the predominant source of electricity in the country,
In mid-August, the government commenced work to monitor coal-powered electricity generation plants, the current ‘accused’ in Jakarta’s pollution case. The public’s optimism and hopefulness should not be held without caution given the government’s history of inaction and defensiveness. The media, environmentalists, and international watchdogs play critical roles in ensuring that the government not only acknowledges the severity of the crisis but also takes swift and effective measures accordingly.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the Department of Sociology, LSE Human Rights, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
I came to this evening of short films not sure what to expect.
I have a history with West Papua (here referring to the Indonesian part of the island of New Guinea, which comprises five provinces, one named “West Papua”) from my days fronting the legendary West Papuan band Black Brothers in the early 1990s.
During that time, I was exposed to stories of struggle and pride in the identity of the people of West Papua. From their declaration of self-determination and self-government and the raising of the Morning Star flag on 1 December 1961, to the so-called “Act of Free Choice” referendum in 1969 which saw the fledgling Melanesian state become part of the larger Indonesian state, to the next 40 years of struggle.
However, apart from the occasional ABC or SBS news story and the 1963 ethnographic film Dead Birds, I hadn’t seen much footage on West Papua until now.
The West Papua Mini Film Festival is a touring festival of short films organised by the West Papuan community and their allies and supporters in Australia to raise awareness of the situation in West Papua.
The four films I saw, at the first screening in Sydney, were:
My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee) Pepera 1969, A Democratic Integration? Papuan Hip-Hop: When the Microphone Talks Black Pearl and General of the Field
The first two films were quite harrowing portrayals of internal displacement and coercion in West Papua. My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee) follows the lives and families of two children, both named “refugee”, born and currently being raised in parts of West Papua distant from their families’ places of origin.
Their displacement is clearly correlated with the increased presence of extractive corporate interests backed in and supported by a military presence.
In both children’s cases this has been enabled by the gradual breaking up of the region of West Papua into first two, and now five, separate provinces.
A scene from My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee)
My Name is Pengungsi (Refugee). Video trailer: Jubi TV
The second film, Pepera 1969, A Democratic Integration, deals with the history of oppression and coercion under Indonesian rule and the absurdity of the rubber-stamping process undertaken by Indonesia (the Act of Free Choice, the Indonesian acronym for which is Pepera) which enabled it to annex West Papua under the impotent gaze of the United Nations and the complicit support of countries including the US and Australia.
The film documents the process leading into decolonisation and West Papua’s short-lived period of self-rule.
The second two films were insightful celebrations of Papuan identity in the arts, through hip-hop artists like Ukam Maran and the earlier musical group Mambesak, and in sport, with the incredible story of the Persipura football club of Jayapura.
The latter’s achievements as a football team and subsequent discrimination and suppression in the racially charged Indonesian football league provide an allegory of West Papuan identity.
In both cases, the strength and resilience of West Papuan identity, and West Papuans’ pride in their ancient ties to land and culture, are palpable.
A scene from Papua Hip-Hop: When the microphone talks.
What I liked about the four films was that they presented a montage of West Papua from rural to urban, from the everyday life of internally displaced people to the exciting work of hip-hop artists with their songs of protest; from the big picture and history of West Papua to the smaller microcosm of the Persipura football team and supporters.
All in all, I was surprised how much I came out of the festival better informed about a place, its history and current developments. And this despite having the privilege of knowing more about West Papua than many Australians.
For those who don’t know much about West Papua and would like to know more, attending the West Papua Mini Film Festival is a must. It is on at various locations around Australia until 21 April 2024, with details here.
And to end on a happy note, my evening of film appreciation included meeting one of the festival’s organisers, Victor Mambor. Victor is the nephew of the late Steve Mambor, drummer for the Black Brothers!
West Papua Mini Film Festival 2024, 9-21 April 2024, Wollongong, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane, Lismore, Hobart, Melbourne, and Darwin.
The films are also available to view with English and Indonesian subtitles on the Jubi TV Youtube channel.
‘Alopi Latukefu is the director of the Edmund Rice Centre. He previously worked for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This review was first published on ANU Development Policy Centre’s DevPolicyBlog and is republished here under Creative Commons.
More videos appear to have been released by the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) showing New Zealand hostage Phillip Mehrtens.
The New Zealander was taken hostage more than a year ago on February 7 in Paro in the highlands of the Indonesian-ruled region of West Papua while providing vital air links and supplies to remote communities.
In the recent videos he is seen surrounded by armed men and delivers a statement, saying his “life is at risk” because of air strikes conducted by the Indonesian military.
An appeal in February by Foreign Minister Winston Peters for the release of the New Zealand hostage pilot Phillip Mehrtens by his West Papuan rebel captors. Image: NZ govt
He asks Indonesia to cease airstrikes and for foreign governments to pressure Indonesia to not conduct any aerial bombardments.
RNZ has sought comment from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Peters said his continued detention served no-one’s interests.
In the last year, a wide range of New Zealand government agencies has been working extensively with Indonesian authorities and others towards securing Mehrtens release.
The response, led by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, has also been supporting his family.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
On Friday, March 22, a video circulated of TNI (Indonesian military) soldiers torturing a civilian in Papua. In the video, the victim is submerged in a drum filled with water with his hands tied behind his back.
The victim was alternately beaten and kicked by the TNI members. The victim’s back was also slashed with a knife.
The video circulated globally quickly and was widely criticised.
Gustav Kawer from the Papua Association of Human Rights Advocates (PAHAM) condemned the incident and called for the perpetrators to be brought to justice.
This was then followed by National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM), Indonesian Human Rights Watch (Imparsial), the Diocese, the church and students.
Meanwhile, Cenderawasih/XVII regional military commander (Pangdam) Major-General Izak Pangemanan tried to cover up the crime by saying it was a hoax and the video was a result of “editing”.
This argument was later refuted by the TNI itself and it was proven that TNI soldiers were the ones who had committed the crime. Thirteen soldiers were arrested and accused over the torture.
The torture occurred on 3 February 2024 in Puncak Regency, Papua.
Accused of being ‘spies’
The victim who was seen in the video was Defianus Kogoya, who had been arrested along with Warinus Murib and Alianus Murib. They were arrested and accused of being “spies” for the West Papua National Liberation Army-Free Papua Organisation (TPNPB-OPM), a cheap accusation which the TNI and police were subsequently unable to prove.
Indonesia human rights: 13 soldiers arrested after torture video. Video: Al Jazeera
The three were arrested when the TNI was conducting a search in Amukia and Gome district. When Warinus was arrested, his legs were tied to a car and he was dragged for one kilometre, before finally being tortured.
Alianus, meanwhile ,was also taken to a TNI post and tortured. After several hours, they were finally handed over to a police post because there was not enough evidence to prove the TNI’s accusations.
Defianus finally fainted, while Warinus died of his injuries. Warinus’ body was cremated by the family the next day on February 4.
