Ministers say exceptional security needed but rights groups warn new law could extend police powers permanently
The French government is fast-tracking special legislation for the 2024 Paris Olympics that would allow the use of video surveillance assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
Ministers have argued that certain exceptional security measures are needed to ensure the smooth running of the events that will attract 13 million spectators, but rights groups have warned France is seeking to use the Games as a pretext to extend police surveillance powers, which could then become permanent.
The headquarters of the Malvatumauri of National Council of Chiefs of Vanuatu has burned down.
The fire broke out about 1am Monday local time.
Police are investigating the cause of the fire in Port Vila.
The Malvatumauri nakamal is a custom parliament for all Vanuatu’s chiefs.
“This nakamal was the identity of the people of Vanuatu. It symbolised the unity of the custom of the Vanuatu and the law, peace and order of communities in Vanuatu,” said Chief Willie Plasua.
He told all chiefs around the country that while it was a major loss, it was only temporary.
“Custom, culture and tradition will never die and we will rebuild our headquarters,” Plasua said.
RNZ Pacific correspondent Hilaire Bule said the cost of the nakamal was more than 100 million vatu (US$850,000) and was co-financed by the Vanuatu and Australian governments.
The house was built with local materials to house the members of Malvatumauri during their annual general meeting.
An eyewitness, Sylverio Molkis, said on seeing the fire he made several phone calls to the fire brigade but could not get through.
“I also called the police but there was no answer and I had to go myself to the fire station to tell them about the blaze,” he said.
Only two buildings housing the administration offices of the Malvatumauri have survived.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A coalition of more than 1,300 climate and racial justice groups from across the United States on Monday joined a call for an independent investigation into the police killing of forest defender Manuel Paez Terán earlier this month, and demanded the resignation of Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens.
Nearly two weeks after the fatal shooting of the 26-year-old activist and medic—known as Tortuguita—Dickens “has still failed to condemn the killing,” said the groups, and has instead opted “to condemn protestors and parrot the rhetoric of extreme right-wing governor Brian Kemp.”
Tortuguita was shot and killed on January 18 when a joint task force including Atlanta police officers raided an encampment at Weelaunee forest. The forest is the site of a proposed $90 million police training facility known as Cop City.
“His championing of Cop City occurs against the backdrop of a continued investment in the gentrification of Atlanta and a continued disinvestment of affordable housing for a city identified as having the country’s highest level of wealth inequality.”
Over the weekend Dickens, a Democrat, condemned people who have protested Tortuguita’s killing in Atlanta, accusing protesters of traveling to the city to “wreak havoc” at demonstrations that were overwhelmingly peaceful.
“Within a few hours of the shooting, Dickens tweeted support for [an] injured state trooper and completely ignored the death at the hands of a task force which included Atlanta police officers on his watch,” wrote the groups, which include People vs. Fossil Fuels, Jewish Voice for Peace, Climate Justice Alliance, and Oil Change International. “As a growing number of Atlanta residents, national and global news outlets, and human rights and environmental organizations worldwide call for an investigation of the police narrative of Tortuguita’s death, Dickens has dismissed their concerns. He has refused to bring any scrutiny to the one-sided and unsubstantiated recounting of events. Dickens has yet to offer condolences to the slain protestor’s family.”
The groups noted that Dickens and the Atlanta City Council have the authority to terminate the land lease for Cop City in the forest and called for the mayor to do so immediately, denouncing his strong support for the Atlanta Police Foundation’s proposal.
“His championing of Cop City occurs against the backdrop of a continued investment in the gentrification of Atlanta and a continued disinvestment of affordable housing for a city identified as having the country’s highest level of wealth inequality,” said the groups. “Mayor Dickens can somehow find $90 million dollars for Cop City, one third of which will come from taxpayer money. Still, he can’t find money to keep our already overwhelmed hospitals open or to finance much-needed affordable housing.”
Ikiya Collective, a signatory of the letter, noted that the training slated to take place at Cop City “will impact organizing across the country” as police are trained to respond to popular uprisings.
“This is a national issue,” said the collective. “Climate justice and police brutality are interconnected, which is why we are joining the Stop Cop City calls to action with the frontline communities in Atlanta.”
“It is imperative that we demand an independent investigation into the police murder of Manuel ‘Tortuguita’ Paez Terán,” said Ikiya Collective. “We join calls for the termination of the lease and for Mayor Dickens’ resignation.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Five Black police officers are currently up on second degree murder charges over the killing of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, US. However, reports are starting to emerge that a white police officer was also involved – and that it was him that hit Tyre with the initial taser. Yet so far, this cop has not faced any consequences – and people are starting to ask questions.
Tyre Nichols: killing sparks protest
As Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported, police killed Tyre after beating him repeatedly following a traffic stop. He died on 10 January, three days after cops initially stopped him on suspicion of reckless driving. Authorities have fired five police officers and charged them all with second degree murder. Memphis authorities released the graphic bodycam footage of officers repeatedly attacking the 29-year-old as he moans and calls out for his mother.
His death and the subsequent details sparked protests in Memphis, Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and a handful of other cities:
In addition to second-degree murder charges, the police officers are facing indictments for aggravated assault and aggravated kidnapping.
There’s been a lot of talk on social media over the fact the five officers that killed Tyre were Black. However, as people pointed out on Twitter, this is how white supremacy works:
were y’all sitting there yelling “all cops are bastards” and “fuck the police” thinking we only meant the white ones…?
The fact that not a single white body has to be present for white supremacy to maintain itself isn't common knowledge is absolutely tragic and by design.
— Don’t watch me. Watch my films. (@NotNikyatu) January 27, 2023
However, reports are now emerging that a sixth officer who was involved in Tyre’s killing was white – and authorities have done nothing so far about the role he played.
White supremacy
First, Memphis councillor JB Smiley Jr pointed out on Twitter that one officer had not been charged yet:
The officer who tased #TyreNichols and who compelled the other officers to stomp him must be fired. We must put an end to the culture that allows excessive force and assumes it is commonplace. pic.twitter.com/xXKUXb05F6
At that time, no details of this sixth officer were public. However, on 29 January, reports started emerging on Twitter that this was the officer who initially stopped Tyre – and he was white:
It appears #TyreNichols was initially stopped by a male White officer who has not been identified. When he is stopped, it appears he is snatched out of the car by a male Black officer and pepper sprayed
This is Preston Hemphill. Detective Hemphill is named in the affidavit as having deployed his taser. He’s 26, born in July 1996. He needs to be charged accordingly for his part of contributing to Tyre Nichols being murdered. Notice the Apple Watch in both pictures..same band. pic.twitter.com/erNmaqgrDG
There was a white officer that was tasing my son and we don’t understand how come his name was not put out there or mentioned in this whole fiasco
The fact authorities immediately charged the five Black cops shows that, even though the police is a white supremacist institution, if you’re white it will still protect you more – as one Twitter user pointed out:
Preston Hemphill (R) was the officer that tased Tyre Nichols, playing a contributing role to his murder.
He wasn’t arrested, charged or fired unlike the other five Black cops.
Overall, though, Tyre’s killing isn’t about the skin colour of cops. Ultimately, the police as an institution is a white supremacist one. As author Wil Gafney said on Twitter:
Whiteness enslaves. Whiteness corrupts. Whiteness consumes. Whiteness kills. Those five black police officers were executing white supremacist policing in the service of whiteness; whiteness which happily receives their service, but not their persons. They could easily be next.
I need so many people to understand this regarding Tyre Nichols. Several of the police officers who murdered Freddie Gray were Black. The entire system of policing is based on white supremacist violence. We see people under the boot of oppression carry its water all the time. https://t.co/H11cuzHPxC
Meanwhile, the police killing of Tyre has sparked people to call once again for defunding or abolition of the police. As artist and activist Bree Newsome Bass said:
The establishment would’ve done better to make major concessions after George Floyd because I think the Tyre Nichols case has now moved a lot of people from reform to abolition.
Abolitionism, especially around the police, is not just about the police – contrary to what some people might say. Joshua P Hill summed this up well:
The problem isn't only police killings. Police protect fascists who harass abortion clinics, and attack folks who demand affordable housing, or climate action, or go on strike. This is what policing is, this is why abolition is vital to a better world. https://t.co/fs9ZtRy2E6
— Read Jackson Rising by @CooperationJXN (@JoshuaPHilll) January 28, 2023
Regardless of ethnicity or race, it was police officers that killed Tyre Nichols. And it was institutional white supremacy that took his life – as it does every time police in the US kill Black and brown people.
