Papua New Guinea police have arrested five men in Goroka over their alleged involvement in the killing of PNG Ports managing director Fego Kiniafa.
Provincial Police Commander Chief Superintendent Michael Welly said the men were in police custody and were now being questioned over the slaying of Kiniafa on the morning of September 17 — last Saturday — near Nagamiufa village outside Goroka town.
Kiniafa and his driver were reportedly slashed with machetes after the CEO shot a Nagamiufa villager.
Welly said investigations were continuing into the killing which sparked a tribal fight.
In the early hours of last Saturday between 1am and 4am, it was alleged that Kiniafa, who had turned 43 on September 16 — PNG Independence Day — was with a few men near Nagamiufa village when a confrontation occurred.
Kiniafa, from Korofeigu village in Lower Bena, is alleged to have discharged a weapon.
The bullet hit another man.
Several tribesmen incited
The shooting incited several tribesmen of the injured man to attack Kiniafa, slashing him several times before leaving him.
Details about what happened next has not been mentioned by police. However, it is believed Kiniafa was rushed to Goroka General Hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
Two days later on Monday, a 4am dawn raid was conducted at Nagamiufa village by men allegedly from Korofeigu village, Lower Bena.
The raid on Nagamiufa caused about 400 plus women, girls and the elderly to seek refuge within the gates of the Bihute Correctional Services prison.
Goroka Airport also shut its gates, causing several 100 passengers made up of tourists and locals to be stranded inside the terminal.
Throughout Goroka town, businesses closed their doors, the hospital tightened its security, and schools were shut for the day as police tried to calm the situation.
Assistant Commissioner of Police (Northern Command) Peter Guinness has confirmed with the PNG Post-Courier that two mobile squads from Mt Hagen, Western Highlands and a mobile squad from Lae, Morobe province, had been deployed in Goroka, Eastern Highlands province.
Since Monday the situation has returned to some sort of normalcy with police continuing to keep watch.
Investigations were ongoing.
Miriam Zarriga is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.
The right to protest, fragile and meekly protected by the judiciary in Britain’s common law tradition, did not really hold much force till European law confirmed it. In the UK, condemning other countries for suppressing rights to protest is standard fare. So it was with some discomforting surprise – at least to a number of talking heads – that people were arrested for protesting against the monarchy after the passing of Queen Elizabeth II.
Such surprise is misplaced. In the UK, protestors can be marched away before the operation of vast, and vague discretionary powers wielded by the police. An old, ancient favourite is the breaching of the peace, something many a blue-clad officer is bound to see in any gathering of human beings.
In addition to that general power available to the police, the Public Order Act 1986 UK also covers public order offences. Section 5 enumerates instances where a person is guilty of such offences: where “they use threatening or abusive words or behaviour or disorderly behaviour or disorderly behaviour” or display “any writing, sign or visible representation which is threatening or abusive.”
An additional, emotive ingredient is also added to the legislation. Such conduct should take place “within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby.” During times of government declared mourning, the abuse of such wording is nigh boundless, despite the imprecise defence of “reasonable accuse” available to the accused party.
It is precisely in such wording that suppression of protest can take place with relative ease. The conditions of grieving were so utterly total in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death as to be sinisterly oppressive. The slightest show of disagreement with the grievers was treated as abnormal and offensive. It was, as Jonathan Freedland wrote, “our collective moment of madness, a week when somehow we lost our grip.”
The police can count upon another weapon in their already vast armoury of quelling protest. The latest Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act of 2022 is yet another tool, adding “noise-related” provisions. It grants police powers to limit public processions, public assemblies and one-person protests “where it is reasonably believed that the noise they generated may result in serious disruption to the activities of an organisation carried on in the vicinity or have a significant impact on people in the vicinity of the protest.”
The public nuisance element in the legislation is also troubling. Police powers are granted to enable arrest and charging of individuals responsible for knowingly or recklessly doing something that risks or causes serious harm to the public. This also covers obstructions to the public “in the exercise or enjoyment of a right that may be exercised or enjoyed by the public at large”. The legislation defines serious harm as death, personal injury or disease; loss of, or damage to, property, or; serious distress, serious annoyance, serious inconvenience or loss of amenity.”
While the degree of mourning for the Queen’s passing has lacked the intense and grotesque mawkishness shown at Diana’s death, those wishing to sport a different view have also been singled out for their dissent. There are a good number who see little merit in the monarchy continuing and have expressed disagreement with the new occupant. One anti-Royal protestor, holding the sign “Not My King” in a peaceful and dignified manner, was removed by police in an incident that caused a flutter of concern.
A protestor in Edinburgh was also arrested for holding up the somewhat spicier “Fuck imperialism, abolish monarchy” placard in front of St. Giles Cathedral. According to a police spokeswoman, the arrest was made “in connection with a breach of the peace”. Conservative commentator Brendan O’Neill saw it rather differently, calling it “an alarming, almost medieval act of censorship” and “an intolerable assault on freedom of speech.”
Despite initiating a number of arrests the Metropolitan Police insist, as they tend to, that, “The public absolutely have a right to protest and we have been making this clear to all officers involved in the extraordinary operation currently taking place.”
For those believers in Britannic exceptionalism, this was disturbing. It troubled University of East Anglia academic David Mead, who found it difficult to identify “what criminal offences protesters might have committed by shouting ‘not my king’ or ‘abolish the monarchy’ as the royal procession of the casket made its way along the streets”.
Mead poses a few questions. Was there threatening or abusive language likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress within the meaning of the Public Order Act? Seemingly not. Were the chants or placards in question threatening or abusive? Again, the case did not stack up. Even the public nuisance charge would fail to stick.
Perhaps the only ground left was that unclear power of taking proportionate action to prevent breaches of the peace. Even in an absence of violence, the police might still decide that violence to a person or property might imminently arise. Best step in before it’s too late.
This is hardly a satisfactory state of affairs, showing, yet again, that the Sceptred Isle can hardly be counted as an impregnable bastion of free speech and public dissent. “If people are not allowed to quietly, if offensively, protest against the proclamation of a king,” reflects O’Neill, “then clearly our country is not as free as we thought.”
On Saturday 18 September, busloads of Hindutva nationalists descended on Leicester to carry out violent attacks against members of the local community. Mainstream reports are framing the violence to be a case of local tensions between Hindu and Muslim communities. However, this was a targeted attack led by Hindu nationalists who were not local to the area. According to witnesses, those involved shouted Hindutva exclamations, targeted attacks against local Muslims, and damaged mosques in the area.
The violence on Saturday reflects the rise of Hindu nationalism in the UK. Rather than seeking short-sighted criminal justice responses to a global issue, we must unite in solidarity against Hindutva fascism.
Speaking to the false victimhood narrative espoused by Hindu nationalists, Majid Freeman (who witnessed events on Saturday) tweeted:
Just a small minority of Hindu extremists in #Leicester who are causing trouble & taunting the Muslims did u say? They’re out in their hundreds then play victim online afterwards. The police told Muslims it was all under control but clearly NOT! This is the reality on the ground. pic.twitter.com/qk67GFvml4
The Guardian‘s northern community affairs correspondent Aina J. Khan shared:
Multiple witnesses and videos confirm a group of Hindu men were chanting, “Jai Shri Ram,” Hindi for “hail Lord Ram" or "victory to Lord Ram,” as they marched through a Muslim majority area in Leicester. This chant has become synonymous with anti-Muslim violence in India. https://t.co/061wokdtRF
Indeed, “Jai Shri Ram” has been co-opted by Hindutva nationalists enacting vicious Islamphobic mob violence in India. The utterance of this phrase in Leicester reflects the success of attempts to export Hindu nationalism to the UK.
The Indian High Commission in the UK issued a press release, framing local retaliation carried out by a small number of community members to be “against the Indian Community” and Hindu religion. This framing of events is disingenuous, and feeds into false ‘both sides’ arguments. It ultimately seeks to legitimise the fascist ideology of Hindu nationalist paramilitary group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its political arm the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is led by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi.
As writer and activist Amrit Wilson has explained, the Hindu far-right RSS and BJP have a great deal of power and influence in Britain.
Reacting to the Labour Party’s criticism of Modi’s settler colonial agenda in Kashmir in 2019, Hindu nationalists launched a strident anti-Labour propaganda campaign in areas including Leicester, Harrow, and Brent. This campaign was based on claims that Labour’s commentary was anti-Indian and anti-Hindu.
Meanwhile, evidence suggests that UK spy agencies shared intelligence with the Indian authorities to help capture and detain Sikh human rights activist Jagtar Singh Johal in 2017.
The RSS and BJP also have a great deal of support from the British government. In 2020, Indian police used tear gas and water cannons against Indian farmers protesting Modi’s repressive farm laws. By 2021, an estimated 700 farmers had died while campaigning to overturn the laws. But in April 2022, then-prime minister Boris Johnson celebrated Britain’s partnership with the Indian government in the name of “global peace and security“. This reflects the extent to which the British state has legitimised Modi’s oppressive and deeply Islamophobic BJP government in India.
Policing is not the answer
On 19 September, Leicester Police shared that officers had arrested 47 people and sentenced one young person in relation to the events. Police have now increased their presence in East Leicester.
Reacting to calls for criminal justice responses to the violence in Leicester, writer Ilyas Nagdee said:
The only calls being made consistently re Leicester is increased policing, surveillance and state intervention.
By virtue of my TL, I've primarily seen this from Muslim orgs – its a huge error and one which will have tragic consequences.
Seeing people responding to Leicester from all sides calling for censorship, increased police powers and activity and deportations. This is not how we combat malicious actors: community organising and directly challenging bigotry when it rears its head is the only route forward.
Indeed, we can’t let what happened in Leicester legitimise the further encroachment of policing and surveillance of South Asian communities in Britain. In particular, South Asian Muslims are overpoliced and surveilled through state ‘War on Terror’ strategies such as the Islamophobic Prevent duty. And a recent report by the Institute of Race Relations revealed that citizenship-stripping powers introduced in 2002 have reduced South Asian British Muslims to a ‘second-class citizenship’.
Responses that depend on the criminal justice and immigration systems will only serve to further harm South Asian communities in general, and South Asian Muslims in particular. Instead, we need responses that foster accountability, healing, and community.
South Asian solidarity
The only logical response to the violence in Leicester is a united front against Hindu fascism. As writer Taj Ali shared:
The vast majority of British Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus get along. We are neighbours and friends. We organised together in the past to fight racism and discrimination. And we won't allow the extremists to divide us.
In fact, Britain has a long, rich history of South Asian anti-racist and anti-fascist organising. In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, young British South Asian Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus collectively built strong self-defence and community empowerment movements in towns and cities across the UK. This legacy is present in the organisation of groups such as Black Lives Matter and Sikhs Against the English Defence League today.
Broad-based solidarity is the only way we can overcome ‘divide and rule’ politics. Recognising this, anti-imperialist and anti-racist group South Asia Solidarity has organised an emergency protest at 6pm on Thursday 22 September at the Indian High Commission:
#Leicester Emergency Protest for Peace and Unity Thurs 22 Sept 6pm. We must stand together to foil #BJP, #RSS plan to divide our communities & export orchestrated #Hindutva fascist violence onto the streets of UK cities. Join us outside the Indian High Commission, London WC2B 4NA pic.twitter.com/CyLPhht6BZ
Saturday’s events have made it abundantly clear that it’s time for us to take a firm stand against the rise of Hindu nationalism in the UK, and undermine attempts to stifle South Asian solidarity.
Janine Jackson interviewed Muslim Advocates’ Sumayyah Waheed about CNN‘s John Miller for the September 16, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CounterSpin220916Waheed.mp3
Janine Jackson: In March of this year, John Miller—then deputy commissioner of intelligence and counter-terrorism for the New York Police Department—told a New York City Council meeting that “there is no evidence” that the NYPD surveilled Muslim communities in the wake of September 11, 2001—”based,” he said, “on every objective study that’s been done.”