Defianus is still suffering and remains seriously ill. This is a TNI crime in Papua.
But that is not all. On 22 February 2022, the TNI also tortured seven children in Sinak district, Puncak. The seven children were Deson Murib, Makilon Tabuni, Pingki Wanimbo, Waiten Murib, Aton Murib, Elison Murib and Murtal Kurua.
Makilon Tabuni died as a result.
Civilians murdered, mutilated
On August 22, the TNI murdered and mutilated four civilians in Timika. They were Arnold Lokbere, Irian Nirigi, Lemaniel Nirigi and Atis Tini.
The bodies of the four were dismembered: the head, body and legs were separated into several parts, put in sacks then thrown into a river.
Six days later, soldiers from the Infantry Raider Battalion 600/Modang tortured four civilians in Mappi regency, Papua. The four were Amsal P Yimsimem, Korbinus Yamin, Lodefius Tikamtahae and Saferius Yame.
They were tortured for three hours and suffered injuries all over their bodies.
Three days later, on August 30, the TNI again tortured two civilians named Bruno Amenim Kimko and Yohanis Kanggun in Edera district, Mappi regency. Bruno Amenim died while Yohanis Kanggun suffered serious injuries.
On October 27, three children under the age of 16 were tortured by the TNI in Keerom regency. They were Rahmat Paisel, Bastian Bate and Laurents Kaung. They were tortured using chains, coils of wire and water hoses.
The atrocity occurred in the Yamanai Village, Arso II, Arso district.
On 22 February 2023, TNI personnel from the Navy post in Lantamal X1 Ilwayap tortured two civilians named Albertus Kaize and Daniel Kaize. Albertus Kaize died of his injuries. This crime occurred in Merauke regency, Papua.
95 civilians tortured
Between 2018 and 2021, Amnesty International recorded that more than 95 civilians had been tortured and killed by the TNI and the police. These crimes target indigenous Papuans, and the curve continues to rise year by year, ever since Indonesia occupied Papua in 1961.
These crimes were committed one after another without a break, and followed the same pattern. So it can be concluded that these were not the acts of rogue individuals or one or two people as the TNI argues to reduce their crimes to individual acts.
Rather, they are structural (systematic) crimes designed to subdue the Papuan nation, to stop all forms of Papuan resistance for the sake of the exploitation and theft of Papua’s natural resources.
The problems in Papua cannot be solved by increasing the number of police or soldiers. The problems in Papua must be resolved democratically.
This democratic solution must include establishing a human rights court for all perpetrators of crimes in Papua since the 1960s, and not just the perpetrators in the field, but also those responsible in the chain of command.
Only this will break the pattern of crimes that are occurring and provide justice for the Papuan people. A human rights court will also mean weakening the anti-democratic forces that exist in Indonesia and Papua — namely military(ism).
Garbage of history
A prerequisite for achieving democratisation is to eliminate the old forces, the garbage of history.
The cleaner the process is carried out, the broader and deeper the democracy that can be achieved. This also includes the demands of the Papuan people to be given the right to determine their own destiny.
This is not a task for some later day, but is the task of the Papuan people today. Nor is the task of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) political elite or political activists alone, but it is the task of all Papuan people if they want to extract themselves from the crimes of the TNI and police or Indonesian colonialism.
Independence can only be gained by the struggle of the ordinary people themselves. The people must fight, the people must take to the streets, the people must build their own ranks, their own alternative political tool, and fight in an organised and guided manner.
Sharon Muller is a leading member of the Socialist Union (Perserikatan Sosialis, PS) and a member of the Socialist Study Circle (Lingkar Studi Sosialis, LSS). Arah Juang is the newspaper of the Socialist Union.
References
Gemima Harvey’s report The Human Tragedy of West Papua, 15 January 2014. This reports states that more than 500,000 West Papua people have been slaughtered by Indonesia and its actors, the TNI and police since 1961.
Veronica Koman’s chronology of torture of civilians in Papua. Posted on the Veronica Koman Facebook wall, 24 March 2024.
Fresh clashes in New Caledonia have erupted in the suburbs of Nouméa between security forces and pro-independence protesters who oppose a nickel pact offering French assistance to salvage the industry.
The clashes, involving firearms, teargas and stone-throwing, went on for most of yesterday, blocking access roads to the capital Nouméa, as well as the nearby townships of Saint-Louis and Mont-Dore.
Traffic on the Route Provinciale 1 (RP1) was opened and closed several times, including when a squadron of French gendarmes intervened to secure the area by firing long-range teargas.
The day began with tyres being burnt on the road and then degenerated into violence from some balaclava-clad members of the protest group, who started throwing stones and sometimes using firearms and Molotov cocktails, authorities alleged.
Security forces said one of their motorbike officers, a woman, was assaulted and her vehicle was stolen.
Two of the protesters were reported to have been arrested for throwing stones.
Banners were deployed, some reading “Kanaky not for sale”, others demanding that New Caledonia’s President Louis Mapou (pro-independence) resign.
Northern mining sites also targeted Other incidents took place in the northern town of La Foa, in the small mining village of Fonwhary, near a nickel extraction site, where Société Le Nickel trucks were not allowed to use the road.
Pro-independence protesters banners demand territorial President Louis Mapou resign. Image: 1ère TV
Mont-Dore Mayor Eddy Lecourieux told local Radio Rythme Bleu they had the right to demonstrate, “but they could have done that peacefully”.
“Instead, there’s always someone who starts throwing stones.”
At dusk, the Saint-Louis and Mont-Dore areas were described as under control, but security forces, including armoured vehicles, were kept in place.
“On top of that, there are more marches scheduled for this weekend,” Lecourieux said.
Pro-independent parties, however, strongly oppose the project, saying this would be tantamount to making indigenous Kanaks a minority at local polls, and would open the door to a “recolonisation” of New Caledonia through demographics.
A similar high-risk configuration of two marches took place on March 28 in downtown Nouméa, with more than 500 French security forces deployed to keep both groups away from each other.
French authorities are understood to be holding meeting after meeting to fine-tune the security setup ahead of the weekend.
Florent Perrin, the president of Mont-Dore’s “Citizens’ Association”, told media local residents were being “taken hostage” and the unrest “must cease”.
He urged political authorities to “make decisions on all political and economic issues” New Caledonia currently faces.
Perrin called on the local population to remain calm, but invited them to “individually lodge complaints” based on “breach of freedom of circulation”.
“On our side too, tensions are beginning to run high, so we have to remain calm and not respond to those acts of provocation,” he said.
Pro-independence indigenous Kanak protesters in New Caledonia blockade the village of La Foa yesterday. Image: 1ère TV
In return, France is asking that New Caledonia’s whole nickel industry should undergo a far-reaching slate of reforms in order to make nickel less expensive and therefore more attractive on the world market.
The pact aims to salvage New Caledonia’s embattled nickel industry and its three factories — one in the north of the main island, Koniambo (KNS), and two in the south, Société le Nickel (SLN), a subsidiary of French giant Eramet, and Prony Resources.