Featured image, additional images and additional reporting via Agence France-Presse
The family of Tyre Nichols and others appalled by his death — for which five fired Memphis cops now face murder charges — welcomed the police department’s decision on Saturday to disband a unit created in 2021 to patrol high-crime areas. The move came a day after the Tennessee city put out videos of the former Memphis Police Department (MPD) officers — Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley…
On January 18, 26-year-old Manuel Esteban Paez Terán was gunned down by Atlanta police at a protest site in the South River Forest. The encampment that police were raiding that day is part of a movement to stop the construction of a sprawling, $90-million training facility for police that includes a mock cityscape, so that police can practice acts of urban warfare — a project activists have dubbed…
Three people are dead and at least one person is missing following the flooding overnight in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city.
About 1000 people were still stranded today after Auckland Airport was closed last night because of flooding of the arrival and departure foyers. Flights were cancelled for the morning but domestic flights resumed in the afternoon.
Police responded to a call after a man was found dead in a flooded culvert in Wairau Valley, about 7.30pm last night.
The spokesperson said police were called to a flooded carpark on Link Drive, also in Wairau Valley, after a report of another man found dead about 12.30am on Saturday.
Inquiries into the circumstances of both deaths were ongoing, police said.
Police are also investigating reports of a man having been swept away by floodwaters in Onewhero shortly after 10pm on Friday.
A search and rescue team will deploy today to search for the missing man.
Landslide brings down house
Emergency services also responded to a landslide that brought down a house on Shore Road, Remuera about half past seven. One person remains unaccounted for and the property will be assessed this morning.
A “floating” bus caught in the Auckland floods in Sunnynook Rd, Glenfield, last evening. Image: TikTok screenshot Coconetwireless_Mez/@d.mack
Police continue to urge people to stay home and not drive unless absolutely necessary today.
Police said they were continuing to respond to a high number of calls after the severe weather.
Auckland mayor Wayne Brown said staff would today be assessing what damage had occurred and what steps needed to be taken next.
He declared a state of emergency last night that will remain in force for seven days.
Hipkins said more should been known in a few hours about how bad the damage was after a day of torrential flooding.
He was with a team at the Beehive bunker overnight, talking to the teams coordinating the response in Auckland.
Hipkins said it was difficult to get information about what is going on but up to 1000 people were still stranded at Auckland airport, and right across the region there were many people just simply stuck somewhere where they would not normally be early on a Saturday morning — including in their car, or at a business.
Volunteers from the Whānau Community Hub help a family evacuate from their home in Sandringham last night. Image: Nik Naidu/Whānau Community Centre
MetService said the airport had smashed its all-time record for rainfall in a single 24-hour period — recording 249mm yesterday, beating the previous record set nearly four decades in 1985 — 161.8mm.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Record breaking rain in Auckland. Although the heavy band of rain has moved off to the east there is still a change of showers so the total for rainfall could climb even higher. The impacts of the last 24 hours will be felt by many in Auckland for a long time. Take care out there pic.twitter.com/kiIm6Tsrro
Social justice advocates on Friday registered the Memphis police chief’s response to footage of the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols by five officers as evidence that the video “must be awful,” as Chief Cerelyn Davis said the soon-to-be-released footage shows “acts that defy humanity.”
“You’re going to see a disregard for life, duty of care that we’re all sworn to, and a level of physical interaction that is above and beyond what is required in law enforcement,” David toldCNN.
The footage is expected to be released Friday. Officials in a number of cities including Memphis, Los Angeles, Dallas, New York, and Minneapolis have all said they are preparing for large-scale protests.
“Just the disregard for humanity… That’s what really pulls at your heartstrings and makes you wonder: Why was a sense of care and concern for this individual just absent from the situation by all who went to the scene?” Davis toldCNN.
\u201cHaving difficulty imagining how sickening and horrible something must be to elicit these words from a top cop about the actions of their own \n\nhttps://t.co/xkKKmm21yY\u201d
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland also called the footage “deeply disturbing,” and President Joe Biden acknowledged that nationwide protests may break out over Nichols’ killing, demanding “accountability when law enforcement officers violate their oaths” and joining Nichols’ family in “calling for peaceful protest.”
“I called on Congress to send the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act to my desk,” said Biden on Thursday. “When they didn’t, I signed an executive order that included stricter use of force standards and accountability provisions for federal law enforcement, as well as measures to strengthen accountability at the state and local level. Today, we all must re-commit ourselves to the critical work that must be done to advance meaningful reforms.”
Nichols died on January 10 from cardiac arrest and kidney failure, three days after he was pulled over by Memphis officers—allegedly for reckless driving—although Davis said her department has been “unable to substantiate that at this time.”
The 29-year-old had two violent “confrontations” with the officers, according to the Memphis Police Department, before being rushed to a hospital in critical condition.
The five officers were fired from the department after the attack and on Thursday were charged with crimes including second-degree murder.
Antonio Romanucci, an attorney representing Nichols’ family, called on the nation’s police unions to condemn the killing.
“Where does the Fraternal Order of Police stand on this?” he asked at a press conference. “We have not heard from you… We want to hear you say that what happened to Tyre, what happened to this family, should never, ever happen again.”
\u201cTyre Nichols\u2019 family attorney Antonio Romanucci calls out police unions for not condemning Nichols\u2019 fatal arrest at the hands of Memphis police:\n\n\u201cWe want to hear you say that what happened to Tyre… should never, ever happen again; that you condemn the brutality, the savagery.\u201d\u201d
FBI Director Christopher Wray announced the bureau will open a civil rights investigation into the killing.
“I’ve seen the video myself,” said Wray. “I’m struggling to find a stronger word, but I will tell you that I was appalled.”
Grassroots organizer Bree Newsome Bass expressed disgust over the latest police killing and the drawn-out lead-up to the video being made public.
“The way they’ve spent days and hours emphasizing the violence of Tyre Nichols’ murder like it’s a countdown to a movie release tells you everything about the depravity of the system we live under,” said Newsome Bass.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Elizabeth Cabradilla Amid nationwide protests, prosecutors have charged five former Memphis police officers with murder in the death of Tyre Nichols, who died January 10 of kidney failure and cardiac arrest after a vicious beating three days earlier during a traffic stop. Memphis and other cities across the U.S. are expecting mass protests against police violence over the…
Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday signed an executive order declaring a state of emergency through at least February 9 that will enable him to deploy up to 1,000 National Guard troops “as necessary.” The order follows protests in Atlanta after 26-year-old forest defender Manuel “Tortuguita” Teran was shot dead last week during a multi-agency raid on an encampment to oppose…
On January 18th, Tortuguita, a brave and beloved Weelaunee Forest Defender, was killed by Atlanta Police. As people of conscience, as breathers of air, as anti-imperialists, as feminists, pacifists, activists – we condemn this state-sanctioned murder.
Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, AKA Tortuguita, is the victim of an expanding and increasingly militarized machine of state violence, suppression, racist policing, and environmental destruction. Activists in the Stop Cop City movement have put their bodies on the line to protect the Weelaunee Forest from the development of a monster urban policing training center. If constructed, it will equip thousands of police units from across the country to replicate and escalate the deadly and racist tactics employed by modern American law enforcement institutions. It is sadly unsurprising, too, that Cop City will facilitate Atlanta Police’s continued exchange of militarized police tactics with the Israeli Police Force, itself an arm of racialized state violence and repression.
The construction of “Cop City” would raze the Weelaunee Forest, home for millennia to the original forest defenders, the Muscogee people, who were illegally and lethally forced out of their territory by the United States. The current residents of the area surrounding Weelaunee Forest, largely Black Americans, are overwhelmingly opposed to the Cop City project, which would destroy the most crucial carbon store in the area and would only serve to supercharge the deadly policing apparatus.
The state of Georgia has already charged more than a dozen Forest Defenders with “domestic terrorism” for occupying the forest, showing the extent to which our government is prepared to escalate against activists with wartime rhetoric and suppression tactics. There is a tragic, inescapable irony to this charge.
When a living forest is under threat of total destruction; when lives are stolen in the name of “justice;” when those killed are disproportionately Black and Brown men; when armed forces are deployed to expedite deadly resource extraction and accelerate the climate crisis; we ask:
Who are the real domestic terrorists?