At that point, media had extensively documented the unconstitutional discrimination of the NYPD’s so-called “Demographics Unit,” including installing police cameras outside mosques, and reporting store owners who had visible Qurans or religious calendars. And the NYPD had agreed to disband the unit in the face of multiple federal lawsuits.
In September, CNNhired John Miller as “chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst,” part of changes attached to CNN‘s absorption by Warner Brothers Discovery, whose most powerful shareholder is libertarian billionaire John Malone, who has stated that he would like CNN to feature more “actual journalism,” citing, as an example, Fox News.
Forget what it portends for CNN. The Miller hire is a message to Muslim communities about who it’s OK to harm under official sanction, and how eagerly some will strive to deny and erase that harm and its ongoing effects.
We’re joined now by Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy council at Muslim Advocates. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Sumayyah Waheed.
Sumayyah Waheed: Thank you so much for having me.
CNN‘s John Miller
JJ: I want to read just a little bit more context for the statement that John Miller made to New York City Council member Shahana Hanif, when she asked for transparency and an official apology for the NYPD surveillance and harassment of Muslims.
Just before he said there’s no evidence, Miller said:
Perception allowed to linger long enough becomes reality. I know from my own conversation with Muslim members of the community, and Muslim community leaders, that there are people…who will believe forever…[that] there were spies in their mosques who were trying to entrap people.
It seems important to acknowledge that this isn’t just lying. This is gaslighting, right?
SW: Yeah. And it’s lying under oath. He was providing testimony under oath to the City Council.
It’s important to note he had choices in terms of how to respond to this, the request for an apology. He could have flatly refused it. He could have defended the NYPD’s program. I wouldn’t agree with that, either, but he could have done that.
Instead, he chose to lie about something that’s well-documented. And as you said, specifically something that harms a marginalized community, the Muslims in the New York area, whose harms that they suffered from this massive surveillance echo through today.
And this was not that long ago. This program started in the aftermath of 9/11, so about 20-plus years ago, and then the AP reported on it in, I think, 2012. They won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on it.
And they reported with a treasure trove of documents, internal documents from the NYPD, some of which our organization utilized in our lawsuit against the NYPD for their spying. And a federal appeals court explicitly said that our client’s allegations were plausible, that the NYPD ran a surveillance program with a facially discriminatory classification.
So he chose to lie about something that’s well-documented. He chose to basically spit in the face of Muslim communities who were harmed by this program. And he has basically been rewarded for it, by being hired by a major news outlet with a position that, I don’t even know how much he’s going to be compensated, but he’s now got a national platform to further spread lies.
JJ: It’s incredible, and I just want to draw you out on one piece, which is that folks, even critically thinking folks, will have heard, yes, this was a program that happened, but it was ended, despite what Miller, in his brain, which we don’t want to explore, believes. The program ended, and so therefore maybe things are better.
Could I just ask you a little bit about the harms from something like this surveillance program, which is—cameras outside of mosques, interrogating people in stores, you know? The harms don’t disappear when the program is officially ended.
SW: Not at all. So first of all, just from our lawsuit—and our lawsuit was specifically for New Jersey Muslims who were affected by this, and there were other lawsuits for the New York Muslims, and there were Muslims outside of the New York and New Jersey area who were affected by this. But just from our lawsuit, we knew that the NYPD spied on at least 20 mosques, 14 restaurants, 11 retail stores, two grade schools and two Muslim student associations in New Jersey.
So every aspect of Muslims’ lives was being surveilled, and the community finding out about this pervasive surveillance, that’s not something that you can just dismiss. The community basically was traumatized by this.
And the result—there’s a Mapping Muslims report that actually goes into all the effects, some of the impacts on the Muslim community from this notorious program of surveillance. And they found that Muslims suppressed themselves, in terms of their religious expression, their speech and political associations.
It sowed suspicion within the community, because people found out, you know, the person sitting next to me at the mosque was an informant. How can I go to the mosque and trust everyone there? Maybe I won’t go.
Of course, it severed trust with law enforcement, and then contributed to a pervasive fear and unwillingness to publicly engage.
So that you can’t just flip a switch on. If the NYPD actually wanted to address those harms, that would be a really long road to repair.
And by having John Miller in his position, and not actually censuring him or firing him for those comments, the NYPD signaled the opposite, right, that they’re going to back somebody who doesn’t care to address the harms of the department.
And then, of course, now he’s being further validated by a national news media company.
JJ: And Miller does Big Lie—a term, by the way, that is now reportedly forbidden at CNN with reference to Trump’s stolen election.
But in 2017, as Josmar Trujillo wrote for FAIR.org, Miller was on a local radio station, WNYM, saying that
activists have in their mind this idea that police departments and cities like New York run massive surveillance programs, targeting innocent civilians for no reason. Now, that’s nutty. I mean, why would we do that? How could we do that? And how would it make sense?
Again, this is beyond misinformation to disinformation. And it’s very clear that this is his jam, you know? And so CNN has to want him for that, and not despite that. It just, it’s breaking my brain.
SW: Yes, because news networks should be helping us sort fact from fiction, not further destroying the line. Otherwise they’re nothing better than propaganda machines.
And this is not just propaganda. This is specifically erasing the experiences of marginalized people —and to elevate law enforcement above any criticism, much less actually holding it accountable to ordinary people.
And we know that law enforcement has a pattern of systemically depriving communities that are already marginalized: Black communities, Latinx communities, poor communities, Muslims, disabled communities. I mean, the list goes on.
So, basically, CNN is signaling that this is where they’re putting their weight.
JJ: Yeah. And you know, at that point, Josmar Trujillo was writing about how the NYC City Council was calling on the police department to be transparent about surveillance operations. That was something called the POST Act, and the police and the right-wing media came in shrieking, like this is going to be a “roadmap for terrorists” to how to attack us.
But the point is, that hysteria pulled the goalpost to the right. So now transparency—what surveillance operations are you doing—becomes the weirdest thing that you can call for. And ending that discriminatory surveillance and harassment is pushed off the page and off the table.
And I just wonder what your thoughts are about media and journalism, and what they could do to help, or could stop doing that hurts.
Sumayyah Waheed: “News networks are supposed to help us sort fact from fiction, not further destroy the line.”
SW: Right. I think that, again, going back to my point that news networks are supposed to help us sort fact from fiction, not further destroy the line, and specifically with the powerful actors, whether they’re police departments or elected officials, to utilize that truth-telling, the investigatory process, to hold those actors accountable.
Because that should be the role of the news, is finding the information that might not be obvious, accessing the records that should be public, because we live in a free and open society, supposedly, and enabling people to take that information and hold their elected or public officials accountable.
So simply ceding ground because there’s a loud, screaming, radical voice out there is definitely not the answer. And to further reiterate, you know, the AP, by reporting on this, won the Pulitzer Prize. So it’s not like there’s no reward for it besides, you know, a free and well-engaged society. We should be rewarding truth-telling and proper investigations by journalists.
But you know, this is a rightward shift at CNN under the new chairman, and it comes after the firing of Brian Stelter and John Harwood for criticizing Trump and Republicans who engage in election denials.
So the story is already being told by these moves, right? So it’s just really alarming and disturbing for anyone who values truth, who values our democracy—and particularly for the marginalized communities, who know that this type of gaslighting, this type of elevating law enforcement above any kind of reproach is going to continue to harm us.
JJ: And I wish I didn’t have to note that nothing about that program made anybody safer.
SW: Yes.
JJ: Because what we’re going to hear is, “OK, yeah, we’re harming some people’s civil liberties, but it’s all about safety.”
And so I wish we didn’t have to say it, but the thing is that that harm didn’t make anybody safer.
SW: Right, the entire massive surveillance apparatus did not lead to one investigatory lead.
And I’ll also point out: the federal appeals court that ruled for our clients also cited the Japanese internment as a bad example of being overly deferential to the executive branch, which law enforcement is part of, and not wanting to repeat that shameful history.
So one step towards repeating history is denying it. Another step is forgetting it. But active denial just accelerates that process. So it’s very unsettling, and CNN should really just reverse course, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen, so it’s pretty discouraging.
We’ve been speaking with Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy council at Muslim Advocates. You can find their work online at MuslimAdvocates.org. Thank you so much, Sumayyah Waheed, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
While Papua New Guinean policing continues to be an issue in Porgera, Enga Province, the killings continue in the mining township.
And the latest killing of a village court magistrate has added to the 70 deaths within a period of six months.
Police Commissioner David Manning has recently announced the establishment of a specific unit to “have the sole task and responsibility of securing our major resource projects around the country”.
“We will be taking steps to establish the unit by this week,” he said.
In the latest killing, a village court magistrate from the Lukal area who had been actively involved in facilitating peace efforts for the ongoing tribal disputes was killed on September 17 while he was out in the garden gathering food with his wife and a female in-law.
Unconfirmed reports state that the two women had been taken hostage and were yet to be located.
Nine days earlier, the now deceased Lopan Wake had led the Paiam community in a staged protest calling on the government to declare a state of emergency after a man from the same Lukal village was killed.
Haus krai blocked highway
Frustrated family members, relatives and the Paiam community expressed their frustrations by blocking the highway and staged a haus krai for the deceased on the open road.
They urged the government and relevant authorities to intervene and put an end to the spillover of killings of innocent people in the valley.
Immediate family and relatives of the late magistrate Wake said they want the law and government to deal with the matter.
Family spokesperson Kelly Yambi said there have been many spillover conflicts in Porgera that there was confusion over how to establish what tribal groups were responsible for the Lukal killings.
“I am not sure who is really responsible for the initial tribal conflicts but all I know is that the spillover of the conflict is affecting my people and we are falling victims.
“We signed a covenant with God and we do not want to take revenge.
“We have buried two men already and now I will bury my brother,” Yambi said.
Change to ‘how we do things’
Commissioner Manning said: “As part of our restructure we now see that we need to restructure how we do things and how the police force and other agency partners secure major resource areas.
“While the bulk of our resources are taken up in securing the projects its often for the detriment of the livelihoods of the communities that have been subjected to violent criminal activities.
“So by setting up this new unit, it will elevate demands on the resources so that we not only adequately secure projects but continue to progress our efforts in securing our community.”
“As soon as we establish the unit, our focus will be on reopening Porgera.
“Without a safe and secure environment to do so the reopening of Porgera can be challenging.
“And we are up to the task of providing the necessary support in securing not only the project but the surrounding communities before the project recommences.”
Miriam Zarrigais a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.
Karl Patrick Suyat, 19, has no personal experience of the tyrannical rule of late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos. But memories of the atrocities and human rights violations committed during those dark moments have transcended time.
Despite efforts of Martial Law survivors, human rights groups, and even academics to remind the Filipino people of the abuses of the Marcos family, Marcos Jr was still able to clinch the country’s top post.
Fueled by outrage and anguish, Suyat thought of a way to channel his energy and still fight back despite the Marcoses’ victory — he founded “Project Gunita” (remember) along with Josiah Quising and Sarah Gomez.
Project Gunita is a network of volunteers and members of various civil society organisations that aim to defend historical truth. They particularly push back against historical denialism and protect truths about the Martial Law years.
Through the project, the three founders and their members created a digital archive of all materials that contain information about Marcos’ Martial Law to preserve them.
Archiving is not new since other government offices and groups like the Bantayog ng mga Bayani Foundation and the Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission, under the Commission on Human Rights, have made efforts to preserve Martial Law materials.
But Project Gunita is born out of the spirit of volunteerism and nationalism among young Filipinos.
From old newspapers, magazines, and books — Project Gunita members seek and buy materials, and then scan them to be preserved in the archives. The project’s archiving started right after Marcos Jr’s victory.