KNS’ nickel-processing operations were put in “sleep”, non-productive mode in February after its major financier, Anglo-Swiss Glencore, said it could no longer sustain losses totalling 14 billion euros (NZ$25 billion) over the past 10 years, and that it was now seeking an entity to buy its 49 percent shares.
The other two companies, SLN and Prony, are also facing huge debts and a severe risk of bankruptcy due to the new nickel conditions on the world market, now dominated by new players such as Indonesia, which produces a much cheaper and abundant metal.
New ultimatum from Northern Province On Tuesday, Northern province President Paul Néaoutyine added further pressure by threatening to suspend all permits for mining activities in his province’s nine sites, where southern nickel companies are also extracting.
In a release, Néaoutyine made references to payment guarantees deadlines on April 10 that had not been honoured by SLN.
It is understood SLN’s owner, Eramet, was scheduled to meet in a general meeting in Paris later on Tuesday.
The French pact — France is also a stakeholder in Eramet — would also help SLN provide longer-term guarantees.
Southern province President and Les Loyalists (pro-France) party leader Sonia Backès alleged on Tuesday that Néaoutyine wants to do everything he can to shut down SLN and block the nickel pact
“Now things are very clear — before it was all undercover; now it’s out in the open,” she said.
“Now we will do everything to maintain SLN, because this means 3000 jobs at stake.”
Congress dragging its feet Yesterday, New Caledonia’s Congress was holding a meeting behind closed doors to again discuss the French pact.
The Congress decided to postpone its decision and, instead, suggested setting up a “special committee” to further examine the pact and the condition it is tied to, and more generally, “the nickel industry’s current challenges”.
Opponents to the agreement mainly argue that it would pose a risk of “loss of sovereignty” for New Caledonia on its precious metal resource.
They also consider the nickel industry stake-holding companies are not committing enough and that, instead, New Caledonia’s government is asked to raise up to US$80 million (NZ$132 million), mainly by way of new taxes imposed on taxpayers.
Last week, a group of Congressmen, mostly from pro-independence Union Calédonienne, one of the four components of the pro-independence FLNKS, with the backing of one pro-France party, Avenir Ensemble, had a motion adopted to postpone one more time the signing of the pact.
President Mapou defies pro-independence MPs President Louis Mapou, himself from the pro-independence side, urged the supporters of the motion to “let [him] sign” last week during a Congress public sitting.
“Let’s do it . . . Authorise us to go at it . . . What are you afraid of?” he said.
“Are we afraid of our militants?”
Mapou said if there was no swift Congress response and support to sign the pact, for which he himself had asked the Congress for endorsement, he would “take [his] responsibility” and go ahead anyway.
“I will honour the commitment I made to the French State.”
He said if they wanted to to sanction him with a motion of no confidence to go ahead. He was not afraid of this.
Mapou also told the pro-independence side in Congress that he believed they khad ept postponing any Congress decision “because you want to engage in negotiations as part of [New Caledonia’s] political agreements”.
Last week, Backès, who expressed open support for Mapou’s “courage”, told Radio Rythme Bleu she and Mapou had both received death threats.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
It has been 60 years since Indonesia has been refused humanitarian agencies and international media access to enter West Papua, says a leading West Papuan leader and advocate.
Speaking with the Vanuatu Daily Post on Friday in response to claims by the Indonesia ambassador Dr Siswo Pramono last Thursday, Wenda said organisations such as the Red Cross, International Peace Brigades, human rights agencies, and even the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had been banned from West Papua for 60 years.
“Indonesia claims to be a democratic country. Then why does Indonesia refuse to allow, in line with calls from the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) and the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), a visit from the United Nations (UN) Commissioner to examine the human rights situation?” he said.
“It has been 60 years, yet Indonesia has not heeded this call, while the killings continue.
“If Indonesia truly upholds democracy, then it should allow a visit by the UN Commissioner.
Indonesia ‘must respect UN visit’
“This is why we, as Melanesians and Pacific Islanders, are demanding such a visit. Even 85 countries have called for the UN Commissioner’s visit, and Indonesia must respect this as it is a member of the UN.”
The ULMWP also issued a statement stating that more than 100,000 West Papuans were internally displaced between December 2018 and March 2022 as a result of an escalation in Indonesian militarisation.
Indonesian Ambassador Dr Siswo Pramono’s controversial and historically wrong “no colonisation” claims over West Papua published in the Vanuatu Daily Post last Thursday have stirred widespread criticism. Image: VDP screenshot APR
It was reported that as of October 2023, 76,228 Papuans had remained internally displaced, and more than 1300 Papuans were killed between 2018 and 2023.
Also a video of Indonesian soldiers torturing a West Papuan man in Puncak has made international news.
In response to the disturbing video footage about the incident in Papua, Indonesia stated that the 13 Indonesian Military (TNI) soldiers allegedly involved had been detained.
“The Embassy emphasised that torture is not the policy of the Government of Indonesia nor its National Armed Forces or Indonesian National Police,” the statement relayed.
“Therefore, such actions cannot be tolerated. Indonesia reaffirms its unwavering commitment to upholding human rights, including in Papua, in accordance with international standards.”
Indonesia lobbying Pacific
The ULMWP said Indonesia was lobbying in Vanuatu and the Pacific, “presenting themselves as friends”, while allegedly murdering and torturing Melanesians.
“This claim is flatly untrue: for one thing, the Ambassador claimed that ‘West Papua has never been on the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation (C-24)’ — but in fact, West Papua was added to the list of ‘Non-Self Governing Territories’ as the Dutch decolonised in the 1960s,” the movement stated.
“According to the 1962 New York Agreement, West Papua was transferred to Indonesia on the condition of a free and fair vote on independence.
“However, in 1969, a handpicked group of 1022 West Papuans (of an estimated population of 800,000) was forced to vote for integration with Indonesia, under conditions of widespread coercion, military violence and intimidation.
“Therefore, the right to self-determination in West Papua remains unfulfilled and decolonisation in West Papua is incomplete under international law. The facts could not be clearer — West Papua is a colonised territory.”
The Vanuatu Daily Post also asked some similar questions that had been posed to Indonesia on March 28, 2024, to which Wenda responded adeptly.
Insights into West Papua
Additionally, he provided insightful commentary on the current geopolitical landscape:
What do you believe Indonesia’s intention is in seeking membership in the MSG? Indonesia’s intention to join MSG is to prevent West Papua from becoming a full member. Their aim is to obstruct West Papua’s membership because Indonesia, being Asian, does not belong to Melanesia.
While they have their own forum called the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), we, as Melanesians, have the PIF, representing our regional bloc. Indonesia’s attempt to become an associate member is not in line with our Melanesian identity.
Melanesians span from Fiji to West Papua, and we are linguistically, geographically, and culturally distinct. We are entitled to our Melanesian identity.