Forests are the lungs of the Earth. Every tree felled for major development robs our planet of its natural ability to release oxygen into the atmosphere and store carbon in the soil. This knowledge is what drives the forest defenders to put their bodies on the line, just as environmental activists the world over resist and disrupt systematic deforestation which is linked to Indigenous displacement and fascist governments. It has become tragically commonplace to hear of land defenders and environmental activists in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico the Philippines, and Honduras being killed for their bold defiance of environmental destruction. Tortuguita’s killing must shock us into action and guide our demands to ensure that no more activists are killed, whether here in North America or across the Global South, for their acts of conscience. Particularly, this killing must serve as a wakeup call to those in the climate movement who have yet to draw the connections between natural resource extraction and the rampant US militarism which threatens people and their environments here and abroad.
CODEPINK stands with the Weelaunee Forest Defenders, who are risking their freedom and lives to prevent an appalling misappropriation of $90 million. We recognize that the cost of Cop City is not only the unacceptable destruction of the forest and the militarization of police. Cop City is part and parcel of this country’s perennial failure to prioritize healthcare over police, green jobs over nukes, working families over Wall Street, Indigenous communities over oil profits – in short, life over death. Tortuguita’s killing is a testament to a broader sickness in American policy, and as we call for an end to deadly US intervention abroad, we join in calls to bring it to a halt here, at home.
The first time Sitiveni Rabuka was elected into office was more than 30 years ago. Today marks a little over a month since he became Fiji’s Prime Minister for a second time. He catches up with Tagata Pasifika’s John Pulu to discuss his return to office, Fiji’s covid-19 recovery and the investigation of Fiji’s former attorney-general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum.
It’s been a busy start for the newly elected leader of Fiji, Sitiveni Rabuka.
And while he’s only held the role for a little over a month, walking into the Prime Minister’s office felt familiar for the leader of the People’s Alliance (PA) party.
“The office dynamics are still the same,” he says.
“It was just like going back to an old car or an old bicycle that you have driven before or ridden before.
“The people are new…[there’s] possible generational difficulties and views but I have not encountered any since the month I came into the office.”
However, his journey into office was not an easy one. After the initial tally of votes at last years’ December election, neither Rabuka nor his predecessor Voreqe Bainimarama had gained a comfortable majority to take Parliament.
Sodelpa (Social Democratic Liberal Party) became the kingmakers, voting to form a coalition with the PA, and they were joined by the National Federation Party (NFP).
Bainimarama out of office
For the first time since 2014, Bainimarama was out of office. Rabuka says they have not spoken since the election.
“There has been no communication since the outcome,” he says.
“It was something I tried to encourage when I was in the opposition and opposition leader, for across-the-floor discussions on matters that affect the nation.
“We grew up in the same profession…we are friends,” Rabuka insists.
Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka talking to Tagata Pasifika . . . returning to office as PM is like “going back to an old car . . . you have driven before”. Image: TP Plus screenshot APR
However, there’s plenty else to keep Rabuka busy at this time.
The coalition trinity means more cooks in the kitchen, but Rabuka is confident that they can work together to lead Fiji.
“I worked with the National Federation Party in 1999. Sodelpa was the party I helped to register,” he recalls.
‘Differences in past’
“There might have been differences in the past but we are still family and it’s only natural for us to come together and work together again.”
They’ve already enacted a number of changes including lifting a ban on a number of Fijians who were exiled by the previous government.
“It’s interesting that many of those returning thought they were on a blacklist,” Rabuka muses.
“When we asked Immigration, Immigration [said] ‘there is no such thing as a blacklist, or anyone being prohibited from coming back’.
“They all came back and they were very happy. But it also reflected the freedom in the atmosphere.”
And speaking of freedom, investigations into former attorney-general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum have reportedly been suspended.
Under investigation
According to FBC News, Sayed-Khaiyum was under investigation for allegedly inciting communal antagonism.
Rabuka says Sayed-Khaiyum is a person of interest, but isn’t yet subjected to any prosecution processes at this time.
“But if it develops from there, there might be restrictions on his movement – particularly out of Fiji.”
Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air. Republished from Tagata Pasifika with permission.
Progressive lawmakers are calling for an independent investigation into the death of climate justice activist Manuel Terán, who also went by the name Tortuguita, who was killed by police last week as law enforcement officers were carrying out a violent raid of a protest camp in a wooded area in Atlanta, Georgia. Activists say that the police raid of the camp was only law enforcement’s most recent…
Nestled near the headwaters of the Au Sable River in Northern Lower Michigan, in lands forcibly taken from the Odawa and Ojibwa, the Michigan Army National Guard (MIANG) currently operates the largest National Guard training site in the country, Camp Grayling. At 230 square miles, it could fit Detroit (139 sq. miles), Lansing (37 sq. miles), and Grand Rapids (45 sq. miles) safely within its…
Police interviewing of FijiFirst Party general secretary and former attorney-general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum has reportedly been suspended but will continue later.
FBC News reports the interview with Sayed-Khaiyum will continue.
The police Chief of Intelligence and Investigations, Assistant Commissioner Surend Sami, told the state broadcaster the suspension is to allow investigators to verify issues and information gathered during the interviews.
The Minister for Rural, Maritime Development and Disaster Management, Sakiasi Ditoka, had filed a complaint against Sayed-Khaiyum on December 22, for allegedly inciting racial hatred and violence at a media conference in Suva before the coalition government had been formed.
In that conference, Sayed-Khaiyum had claimed stoning incidents highlighted by the police and said that this demonstrated the “divisive character” of the People’s Alliance Leader Sitiveni Rabuka, who is now the Prime Minister.
President told not to take external legal advice Fiji’s Attorney-General, Siromi Turaga, has told the President he should not take legal advice from the former attorney-general, the former prime minister or from the opposition FijiFirst party.
FBC News reports Turaga saying that he briefed President Ratu Wiliame Katonivere that he must only accept legal opinions from the Attorney-General’s Chambers.
He said no other law firm should be advising on any other matters, and if he is in doubt, the Attorney-General’s Chambers is able to assist the President.
Turaga said that according to the Constitution and the law, any issues dealing with government affairs are to be dealt with by the coalition government and its head, Sitiveni Rabuka.
Complaint lodged against former PM A human rights activist has filed a complaint against FijiFirst leader Voreqe Bainimarama.
FBC News reports that Surend Sami confirmed the complaint was in relation to statements made on live videos on the FijiFirst Facebook page on January 1 and 4.
In her complaint, Shamima Ali has alleged that Bainimarama’s statements were intended to cause public alarm, anxiety, disaffection, discontent and were made with malicious intent.
Sami said the investigation had now been taken over by the Criminal Investigation Department.
President Katonivere will officially open Parliament next week on Friday, February 3.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A veteran journalist known for covering rights abuses in Indonesia’s militarised Papua region says a bomb exploded outside his home yesterday and a journalists group has called it an act of “intimidation” threatening press freedom.
No one was injured in the blast near his home in the provincial capital Jayapura, said Victor Mambor, editor of Papua’s leading news website Jubi, who visited New Zealand in 2014.
Police said they were investigating the explosion and that no one had yet claimed responsibility.
Tabloid Jubi editor Victor Mambor being interviewed by Pacific Media Watch’s Anna Majavu during the first visit by a Papuan journalist to New Zealand in 2014. Image: Del Abcede/PMW
Mambor is also an advocate for press freedom in Papua. In that role, he has criticised Jakarta’s restrictions on the media in Papua, as well as its other policies in his troubled home province.
The AJI awarded Mambor its press freedom award in August 2022, saying that through Jubi, “Victor brings more voices from Papua, amid domination of information that is biased, one-sided and discriminatory.”
“AJI in Jayapura strongly condemns the terrorist bombing and considers this an act of intimidation that threatens press freedom in Papua,” it said in a statement.
‘Voice the truth’ call
“AJI Jayapura calls on all journalists in the land of Papua to continue to voice the truth despite obstacles. Justice should be upheld even though the sky is falling,” said AJI chair Lucky Ireeuw.
Amnesty International Indonesia urged the police to find those responsible.
“The police must thoroughly investigate this incident, because this is not the first time … meaning there was an omission that made the perpetrators feel free to do it again, to intimidate and threaten journalists,” Amnesty’s campaign manager in Indonesia, Nurina Savitri, told BenarNews.