Dictator Ferdinand Marcos … declared Martial Law in the Philippines on 21 September 1972 as reported in the Phlippine Daily Express three days later. Image: Wikipedia
“Having read through the history of dictatorships, from Benito Mussolini to Adolf Hitler to Ferdinand Marcos himself, lagi’t-laging ang unang hinahabol, ang unang-unang tinatarget ng mga diktador ay ‘yong mga silid-aklatan, libraries, at ‘yong mga arkibo – the archives (always, the ones being targeted first by dictators are libraries and archives),” Suyat told Rappler.
Suyat believes that the Marcoses won’t be content with just distorting and whitewashing the atrocities of the Marcos administration. They would eventually go after the archives to erase the truth, Suyat added.
“The only question is when, it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. And I don’t want to wait until that time happens before we start to scramble around to save the archives.
“Habang may panahon pa (while we still have time), while we can still do it, ‘di ba? (right?)Bakit hindi natin gagawin? (Why don’t we do it?).”
Even before Marcos Jr’s victory, journalists have pointed out that his family not only revises history, but also introduces an alternative history that favours them. The Marcoses also rode on various disinformation networks to disseminate falsehoods.
A two-part investigative story by Rappler showed how the Marcoses used social media to reclaim power and rewrite history to hide their wrongdoings.
Passing the torch The personal experiences of Project Gunita founders fanned their desire to continue the fight of the generation who came before them. Suyat, who grew up in a family of Martial Law survivors, feels it is his responsibility to protect their stories.
“I cannot allow their stories, as well as the stories of people I had gotten acquainted with later in life who are Martial Law survivors to be erased by historical denialism, that we all know is being perpetrated by the Marcos family,” Suyat told Rappler in a mix of English and Filipino.
Josiah Quising, a co-founder of Project Gunita and a lawyer, believes that these stories should be preserved because true justice for Martial Law victims has yet to be attained.
“It’s very frustrating ‘yong justice system sa Pilipinas and how, for decades, ay wala pa ring totoong hustisya sa mga nangyari during the Martial Law era,” Quising told Rappler.(It’s very frustrating, the justice system in the Philippines, and how, for decades, there has been no true justice for everything that happened during the Martial Law era.)
On the inauguration of Marcos Jr, Martial Law survivors led by playwright Boni Ilagan pledged to continue guarding against tyranny.
In the same event, they had a ceremonial passing of the torch, which symbolized the passing of hope and responsibility from Martial Law survivors to the younger generation.
Suyat and Quising believe that their generation is equally responsible for guarding the country’s freedom — at least in their own way. They strongly believe that since the government is now being led by the dictator’s son, they cannot expect it to preserve the memories of Martial Law, so they have to step in.
Preserving truths from generation to generation
“Wala ka namang naririnig. ‘Di ka naman nakikinig Parang kuliling sa pandinig Kayong nagtataka Ha? Inosente lang ang nagtataka,” Inosente lang ang nagtataka by Bobby Balingit
(You hear nothing. But you are not listening. Like a chime to the ear. You who wonder. What? Only the innocent wonder.)
This song comes to Kris Lanot Lacaba’s mind whenever he hears people deny the atrocities of Martial Law. His father, Pete Lacaba, a poet and journalist, was tortured and arrested under the Marcos regime.
As a son of a Martial Law survivor, Lacaba has heard stories of torture and violence straight from the victims themselves. He recalled that it was on the pavements of Camp Crame, where his father was imprisoned, that he learned how to walk.
Even though decades have passed since those dark periods, he still vividly remembers how his father became a victim of Marcos’ oppressive rule.
“Ang ginagawa ro’n, may dalawang kama tapos pinapahiga ‘yong tatay ko, ‘yong ulo niya sa isang kama, ‘yong paa niya sa isang kama. At ‘pag nahulog ‘yong kama niya ro’n eh gugulpihin pa siya lalo (What they did to my father was, there were two beds and they would tell my father to lie down, his head on one bed, and the other, on the other bed. If he fell, he would be beaten further),” Lacaba told Rappler.
Aside from his father, his uncles Eman Lacaba and Leo Alto were both killed during Martial Law. It is extremely hard for Lacaba to respond to people who deny that human rights violations happened under Martial Law.
Now that he has his own children, Lacaba passes on the stories of Martial Law to them so the memories would be preserved.
“Mahirap eh, bilang magulang. Paano ba natin ikukuwento ito? Pa’no ba natin ipapamahagi ‘yong karanasan ng magulang nila at ng mga lolo’t lola nila?” Lacaba said. (It’s hard as a parent. How do we tell this story to the kids? How do we tell the kids about the experiences of their parents and grandparents?)
He even thinks of ways to make the stories appropriate to his children.
“So kinukuwento namin sa mga bata, ‘no? Hinahanapan namin ng paraan na maging appropriate sa age din nila ‘yong mga kuwento.” (So we tell the stories to my children. We find ways to make the stories appropriate to their age.)
Aside from his kids, Lacaba says he would always accept invitations by schools and universities to share the Martial Law story of his family. He believes that in this way, he will not only share the truths he learned from his father, but get to listen to other stories, too.
After all, Lacaba believes, conversation about Martial Law should reach everyone.
The notion that Papua is the “Land of Peace” has no substance.
Many feel that this phrase “Papua Tanah Damai” or “Papua Land of Peace” only conceals the reality of Papua. In recognition of that, we would like to convey our observations about the current crisis in Papua.
Besides reading media news reports about today’s planned rally supporting Papua Governor Lukas Enembe, I also read a letter from the People of Indonesia’s Archipelago urging its followers living in Papua to arm themselves, guard the mosque, and give their children a holiday on Monday.
It is important to note that these developments can be viewed from two perspectives — the “criminalised” Enembe became a symbol of resistance by Indigenous Papuans who have been treated like second-class citizens for 59 years; and the Nusantara militias backed by “bigwigs” (as seen in the Racism Protests of 29 August 2019).
Who are the bigwigs? And how do they operate?
Papua was managed by Tentara Nasional Indonesia (TNI) — the Indonesian National Armed Forces — during the Suharto era.
President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, however, is more concerned with the role of the Indonesian National Police.
‘Criminalising’ Enembe
According to the Papuan Council of Churches, in 2021 the Indonesian National Police took over in Papua and it was led by Tito Karnavians, the Head of the State Intelligence Agency (Budi Gunawan), and Paulus Waterpauw, the Papua Police Chief.
Taking into account the current crisis in Papua, from the perspective of the state actors, and in particular the alarming letter of Nusantara, an armed group that was part of the August 29 anti-racism protest, we ask: Is tomorrow any better?
Perhaps the political party opposing the Democratic Party, is criminalising Governor Enembe (as its chairman) in order to gain votes in the 2024 elections for its party?
A candidate for governor, an ambitious successor looking to depose Enembe prematurely before the 2024 elections? Another instance of the central government interfering in Papua’s affairs.
The victims behind Enembe
Who is behind Enembe? Recently activists (and their relatives) who have been protesting against racism — which has now been branded as “treason” — are the victims of state violence (by officials).
Reverend Dr Benny Giay’s West Papua Council of Churches open pastoral letter in Bahasa yesterday – a plea for genuine peace. Image: APR
These headaches for the Papuan victims have occurred since early December 2018 in Nduga regency, Intan Jaya, Puncak, Pegunungan Bintang, Maybrat Sorong, and Surua Yahukimo; families and relatives of four mutilated residents of Nduga who were only cremated two days ago; and families and relatives of Mapi residents who were murdered on 30 August 2022 among others.
The victims of these episodes of violence ask: How can KPK criminalise governor Enembe when they failed to arrest [current regent] Romanus Baraka in Merauke, who alleged in the name of Jesus that (Representative) Jan Mandenas and he were involved in corruption?
Why hasn’t the KPK arrested PDIP [Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle] official Komarudin Watubun? Why?
It is common for the parties we mentioned above, particularly the strong ones, to play together. Parties like these enjoy destroying weaker opponents. The actions of Ferdy Sambo in Jakarta illustrate this.
Promote peace, dialogue
Therefore, we invite all members of the congregation and the community here to promote peace, dialogue, and communication.
It is only natural that we demand our dignity and respect. However, do not demand sharp tools and weapons — not with anarchy and savagery. Whenever possible, keep the area free of turmoil and bloodshed.
In Jayapura, Abepura, Sentani and throughout the Land of Papua, we ask security forces to grant the victims a voice today and tomorrow. We want to see the security forces escorting the masses on September 20, 2022, to be more humanist to ensure the safety and well-being of the masses.
Reverend Dr Benny Giay is a West Papuan theologian, social anthropologist, and an activist. He is ordained as a pastor in the Kemah Injil Church (KINGMI) (Gospel Tabernacle Church) and in 2010 assumed leadership of the Kingmi Synod of the Evangelical Christian Church of West Papua. This open letter was written yesterday as an appeal for peace ahead of today’s planned rally in Jayapura and has been translated by Yamin Kogoya, a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.
Goroka town is under lockdown and remains tense as Papua New Guinea police mount a heavy presence following the brutal slaying of the PNG Ports chief executive Fego Kiniafa outside the Eastern Highlands provincial capital.
Kiniafa was slashed to death at Nagamiufa on Saturday after he allegedly shot a Nagamiufa man.
Four men who were with Kiniafa are alleged to have been taken hostage by Nagamiufa villagers.
His relatives from Korofeigu, Lower Bena, are reported to have mobilised and attacked Nagamiufa village, sparking a tribal conflict that shut down businesses in Goroka and sent people scattering.
Highway travellers were left stranded as vehicles deserted the roads between Lower Bena and Goroka, and international visitors to the just ended Goroka Show were also stranded at the new airport.
Police reported the Lower Benas wiped out Nagamiufa village in a 4am dawn raid yesterday.
Most people had fled in fear of the attack to neighbouring villages.
Raid because of no arrest
The raid allegedly occurred because there has not been any arrest made in relation to the death of Kiniafa two days after he was slashed to death near Nagamiufa village.
PNG Ports chief Fego Kiniafa … Goroka reported to be tense after his killing. Image: PNG Investment Conference
Spears, guns and other weapons were used as Goroka town was deserted with businesses shut down and the Goroka General Hospital also on lockdown as security was tightened.
Travellers wishing to travel out of the province after the EHP show were left stranded and locked inside the terminal as the airport closed its gates.
On Saturday morning, Police Commissioner David Manning confirmed the death of Kiniafa, 43, from a confrontation near Nagamiufa village.
EHP Police Commander Chief Superintendent Michael Welly said that the killing occurred between midnight and 6am on September 17.
According to police reports, Kiniafa was allegedly involved in a confrontation with several suspects from the surrounding settlements around Nagamiufa village in Goroka.
Kiniafa allegedly shot another man, and in retaliation the relatives of the man ambushed Kiniafa and his driver with bush-knives, killing them.
Four men allegedly kidnapped
Superintendent Welly said: “It is alleged that four men who were with Mr Kiniafa are said to have been kidnapped as well with police investigating the allegations and as well as investigating the incident on Saturday.”
Kiniafa was found at the scene and rushed to the hospital before being pronounced dead on arrival.
PNG Ports on Saturday afternoon released a short statement confirming Kiniafa’s death and announcing that chief operations officer Rodney Begley would manage and oversee the office of the CEO.
Kimiafa, who turned 43 on PNG’s Independence Day — Friday, September 16 — was one of the youngest chief executives of a government entity.
State-owned PNG Ports chief executive officer Fego Kiniafa has been killed at Nagamiufa in Goroka of Eastern Highlands Province, says Papua New Guinea’s Police Commissioner David Manning.
A police report said he had died in a fight after an argument was started over a few bottles of beer.
It said Kiniafa had allegedly shot and wounded the aggressor on his neck.
Kiniafa was then killed by members of the community who retaliated.
The situation in Goroka is reported to be tense.
Manning told news media his officers had started an investigation into the killing.
Board chairman Kepas Wali announced in a circular that Rodney Begley had been appointed acting CEO for the state-owned enterprise.
Wali expressed grief and sorrow at Kiniafa’s death.