Currently, West Papua is not represented in MSG; only Indonesia is recognised. We have long been denied representation, and Indonesia’s intention to become an associate member is solely to impede West Papua’s inclusion is evident.
Is Indonesia supporting West Papua’s efforts to become a full member of the MSG? I don’t think their intention is to support; rather, they seek to exert influence within Melanesia to obstruct and prevent it. This explains their significant investment over the last 10 years. Previously, they showed no interest in Melanesian affairs, so why the sudden change?
What aid is Indonesia offering Vanuatu and for what purpose? What are Indonesia’s intentions and goals in its foreign relations with Vanuatu? I understand that Indonesia is an associate member of the MSG and contributes to its annual budget, which is acceptable. However, if Indonesia is investing heavily here, why aren’t they focusing on addressing the needs of their own people?
I haven’t observed any ni-Vanuatu begging on the streets from the airport to here [Port Vila]. In contrast, in Jakarta, there are people sleeping under bridges begging for assistance.
Why not invest in improving the lives of your own citizens? People in Jakarta endure hardships, living in slum settlements and under bridges, whereas I have never witnessed any Melanesians from West Papua to Fiji begging.
So, why the sudden heavy investment here, and why now?
Republished from the Vanuatu Daily Post with permission.
The Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) has declared its solidarity with civil society groups and student protesters demonstrating against the torture of a Papuan man, Defianus Kogoya, by Indonesian troops in West Papua last February.
The torture was revealed in a video that went viral across the world last month.
PANG said in a statement that peaceful demonstrations came after the video was circulated showing Defianus Kogoya bound in a water-filled barrel, being beaten and cut with knives by Indonesian soldiers.
Indonesian authorities have since admitted and apologised for the torture, and announced the arrest of 13 soldiers.
In the same video incident, two other Papuan men, Warinus Murib and Alianus Murib, were also arrested and allegedly tortured. Warinus Murib died of his injuries.
Reports state that 62 protesting students have been arrested and interrogated before they were released, while two people were seriously injured by Indonesian security forces.
In an earlier protest, 15 people were arrested for giving out pamphlets. Protesters demand all military operations must cease in West Papua.
“We condemn the excessive military presence in West Papua and the associated human rights violation against Papuans,” said the PANG statement.
“We also condemn the use of heavy-handed tactics by the Indonesian police to violently assault and detain students who should have the right and freedom to express their views.
“This demonstrates yet again the ongoing oppression by Indonesian authorities in West Papua despite decades of official denial and media censorship.”
United Nations experts have expressed serious concerns about the deteriorating human rights situation in the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua, citing shocking abuses against indigenous Papuans, including child killings, disappearances, torture and mass displacement of people.
Thirteen arrests over the Papuan torture video. Video: Al Jazeera
Media censorship
In its concluding observations of Indonesia’s second periodic report under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted on 26 March 2024, the Human Rights Committee expressed deep concern over:
patterns of extrajudicial killings,
enforced disappearances, torture, and
other forms of cruel and degrading treatment, particularly of or against indigenous Papuans and the failure to hold perpetrators accountable for their actions.
The committee also highlighted continuing reports of media censorship and suppression of the freedom of expression.
“We call on the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), the Pacific Island Forum (PIF) and the people and the governments of all Pacific Island countries to demand that Indonesia allow for the implementation of the decision of the PIF Leaders in August 2019 for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to conduct a mission to West Papua,” the PANG statement said.
“We call on the special envoys of the PIF on West Papua to expedite their mandate to facilitate dialogue with Indonesia, and particularly to pave the way for an urgent UN visit.
“We echo the calls made from the 62 students that were arrested for the Indonesian government to cease all military operations in West Papua and allow the United Nations to do its job.
“Our Pacific governments should expect nothing less from Indonesia, particularly given its privileged position as an associate member of the MSG and as a PIF Dialogue Partner,” PANG said.
Republished from the PNG Post-Courier with permission.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
French shipbuilder Naval Group announced on 28 March that it has been selected with local partner PT PAL to supply two Scorpene Evolved diesel-electric submarines to Indonesia. The two submarines, which feature lithium-ion batteries, will be built in Indonesia in PT PAL’s shipyard in Surabaya via a technology transfer from Naval Group, it added. The […]
An Australian West Papuan solidarity group has condemned a brutal crackdown by Indonesian police against student protesters demonstrating against torture by the security forces.
A video of the cruel torture of a West Papuan man, Defianus Kogoya, by Indonesian troops in West Papua in early February, went viral last week with students and civil society groups staging several protest rallies and meetings over the past two days.
Indonesian security forces violently crushed these protests with tear gas and water cannon and arrested 62 people at one demonstration.
“Yet again we have peaceful demonstrators being arrested, beaten and tear gassed by the Indonesian security forces,” Joe Collins, spokesperson of the Australian West Papua Association (AWPA), said in a statement.
“Do they really believe West Papuans will be so intimidated that they’ll stop protesting against the injustices they suffer under Indonesian rule?
“The West Papuan people will continue to protest until the international community and the United Nations start to bring Jakarta to account for the actions of its military in West Papua.
“The issue isn’t going away.”
University crackdown
In Jayapura, a rally was held yesterday at Perumnas 3 Waena and the Jayapura University of Science and Technology (JUST) by civil society groups, including by the Papuan Student and People’s Front Against Militarism (FMRPAM).
The local news outlet Jubi reported that the police had cracked down on the rally, assaulting demonstrators and firing tear gas.
The demonstrators were demanding that an independent investigation team be formed into the case of torture of Puncak regency residents by Indonesian military (TNI) soldiers and asked that the perpetrators be tried at the III-19 Jayapura Military Court.
Although the demonstrators tried to negotiate with the police, it ended in frustration. The police then dispersed the crowd by hitting the demonstrators and firing tear gas.
“Disperse, disperse, this is a public street,” shouted the Commander of Battalion A Pioneer of the Papua Mobile Brigade in Kotaraja Jayapura, Police Commissioner Clief Duwit.
The police then dispersed the crowd by beating them and firing tear gas.
Demonstrators ran for their lives towards the JUST campus.
In Sentani, at the red light junction where protesters began giving speeches and criticise the behaviour of the military in West Papua, security forces arrived quickly with two water canon vehicles.
Jubi reported that the field coordinator of the FMRPAM action, Kenias Payage, said that his party was taken away by a combination of TNI/Polri security forces while carrying out a peaceful speech at the Sentani red light.
Sixty two people were reportedly arrested.
Reverend Benny Giay . . . “Those who are arrested or killed are often referred to as ‘armed groups’, ‘separatists’, ‘terrorists’, and with other accusations.” Image: Jubi/CR-8
‘Third party’ probe call
Meanwhile, Reverend Benny Giay, the moderator of the Papuan Church Council, has called for a “third party” to investigate allegations of violence by the security forces in Papua, reports Jubi News.
The third party should examine the facts, including allegations that the victims were members of the pro-independence West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB).