The Papua region, located at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago, has been the site of a decades-old pro-independence insurgency where both government security forces and rebels have been accused of committing atrocities against civilians.
Foreign journalists have been largely barred from the area, with the government insisting it could not guarantee their safety. Indonesian journalists allege that officials make their work difficult by refusing to provide information.
The armed elements of the independence movement have stepped up lethal attacks on Indonesian security forces, civilians and targets such as construction of a trans-Papua highway that would make the Papuan highlands more accessible.
Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, has accused Indonesian security forces of intimidation, arbitrary arrests, torture, extrajudicial killings and mass forced displacement in Papua.
Security forces kill 36
Last month, Indonesian activist group KontraS said 36 people were killed by security forces and pro-independence rebels in the Papua and West Papua provinces in 2022, an increase from 28 in 2021.
In Sydney, Joe Collins of the AWPA said in a statement: “These acts of intimidation against local journalists in West Papua threaten freedom of the press.
“It is the local media in West Papua that first report on human rights abuses and local journalists are crucial in reporting information on what is happening in West Papua”.
Collins said Canberra remained silent on the issue — ‘the Australian government is very selective in who it criticises over their human rights record.”
There was no problem raising concerns about China or Russia over their record, “but Canberra seems to have great difficulty in raising the human rights abuses in West Papua with Jakarta.”
Republished from Free Radio Asia with additional reporting by Pacific Media Watch.
Victor Mambor as an advocate for media freedom in West Papua. Image: AWPA
Like so many of the evils in our midst, sex trafficking (and the sexualization of young people) is a cultural disease that is rooted in the American police state’s heart of darkness. It speaks to a sordid, far-reaching corruption that stretches from the highest seats of power (governmental and corporate) down to the most hidden corners and relies on our silence and our complicity to turn a blind eye to wrongdoing.
It is estimated that the number of children who are at risk of being trafficked or have already been sold into the sex trade would fill 1300 school buses.
Every year, the ages of the girls and boys being bought and sold get younger and younger.
The average age of those being trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed out, “Let’s think about what average means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds.”
A Pennsylvania police chief and his friend were arrested for allegedly raping a young girl hundreds of times—orally, vaginally, and anally several times a week—over the course of seven years, starting when she was 4 years old.
Two NYPD cops were accused of arresting a teenager, handcuffing her, and driving her in an unmarked van to a nearby parking lot, where they raped her and forced her to perform oral sex on them, then dropped her off on a nearby street corner.
And then you have national sporting events such as the Super Bowl, where sex traffickers have been caught selling minors, some as young as 9 years old. Whether or not the Super Bowl is a “windfall” for sex traffickers as some claim, it remains a lucrative source of income for the child sex trafficking industry and a draw for those who are willing to pay to rape young children.
Social media makes it all too easy. As one news center reported, “Finding girls is easy for pimps. They look on … social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high schools and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. On the trolley. Girl-to-girl recruitment sometimes happens.” Foster homes and youth shelters have also become prime targets for traffickers.
Rarely do these children enter into prostitution voluntarily. Many start out as runaways or throwaways, only to be snatched up by pimps or larger sex rings. Others, persuaded to meet up with a stranger after interacting online through one of the many social networking sites, find themselves quickly initiated into their new lives as sex slaves.
For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end.
Those being sold for sex have an average life expectancy of seven years, and those years are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those you love hurt or killed.
As David McSwane recounts in a chilling piece for the Herald-Tribune: “In Oakland Park, an industrial Fort Lauderdale suburb, federal agents in 2011 encountered a brothel operated by a married couple. Inside ‘The Boom Boom Room,’ as it was known, customers paid a fee and were given a condom and a timer and left alone with one of the brothel’s eight teenagers, children as young as 13. A 16-year-old foster child testified that he acted as security, while a 17-year-old girl told a federal judge she was forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a night.”
One particular sex trafficking ring catered specifically to migrant workers employed seasonally on farms throughout the southeastern states, especially the Carolinas and Georgia, although it’s a flourishing business in every state in the country. Traffickers transport the women from farm to farm, where migrant workers would line up outside shacks, as many as 30 at a time, to have sex with them before they were transported to yet another farm where the process would begin all over again.
This growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open.
That so many children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.
A special task force from Fiji’s Criminal Investigations Department (CID) is handling former attorney-general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum’s alleged incitement case.
Fiji Police Force chief of intelligence and investigations Assistant Commissioner of Police Surend Sami said the task force was working under the direction of the director CID.
“As earlier stated, there is a special task force that is handling this case which works under the direction of the director CID,” Assistant Commissioner Sami said.
“The process of getting statements and necessary evidence continues by the investigators and once the process is completed then the next course of action will be taken.
“We do not want to pressure the investigators and must allow them to conduct their work thoroughly”.
Sayed-Khaiyum arrived in the country on Thursday.
Sakiasi Ditoka, Minister for Rural Maritime Development and Disaster Management and general secretary for the People’s Alliance, had filed a complaint against Sayed-Khaiyum on December 22 alleging that he had incited racial hatred and violence with his public statements at a press conference in Suva.
Rakesh Kumaris a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.
We get an update on calls for an independent investigation into the Atlanta police killing of an activist during a violent raid Wednesday on a proposed $90 million training facility in a public forest, known by opponents to the facility as “Cop City.” Law enforcement officers — including a SWAT team — were violently evicting protesters who had occupied a wooded area outside the center when they…
Police accountability advocates on Thursday called for an independent investigation after an activist was shot and killed during a multi-jurisdictional law enforcement raid on a forest encampment blocking the construction of a massive police training center just outside Atlanta popularly known as Cop City.
Details surrounding the deadly encounter near the planned site of Atlanta’s public safety center continued to trickle out Thursday, as a wounded state trooper recovered and left-wing activists both mourned a fallen comrade and questioned the official account of events.
At least seven other people, meanwhile, were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism in connection with Wednesday’s law enforcement operation in the southern DeKalb County woods.
Activists tied to the “Defend the Forest” movement identified the person killed by law enforcement—after allegedly firing at troopers first—as Manuel Teran, aka “Tortuguita.” Online posts described Teran as a “beloved member of the community” who split time between Atlanta and Florida.
“We are devastated by the loss of our friend who was killed by the police. Tortuguita was a kind, passionate, and loving person, cherished by their community,” said a statement published on the Atlanta Community Press Collective website.
\u201cThis is the Manuel “Tortuguita” Teran, the young, queer, Afro-Venezuelan forest defender killed by police yesterday in their raid to clear the forest so they could build Cop-City. Don’t let the media criminalize them.\u201d
“We don’t know what happened yesterday,” the statement acknowledged, adding that Teran was killed while “defending the forest.”
According toUnicorn Riot, “throughout the day and into the night, efforts to extract forest defenders from the trees continued, with arborists cutting down trees and tree houses in an effort to remove protesters.”
Jeff Ordower, North America director at the climate action group 350.org, said in a statement
Thursday, “With heavy hearts, we stand with the Atlanta Forest
Defenders and all of those who defend the land, the water, and the
planet.”
“Tortuguita’s ‘crime’ was defending a forest in the heart of Atlanta—yet police moved in full force to evict the encampment, using their usual litany of brutal tactics,” he added. “As we’ve seen all too often with police brutality, we can expect the usual false claims of ‘self-defense,’ coupled with an attempt to smear the victim and movement. Our movement will continue to stand up for intersectional justice—for the people and the planet.”
\u201c\ud83c\udf9e\ufe0fAtlanta Community Reacts to Police Killing of Forest Defender Manuel Teran\n\nMore Updates Here \u27a1\ufe0f https://t.co/qre2y0SMp7\u201d
In an Instagram post, the activist group Stop Cop City said that “in Manuel’s name, we continue to fight to protect the forest and stop Cop City with love, rage, and a commitment to each other’s safety and well-being.”
The Atlanta Police Foundation, a private organization, was given permission in 2021 to build Cop City, a $90 million, 85-acre police and fire training facility in the Weelaunee Forest in DeKalb County on land stolen from the Muscogee people, many of whom were forced westward during the genocidal Trail of Tears period.
In 2017, the area was designated one of four “city lungs” by the Atlanta City Planning Department, which recommended the forest become a massive urban park. Instead, Cop City was approved.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
An activist was shot and killed by police on Wednesday during a violent raid of the protest camp and community gathering space that has blocked construction of an enormous police training facility known as “Cop City” on roughly 100 acres of public forest in southeast Atlanta. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation initially said a suspect was shot and killed after allegedly firing a gun and injuring…
Papua police chief Mathias Fakhiri has ordered the head of the Internal Affair Division and director of Criminal Investigation of the Papua Police to immediately investigate the actions taken by police officers.