Goroka town, Eastern Highlands, Papua New Guinea … an argument over “a few bottles of beer” led to the killing. Image: RNZ
During the present period of mourning for Queen Elizabeth II, public sensitivities in the United Kingdom and Australia are high. There is strong sentiment in both countries in favour of showing respect for the Queen’s death.
Some people may wish to do this privately. Others will want to demonstrate their respect publicly by attending commemorations and processions.
There are also cohorts within both countries that may wish to express discontent and disagreement with the monarchy at this time.
This has caused tension across the globe. For instance, a professor from the United States who tweeted a critical comment of the Queen has been subject to significant public backlash.
Also, an Aboriginal rugby league player is facing a ban and a fine by the NRL for similar negative comments she posted online following the Queen’s death.
This tension has been particularly so in the UK, where police have questioned protestors expressing anti-monarchy sentiments, and in some cases, arrested them.
Police arrest anti-monarchy protesters at royal events in England, Scotland https://t.co/GJSzOa1SKU
But should such concerns about the actions of the Queen and monarchy be silenced or limited because a public declaration of mourning has been made by the government?
This raises some difficult questions as to how the freedom of speech of both those who wish to grieve publicly and those who wish to protest should be balanced.
What laws in the UK are being used to do this? There are various laws that regulate protest in the UK. At a basic level, police can arrest a person for a “breach of the peace”.
Also, two statutes provide specific offences that allow police to arrest protesters.
Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 UK provides that a person is guilty of a public order offence if:
they use threatening or abusive words or behaviour or disorderly behaviour
or display any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening or abusive.
The offence provision then provides this must be “within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress” by those acts.
There is some protection for speech in the legislation because people arrested under this provision can argue a defence of “reasonable excuse”. However, there’s still a great deal of discretion placed in the hands of the police.
Seriously worrying that holding a sign saying #notmyking can get you removed by police. What ever your views on the monarchy, this should concern you. https://t.co/uj1TGkdL5t
In the context of the period of mourning for Queen Elizabeth II, the wide terms used in this legislation (such as “nuisance” and “distress”) gives a lot of discretion to police to arrest protesters who they perceive to be upsetting others.
For instance, a protester who holds a placard saying “Not my king, abolish the monarchy” may be seen as likely to cause distress to others given the high sensitivities in the community during the period of mourning.
Is there a right to protest under UK and Australian law? Protest rights are recognised in both the UK and in Australia, but in different ways.
In the UK, the right to freedom of expression is recognised in Article 10 of the Human Rights Act.
In Australia, there’s no equivalent of the right to freedom of expression at the federal level as Australia doesn’t have a national human rights charter. Rather, there’s a constitutional principle called the “implied freedom of political communication”.
This isn’t a “right” as such but does provide some acknowledgement of the importance of protest.
Also, freedom of expression is recognised in the three jurisdictions in Australia that have human rights instruments (Victoria, Queensland and the ACT).
Can the right to protest be limited in a period of mourning? In this period of public mourning, people wishing to assemble in a public place to pay respect to the queen are exercising two primary human rights: the right to assembly and the right to freedom of expression.
But these are not absolute rights. They cannot override the rights of others to also express their own views.
Further, there is no recognised right to assemble without annoyance or disturbance from others. That is, others in the community are also permitted to gather in a public place during the period of mourning and voice their views (which may be critical of the queen or monarchy).
It is important to also note that neither the UK nor Australia protects the monarchy against criticism. This is significant because in some countries (such as Thailand), it is a criminal offence to insult the monarch. These are called “lèse-majesté” laws — a French term meaning “to do wrong to majesty”.
The police in the UK and Australia cannot therefore use public order offences (such breach of the peace) to unlawfully limit public criticism of the monarchy.
It may be uncomfortable or even distressing for those wishing to publicly grieve the Queen’s passing to see anti-monarchy placards displayed. But that doesn’t make it a criminal offence that allows protesters to be arrested.
The ability to voice dissent is vital for a functioning democracy. It is therefore arguable that people should be able to voice their concerns with the monarchy even in this period of heightened sensitivity. The only way in which anti-monarchy sentiment can lawfully be suppressed is in a state of emergency.
A public period of mourning does not meet that standard.
The son of Fijian Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama is facing criminal charges in Australia over domestic violence-related allegations.
Meli Bainimarama, 36, was charged in the Windsor Court in Sydney with 17 offences related to domestic violence, including five charges of assault resulting in bodily harm, stalking, common assault, and destroying or damaging property.
The offences alleged happened between February and May of 2022 in Sydney.
Meli Bainimarama was arrested in Queensland last week and extradited to New South Wales the next day.
He was granted bail.
An interim suppression order, granted last Saturday, was lifted today.
Meli Bainimarama did not appear in person and his lawyer appeared via audio link.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This week on CounterSpin: Journalist-turned-cop-turned-journalist-turned-cop-turned-journalist John Miller makes a blur of the revolving door. For years, he’s been back and forth between the New York Police Department (and the FBI) and news media like ABC. And now he’s the new hire at CNN. Don’t miss the message: For corporate media, being a paid flack for the police in no way disqualifies you to offer what viewers will be assured is a dry-eyed analysis of law enforcement patterns and practices. The hire is part of CNN‘s rebranding under new leadership; the major stockholder cites Fox News as an exemplar. But while it’s tempting to say CNN is acting like the kid who imagines his bully will let up if he offers both his and his little brother’s lunch money, the harder truth is that CNN knows it won’t attract or appease Fox or Fox viewers. So we should focus less on how one network “counters” the other than on whom they’re both ready to throw under the bus—in this case, Muslims. We’ll talk about the Miller hire with Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy counsel at Muslim Advocates.
Also on the show: Listeners may have seen the “just asking questions, don’t get mad” Atlanticarticle about how it might make sense to keep pricing insulin out of the reach of diabetics because, wait, wait…hear me out. (The idea was that if insulin winds up cheaper than newer, better drugs, more people might die.) Other outlets are musing about how higher unemployment might be the best response to higher prices. Why are we doing thought experiments about hurting people? Implied scarcity—”obviously we can’t do all the things a society needs, so let’s discuss what to jettison”—is a whole vibe that major media could upend, but instead enable. We’ll talk about how that’s playing out in coverage of inflation with Chris Becker, associate director of policy and research and senior economist at the Groundwork Collaborative.
Papuan protesters from seven customary regions this week stormed the Mako Brimob police headquarters in Kota Raja, Jayapura, accusing the KPK and police of “criminalising” local Governor Lukas Enembe.
The protest on Monday was organised in response to the Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK) Corruption Eradication Commission’s attempt to investigate corruption allegations against Governor Lukas Enembe.
This time, Enembe is suspected of receiving gratification of Rp 1 miliar (NZ$112,000).
These accusations are not the first time that the KPK has attempted to criminalise Lukas Enembe, the Governor of Papua. The KPK has tried this before.
KPK had attempted to implicate the governor in their corruption scam in February 2017, but the attempt failed.
On 2 February 2018, KPK attempted another attack against Governor Enembe at the Borobudur Hotel, Jakarta, but [this] failed miserably. Instead, two KPK members were arrested by the Metro Jaya Regional Police. The KPK announced a suspect without checking with the governor first.
The representative of the Papuan people at the rally stated that KPK failed to follow the correct legal procedures in executing this investigation.
KPK should avoid inflaming the Papuan conflict, as the Papuan people have so far followed Jakarta’s controversial decisions — decisions that are contrary to the wishes of the Papuan people, a representative stated at the rally.
For instance, Jakarta’s insistence on the creation of new provinces from the existing two (Papua and West Papua) has been strongly rejected by most Papuans.
Remained silent
The spokespeople for the protesters warned KPK that they had remained silent because Governor Enembe was able to maintain a calm among the community. However, if the governor continues to be criminalised, Papuans from all seven customary regions will revolt.
Papuan protesters hold “save him” banners in support of accused Governor Lukas Enembe. Image: APR
The KPK has named Governor Enembe as a suspect in the corruption of his personal funds.
“This is ‘funny’,” protesters said. “One billion rupiahs [NZ$112,000] of his own money used for medical treatment were alleged to be corrupt. This is strange. We will raise that amount, from the streets and give it to KPK.
“Remember that,” speakers said.
Stefanus Roy Renning, the coordinator of Governor Enembe’s Legal Council Team, said the case the governor was accused of (1 billion Rupiah) is actually, the governor’s personal funds sent to his account for medical treatment in May 2020.
Governor Lukas Enembe … seen as a threat and an obstacle for other political parties seeking the position of number one in Papua. Image: West Papua Today
Therefore, if you refer to this [KPK’s behaviour] as criminalisation, then yes, it is criminalisation.
This is due to the fact that the suspect’s status was premature and not in line with the criminal code, and that the governor himself has not been questioned as a witness in the alleged case.
Questioned as witness
Renning said that for a suspect to be determined, there must be two pieces of evidence and he or she must be questioned as a witness.
Benyamin Gurik, chair of the Indonesian Youth National Committee (KNPI), expressed apprehension about the allegations, saying it amounted to the criminalisation of Papuan public figures, which may contribute to conflict and division in the region.
“Jakarta should reward him for all of the good things he’s done for the province and country, not criminalise him,” said Gurik.
Supporters of Governor Lukas Enembe guard his home. Image: APN
Otniel Deda, chair of the Tabi Indigenous group, urged the KPK to act more professionally.
He suspects that the KPK’s actions were sponsored by “certain parties” intent on shattering the reputation of the Papuan leader.
The governor himself has his own suspicions as to who is behind the corruption accusations against him.
He suspects KPK and the police force are among the highest institutions in the country being used to serve political games that are being played behind his back.
Purely a political move
According to Dr Sofyan Yoman, president of the Fellowship of West Papuan Baptist Churches (PGBWP), the attempted criminalisation of Governor Enembe is a purely political move geared toward dictating the 2024 election outcome, not a matter of law.
An angry group of Governor Lukas Enembe supporters performing a war dance armed with traditional bows and arrows outside his home in an effort to thwart police plans. Image: APR
Dr Yoman explained that other parties in Indonesia are uncomfortable and lack confidence in entering the Papua provincial political process in 2024.
There have been those who have seen, observed, and felt that the existence of Lukas Enembe is a threat and an obstacle for other political parties seeking the position of number one in Papua.
To break the stronghold of Governor Enembe, who is also the chair of the Democratic Party of the Papuan province, there is no other way than to use KPK to criminalise him.
In a statement to Dr Yoman on Wednesday, Governor Enembe said:
Mr Yoman, the matter is now clear. This is not a legal issue, but a political one. The Indonesian State Intelligence, known as Badan Intelligence Negara (BIN), and the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, known as Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan (PDIP), used KPK to criminalise me.
Mr Yoman, you must write an article about the crime so that everyone is aware of it. State institutions are being used by political parties to promote their agenda.
Account blocked
Dr Yoman met the governor and his wife at Governor Enembe’s Koya residence, where he was informed of the following by Yulce W. Enembe:
In the last three months, our account has been blocked without any notification to us as the account owner. We have no idea why it was blocked. We could not move. We can’t do anything about it. Our family has been criminalised without showing any evidence of what we did wrong. Now we’re just living this way because our credit numbers are blocked.
The governor himself gave an account of how he used the Rp 1 billion:
As my health was getting worse, we left for Jakarta at night in March 2019. We were in lockdown due to COVID-19 at the time. When I left, I saved 1 billion in my room. In May 2019, I called Tono (the governor’s housekeeper). I asked Tono to go to my room and take the money in the room worth 1 billion. I asked Tono to transfer it to my BCA account. That’s my money, not corruption money.
“The KPK is just anybody,” the governor stated. “The KPK’s actions were purely political, not legal. KPK has become a medium for PDIP political parties. Considering that the Head of BIN, the Minister of Home Affairs, and the KPK descend from one institution — the police — these kinds of actions are not surprising to me.