“Those who are arrested or killed are often referred to as ‘armed groups’, ‘separatists’, ‘terrorists’, and with other accusations,” Reverend Giay said.
“It’s necessary to have a third party to clarify this. There is a lot of violence in Papua now but the media doesn’t classify it, so we suspect everything,” he said earlier this month.
Fincantieri and the Indonesian Ministry of Defence have signed a 1.18-billion-euro contract, within the framework of collaborative relations initiated by the Italian Ministry of Defence, for the supply of two PPA Units. PPA is a highly flexible ship with an outstanding technological standard. It has the capacity to serve multiple functions, ranging from patrol with […]
Indonesia’s military regional command in Papua has denied claims made by a pro-independence West Papuan group that abducted New Zealand pilot Phillip Mehrtens more than a year ago that the army had staged a bombing attack, The Jakarta Post reports.
Responding to a claim by the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) that aerial bombing had taken place in an area in Nduga regency where Mehrtens had been taken hostage on February 7 last year, the Indonesian Military (TNI) said it had deployed only flyby operations there.
Lieutenant Colonel Candra Kurniawan, a spokesperson for the Cendrawasih Regional Military Command in Papua province, denied that any military operation involving aerial bombs had taken place.
“This [patrol] was conducted together with the local community. There has been nothing like an air strike,” Candra told the Bahasa-language Tempo on Saturday.
He also rebuffed TPNPB’s claim that TNI soldiers had engaged in a firefight with members of pro-independence group.
“Many [TNI] members are in the field serving the community, the situation is also conducive,” Colonel Candra said.
On March 30, TPNPB spokesperson Sebby Sambom said in a statement received by Tempo that the military had deployed aerial attacks using “military aircraft, helicopters and drones” and destroyed four of the group’s posts in Nduga.
On 14 February Indonesians did not only elect a new president, but also 580 members of the parliament, the Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat (DPR).
The first four post-Suharto parliamentary elections were subject to great scrutiny, being scheduled months before the appointment of the president (in 1999) and the direct election of the president (from 2004). But as a result of a 2013 Constitutional Court decision, both legislative and presidential elections have been held on the same day, all but ensuring that interest in the DPR elections has been buried in the avalanche of attention on who would prevail in the presidential polls.
The composition of the DPR elected in February will nonetheless be a critical factor for the stability and success of the incoming Prabowo administration. The balance of power amongst the parties in the parliament will be a major factor determining the composition of the incoming president’s cabinet. The parliament can potentially be a check on the executive power of the president and his fiscal initiatives, as well as an instrument for contesting his legislative program.
This article provides an overview of the 2024 DPR election results, focusing on the similarity between this result and that of the 2019 election. In 2024, voters supported the same parties in largely the same proportions as they did in the last election. With a couple of exceptions, the parties have maintained their bases of support, while failing to break into any new electoral ground.
I argue that the outcome shows that each of Indonesia’s parties has consolidated a base of support, despite an apparently low level of party identification amongst voters. I conclude that the party system has solidified and that simultaneous presidential and DPR elections have strengthened the trend towards a two-track electoral competition, with the presidential elections becoming a “air war” between national leaders and the DPR elections a “ground war” between parties at a localised level.
Social bases versus coat tails
We can sort Indonesia’s nine parliamentary parties into two main categories. The first consists of six parties drawing support mainly from a distinct segment of Indonesian society or a stream (aliran) of political thinking mostly focused around the issue of the role of religion and the state, usually with a particular regional strength. These were all formed—or reformed—during the blossoming of democracy in 1998–1999 and have historical antecedents in the New Order.
The largest is Megawati Soekarnoputri’s PDI-P, which leads the “nationalist” stream. Four parties largely compete for the “traditionalist” and “modernist” streams of Islamic thinking: PKB, PKS, PAN and PPP. Golkar sits less comfortably within this categorisation, but it has an electoral base originating from its origins as the official regime party during the Suharto era.
The other category of populist or “presidentialist” parties have been created since 1999 as personal political vehicles for leading politicians who, for legislative and campaigning reasons, needed to create a party to support their presidential bids or, failing that, secure individual oligarchs a powerbroking role. Presidentialist parties now in include former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s Partai Demokrat (PD), incoming president Prabowo Subianto’s Gerindra party, media tycoon Surya Paloh’s Nasdem party and, until its failure to enture the DPR in 2014, the Hanura party founded by retired general and failed Golkar presidential candidate Wiranto.
Vote share in 2024 DPR elections by party
Source: Indonesian General Elections Commission (KPU)
The first thing to note in the 2024 results is that Prabowo’s personal vehicle Gerindra, with 13.2% of the vote, has done relatively poorly given that its key public figure won a decisive victory in the presidential poll. The party did achieve a 0.7 percentage point increase over its 2019 result, but it still only won third place after PDI-P and Golkar.
Gerindra might have hoped to benefit from the “coat tail effect”, a longstanding trope in Indonesian political commentary suggesting that winning a presidential campaign brings success in the parliamentary elections. This was most spectacularly illustrated by PD which, after being minted for SBY in 2003, won 7.5% of the 2004 DPR vote and then swept the field with 21% in 2009 ahead of SBY’s landslide reelection that same year.
Gerindra’s solid but unspectacular result in 2024 suggests the party does not attract widespread voter support beyond those drawn to the profile of its leader. It raises questions about Gerindra’s base in any of Indonesia’s regional, religious or socio-economic communities which sustain the longevity of a number of other parties. The result this time could be seen as a repudiation of the power of the “coat tail effect” effect— although it will be interesting to see how Gerindra performs in the 2029 DPR election if, as seems likely, Prabowo stands again. Could it replicate PD’s experience and win handsomely from its association with a winning incumbent?
The biggest loser is PDI-P. Although it received the highest vote (16.7%), it lost 3.2 percentage points from its 2019 performance. The only time PDI-P has performed worse than this was in 2009, when it crashed to 14% percent as it was swept aside by PD in SBY’s reelection year. A major factor appears to be that many previous supporters were influenced by incumbent President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s break from PDI-P, putting his immense personal prestige behind Prabowo’s candidacy.
This result represents a huge blow to Megawati and her imperious style of leadership of PDI-P, although her iron grip of the party is unlikely to be weakened. Relations between Jokowi and Megawati were always distant at best, and she gave only half-hearted support to Jokowi’s first presidential bid in 2014. There were frequent tensions between the two, particularly over Megawati’s attempts to subordinate Jokowi into the status of a mere party functionary of PDI-P.
Thus, in the case of PDIP at least, it appears we may have witnessed a coat tail effect of a rather different kind, where a turncoat incumbent was able to shift some vote away from his own party, even if he didn’t take it to the party of the presidential candidate he supported.
The biggest winner is Golkar, which increased its vote by 3.1 percentage points over its 2019 result, going from 12.2% to 15.3%. This is the biggest boost experienced by any party in 2024, and has placed it in second place behind PDI-P. Although a good result, it is only slightly ahead of the party’s 2009 and 2014 results. As one of the parties supporting Prabowo’s presidential bid, Golkar may have partially benefitted from the swing away from PDI-P, although this does not fully account for its performance.