He asked his staff to approach families and religious, community and traditional leaders, so that the arrest of Governor Lukas Enembe would not create unrest.
“I ask for the report today. If there is indeed a wrong handling, I ensure there will be law enforcement against members who do not comply with the standard operating procedures,” he said.
“I urge all parties not to spread hoaxes or information that does not match the facts,” he said.
“Let us provide moral support so that the legal process runs as it is.”
Wenda calls for governor’s release A West Papuan independence leader, Benny Wenda, has called for the immediate and unconditional release of Governor Enembe.
Wenda said the arrest follows the governor’s “criminalisation” in September 2022, when he was accused of corruption and banned from travelling abroad for essential medical treatment.
The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) leader said Enembe’s treatment could not be separated from his increasingly vocal stance against Indonesia’s colonial policies in West Papua.
Wenda said Enembe opposed Indonesia’s division of West Papua into new provinces, which the exiled leader described as a “divide and rule” tactic designed to steal the region’s natural resources and allow further militarisation of villages.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
West Papuan independence campaigner Benny Wenda at the Pacific Islands Forum summit in Tuvalu, 2019. Image: Jamie Tahana/RNZ Pacific
“Armies of officials are clothed in uniform, invested with authority, armed with the instruments of violence & death & conditioned to believe that they can intimidate, maim or kill Negroes with the same recklessness that once motivated the slaveowner.” — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Protest by non-locals [organizers against Cop City] are inherently terrorism.” — Second-in-command Atlanta Police…
A Metropolitan Police officer has pleaded guilty to at least 29 sexual offences, including 14 rape charges. David Carrick was an armed police officer, serving in the parliamentary and diplomatic protection command. He joined the Met in 2001 after leaving the army, and his attacks span a period of 18 years. The police force admitted that there are likely to be more victims who are too scared to come forward, and other women who couldn’t face the ordeal of a trial. Carrick used his position in the police to terrify women into staying silent.
Inaction by the Met over Carrick
The Met suspended Carrick in October 2021. However, Sky News has reported that:
the Met Police confirmed Carrick “had come to the attention of the Met and other forces on nine occasions prior to October 2021” but had not been charged over those allegations against him.
They included allegations of rape, domestic violence, and harassment between 2000 and 2021.
Barbara Gray, the Met’s assistant commissioner, said:
We should have spotted his pattern of abusive behaviour and because we didn’t, we missed opportunities to remove him from the organisation.
However, the force chose to ignore multiple complaints. It didn’t miss them, as Gray claimed. Not only did the police force do nothing about the allegations, it even armed Carrick, giving him a gun in 2009. He even passed another vetting procedure in 2017, despite the force knowing about the allegations.
This shows, once again, how disgustingly misogynist the Metropolitan Police is. It has such little regard for women’s safety that it ignored multiple complaints, and rewarded Carrick by promoting him up the ranks into an elite armed unit.
Rampant misogyny
It is hardly surprising that one of the worst sex offenders in Britain could be allowed to thrive in the Metropolitan Police. The Canary has extensively reported on the rampant misogyny in the Met. It took the brutal murder of Sarah Everard for the Met to announce that it would investigate all cases of sexual misconduct or domestic abuse allegations against its officers. Sarah was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by then-serving Metropolitan Police officer, Wayne Couzens, in March 2021. He even remained an officer after police arrested him that month, and was only sacked in July, over a month after he pleaded guilty to kidnapping and raping her.
Just months after Sarah’s murder, Cressida Dick – who was then the Metropolitan Police Commissioner – was accused of “presiding over a culture of incompetence and cover-up”. Dick resigned in April 2022 after she was criticised for her handling of racist, misogynist, and homophobic messages shared by a group of officers based at Charing Cross police station. The men sent WhatsApp and Facebook messages to each other, making multiple references to rape and violence against women. One officer was even referred to as “mcrapey raperson” because of rumours that he had brought a woman to a police station to have sex with her.
It’s also important not to forget the Met’s handling of the murders of sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, who were stabbed to death in a park in Wembley in June 2020. Their family had to search for the women themselves after the Met didn’t immediately respond to their calls for help. When the police did finally turn up, officers took selfies of themselves next to Bibaa and Nicole’s dead bodies. Their mother, Mina Smallman, said at the time:
If ever we needed an example of how toxic it has become, those police officers felt so safe, so untouchable, that they felt they could take photographs of dead black girls and send them on. It speaks volumes of the ethos that runs through the Metropolitan Police.
Thousands of women have been murdered or abused by the police
In 2021, a report found that at least 194 women have been murdered by the police and prison system in England and Wales. In 2022, freedom of information requests from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that 82% of police officers who were accused of domestic abuse kept their jobs. The Guardianreported that:
1,080 out of 1,319 police officers and staff who were reported for alleged domestic abuse during a three-year period were still working.
The Guardian continued:
The conviction rate of police officers and staff for domestic abuse is 3.4%, lower than the 6.3% in the general population.
Institutional violence
This being the case, it’s little consolation when the Met yet again sheds crocodile tears, apologising that one of its elite officers, Carrick, has been raping women for two decades. Gray said:
We are truly sorry that being able to continue to use his role as a police officer may have prolonged the suffering of his victims.
The Met will go on looking after their own, thriving on a culture of violence, racism, and misogyny. Its officers will, no doubt, continue to abuse and terrify women. These officers will be loose on the streets, arresting and traumatising women, children and Black communities with brutal and humilitatingstrip searches, while their undercover police officers will continue to invade women’s lives.
Meanwhile, the state will continue to play its part, having passed a succession of new laws giving some of the country’s most violent men – police officers – inexhaustible new powers.
The Met will start the process of sacking Carrick on Tuesday 17 January. Far too little, too late.
Harrowing video footage released this week shows officers with the Los Angeles Police Department forcibly restraining and repeatedly using a Taser on 31-year-old Keenan Anderson — a high school teacher and cousin of Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors — following a traffic accident. Soon thereafter, Anderson was transported to a local hospital where he suffered cardiac arrest and died.
Following months of legal limbo and a health crisis, Papua Governor Lukas Enembe was arrested this week by the country’s Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) in a dramatic move condemned by critics as a “kidnapping”.
At noon on Tuesday, January 10, Governor Enembe was dining in a local restaurant near the headquarters of Indonesia’s Mobile Brigade Corps, known as Brimob.
After the arrest the Brimob transported him directly to Sentani Theys Eluay airport — an airport named in honour of another prominent Papuan leader who was callously murdered by the same security forces in 2002, not far from where the governor was arrested.
Governor Enembe was immediately flown to Jakarta to arrive at the Army Central Hospital (RSPAD), Gatot Soebroto, Central Jakarta, reports Kompas.com.
In what seems to be a cautiously premeditated arrest, Jakarta targeted Governor Enembe while he was alone and without the support of thousands of Papuans who had barricaded his residence since September last year.
Once the news of his arrest was leaked, supporters attempted to gather in Sentani at the airport, but they were outnumbered by heavy security forces. A few protesters were shot, and several were injured, with one protester dying from his injuries.
1 shot dead, several wounded
Papua Police Public Relations Officer Kombes Ignatius Benny Prabowo said when contacted by Tribunnews.com in Jakarta: “Yes, it is true that someone was shot dead on Tuesday.”
Among those who were shot were Hemanus Kobari Enembe (dead), Neiron Enembe, Kano Enembe, and Segira Enembe.
Surprisingly, they share the same clan names of the governor himself, indicating that only his immediate family were informed of his arrest.
Hemanus Kobari Enembe paid the ultimate price at the hand of Jakarta’s calculated planning and arrest of Papua’s governor.
The crisis began in September 2022, when Governor Enembe was named a suspect by the KPK and summoned by Brimob after it accused him of receiving bribes worth 1 million rupiah (NZ$112,000). This amount was then escalated into a rush of accusations against the governor, including a new allegation that the governor had paid US$39 million to overseas casinos, disclosing details of his private assets such as cars, houses, and properties.