“I am being politically criminalised”, said the governor. “Part of a pattern of psychological and physical threats and intimidation I have faced for some time”
“I am not a criminal or a thief,” the governor said.
Singapore health travel
The governor’s overseas travels for medical treatment in Singapore have been halted [barred] by the Directorate General of Immigration based on a prevention request from the KPK.
This appears to be a punitive measure taken by the country’s highest office to further punish the governor, preventing him from receiving regular medical care in Singapore.
Media outlets in Indonesia and Papua have been dominated by stories about the governor’s name linked to the word “corruption”, creating a space for hidden forces to assert their narratives to determine the fate of not only the governor, but West Papua, and Indonesia.
West Papua is a region in which whoever controls the information distributed to the rest of the world, controls the narrative. It is a region where the Indonesian government and the Papuan people have fought for years over the flawed manner in which West Papua was incorporated into Indonesia in the 1960s.
When news of a criminalised Papuan public figure such as Governor Enembe comes to the surface, it is often conveniently used as a means of demoralising popular Papuan leaders who are trusted and loved by their people.
It has been proven again and again over the past decade that Jakarta would have to deal with the revolt of hundreds of thousands of Papuans if they sought to disturb or displace Governor Enembe.
Ultimately, these kinds of nuanced incidents are often created and used to distract Papuans from focusing on the real issue. The issue of Papuan sovereignty is what matters most — the state of Papua, as Jakarta is forcing Papuans to surrender to Indonesian powers that seek to transform Papua and West Papua into Indonesia’s dream.
Papuan dream turned nightmare
Tragically, the Indonesian dream for West Papua have turned into nightmares for the people of Papua, recently claiming the lives of four Indigenous Papuans from the Mimika region, whose bodies were mutilated by Indonesian soldiers.
In recent weeks, this tragic story has been featured in international headlines, something that Jakarta wishes to keep out of the global spotlight.
The UN acting High Commissioner for Human Rights Nada Al-Nashif raised West Papua in her statement during the 51st session of the Human Rights Council on Monday — the day that Governor Enembe was summoned to police in Kota Raja.
Despite Jakarta’s attempts to spin news about West Papua as domestic Indonesian sovereignty issues, the West Papua story will persist as an unresolved international issue.
Governor Enembe (known as Chief Nataka) his family, and many Papuan figures like them have fallen victim to this protracted war between two sovereign states — Papua and Indonesia.
Some of the prominent figures in the past were not only caught in Jakarta’s traps but lost their lives too. In the period between 2020 and 2021, 16 Papuan leaders who served the Indonesian government are estimated to have died, ranging in their 40s through to their 60s.
Papuans have lost the following leaders in 2021 alone:
Klemen Tinal, Vice-Governor of Papua province under Governor Enembe, who died on May 21.
Pieter Kalakmabin, Vice-Regent of the Star Mountain regency, died on October 28.
Abock Busup, Regent of Yahukimo regency (age 44), was found dead in his hotel room in Jakarta on October 3.
Demianus Ijie, a member of Indonesia’s House of Representatives, died on July 23.
Alex Hesegem, who served as Vice-Governor of Papua from 2006-2011, died on June 20.
Demas P. Mandacan, a 45-year-old Regent from the Manokwari regency, died on April 20.
The Timika regency (home of the famous Freeport mine) lost a member of local Parliament Robby Omaleng, on April 22.
In 2020, Papuans lost the following prominent figures: Herman Hasaribab; Letnan Jendral, a high-ranking Indigenous Papuan serving in the Indonesian Armed Forces, who died on December 14; Arkelaus Asso, a member of Parliament from Papua, died on October 15; another young Regent from Boven Digoel regency, Benediktus Tambonop (age 44), died on January 13; Habel Melkias Suwae, who served twice as Regent of Jayapura, the capital of Papua, died on September 3; Paskalis Kocu, Regent of Maybrat, died on August 25; on February 10, Sendius Wonda, the head of the Biro of the secretary of the Papua provincial government, died; on September 9, Demas Tokoro, a member of the Papuan People’s Assembly for the protection of Papuan customary rights, died; and on November 15, Yairus Gwijangge, the brave and courageous Regent of the Nduga regency (the area where most locals were displaced by the ongoing war between the West National Liberation Army and Indonesian security forces), died in Jakarta.
These Indigenous Papuan leaders’ deaths cannot be determined, due to the fact that the institutions responsible for investigating these tragic deaths, such as the legal and justice systems and the police forces, are either perpetrators or accomplices in these tragedies themselves.
Dwindling survival for Papuans
This does not mean Jakarta is to blame for every single death, but its rule provides an overarching framework where the chances of Papuans surviving are dwindling.
This is a modern-day settler colonial project being undertaken under the watchful eye of international community and institutions like the UN. This type of colonisation is considered the worst of all types by scholars.
It is only their grieving families and the unknown forces behind their deaths that know what really happened to them.
The region for the past 60 years has been a crime scene, yet hardly any of these crimes have been investigated and/or prosecuted.
Given the threats, intimidation, and illness Governor Enembe has endured, it is indeed a miracle he has survived.
A big part of that miracle can be attributed to his people, the Papuans who put their lives on the line to protect him whenever Jakarta has tried to harass him.
This week, KPK tried to criminalise the governor and Papuans warned Jakarta – “don’t you try it”.
Yamin Kogoya is a West Papuan academic who has a Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development from the Australian National University and who contributes to Asia Pacific Report. From the Lani tribe in the Papuan Highlands, he is currently living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
Enforcing a particular view to support the power of the state is a bad look. And that kind of action often undermines the very thing it is meant to defend. Sadly, nobody told the British police. Though it’s worth asking if it would have made any difference.
In the week following the Queen’s death, and as Charles was proclaimed our new ‘ruler’, a number of arrests were made. And they were for what are, objectively, fairly innocuous acts.
‘Who elected him?’
On 11 September, the Sunday after the queen’s death, a woman was arrested in Edinburgh after up holding a sign protesting the monarch and imperialism. Police said she had committed a breach of the peace as the Queen’s coffin was brought into the city. She was later charged.
Then on Tuesday Symon Hill, a peace activist renowned for his run in with Piers Morgan over the white poppy, was arrested in Oxford.
Contrary to some claims on social media, I did not say *anything* remotely disrespectful today about Elizabeth's death. I did not disrupt an act of mourning (and never would). My objection was to the proclamation of Charles Windsor as king. #NotMyKing
He had merely asked out loud in a public street who elected King Charles.
Sick old man
Also in Scotland, a young man named Rory was arrested for heckling Prince Andrew. The controversial Royal was stripped of public duties over allegations about his relationship to the late paedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Rory had shouted “You’re a sick old man” at Andrew before being dragged away by police. He was also charged. Rory said he thought it was wrong that Andrew had been allowed to get away with what he had been accused of:
Spoke to the protestor who was arrested on the Royal Mile today for shouting abuse at Prince Andrew during the Queen’s procession – his name is Rory, here’s what he had to say: pic.twitter.com/8GTwnVGLF7
While in London, an officer threatened barrister Paul Powlesland with arrest for holding a blank sign.
Just went to Parliament Square & held up a blank piece of paper. Officer came & asked for my details. He confirmed that if I wrote “Not My King” on it, he would arrest me under the Public Order Act because someone might be offended.
Powlesland later appeared on TV explaining his views. He said that while he hadn’t been a republican before, he certainly was one now.
State-enforced grief
Even confirmed republicans were surprised at how badly a bit of minor, individual protest was handled. One person pointed out that this undermined the idea of the Royals having only symbolic power:
Another pointed out that the endless coverage of the death and succession made republicanism appear to be a view held by a tiny minority.
The relatively high profile arrests of a few anti-monarchy protesters alongside rolling coverage of “the queue” is giving the impression that our country is largely pro-monarchy and those against are just a small number of activist extremists.
In truth, up to 31 percent of 18 to 24 years olds support the idea of an elected head of state.
Naturally, comparisons were made with authoritarian regimes like North Korea:
The U.K. is looking more alarming than North Korea with all the arrests going on. People are silently protesting a monarchy and are being heavily policed and jailed.
While the UK is increasingly leaning towards fascism, North Korea is objectively more authoritarian in a much more profound and literal way. For now, at least.
Normal Island
Republicanism is a legitimate point of view. And it is legitimate to express it at any time. And there is no time more appropriate than during the succession of a new king. The reaction on both social media and by the state, to what has been mild protest, tells a story.
That story is of a country which likes to laud its version of democracy while doing absolutely nothing to suggest it has any notion of the concept. And in doing so, it makes the case for a republic on behalf of those who want it.
A woman has been arrested for the alleged murder of two young children whose remains were discovered in suitcases in Manurewa, South Auckland, last month.
New Zealand police can now confirm that a 42-year-old woman has been arrested in South Korea.
Counties Manukau CIB detective inspector Tofilau Fa’ amanuia Vaaelua said South Korean authorities arrested the woman today on a Korean arrest warrant on two charges of murder relating to the two young victims.
The arrest warrant was issued by the Korean courts as a result of a request by NZ police for an arrest warrant under the extradition treaty between New Zealand and the Republic of Korea.
He said NZ police had applied to have her extradited back to New Zealand to face the charges and had requested she remain in custody while awaiting the completion of the extradition process.
“To have someone in custody overseas within such a short period of time has all been down to the assistance of the Korean authorities and the coordination by our NZ Police Interpol staff,” he said.
There were a number of enquiries to be completed both in New Zealand and overseas, he added.
Police said the children, believed to be aged between five and 10 years old, may have been hidden in the suitcases in an Auckland storage yard for several years.
The bodies were discovered on 11 August 2022 after a Clendon Park family won an auction for abandoned goods in a storage unit, without realising what was inside.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
While proponents pretend that such practices do not constitute broken windows policing tactics but “quality of life” or “community policing,” in fact, there has never been a division between these policing practices, logics or outcomes. While technocratic criminal justice practitioners advocate for these policies as simply following “evidence-based practices,” this is simply not the case. We are witnessing a liberal law-and-order backlash to anti-racist activism against policing. Through scapegoating abolitionist movements to defund the police and more moderate criminal justice reforms as the source of violent crime, Democrats are returning to the very playbooks that propelled mass incarceration.
The previous hiring of John Linder — then part of the Linder Maple Group — occurred during a period of high-profile reforms to the NOPD. In 1994 then-Mayor Marc Morial appointed Richard Pennington as the superintendent of the NOPD to modernize law enforcement and restore public confidence in policing to better fight on crime. At the time, concerns about rising crime were sensationalized by local news that positioned New Orleans as exceptionally violent.
Pennington enacted a series of reforms he termed the “Pennington Plan”: the creation of a Public Integrity Bureau aimed at weeding out corrupt cops; the implementation of community policing — the increased saturation of police in Black working class and poor communities; the expansion of police training on topics from interrogation techniques to customer service; and the appropriation of pay raises to all police officers.
While the named purpose of the Pennington Plan was to restore public safety in response to out-of-control crime, these reforms went hand-in-hand with Morial’s urban redevelopment aims; policing public space was deemed essential for gentrification projects. As documented in the “City of New Orleans 1995 Annual Report,” Morial sought to expand the city’s tourism economy through building a new convention center and expanding the footprint of the downtown tourism areas. In addition, Morial advocated for the privatization of public housing in the name of “revitalizing” neighborhoods through the displacement of long-term Black working-class and poor residents.
In 1996, Morial hired the Linder Maple Group to develop a five-year plan for the NOPD. The Linder Maple Group, well known as architects of the NYPD’s adoption of broken windows policing, was a strategic choice as Morial sought to remake New Orleans along the lines of Giuliani’s New York. While the NOPD had integrated aspects of broken windows policing in the first phase of the Pennington Plan, the Linder Maple Group proposed more. Following the recommendations of Linder Maple, the NOPD increased patrols in the French Quarter and the adjacent Downtown Development District along with the adoption of zero tolerance for “quality of life” offenses to visibly mark that the city was clamping down on disorder.