The rest of the political scene is remarkably stable, with notable continuity in the results of the last two elections. Indeed, most parties have performed very close to their average for the last several elections.
PKB experienced a small boost of 0.9 percentage points. Its 10.6% of the vote makes it the fourth largest party in the DPR, not far behind Gerindra. This maintains the consolidation of the party’s support over the last three elections, recovering from its disastrous low point of only 5% percent in 2009, at a time when the party was riven with internal splits. Indeed, this year’s result is very close to what PKB received at its debut election in 1999.
Similarly, Nasdem attracted just under a 0.9 percent point gain, winning 9.7% of the vote. This party has a developed a modus operandum of sponsoring candidates from wealthy and influential families in the regions, using their local profile and resources to win seats in the party’s name. Nasdem has also been noted for putting forward women from such regional “dynasties”, resulting in a strong profile of female DPR members in the party’s ranks.
PKS achieved virtually the same result as in 2019. Its 8.4% of the vote is just above the average it has achieved in the four elections from 2004 to 2019, suggesting that the party has been unable to break out from the confines of its particular constituency and broaden its support amongst voters from different Islamic traditions or amongst more secular-minded Indonesians.
PD has registered a small decline, down 0.4 percentage points to 7.4%. From its glory days when SBY was president, the party has suffered a continual erosion of popularity in subsequent elections. SBY has repeated the tendency of Indonesian leaders to succumb to the temptations of dynasticism, appointing his politically inexperienced son, Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono, as leader of the Democrats to the exclusion of better qualified veterans of the party.
PAN slightly improved on its 2019 election, receiving 7.2% of the vote, an outcome that is a little above its average result in all elections since 1999. While apparently maintaining a consistent support base, the party has again shown itself unable to break from its core constituency.
PPP narrowly missed crossing the 4% threshold that election laws set as the “parliamentary threshold” that allows a party to be assigned seats in the DPR. PPP won just 3.88% of the vote: in a crowded field of parties appealing to the various streams of the Islamic community, it appears PPP has struggled to maintain its raison d’être in the post-Suharto era.
What coat-tails? Prabowo speaks at a Gerindra party meeting in West Java, December 2023. (Photo: Partai Gerakan Indonesia Raya on Facebook)
Dividing the spoils
The next big battle will be for control of the DPR and its committees. The current law regulating the legislature’s operation—known by its Indonesian acronym, the MD3 law—states that the powerful DPR speakership goes to the party with the highest representation, with the four deputy speaker positions being taken by the parties in the second to fifth places. The leadership to be sworn in in October 2024 will therefore look exactly the same as the outgoing parliament’s, with PDI-P in the speaker’s chair and Golkar, Gerindra, PKB and Nasdem holding the deputies’ gavels.
The leadership and deputy leaderships of the parliamentary committees are distributed amongst the parties in proportion to their number of seats. With some 90 positions available, the apportionment of these influential titles will see a game of labyrinthine politicking.
Because PDI-P holds first place with such a narrow lead, the newly-strengthened Golkar ranks may begin looking with envious eyes to the speaker’s position and attempt to change the MD3 law and have this strategic position decided based on a majority vote of the parties rather than assigned by right to the biggest party. Golkar’s capacity to change this or other legislation will, of course, depend on the balance of power and allegiance amongst all the parties. Thus the final big remaining question is which grouping of parties will control the majority in the DPR.
Prabowo will need to build a coalition of parties to support his administration in parliament. Under Indonesia’s presidential system, the president does not need a parliamentary majority, but a troublesome parliament would be a major impediment for his presidency. At first glance, this might seem a difficult task for Prabowo because Gerindra is far short of a majority and even the addition of all the parties that supported his presidential candidacy only brings his numbers to 43%.
As president Prabowo will undoubtedly follow the approach of his predecessors and entice as many parties as possible into his tent. Most parties will likely join his parliamentary alliance, with the possible exception being PDI-P. While PKS stayed out of Jokowi’s governing coalition, it may find Prabowo a more amenable president. In any case, PKS may conclude that it gained virtually nothing in electoral terms as an opposition party in the last parliament and that jumping on the president’s bandwagon may bring more benefits.
While it is a truism that a healthy legislature requires a healthy opposition, past experience has shown that most Indonesian parties are more attracted by a share of the spoils of executive government than by the prospect of keeping the government accountable and providing an alternative government. This is where the politicking for DPR positions and jockeying for cabinet posts are directly connected to each other: a party’s DPR numbers are its main bargaining chip for a place in cabinet and a ministerial post is the key inducement in the president’s hand when seeking party support.
So the upcoming weeks and months will see a continuing flurry of flirtations, backroom meetings and negotiations amongst Prabowo and the leaders of the parties to patch together a cabinet which roughly reflects the balance of forces in the DPR. Prabowo’s cabinet will, like its forerunners, be a combination of party figures and, especially in the economic portfolios, technocratic experts.
DPR Speaker Puan Maharani with her mother Megawati Soekarnoputri, June 2023 (Photo: Puan Maharani on Facebook)
A stabilised two-track party system?
The parliamentary election has produced few surprises and a lot of continuity. The first two or three elections after 1998 saw major shifts in voter support. Firstly, the 1999 and 2004 elections saw a rapid decline in the initially high vote going to PDI-P, Golkar and PPP as their networks decayed and the influence left over from the Suharto era waned.
Secondly, from 2004 to 2014 there was a fragmentation of the electorate as the “presidentialist” parties sprang up to drive the political ambitions of new leaders unwilling or unable to accommodate themselves in the existing party hierarchies. This contributed to a flattening out of the different levels of support for each of the parties, with the parties holding the most seats in the DPR not being very much bigger than the smaller ones.
Since 2014, however, the parliamentary scene has stabilised, or perhaps stagnated. The parties appear to have succeeded in holding on to a core constituency of supporters, but have not been able to make progress beyond their base. Most of the parties have achieved results that are very close to their average performance over the last three elections.
What is it that these parties offer to their respective constituencies and how do they keep their support? When repeated studies and surveys have indicated a low level of identification with (and loyalty to?) parties, this raises the question of how it is that the party spectrum appears to have settled down into a set number of players with an ongoing connection with a group of voters.
Amongst the overall scene of stability, there were three small notable developments. Firstly, although PPP was a victim of the legislative mechanism of the threshold, its 2024 results are only the last of a series of declines that speak to the critical importance of maintaining a clear voter base. Secondly, the virtual disappearance of Hanura shows the potential fate of presidentialist parties if their only appeal is the personality of their founder—hence the eagerness of SBY to keep his family in control of PD. Thirdly, the failure of the Partai Solidaritas Indonesia (PSI) to break into the circle of established parties is a striking illustration of the difficulty of shifting the voter attitudes without a constituency that is better defined than that of “youth”.