Governor Lukas Enembe . . . ill, but heavily guarded by the BRIMOD police after his arrest. Image: CNN/APR
Voices of prominent Papuan figures
A prominent Papuan, Natalius Pigai, Indonesia’s former human rights commissioner, was interviewed on January 11 by an INews TV news presenter regarding these extra allegations.
“If that’s the case,” Pigai replied, “then why don’t we use these wild extra allegations to investigate all the crimes committed in this country by the country’s top ministerial level, including the children of the president, as a conduit for investigating some of the crimes committed by his office in this country?
“Are we interested in that? Why just target Governor Lukas?”
Papuan Dr Benny Giay . . . his view is that the arrest of Governor Lukas Enembe serves the “interests of the political elite” in Jakarta. Image: Jubi screenshot APR
Papuan public intellectual Dr Benny Giay was seen in a video saying that the arrest of Governor Enembe by the KPK in Jayapura was to serve the interests of Jakarta’s political elite, whom he described as “hardliners” in relation to the power struggle to become number one in Papua’s province.
According to him, Governor Lukas Enembe was a victim of this power struggle.
Dr Socrates Yoman, president of the West Papua Fellowship of Baptist Churches, described the arrest as a “kidnapping”. He said the governor had been arrested illegally, without following any legal procedures — and neither the governor nor legal counsel was informed of his arrest.
According to Dr Yoman, Governor Enembe is ill and in the process of recovering from his illness. Thus, this pressure exerted by the state through the military and police violated Governor Enembe’s basic rights to health and humanity.
The behaviour of the state through BRIMOB constituted a crime against humanity or a gross violation of human rights because the governor was arrested during lunchtime without an arrest warrant and while he was unwell, he said.
“The governor is not a terrorist — he was elected Governor of Papua by the Papuan people.
“This kidnapping shows that the nation or country has no law. The country is controlled by people who have lost their humanity, opting instead for animalistic rage and a senseless lust for violence.
“Our goal is to restore their humanity so that they can see other human beings as human beings and become whole human beings,” said Dr Yoman.
The governor’s health
The governor’s health has deteriorated since he was banned from traveling to Singapore for regular medical aid since September last year.
The 23 November 2022 letter from the Singaporean doctors appealing for Governor Enembe’s medical evacuation . . . ignored by the Indonesian authorities. Image: APR screenshot
Last October, Governor Enembe received two visits from Singapore medical specialists who have been treating him for a number of years.
Despite these visits, his health has continued to deteriorate, which led Singapore’s medical specialists to send a letter in November to authorities in Indonesia requesting that the governor be airlifted to Mount Elizabeth hospital.
The letter from Royal Healthcare in Singapore said:
“We have treated Governor Lukas remotely with routine blood tests, regular zoom consults and monitoring of his glucose and blood pressure levels since November 1, 2022. However, his condition has deteriorated rapidly the last week. His renal function is at a critical range (5.75mg/dl), and he may require dialysis sooner than later. His blood pressure is hovering 190-200/80-100 increasing his risk of morbidity and mortality. He has been advised on immediate evacuation to Singapore with direct admission to Mount Elizabeth Novena Hospital.”
The letters were ignored, and the sick governor was arrested and taken to a hospital in Jakarta, where he had previously refused to go.
Governor Enembe had previously written to KPK requesting that he receive urgent medical treatment in Singapore. Papuan police chiefs and KPK members were asked to accompany him, but this did not happen.
On November 30, 2022, Firli Bahuri, Chairman of KPK, visited the governor at his barricaded residence in Koya Jayapura, Papua, in what appeared to be a humane approach.
But what happened on Tuesday indicates that KPK had already decided to arrest him and take him to the Indonesian capital of Jakarta — almost 4500 km from his home town.
Many Papuan figures who go to Jakarta return home in coffins. Papuan protesters did not want their leader to be taken out of Papua, partly due to this fear.
Despite these protests, letters, and requests, Jakarta completely disregarded the will of the people and of the governor himself.
The plot to kidnap Governor Enembe appears to have been well planned over a period of four months since September, providing enough space for the situation in Papua to calm down and allowing the governor to leave his barricaded house alone without his Papuan “special forces”.
It was during the lunch hour of noon on Tuesday that KPK targeted him in a cunningly calculated manner.
Governor’s image in social media
Governor Enembe is portrayed in the Indonesia’s national narrative as a representative of the so-called “poor and backward” majority of Papuans, while portraying him as a man of a lavish lifestyle, owning properties and cars, and with great wealth.
Comments on social media are flooded with a common theme — portraying Papua’s governor as a “criminal”, with some even calling for his “execution”.
Some social media comments emerging from those fighting for West Papua’s liberation are echoing these themes by claiming that Governor Enembe’s case has nothing to do with the Free Papua Movement– his problem is with Jakarta only as he is a “colonial puppet ruler”.
It is true that Lukas Enembe is governor of Indonesian settler colonial provinces. However, Papuans have failed to understand the big picture — the ultimate fate of West Papua itself.
What would happen if West Papua remains part of Indonesia for the next 20-50 years?
Our failure to see the big picture by both Papuans and Indonesians, as well as the international community, is a result of Jakarta fabrication that West Papua is merely a national sovereignty issue for Indonesia. That is the crux of that fatal error.
The isolation of the governor from the rest of the Papuans as a “corruptor” and other dehumanising labels are designed to destroy Papuans’ self-esteem, stripping them of their pride, dignity, and self-respect.
The images and videos of the governor’s arrest, deportation, handcuffing in Jakarta in KPK uniform, and his admission to the military hospital while surrounded by heavily armed security forces are psychologically intimidating to Papuans.
Through brutal silence, politically loaded imagery has been used to convey a certain message:
“See what has happened to your respected leader, the big chief of the Papuan tribes; he is no longer a person. Jakarta still has the final say in what happens to all of you.”
Papuans are facing a highly choreographed state-sponsored terror campaign that shows no signs of abating.
For Papuans, the new year of 2023 should be a time of hope, new dreams, and new lives, but this has been marred once again by the arrest and kidnapping of a well-known and popular Papuan figure, as well as the death of a member of the governor’s family on Tuesday.
As human miseries continue to unfold in the Papuan homeland, Jakarta continues to conduct business as usual, pretending nothing is happening in West Papua while beating the drum of “development, prosperity, and progress” for the betterment of the backward Papuans.
With such prolonged tragedies, it is imperative that the old theories, terminologies, and paradigms that govern this brutal state of affairs be challenged.
A new paradigm is needed
The very foundation of our thinking between West Papua and Indonesia must be re-examined within the framework of what Tunisian writer, Albert Memmie, described as “coloniser and colonised”, when examining French treatment of colonised Tunisians, who emerged concurrent with Franz Fanon, the leading thinker of black experience in white, colonised Algeria.
The works of these thinkers provide insight into how the world of colonisers and colonised operates with its psychopathological manipulations in an unjust racially divided system of coloniser control.
These great decolonisation literature treasures will help Papuans to connect the dots of this last frontier to a bigger picture of centuries of war against colonised original peoples around the world, some of which were obliterated (Tasmania), able to escape (Algeria), or escaped but are still trying to reorganise themselves (Haiti).
Therefore, the coloniser and colonised paradigm is a useful mental framework to view Jakarta’s settler colonial activities and how Papuans (colonised) are continuously being lied to, manipulated, dissected, remade and destroyed — from all sides — in order to prevent them from uniting against the entity that threatens their very existence.
The real culprits in West Papua and proper Papuan justice
Most ordinary Papuans are unable to gain access to information regarding who exploits their natural resources, how much they are making, who receives the most benefits and how or why.
But Jakarta is too busy displaying Governor Enembe’s personal affairs and wild allegations in headline news — his entire existence is placed on public display, as an object of humiliation, just as the messianic Jesus was crucified on a Roman cross in order to convince Galilean followers that their beloved leader failed.
Let us not forget, however, that it was this publicly humiliated and crucified Jesus who forever changed the imperial world order and human history.
If true justice is to be delivered to colonised Papuans, then Papuans must put the Dutch on trial for abandoning them 60 years ago, and then hold the United Nations and the United States responsible for selling them, to Indonesia, 60 years ago.
In addition to arresting all international capitalist bandits that are exploiting West Papua under the disguise of multinational corporations, Indonesia should also be arrested for its crimes against Papuans, dating back over 61 years.
However, the question remains… who will deliver this proper justice for the colonised Papuans? Jakarta has certainly set itself on a pathological path of arresting, imprisoning, and executing any figure that appears to be a messianic figure to unite these dislocated original tribes for its final war for survival.