In addition, the NOPD adopted CompStat, which used statistics to track complaints and arrests by geographic policing districts to identify concentrated “hot spots” to hold district commanders to quantitative policing goals — incentivizing higher arrest rates. CompStat’s adoption was coupled with the NOPD de-prioritizing response to 911 calls. Finally, in a 1996 press conference Pennington announced his plan to implement a recruitment campaign to increase the NOPD from 1,285 to 1,700 cops.
Following these initiatives, Morial and Pennington were widely heralded by writers in the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, and beyond for the professionalization of the NOPD and the city’s triumph over crime. Yet against the claims made by city boosters, these policing policies impacts on crime rates were more than uneven.
Like elsewhere in the U.S., New Orleans was already experiencing a general crime decline prior to the election of Morial. While homicides did experience a notable decline after 1995 (before the hiring of Linder Maple), overall offenses labeled “violent crime” and those labeled “property crime” by the NOPD were on a significant downward trend as early as 1990, according to data provided by the City of New Orleans. Furthermore, there was little to no significant correlation between implementing broken windows and community policing tactics on the city’s drop in crime. Indeed, as political science scholar Kevin A. Unter has documented, it was more likely violence would go up rather than drop following the increase in officers and the implementation of CompStat. And against the liberal notion that professionalizing police could end the endemic racial violence of policing, New Orleanians continued to experience police corruption and abuse, as evidenced by dozens of letters to elected officials in the late 1990s and early 2000s that I reviewed while doing archival research.
Under these policies, New Orleans’s arrest rates skyrocketed. Municipal arrests jumped from 20,000 to almost 35,000, traffic arrests jumped from 4,500 to 11,00, and drug arrests jumped from just under 4,000 to over 7,000 between 1994 and 1998, according to Unter’s doctoral research. Juvenile arrests climbed from just under 3,000 in 1993 to almost 10,000 in 1998. With this continual surge of people into the criminal legal system, 1998 marked the year that Louisiana became the state with the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the United States.
Counter to the assumptions made by Democratic leaders swept up in the current wave of law-and-order nostalgia, the return of 1990s-era policing practices will not make our cities safer but it will heighten arrests and incarceration. Investing in state violence will not end interpersonal violence. It will sow disorder and instability for countless people.
Three alluvial miners were buried alive at Koranga mining area in Papua New Guinea following the earthquake which measured 7.6 on the Richter scale which hit Morobe province on Sunday morning.
The PNG Post-Courier today reports a death toll of seven after the devastation from the quake in the Morobe, Madang and the Highlands region.
The three miners — all from one family — who died were working inside a tunnel at the mine site at Koranga Creek when the earthquake hit the area about 11.30am.
The miners felt the earthquake and made their way out of the tunnel but they were too late and were buried alive.
A small girl who accompanied them to the mine site was sitting outside the tunnel. She felt the earth shaking and ran to the safety of higher ground and alerted the community.
The community went to the disaster area and retrieved the three bodies from beneath the rubble. They took the bodies to their house at Koranga compound.
Wau-Waria police station commander Senior Inspector Leo Kaikas confirmed the death of the family members and said their bodies would be transported by road to Lae to be placed at the Angau Memorial Hospital in Lae.
“The miners should take extra care when engaged in alluvial mining activities near the steep areas along Koranga creek and Mt Kaindi areas,” Kaikas said.
“I’m still carrying out assessment on the extent of the damage around Wau Waria district to confirm the number of people who were affected by the landslip following the earthquake.”
Wau Urban Ward 11 Member Rumie Giribo said arrangements had been made to transport the bodies to Lae to be placed at the morgue at the Angau Memorial Hospital.
ANALYSIS:By David Engel, Albert Zhang and Jake Wallis
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has analysed thousands of suspicious tweets posted in 2021 relating to the Indonesian region of West Papua and assessed that they are inauthentic and were crafted to promote the policies and activities of the Indonesian government while condemning opponents such as Papuan pro-independence activists.
This work continues ASPI’s research collaboration with Twitter focusing on information manipulation in the Indo-Pacific to encourage transparency around these activities and norms of behaviour that are conducive to open democracies in the region.
It follows our August 24 analysis of a dataset made up of thousands of tweets relating to developments in Indonesia in late 2020, which Twitter had removed for breaching its platform manipulation and spam policies.
This report on Papua focuses on similar Twitter activity from late February to late July 2021 that relates to developments in and about Indonesia’s easternmost region.
This four-month period was noteworthy for several serious security incidents as well as an array of state-supported activities and events in the Papua region, then made up of the provinces of West Papua and Papua.
These incidents were among many related to the long-running pro-independence conflict in the region.
A report from Indonesia’s Human Rights Commission detailed 53 violent incidents in 2021 across the Papua region in which 24 people were killed at the hands of both security forces and the armed wing of the Free Papua Organisation (OPM) separatist movement, the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB).
‘Armed criminal group’
Jakarta normally referred to this group by the acronym “KKB”, which stands for “armed criminal group”.
This upsurge in violence followed earlier cases involving multiple deaths. The most notorious took place in December 2018, when TPNPB insurgents reportedly murdered a soldier and at least 16 construction workers working on a part of the Trans-Papua Highway in the Nduga regency of Papua province (official Indonesian sources have put the death toll as high as 31).
The Indonesian government responded by conducting Operation Nemangkawi, a major national police (POLRI) security operation by a taskforce comprising police and military units, including additional troops brought in from outside the province.
The security operation led to bloody clashes, allegations of human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings, and the internal displacement of many thousands of Papuans, hundreds of whom, according to Amnesty International Indonesia, later died of hunger or illness.
Besides anti-insurgency actions, an important component of the operation was the establishment of Binmas Noken Polri, a community policing initiative designed to conduct “humanitarian police missions or operations” and assist “community empowerment” through programmes covering education, agriculture and tourism development.
“Noken” refers to a traditional Papuan bag that indigenous Papuans regard as a symbol of “dignity, civilisation and life”. Binmas Noken Polri was initiated by the then national police chief, Tito Karnavian, the same person who created the recently disbanded, shadowy Red and White Special Task Force highlighted in our August 24 report.
A key development occurred in April 2021 when pro-independence militants killed the regional chief of the National Intelligence Agency (BIN) in an ambush. Coming on the back of other murders by independence fighters (including of two teachers alleged to be police spies earlier that month), this prompted the government to declare the KKB in Papua—that is, the TPNPB “and its affiliated organisations”—”terrorists” and President Joko Widodo to order a crackdown on the group.
9 insurgents killed
Nine alleged insurgents were killed shortly afterwards.
In May 2021, hundreds of additional troops from outside Papua deployed to the province, some of which were part of an elite battalion nicknamed “Satan’s forces” that had earned notoriety in earlier conflicts in Indonesia’s Aceh province and Timir-Leste.
During the same month, there were large-scale protests in Papua and elsewhere over the government’s moves to renew and revise the special autonomy law, under which the region had enjoyed particular rights and benefits since 2001.
The protests included demonstrations staged by Papuan activists and students in Jakarta and the Javanese cities of Bandung and Yogyakarta from May 21-24. The revised law was ushered in by Karnavian, who was then (and is still) Indonesia’s Home Affairs Minister.
The period also saw ongoing preparations for the staging of the National Sports Week (PON) in Papua. Delayed by one year because of the covid-19 pandemic, the event eventually was held in October at several specially built venues across the province.
The dataset we analysed represents a diverse collection of thousands of tweets put out under such hashtags as #BinmasNokenPolri, #MenolakLupa (Refuse to forget), #TumpasKKBPapua (Annihilate the Papuan armed criminal group), #PapuaNKRI (Papua unitary state of the Republic of Indonesia), #Papua and #BongkarBiangRusuh (Take apart the culprits of the riots).
Most were overtly political, either associating the Indonesian state with success and public benefits for Papuans or condemning the state’s opponents as criminals, and sometimes doing both in the same tweet.
Papuan Games tweets Among several tweets under #Papua proclaiming that the province was ready to host the forthcoming PON thanks to Jakarta’s investment in facilities and security, 18 dispatched on June 25 proclaimed: “PAPUA IS READY TO IMPLEMENT PON 2020!!! Papua is safe, peaceful and already prepared to implement PON 2020. So there’s no need to be afraid. Shootings by the KKB … are far from the PON cluster [the various sports facilities] … Therefore everyone #ponpapua #papua”.
Many tweets were clearly aimed at shaping public perceptions of the pro-independence militia and others challenging the state.
Under #MenolakLupa in particular, numerous tweets related to past and contemporary acts of violence by the pro-independence militants. Two sets of tweets from March 22 and 24 that recall the 2018 attack at Nduga are especially noteworthy, in that both injected the term “terrorist” into the armed criminal group moniker that the state had been using hitherto, making it “KKTB”. This was a month before the formal designation of the OPM as a “terrorist” organisation.
As if to stress the OPM’s terrorist nature, subsequent tweets under #MenolakLupa carried through with this loaded terminology. For example, tweets on June 15 stated that in 2017 “KKTB committed sexual violence” against as many as 12 women in two villages in Papua.
A fortnight later, another set of tweets said that in 2018 the “armed terrorist criminal group” had held 14 teachers hostage and had taken turns in raping one of them, causing her “trauma”. Others claimed former pro-independence militants had converted to the cause of the Indonesian unitary state and therefore recognised its sovereignty over Papua.
Some tweets relate directly to specific contemporary events. Examples are flurries of tweets posted on July 24-25 in response to the protests against the special autonomy law’s renewal that highlight the alleged irresponsibility of demonstrations during the pandemic, such as: “Let’s reject the invitation to demo and don’t be easily provoked by irresponsible [malign] people. Stay home and stay healthy always.”
Others are tweets put out under #TumpasKKBPapua after the shooting of the two teachers, such as: “Any religion in the world surely opposes murder or any other such offence, let alone of this teacher. Secure the land of the Bird of Paradise.”
Warning over ‘hoax’ allegations
Other tweets warn Papuans not to succumb to “hoax” allegations about the security forces’ behaviour or other claims by overseas-based spokespeople such as United Liberation Movement of West Papua’s Benny Wenda and Amnesty International human rights lawyer Veronica Koman.
Tweets on April 1 under #PapuaNKRI, for example, warned recipients not to “believe the KKB’s Media Propaganda, let’s be smart and wise in using the media lest we be swayed by fake news.”
Many of the tweets in the dataset are strikingly mundane, with content that state agencies already were, or would have been, publicising openly. A tweet on February 27 under #Papua, for example, announced that the Transport Minister would prioritise the construction of transport infrastructure in the two provinces.
Those under #BinmasNokenPolri often echoed advice that receivers of the tweet could just as easily see on other media, such as POLRI’s official Binmas Noken website.
Some were public announcements about market conditions and community policing events where, for example, people could receive government assistance such as rice, basic items and other support.
Most reflected Binmas Noken’s community engagement purpose, ranging from a series on May 20 promoting a child’s “trauma healing” session with Binmas Noken personnel to another tweeted out on June 20 advising of a badminton contest involving villages and police arranged under the Nemangkawi Task Force.
‘Healthy body, strong spirit’
A further 34 tweets on June 20 advised that “inside a healthy body is a strong spirit”, of which the first nine began with the same broad sentiment expressed in the Latin motto derived from the Roman poet Juvenal, “Mens sana in corpore sano.” (Presumably, after this first group of tweets it dawned on the sender that his or her classical erudition was likely to be lost on indigenous Papuan residents.)
As with the tweets analysed in our August 24 report, based on behavioural patterns within the data, we judge that these tweets are likely to be inauthentic—that is, they were the result of coordinated and covert activity intended to influence public opinion rather than organic expressions by genuine users on the platform.
Without conclusively identifying the actors responsible, we assess that the tweets mirror the Widodo government’s general position on the Papuan region as being an inalienable part of the Indonesian state, as well as the government’s security policies and development agenda in the region.