The fact that the most recent entrant to the parliamentary contest, Nasdem, has seen steady growth in the last three elections through attracting the support of local notables, while having a relatively low-key national leader, attests to efficacy of grounding a party in localised politics. And the experience of PKB’s recovery from its near-death experience in 2009 shows that any party claiming to speak for a particular sector of society must be credible amongst the grassroots of that constituency.
Given the attention that scholars have paid to the role the distribution of patronage and “money politics” plays in election campaigns, and the fact that the party vote has actually changed very little over the last three elections, we need to measure the extent to which moving large amounts of resources does actually materially affect election results. Is the distribution of largesse only as important as, say, the coat tail effect, or is it even less than this? It may be that spending money—and being seen to spend money—is important for a party’s credibility as a big player, and for servicing its own supporters, but that it cannot really move large masses of voters.
The presidential and parliamentary elections appear to have taken on a very distinct character during simultaneous polls. In these last two elections, the presidential campaign has become essentially a contest in the “air war” conducted at a national level and especially reliant on the mass media and, of course, on the personality of a handful of players. The DPR elections, on the other hand, while still affected by the colour and movement of the presidential competition, appear to be increasingly dominated by the tactics of the “ground war” where local affinities, local figures and local patronage have become critical to success.
Separate presidential and parliamentary elections have gradually given rise to a two-track electoral contest and an associated strengthening of a two-track party system. Simultaneous presidential and parliamentary elections seem to be giving further impetus to this trend. There is fertile ground here for further research.
ANALYSIS:By David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report
On my office wall hangs a framed portrait of Shireen Abu Akleh, the inspiring and celebrated American-Palestinian journalist known across the Middle East to watchers of Al Jazeera Arabic, who was assassinated by an Israeli military sniper with impunity.
State murder.
She was gunned down in full blue “press” kit almost two years ago while reporting on a raid in the occupied West Bank’s Jenin refugee camp, clearly targeted for her influence as a media witness to Israeli atrocities.
As in the case of all 22 journalists who had been killed by Israeli military until that day, 11 May 2022, nobody was charged.
Now, six months into the catastrophic and genocidal Israeli War on Gaza, some 137 Palestinian journalists have been killed — murdered – by Israeli snipers, or targeted bombs demolishing their homes, and even their families.
Also in my office is pasted a red poster with a bird-of-paradise shaped pen in chains and the legend “Open access for journalists – Free press in West Papua.”
The poster was from a 2017 World Media Freedom Day conference in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, which I attended as a speaker and wrote about. Until this day, there is still no open door for international journalists
Harassed, beaten
Although only one killing of a Papuan journalist is recorded, there have been many instances when local news reporters have been harassed, beaten and threatened – beyond the reach of international media.
Ardiansyah Matra was savagely beaten and his body dumped in the Maro River, Merauke. A spokesperson for the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), Victor Mambor, said at the time: “‘It’s highly likely that his murder is connected with the terror situation for journalists which was occurring at the time of Ardiansyah’s death.”
Dr David Robie . . . author and advocate. Image: Café Pacific
Frequently harassed himself, Mambor, founder and publisher of Jubi Media, was apparently the target of a suspected bomb attack, or warning, on 23 January 2023, when Jayapura police investigated a blast outside his home in Angkasapura Village.
At first glance, it may seem strange that comparisons are being made between the War on Gaza in the Middle East and the long-smouldering West Papuan human rights crisis in the Asia-Pacific region almost 11,000 km away. But there are several factors at play.
Melanesian and Pacific activists frequently mention both the Palestinian and West Papuan struggles in the same breath. A figure of up to 500,000 deaths among Papuans is often cited as the toll from 1969 when Indonesia annexed the formerly Dutch colony in controversial circumstances under the flawed Act of Free Choice, characterised by critics as the Act of “No” Choice.
The death toll in Gaza after the six-month war on the besieged enclave by Israel is already almost 33,000 (in reality far higher if the unknown number of casualties buried under the rubble is added). Most of the deaths are women and children.
The Palestinian and West Papuan flags flying high at a New Zealand protest against the Gaza genocide in central Auckland. Image: David Robie/APR
Ethnic cleansing
But there are mounting fears that Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Gazans has no end in sight and the lives of 2.3 million people are at stake.
Both Palestinians and West Papuans see themselves as the victims of violent settler colonial projects that have been stealing their land and destroying their culture under the world’s noses — in the case of Palestine since the Nakba of 1948, and in West Papua since Indonesian paratroopers landed in a botched invasion in 1963.
They see themselves as both confronting genocidal leaders; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose popularity at home sinks by the day with growing protests, and Indonesia’s new President-elect Prabowo Subianto who has an atrocious human rights reputation in both Timor-Leste and West Papua.
And both peoples feel betrayed by a world that has stood by as genocides have been taking place — in the case of Palestine in real time on social media and television screens, and in the case of West Papua slowly over six decades.
Indonesian politicians such as Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi have been quick to condemn Israel, including at the International Court of Justice, but Papuan independence leaders find this hypocritical.
“We have full sympathy for the struggle for justice in Palestine and call for the restoration of peace,” said United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) president Benny Wenda.
Pacific protesters for a Free Palestine in New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland. Image: David Robie/APR
‘Where’s Indonesian outrage?’
“But what about West Papua? Where was Indonesia’s outrage after Bloody Paniai [2014], or the Wamena massacre in February?
“Indonesia is claiming to oppose genocide in Gaza while committing their own genocide in West Papua.”
“Over 60 years of genocidal colonial rule, over 500,000 West Papuans have been killed by Indonesian forces.”
Wenda said genocide in West Papua was implemented slowly and steadily through a series of massacres, assassinations and policies, such as the killings of the chair of the Papuan Council Theys Eluay in 2001; Mako Tabuni (2012); and cultural curator and artist Arnold Ap (1984).
In the South Pacific, Indonesia is widely seen among civil society, university and community groups as a ruthless aggressor with little or no respect for the Papuan culture.
Jakarta is engaged in an intensive diplomacy campaign in an attempt to counter this perception.
Unarmed Palestinians killed in Gaza – revealing Israel’s “kill zones”. Video: Al Jazeera
Israel’s ‘rogue’ status
But if Indonesia is unpopular in the Pacific over its brutal colonial policies, it is nothing compared to the global “rogue” status of Israel.
In the past few weeks, as atrocity after atrocity pile up and the country’s disregard for international law and United Nations resolutions increasingly shock, supporters appear to be shrinking to its long-term ally the United States and its Five Eyes partners with New Zealand’s coalition government failing to condemn Israel’s war crimes.
On Good Friday — Day 174 of the war – Israel bombed Gaza, Syria and Lebanon on the same day, killing civilians in all three countries.
In the past week, the Israeli military racheted up its attacks on the Gaza Strip in defiance of the UN Security Council’s order for an immediate ceasefire, expanded its savage attacks on neighbouring states, and finally withdrew from Al-Shifa Hospital after a bloody two-week siege, leaving it totally destroyed with at least 350 patients, staff and displaced people dead.