Yamin Kogoya is a West Papuan academic/activist who has a Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development from the Australian National University and who contributes to Asia Pacific Report. From the Lani tribe in the Papuan Highlands, he is currently living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
How do you trust a government that continuously sidesteps the Constitution and undermines our rights? You can’t.
When you consider all the ways “we the people” are being bullied, beaten, bamboozled, targeted, tracked, repressed, robbed, impoverished, imprisoned and killed by the government, one can only conclude that you shouldn’t trust the government with your privacy, your property, your life, or your freedoms.
Consider for yourself.
Don’t trust the government with your privacy, digital or otherwise. In the two decades since 9/11, the military-security industrial complex has operated under a permanent state of emergency that, in turn, has given rise to a digital prison that grows more confining and inescapable by the day. Wall-to wall surveillance, monitored by AI software and fed to a growing network of fusion centers, render the twin concepts of privacy and anonymity almost void. By conspiring with corporations, the Department of Homeland Security “fueled a massive influx of money into surveillance and policing in our cities, under a banner of emergency response and counterterrorism.” For instance, all across the country, police are installing Flock Safety license plate readers as part of a public-private partnership program between police and the surveillance industry. These cameras, which upload data in real time to fusion crime centers, signal a turning point in the transition from a police state to a police-driven surveillance state.
Don’t trust the government with your property. In yet another effort to legitimize warrantless searches, police are employing “hit-and-hold” tactics in which police enter a home, carry out an initial sweep of the property, handcuff the occupants, then wait for official search warrants to be secured and applied retroactively. In the meantime, police have managed to bypass the Fourth Amendment. The rationale, to prevent possible destruction of evidence, is the same one used to deadly effect with no-knock raids. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have allegedly been associated with some criminal scheme.
Don’t trust the government with your finances. The U.S. government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are being forced to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity. The national debt is $31.3 trillion and growing, and we’re paying more than $300 billion in interest every year on that public debt, yet there seems to be no end in sight when it comes to the government’s fiscal insanity. According to Forbes, Congress has raised, extended or revised the definition of the debt limit 78 times since 1960 in order to allow the government to essentially fund its existence with a credit card.
Don’t trust the government with your health. For all intents and purposes, “we the people” have become lab rats in the government’s secret experiments, which include MKULTRA and the U.S. military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men. Indeed, you don’t have to dig very deep or go very back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins. Unfortunately, the public has become so easily distracted by the political spectacle out of Washington, DC, that they are altogether oblivious to the grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the U.S. government, which has meted out untold horrors against humans and animals alike.
Don’t trust the government with your life: At a time when growing numbers of unarmed people have been shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety, even the most benign encounters with police can have fatal consequences. The number of Americans killed by police continues to grow, with the majority of those killed as a result of police encounters having been suspected of a non-violent offense or no crime at all, or during a traffic violation. According a report by Mapping Police Violence, police killed more people in 2022 than any other year within the past decade. In 98% of those killings, police were not charged with a crime.
Don’t trust the government with your freedoms. For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people. Freedom no longer means what it once did. This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.” On paper, we may be technically free, but in reality, we are only as free as a government official may allow.
Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.
Remember the purpose of a good government is to protect the lives and liberties of its people.
Unfortunately, what we have been saddled with is, in almost every regard, the exact opposite of an institution dedicated to protecting the lives and liberties of its people.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” should have learned early on that a government that repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn can’t be trusted.
Stunning new data shows that police across the U.S. killed 1,176 people in 2022, the highest number of police killings in a year since researchers began recording such data a decade ago. According to Mapping Police Violence, there were only 12 days in 2022 when police didn’t kill someone. The majority of the killings took place in scenarios where no crime was alleged, or where police were called…
Nearly three years after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked worldwide protests demanding far-reaching reforms to stop law enforcement agents from perpetrating violence against the communities they’re meant to protect, new data shows 2022 was the deadliest year on record for people who had police encounters in the United States.
At least 1,176 people were killed by police officers last year, according to the project Mapping Police Violence—the most since experts began tracking police violence and the use of deadly force.
The number represents the killing of more than three people per day on average by police officers, or nearly 100 per month last year.
In 2020, he year Floyd was killed, at least 1,152 people were killed by police officers, and in 2021 1,145 people were killed.
As researchers showed in a study published in The Lancet in 2021, about half of killings by law enforcement agents go unreported, so the true number of people killed by the police last year may be double the figure reported by Mapping Police Violence.
\u201cAccording to the Lancet the number of Americans killed by police is actually double the official number every year. So that means 2022 saw closer to 2,400 murders by police. That\u2019s 6.4 killings a day.\u201d
— Lee Camp [Redacted] (@Lee Camp [Redacted])
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People killed by the police in 2022 included Jayland Walker, who was killed by Akron, Ohio police officers after they chased him following an alleged traffic violation; Donovan Lewis, who was fatally shot by a Columbus, Ohio officer in August after police came to his house with a warrant; and Patrick Lyoya, who was killed by Grand Rapids, Michigan police after he ran away from an officer who grabbed him during a traffic stop due to an issue with his license plate.
In 32% of the cases documented by Mapping Police Violence, the victim was fleeing the police before they were killed. Legal experts say police are almost always unjustified in shooting people when they are running away from law enforcement, particularly after being suspected of committing nonviolent crimes.
“These are routine police encounters that escalate to a killing,” Samuel Sinyangwe, a data scientist and policy analyst who founded Mapping Police Violence, told The Guardian. “What’s clear is that it’s continuing to get worse, and that it’s deeply systemic.”
Only 31% of police killings took place after an alleged violent crime, while 46% did not involve people who had been accused of violence. Nine percent took place during mental health or welfare checks, 8% involved traffic violations, 18% involved allegations of nonviolent offenses, and 11% involved no alleged offense.
While Black people make up 13% of the U.S. population, they accounted for 24% of the people killed by the police last year.
Bianca Austin, the aunt of Breonna Taylor, who was killed in March 2020 by police officers in Louisville when they executed a warrant in the middle of the night, demanded to know what more advocates can do to stop police violence, especially as lawmakers reject calls for far-reaching reforms and greater investments in communities—rather than police departments—as a way of making people safer.
“It just never stops,” Austin told The Guardian. “There was a movement and uproar across the globe, and we’re still having more killings? What are we doing wrong? It’s so disheartening.”
Since the killings of Floyd and Taylor sparked mass protests, legislators have passed police reforms in at least 20 states, including new restrictions on the use of force against fleeing suspects in Colorado, Illinois, and Massachusetts, and bans on chokeholds and neck restraints in California, Nevada, and New York.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
We begin this long and winding ode on August 7, 2012 — a classic hot-and-humid Big Apple summer day. I was taking part in a demonstration called “Occupy Saks” and I came within an eyelash of being arrested by seven cops. I’ll get to that shortly.
For now, I’ll explain that the protest was ostensibly against a man named Carlos Slim who, despite such a cinematic moniker, is not a James Bond villain.
Slim is one of the world’s wealthiest humans with a fortune amassed by exploiting the poorest of the poor in Mexico through his telephone monopoly. For a short while, he was the only “richest man in the world” ever from a developing nation.
Slim was born in Mexico but is of Lebanese descent. He loves baseball, possesses at least 12 mansions across the globe, and owns part of the New York Times. At the time of the aforementioned protest, Slim was also the largest shareholder in Saks Fifth Avenue.
One of Carlos Slim’s dozen or so mansions. This one is in Manhattan. Slim purchased it for $44 million.
So, there we were. Occupy Wall Street, working with groups like Two Countries, One Voice, to spread “awareness” about Slim’s crimes. We had music and chanting and costumes and puppets and all that. We followed the well-worn script. This included handing out fliers to “educate” the masses.
Needless to say, most passers-by justifiably treated us as if we were just another NYC sidewalk nuisance. This brings me to reason #1 why current modes of street activism are counterproductive:
1. Street activism reinforces the negative public perception. To the average person, an activist is a fringe character. A fanatic. A wild-eyed zealot who sees the world in black-and-white terms. This perception exists for two primary reasons. Firstly, the corporate media works relentlessly and effectively to portray activism in a negative light. Secondly, many dissidents are wild-eyed zealots who see the world in black-and-white terms.