The vast majority are purposive: by promoting the government’s policies and activities and condemning opponents of those policies (whether pro-independence militia or protesters), the tweets are clearly designed to persuade recipients that the state is providing vital public goods such as security, development and basic support in the face of malignant, hostile forces, and hence that being Indonesian is in their interests.
Dr David Engel is senior analyst on Indonesia in ASPI’s Defence and Strategy Programme. Albert Zhang is an analyst with ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre. His research interests include information and influence operations, and disinformation. Dr Jake Wallis is the Head of Programme, Information Operations and Disinformation with ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre. This article is republished from The Strategist with permission.
This week on CounterSpin: It is meaningful that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has formally apologized to Sacheen Littlefeather, the Apache and Yaqui actress and activist who in 1973 refused the best actor award on behalf of her friend Marlon Brando, because of Hollywood’s history of derogatory depiction of Native Americans. Some cheered, but a lot of the audience booed, some complete with “tomahawk chops,” and John Wayne evidently had to be physically restrained. Arriving at Brando’s house after the ceremony, Littlefeather was shot at.
It’s good that the Academy is apologizing, but the proof of course is in the material acknowledgement of the message: that Native Americans have been treated poorly in US entertainment and, we could add, news media, and that that has impact. Things are changing, and we need to check what that change amounts to: not just visibility, but justice and redress and the improvement of lives. The film Powerlands explores the treatment of Indigenous people around the world—not in terms of media imagery, but in terms of the resource extraction that is stealing water, minerals and homelands. It talks not just about harm but about resistance, and so it also contributes to the seeing of Native communities in their full humanity. We’ll talk with Powerlands filmmaker Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso.
Also on the show: You might consider you’re making a misstep when even Time magazine calls you out. Hardly a progressive bastion, the outlet recently ran a piece critical of Joe Biden’s call for the hiring of 100,000 more police officers and some $13 billion to police budgets—calling it a part of a “manipulative message that if we feel unsafe, it is because we have not yet invested adequately in police, jails and prisons.” Contributor Eric Reinhart noted that using a more comprehensive understanding of safety including “factors like homelessness and eviction, overdose risk, financial insecurity, preventable disease, police violence and unsafe workplaces (which, statistically, present far greater preventable threats to everyday life than crime)—it is readily apparent America’s police-centric safety policies do not effectively promote shared safety.” This is not new knowledge, though it obviously needs resaying. We’ll revisit just a bit from CounterSpin‘s 2017 conversation with Alex Vitale, professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing & Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, and author of the book The End of Policing.
The group, one aged 19 and the others in their 20s, had raised the flag at the Cenderawasih Sports Centre, and although they were not carrying weapons they were convicted of treason.
The Jubi website reported the judge said raising the Morning Star flag and marching while shouting “Free Papua” and “We are not Red and White, we are the Morning Star“, amounted to treason.
And the act of unfurling banners with the words “Self Determination For West Papua, Stop West Papua Militarism” and “Indonesia Immediately Open Access for the UN Human Rights Commission Investigation Team to West Papua” was also considered treason.
‘Intention of separating’
The verdict read “the defendants already have the intention of separating Papua and West Papua from the territory of Indonesia. The defendants have committed the beginning of treason as stipulated in Article 87 of the Criminal Code”.
After the trial, the defendant’s lawyer Emanuel Gobay told Jubi “we firmly reject” the court’s verdict of treason.
During the trial Gobay said no expert witnesses had been presented to explain their perspectives on the charges.
According to Gobay, the conclusions drawn by the panel of judges seemed subjective because there was no information from expert witnesses.
“We question the basis on which the panel of judges concluded the treason. It is as if the panel of judges acted as experts, interpreting and concluding themselves without relying on expert testimony,” Gobay said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The Southern Highlands capital — Mendi — has turned into a battlefield in Papua New Guinea this week as supporters of different candidates for the regional seat went on a warpath.
The warring parties –– believed to be supporters of the incumbent governor against the other regional candidates –– shut down the town on Thursday and during the mayhem, raided the Mendi police station and set fire to regional ballot papers.
Police Commissioner David Manning directed police in Mendi to arrest one of the candidates who was suspected of being behind the problems in Mendi and the counting.
Manning said he had ordered the arrest of the candidate following the ransacking of the Mendi police station in which the remaining ballot boxes for the provincial seat were removed from the containers and burned to ashes.
“I have directed the apprehension of the candidate [named] for questioning in relation to the incident at the police station,” Commissioner Manning said.
The mayhem was the culmination of frustration that have been built over weeks into the on-again off-again counting of the regional ballots that has dragged on for weeks since counting started in mid-July.
Southern Highlands police confirmed that allegations over electoral fraud by counting officials have led to frequent disruptions and the PNG Electoral Commission must take a stand on this.
‘Constitutional terrorists’ “The Electoral Commissioner Simon Sinai needs to clarify if the candidates should go to court to obtain a court order or not to stop the provincial returning officer from counting the disputed ballot boxes,” provincial police commander Superintendent Daniel Yangen said.
Superintendent Yangen joined candidates Peter Nupuri, Benard Kaku and Augustine Rapa in Mendi who are accusing the EC and its official on the ground in Mendi for the turmoil.
Mendi burns! … the PNG Post-Courier’s weekend edition front page. Image: Screenshot APR
Nupiri asked Sinai to replace the election manager, Jimmy Alwynn, to take charge of the counting.
Prime Minister James Marape condemned the burning of the ballot papers, describing those involved as “constitutional terrorists” who would be hunted down by the police.
“Those responsible are not ordinary arsonists but constitutional terrorists who can enter a police station and burn ballot boxes containing the votes of the people,” Marape said.
“This is state property and such an act is one of terrorism,” he said, adding that he had asked the police to go into Mendi, conduct the investigation and arrest those responsible.
He said people in PNG cannot continue to take the law into their own hands and his government would strengthen the police and justice system.
“I will, in the first instance, ensure that Southern Highlands Province, Hela, Enga and other hotspots are attended to at the very earliest,” Marape said.
Ialibu Pangia’s Peter O’Neill blamed the chaos in Mendi on the government.
‘Government-made shambles’
“This election has been a government-made shambles everywhere and democracy has been hijacked to make way for an autocratic style of leadership,” he said.
“I do not condone the violence in Mendi but I can certainly understand why it is happening.
“People are fed up with the way democracy has been cast aside by a power hungry few hellbent on seeking control at the expense of the people.”
O’Neill urged the Electoral Commissioner to reassert himself and take control of the Mendi counting room and ensure a fair outcome for the voters and candidates.
The destruction of the ballot papers has put an abrupt halt to the counting, which was heading into the elimination rounds.
Sinai will decide either to treat the Mendi situation as a “special circumstance” and declare the leading candidate as the winner or order a supplementary byelection.
“I will make a decision once I have gone through the report on the incident,” Sinai.
Communist Party of India (Marxist) protest in Khila Warangal, 10 May 2022.
It all started with a survey. In April 2022, members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), went door to door in the town of Warangal in Telangana state. The party was already aware of challenges in the community but wanted to collect data before working on a plan of action. Thirty-five teams of three to four CPI(M) members and supporters went to 45,000 homes and learned how people were suffering from a range of issues, such as the lack of pensions and subsidised food. Many expressed anxieties around the absence of permanent housing, with a third saying that they were not homeowners and could not pay their rents. The government had promised to build two-bedroom apartments for the poor, but these promises evaporated. With inflation eating into their meagre incomes and serious unemployment due to the collapse of the local bidi (cigarette) industry, desperation marked the people the communists met.
Many in the community expressed their willingness to fight for better living conditions, especially for more huts (gudisela poratam) to be built. In the words of one of the residents, ‘whatever the consequences, even if we are beaten or killed, we will join this struggle’. The CPI(M) formed committees in thirty wards of Jakkaloddi, a part of Warangal, and began to prepare people for the coming fight. The epicentre of the struggle was land that the government had taken in the late 1970s from an old aristocrat, Moinuddin Khadri, using the Land Ceiling Act of 1975. Rather than distributing this land to the landless, however, the government evicted farmers from part of it and then gave the land to leaders of the ruling Telugu Desam Party in 1989.
Sagar, the CPI(M) secretary of Ragasaipeta and a leader of the Jakkaloddi Struggle Committee, addresses members at a general body meeting of the Jakkaloddi campaign on 18 June 2022.
On 25 May 2022, 8,000 people marched to the Warangal Municipal Corporation and handed in 10,000 state housing applications. When they moved to occupy the vacant land, the police told them to stay away and prevented them from entering. Despite this, the Jakkaloddi Struggle Committee, made up of those who had occupied the land, managed to organise the construction of 3,000 huts on the land. At 3am on 20 June, the police arrived, set many of the huts alight while people slept, and beat the occupants as they emerged from their temporary homes. Four hundred people were arrested. The next day, local officials placed a sign outside the area: ‘This site is for the construction of a court complex’.
Neither this sign nor the brutality of the police could stop the people, who returned and continued to camp there for sixty days, G. Nagaiah, a state secretariat member of the CPI(M), told P. Ambedkar of Tricontinental Research Services (India). On 26 June, they began to build 2,000 new huts. The police tried to stop them with more acts of violence, but the people fought back and forced them to retreat. Now, there are 4,600 huts in total.
Women argue with the police, who are trying to evict them from the occupied land, 22 June 2022.
The CPI(M)-led action was prompted by the state government’s failure to alleviate desperate land hunger in the region. The most recent government data shows that, between 2012–2017, there was a shortage of 18.8 million houses in urban India alone. Even this figure is inaccurate because it counts low-quality houses in highly congested city neighbourhoods as adequate housing. In November 2021, the World Bank announced the development of an Adequate Housing Index (AHI), which gives us a clearer picture. Their housing Gini figures show that, in India, two out of every three working-class families live in subpar housing. The AHI looked at data from 64 of the poorer nations and found a housing deficit of 268 million units across these countries, which impacts 1.26 billion people. Furthermore, a quarter of the housing stock in the poorer nations is plainly inadequate. With billions of people around the world unhoused or living in poor quality housing, and with no real plan to address this problem, it is unlikely that any poorer nation will meet the eleventh Sustainable Development Goal to ‘make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable’.
Land struggles in places such as Jakkaloddi resemble those led by Abahlali baseMjondolo, South Africa’s shack dweller movement, and Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). The crackdown and eviction of poor people from land occupations has become a regular occurrence across the globe. Similar attacks have been replicated in Guernica, Argentina, where 1,900 families were evicted on 29 October 2020, and in Otodo-Gbame, Nigeria, where over 30,000 people were evicted between November 2016–April 2017.
Such struggles are led by people who want to establish the material basis of living with dignity. In a recent dossier, our South African colleague Yvonne Phyllis uses a isiXhosa saying to refer to the land: umhlaba wookhokho bethu, ‘the land of our ancestors’. This phrase, so common in most cultures, demands that land be seen as a shared inheritance, not as the property of one person. This expression also invokes, as Phyllis describes it, a recognition of the ‘unresolved question of injustice’ inherited from ‘process[es] of colonial dispossession and deception that advanced the development of capitalism’. These struggles throughout the Global South mirror those in Warangal, where the CPI(M) is leading thousands of people in the fight for housing, successfully securing a total of 50,000 homes in 2008 and continuing to the fight for adequate housing to this day.
Some of the 10,000 huts and tents on the occupied land, 25 May 2022.
The appetite to transcend the global housing crisis is spreading. The people of Berlin – some 3.6 million residents – held a referendum in 2021 over the growing impossibility of finding housing in the German capital. The referendum called for the state to buy back apartments owned by any real estate companies with more than 3,000 units in the city, which could impact 243,000 out of 1.5 million rental apartments. The referendum passed, although it is non-binding. This – along with the growing confidence of people occupying vacant land and building their own homes – illustrates a new mood in the global movement for the right to housing. There is an increased understanding that housing must not be a financial asset used by the billionaire class for speculation or to shield their wealth from taxation. This sensibility is clear among organisations that fight for the right to housing such as Despejo Zero (Brazil) and Ndifuna Ukwazi (South Africa), among mass movements such as the MST and Abahlali, and among political parties such as the CPI(M) that organise people to transcend the housing crisis by occupying land.