Fourteen votes against the lone US abstention after Washington had earlier vetoed three previous resolutions produced the decisive ceasefire vote, but the Israeli objective is clearly to raze Gaza and make it uninhabitable.
As The Guardian described the vote, “When Gilad Erdan, the Israeli envoy to the UN, sat before the Security Council to rail against the ceasefire resolution it had just passed, he cut a lonelier figure than ever in the cavernous chamber.”
The newspaper added that the message was clear.
‘Time was up’
“Time was up on the Israeli offensive, and the Biden administration was no longer prepared to let the US’s credibility on the world stage bleed away by defending an Israeli government which paid little, if any, heed to its appeals to stop the bombing of civilian areas and open the gates to substantial food deliveries.”
Al Jazeera interviewed Norwegian physician Dr Mads Gilbert, who has spent long periods working in Gaza, including at al-Shifa Hospital. He was visibly distressed in his reaction, lamenting that the Israeli attack had “destroyed” the 78-year legacy of the Strip’s largest and flagship hospital.
Speaking from Tromso, Norway, he said: “This is such a sad day, I’ve been weeping all morning.”
Dr Gilbert said he did not know the fate of the 107 critical patients who had been moved two days earlier to an older building in the complex.
“The maggots that are creeping out of the corpses in al-Shifa Hospital now,” he said, “are really maggots coming out of the eyes of President Biden and the European Union leaders doing nothing to stop this horrible, horrible genocide.”
Australia-based Antony Loewenstein, the author of The Palestine Laboratory, who has been reporting on Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories for two decades, described Israel’s attack on the hospital as the “actions of a rogue state”.
Gaza health officials said Israel was targeting all the hospitals and systematically destroying the medical infrastructure. Only five out of a total of 37 hospitals still had some limited services operating.
Indonesian soldiers gag journalists in West Papua – the cartoon could easily be referring to Gaza where attacks on Palestinian journalists have been systemic with 137 killed so far, by far the biggest journalist death toll in any conflict. Image: David Robie/APR
Strike on journalists’ tent
Yesterday, four people were killed and journalists were wounded in an Israeli air strike on a tent in the courtyard of al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.
The Israeli military claimed the strike was aimed at a “command centre” operated by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad armed group, but footage screened by Al Jazeera reporter Hind Khoudary clearly showed it was a tent where displaced people were sheltering and journalists and photographers were working.
The Israeli military have killed another photojournalist and editor, Abdel Wahab Awni, when they bombed his home in the Maghazi refugee camp. This took the number of journalists killed since the start of the war to 137, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office.
Al Jazeera has revealed that Israel was using “kill zones” for certain combat areas in Gaza. Anybody crossing the “invisible” lines into these zones was shot on sight as a “terrorist”, even if they were unarmed civilians.
The chilling practice was exposed when footage was screened of two unarmed civilians carrying white flags being apparently gunned down and then buried by bulldozer under rubble. A US-based civil rights group described the killings as a “heinous crime”.
The kill zones were confirmed at the weekend by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which said the military had claimed to have killed 9000 “terrorists”, but officials admitted that many of the dead were often civilians who had “crossed the line” of fire.
Call for sanctions
The Israeli peace advocacy group Gush Shalom sent an open letter to all the embassies credited to Israel calling for immediate sanctions against the Israeli government, saying Netanyahu was “flagrantly refusing” to comply with the ceasefire resolution.
“We, citizens of Israel,” said the letter, “are calling on your government to initiate a further meeting of the Security Council, aiming to pass a resolution which would set effective sanctions on Israel — in order to bring about an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip until the end of Ramadan and beyond it.”
A Palestinian-American professor of law Dr Noura Erakat, of Rutgers University, recently told a BBC interviewer that Israel had made its end game very clear from the beginning of the war.
“Israel has made its intent clear. Its war cabinet had made its intent clear. From the very beginning, in the first week of October 7, it told us its goal was to depopulate Gaza.
“They have equated the decimation of Hamas, which they cannot achieve militarily, with the depopulation of the entire Gaza strip.”
A parallel with Indonesia’s fundamentally flawed policies in West Papua. Failing violent settler colonialism.
This September 18-21, the Bali International Airshow transforms Ngurah Rai International Airport, Bali into a bustling hub of aerospace, aero technology, and defense innovation, showcasing Indonesia’s ambitions in leading Southeast Asia’s aerospace sector. Hosted by the Coordinating Ministry for Maritime and Investment Affairs, the Ministry of Transportation, the Indonesian Air Forces (TNI AU) and supported […]
OPEN LETTER:To Australia’s Foreign Minister Senator Penny Wong
Dear Foreign Minister,
I am writing to you on behalf of the Australia West Papua Association in Sydney concerning the brutal torture of a West Papuan man, Defianus Kogoya by Indonesian troops in West Papua in early February.
Anybody watching the video footage of the Papuan man being tortured by the Indonesian security forces cannot help but be horrified and outraged at the brutality of those involved in the torture.
A video of the torture is circulating on social media and in numerous articles in the main stream media.
Flashback to Asia Pacific Report’s report on the Indonesian torture on 23 March 2024 . . . global condemnation and protests quickly followed. Image: APR screenshot
The video shows the man placed in a drum filled with water, with both his hands tied. The victim is repeatedly punched and kicked by several soldiers.
His back is also slashed with a knife. One can only imagine the fear and terror the Papuan man must feel at this brutal torture being inflicted on him.
At first the military denied the claim. However, they eventually admitted it was true and arrested 13 soldiers involved in the incident.
I’m sure we will hear statements from Jakarta that this was an isolated incident, that they were “rogue” soldiers and that 13 soldiers have been arrested over the torture. However, if the video had not gone viral would anybody have been held to account?
Tragically this is not an isolated incident. We will not go into all the details of the human rights abuses committed against West Papuans by the Indonesian security forces as we are sure you are aware of the numerous reports documenting these incidents.
However, there are regular clashes between the Indonesian security forces and the TPNPB (Free Papua Movement) who are fighting for their independence. As a result of these clashes the military respond with what they call sweeps of the area.
It’s not unusual for houses and food gardens to be destroyed during these operations, including the arrest and torture of Papuans. Local people usually flee in fear from the military to the forest or other regions creating internally displaced people (IDP).
Human rights reports indicate there are more than 60,000 IDP in West Papua. Many suffer from malnutrition and their children are missing out on their education.
Amnesty International Indonesia, church and civil society groups in West Papua and around the world have condemned the torture and are calling for a thorough investigation into the torture case.
AWPA is urging you to also add your voice, condemning this brutal torture incident by the Indonesian military .
The West Papuan people are calling on the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit West Papua to investigate the human rights situation in the territory. We urge you to use you good offices with the Indonesian government, urging Jakarta to allow such a visit to take place.
Yours sincerely
Joe Collins
Australia West Papua Association (AWPA)
Sydney