For example, I can remember (several times) standing out in sub-zero temperatures with a handful of others, protesting something or other. We’d felt so proud of ourselves. It was so dedicated of us to be risking our own health “for the cause.” When I’d share photos later (see reason #2) I’d use self-serving and self-deluding captions like: “This is what commitment looks like.”
Meanwhile, the people walking past such “protests” would look at us like we were, well, wild-eyed zealots. Some even yelled stuff like: “Get a life!” and “What’s wrong with you people?” I can see now how ridiculous we must’ve looked and how grandiose it was to assume we were doing anything even remotely productive. Multiply my experiences by thousands of events for thousands of “issues” across the country every single day and you have a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure.
Back to Saks: As the rally progressed, there were rumors of a protest flash mob soon to happen inside the store — which was ringed not only by Saks Fifth Avenue security but also by a large contingent of increasingly aggressive police.
(For the uninitiated, a flash mob is “a large public gathering at which people perform an unusual or seemingly random act and then disperse, typically organized by means of the internet or social media.”)
The cops and security in front of Saks were under strict rules to not let any “demonstrators” into the store. The legality of such a decree is questionable but hey, I’ve personally witnessed far more dubious “laws” made up on the spot during my activism days. Anyway, I wanted to get some photos of whatever might happen inside so I wandered around the corner to find a different entrance.
About halfway down 49th Street, I opened a door and walked inside — noticing two cops a few steps behind me. The entrance landed me in the hyper-expensive jewelry department. The saleswomen looked at me in my cargo shorts, sleeveless t-shirt, and backward Yankee cap and began surreptitiously signaling to me that I was being followed.
I regretted surrendering to my urge to get photos but I knew I could not do anything sudden at this point. So, I decided to walk casually but directly to the other side of Saks and exit ASAP.
The crowd of store detectives and cops following me grew with each step I took. I’d committed no crime but I knew this fact would not deter the NYPD. So, I stayed calm, enjoyed some air conditioning on a hot day, and began making my way through the eerie silence. As luck would have it, my “99%” button became unfastened from the small bag I had slung over my shoulder.
The pin dropped to the floor with a sonorous clang — echoing through the quiet section of the cavernous first floor. I reached down slowly, picked it up, and allowed myself a look around as I did. I was fully surrounded.
A uniformed cop — the shortest of the group by far — screamed at me: “Give me one fuckin’ reason why I shouldn’t take you in right now?” Some of the sales staff audibly gasped.
“Um,” I cooly replied, “because I haven’t given you any justification to do so. (pause) Besides I was just heading out anyway.”
I walked slowly — very slowly — toward the exit. The store detectives went back to looking for “demonstrators” while the seven cops stayed with me. The short cop got closer to me and barked: “Are you a demonstrator?”
“No,” I lied. “I just came inside to get some AC before I walked to the subway.”
“Why are you carrying a camera?”
“It’s New York City. Lots of people walk around taking photos.”
I had made it to the door without being stopped so I stepped back outside into the August humidity. All seven cops followed me. The one cop who had so far done all the talking positioned himself in front of me to block my way. I marveled at how emotionally committed he was to this performance.
“Are you a demonstrator?” he tried again. I shook my head “no” so he pointed to my bag.
“What’s in the bag?”
Never fluctuating from a non-threatening monotone, I replied: “You know as well as I do that I don’t have to tell you or show you.”
The cop did not like that legally-accurate reply. His hands balled into fists as he began shifting his weight from one foot to the other. I braced myself to be punched but he instead drilled me with a verbal barrage:
“What’s your button say? Are you a demonstrator? You know demonstrators are not allowed in here! Don’t bullshit me, I know why you’re here and what you’re up to. Are you a demonstrator?”
I did some quick thinking. In my youth, I’d dealt with many a cop and always managed to talk my way out of trouble — once when I was already in the back seat of a squad car! I glanced around at the other six cops and then back to Napoleon. They were all younger than me and relatively fit. But in my sleeveless shirt, I was clearly in better shape than any of them.
It struck me that I looked a lot more like the angry bro’s surrounding me than “the other” they are conditioned to fear, loathe, and oppress. So I decided to slip into the character I sometimes play while working in gyms.
“You know what,” I said with an exaggerated NYC accent, “you’d be bored if you looked in my bag anyway. I’ve got a towel because it’s so friggin’ hot out here, some water to stay hydrated, and a couple of power bars to keep my energy up.” (All true.)
Napoleon unfurled his fists and began to nod. “You mean, like nutrition and all?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You know how hot the subway platforms are? It can drain you.”
All seven cops were nodding now… trying to look like gym rats in the face of my spiel.
“So yeah,” I continued. “I’m not looking for any problems and I’ve got nothing to hide in my bag. You wanna look?”
“Nah,” Napoleon replied, “but just get moving.” The other cops lost interest in me as I walked off — without looking back.
Would I have evaded zip-ties if I were not a middle-aged white male? Yeah, right. But my entire interaction highlights reason #2 why current modes of street activism are counterproductive:
2. Street activism is more about cops, “symbolic” arrests, and social media. One of the more unfortunate yet enduring activist tendencies is to focus way more time and energy on challenging cops than challenging the dominant culture those cops are serving and protecting. So to all you “radicals”: If you really wanna goad cops into arresting you and/or scream “fuck the police,” please recognize that such gestures will do absolutely nothing to bring about serious, sustainable social change or to help lure more folks into activism. But it does lead to “epic” social media posts. A whole new breed of virtual “heroes” measure their “effectiveness” not by, um, being effective but instead by Facebook shares, Instagram likes, Twitter retweets, and donation page tallies.
For me, this silly game went on for a couple more years before I finally identified and rejected the cognitive dissonance. In those ensuing years, I ended up inside Saks Fifth Avenue once again when “Black Lives Matter” first became a thing. (Of course, the remnants of Occupy had lined up under the BLM banner and we did our best to virtue signal our way into your hearts and minds.)
It was December 2014 and the plan was to stage a “die-in” inside Saks during the holiday shopping crush. Dozens of activists (of all ethnicities) entered the store and pretended to be shoppers. When we got the signal, we were supposed to plop down onto the floor and pretend to be dead (see my photo above).
This was (somehow) supposed to represent the people of color who have been killed by law enforcement. I opted to not lie down because I wanted to get photos to document the action and well… I’d already had my fill of almost being arrested in this particular venue
Also, on some level, I could already recognize the ineffectually performative nature of this entire exercise. It would take a little while longer before I’d start saying this out loud and well… instantly, I lost about 90 percent of my “comrades.” The curtain had been pulled back and suddenly, the farce was exposed for what it is. This brings me to reason #3 why current modes of street activism are counterproductive:
3. Street activism gives us the illusion of being a threat. If street activism posed any threat to the status quo, they wouldn’t sell us permits to perform it. It’s all part of the wink-wink-nudge-nudge facade of the Land of the Free. The elites snicker as they agree: Let the silly activists chant and sing. It’ll create the impression we tolerate and even appreciate dissent. Then we can smirk and haughtily remind folks that “this isn’t allowed in many other countries, you know?” And if the protests appear like they may catch on, we release the big illusion.
What’s the big illusion, you ask? Surely you know. We all know and we’re all complicit: It’s when the cops are told to viciously crack down on the hapless protestors. The disproportionate brutality of their response will appear to send a tacit message to the ineffectual activists: “You’re scaring us so we’re shutting you down.” Of course, this isn’t even close to true — but tell a group of social media-pumped sign holders that they’re dangerous, and you can be damn sure they won’t ever try tactics that might actually work. Why risk everything by escalating when our puppets and V for Vendetta masks have the State in a panic, right?
In the end, everyone imagines they’ve won:
The activists have a slew of epic new arrest photos to share — “proof” that their tactics are threatening to the powers-that-shouldn’t-be
The cops get to live out their video game fantasies by bashing their enemies in public with no repercussions
The top 1% remain untouched, unfazed, unchallenged
Coda: The most recent time I went near Saks Fifth Avenue was in 2019 — not to go inside but to photograph their “iconic” holiday decorations.
(@ramoumaaa) 
not been identified.
When he is stopped, it appears he is snatched out of the car by a male Black officer and pepper sprayed
. The elites snicker as they agree: Let the silly activists chant and sing. It’ll create the impression we tolerate and even appreciate dissent. Then we can smirk and haughtily remind folks that “this isn’t allowed in many other countries, you know?” And if the protests appear like they may catch on, we release the big illusion.