Women, refusing to leave the land, roll tuniki leaves into bidis after the police demolished their huts and tents, 20 June 2022.
These land occupations are filled with tension and joy, the perils of being beaten by the police alongside the promise of collective life. Part of this collective life is represented in songs, often written in groups and released anonymously. We end this newsletter with one such song by a state committee member of the people’s cultural group Praja Natya Madali who goes by the pseudonym Sphoorti (meaning ‘inspiration’) from a chapbook called Sphoorti Patalu (‘inspiration songs’):
We will not move an inch
till we get land for our homes,
a morsel of food, and a strip of land.
We shall fight those who stop us.
On this land, the red flags we raised
stand ready for battle.
Birds nest in the branches.
Insects have homes in leaves.
We, who are born human,
thirst for a roof of our own,
for a patch of land for a home.
Drifting from place to place
in make-shift huts,
the shame of no address to our names.
Like leaves blowing in heavy winds,
with the pain of no place to call our own.
Well-healed bosses
steal thousands of acres
in the name of their children, birds, and animals.
For a little patch for which I ask,
the sticks beat me to the edge of death.
You, who have come to ask for our vote:
We demand food and shelter.
We are ready for battle till we get them.
We dare you to stop us.
We are grateful to Jagadish Kumar, a member of the CPI(M) state committee and the Jakkaloddi Struggle Committee, for collecting the photographs featured in this newsletter.
Dania Al-Obeid brings human rights claim after being found guilty of breaching Covid restrictions without court hearing
A woman who was arrested and charged after attending the vigil for Sarah Everard in Clapham last year has launched civil proceedings against the Metropolitan police.
Dania Al-Obeid was convicted for breaching coronavirus restrictions when attending the vigil in 2021 under a Single Justice Procedure, which allows a magistrate to decide on a case without the need for a court hearing.
Journalist Muhammad Asrul is awaiting word from Indonesia’s Supreme Court about whether he will spend further time behind bars for reporting on corruption issues. The decision will have a profound impact not only on his life but also on press freedom in Indonesia.
The country is at a turning point following its transition at the end of the 20th century from military dictatorship to democracy.
Many, including civil society and members of the judiciary, have sought to protect journalists — they see a free, functioning press as part of Indonesia’s future.
Others, however, are waging a battle against independent media and freedom of speech, through prosecutions like Asrul’s and through the impending passage of a criminal code that smacks of authoritarianism. With Indonesia’s two-decade-old democratic path in real jeopardy, the next several months will be decisive.
In 2019, Asrul penned a series of articles alleging corruption by a local political official. The same official filed a complaint with the police, who subsequently arrested and detained Asrul.
After spending more than a month in jail as the police conducted investigations, Asrul was prosecuted under the country’s draconian Electronic Information and Transactions Law (ITE Law), which criminalises the electronic transmission of information that defames or affronts.
At the end of 2021, a court found Asrul guilty and sentenced him to three months in prison.
Police bypassed Press Council
While this would be egregious enough on its own, in Asrul’s case the police chose to bypass Indonesia’s Press Council.
The Press Council is an independent government body tasked with protecting journalists in press-related disputes. The police are supposed to coordinate with the Press Council to determine whether a case should be funnelled into the criminal justice system or resolved through mediation or other solutions outside of the courts.
But the police did not give the council a chance to settle the complaint against Asrul, sidestepping this critical institution. Equally worrying, the court that convicted Asrul stated that the police have the power to override the Press Council in a range of situations, including where individuals offended by news articles go straight to the police instead of the council.
The Clooney Foundation for Justice’s TrialWatch initiative, where I work as a senior programme manager, monitored Asrul’s trial through its partner the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights.
This coming week, we will file an amicus brief requesting that the Supreme Court overturn Asrul’s conviction and ensure that the protections offered by Indonesia’s Press Council remain a reality for journalists throughout Indonesia.
TrialWatch monitors trials such as Asrul’s in more than 35 countries, seeking to overturn unjust convictions against journalists and marginalised individuals and to reform the laws used to target them.
The ITE Law is one such example. Since its enactment in 2008, the ITE Law has been a key tool in suppressing freedom of expression and press freedom in Indonesia, with prosecutions spiking in recent years.
81 people charged
During the first nine months of 2021, for example, at least 81 people were charged with violating the ITE Law, “most of them accused of defamation” — the provision under which Asrul was prosecuted. Those found guilty of defamation can face up to four years behind bars.
While the ITE Law has been a darling of government officials seeking to quash legitimate criticism, it has also been deployed by businesses and other powerful actors who simply do not like what someone has posted online.
TrialWatch recently monitored a trial in which a woman, Stella Monica, was prosecuted for Instagram complaints about acne treatment she received at a dermatology clinic. Monica was acquitted but the clinic aggressively pursued the case, subjecting her to almost two years of legal proceedings.
This playbook for stifling speech may soon receive a boost with the revision of Indonesia’s colonial-era criminal code. In many countries, the amendment of colonial laws has been a step forward, but Indonesia’s iteration is so regressive that when a draft was published in 2019 it triggered widespread protests.
Although the government withdrew the legislation following the protests, this year the new code was resurrected, retaining provisions from the 2019 version that endanger press freedom.
In addition to providing for a potential jail sentence of up to three years for perceived insults to the president and vice-president, the draft code criminalises the dissemination of “incomplete” news and so-called “fake news”.
Attempts to hide developments
Just how troubling these developments are is clear from the Indonesian government’s attempts to hide them. The Deputy Law and Human Rights Minister in charge of the revision process had previously pledged that the legislature would vote on the code by August 17, Indonesia’s Independence Day.
He also stated that the authorities would not share the draft text with either civil society or the public because of the risk of disorder. After an outcry, however, the government published the draft in July and promised further consultations, still leaving civil society with scant time to deliberate and engage the government if the vote indeed takes place in the next few months.
While passage of the code in its current form would be a triumph for government officials and corporate interests seeking to restrict critical speech, it would also be a victory for the increasingly powerful conservative Islamist parties on which President Joko Widodo has relied to maintain power.
The draft code falls squarely on the side of conservatives in Indonesia’s roiling cultural battles, threatening jail time for sex and co-habitation before marriage, which would also functionally criminalise LGBTQ+ relationships. Another provision swells the already expansive blasphemy law, extending it to criminalise comments made on social media.
Although the draft code reflects the reality that repressive forces are gaining ground, there is still hope that the authorities will side with those fighting for fundamental freedoms. The government has shown itself to be responsive not only to pressure from hardliners but also to pressure from pro-democracy forces.
The withdrawal of the code after the 2019 protests and the recent sharing of the draft text are good examples. In another recent example, after enduring intense criticism about overly broad enforcement of the ITE Law, President Widodo commissioned guidelines limiting its application — in particular against journalists.
The guidelines, which were introduced after Asrul’s case had already begun, explicitly state that in cases where a news outlet has published an article, then press regulations — not the ITE law — should apply. While enforcement has been shaky thus far, the guidelines demonstrate the power of public pressure and are an additional tool in the battle for press freedom.
Institutional safeguards
Other institutional safeguards are in place. Indonesia’s Press Council has a mandate that puts it on the same level as other government entities and gives it real power to protect journalists — hence the importance of Asrul’s case and the impending Supreme Court decision on the Council’s role.
To show how significant the Press Council is we need only hop across the ocean, where press freedom advocates in Malaysia have been fighting to establish a similar mechanism for years, recognising its potential to stop the harassment of independent media.
The courts are also making positive noises. In the face of campaigns by government officials, religious conservatives and businesses to clamp down on speech, some judges have ruled in favour of human rights protections — from the acquittal of Monica for her dermatological troubles to a recent high-profile acquittal in a blasphemy prosecution.
What this means is that unlike in countries where the decks are stacked, with the legislature, judiciary and press co-opted by authoritarian powers, all is not lost in Indonesia. Civil society has proven that it can mobilise and that institutional levers can be pulled.
But this upcoming period will be crucial. Buffeted by competing winds, the Indonesian government will decide whether to move forward with the current version of the new criminal code. Actors at the local level, like police and prosecutors, will decide whether to enforce — or not enforce — rights-positive guidelines and laws.
The judiciary will consider cases with wide-ranging consequences for press freedom and freedom of speech, like that of Muhammad Asrul. And even if the criminal code is passed, it awaits a barrage of constitutional challenges, putting the judiciary in the spotlight.
Through its TrialWatch initiative, the Clooney Foundation for Justice will continue to monitor these courtroom battles and advocate for those unjustly targeted in criminal prosecutions. With key decisions forthcoming, the fate of Asrul and many others hang in the balance.
Kyle Delbyck is senior programme manager at the Clooney Foundation for Justice’s TrialWatch initiative, where she coordinates trial observations and ensuing advocacy. Grace Hauser, TrialWatch legal fellow at the Clooney Foundation for Justice, contributed to this article. First published by Al Jazeera English, it is republished under a Creative Commons licence.
Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.
This is the language of force.
This is how the government at all levels—federal, state and local—now responds to those who speak out against government corruption, misconduct and abuse.
These overreaching, heavy-handed lessons in how to rule by force have become standard operating procedure for a government that communicates with its citizenry primarily through the language of brutality, intimidation and fear.
We didn’t know it then, but what happened five years ago in Charlottesville, Va., was a foretaste of what was to come.
At the time, Charlottesville was at the center of a growing struggle over how to reconcile the right to think and speak freely, especially about controversial ideas, with the push to sanitize the environment of anything—words and images—that might cause offense. That fear of offense prompted the Charlottesville City Council to get rid of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that had graced one of its public parks for 82 years.
In attempting to err on the side of political correctness by placating one group while muzzling critics of the city’s actions, Charlottesville attracted the unwanted attention of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and the alt-Right, all of whom descended on the little college town with the intention of exercising their First Amendment right to be disagreeable, to assemble, and to protest.
That’s when everything went haywire.
When put to the test, Charlottesville did not handle things well at all.
On August 12, 2017, government officials took what should have been a legitimate exercise in constitutional principles (free speech, assembly and protest) and turned it into a lesson in authoritarianism by manipulating warring factions and engineering events in such a way as to foment unrest, lockdown the city, and justify further power grabs.
On the day of scheduled protests, police deliberately engineered a situation in which two opposing camps of protesters would confront each other, tensions would bubble over, and things would turn just violent enough to justify allowing the government to shut everything down.
In fact, as the Washington Post reports, police “seemed to watch as groups beat each other with sticks and bludgeoned one another with shields… At one point, police appeared to retreat and then watch the beatings before eventually moving in to end the free-for-all, make arrests and tend to the injured.”
In other words, the government failed to uphold its constitutional mandates.
The police failed to carry out their duties as peace officers.
And the citizens found themselves unable to trust either the police or the government to do its job in respecting their rights and ensuring their safety.
This is not much different from what is happening on the present-day national scene.
Indeed, there’s a pattern emerging if you pay close enough attention.
Civil discontent leads to civil unrest, which leads to protests and counterprotests. Tensions rise, violence escalates, police stand down, and federal armies move in. Meanwhile, despite the protests and the outrage, the government’s abuses continue unabated.
It’s all part of an elaborate setup by the architects of the police state. The government wants a reason to crack down and lock down and bring in its biggest guns.
They want us divided. They want us to turn on one another.
They want us powerless in the face of their artillery and armed forces.
They want us silent, servile and compliant.
They certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully, whether it’s protesting politically correct efforts to whitewash the past, challenging COVID-19 mandates, questioning election outcomes, or listening to alternate viewpoints—even conspiratorial ones—in order to form our own opinions about the true nature of government.
And they definitely do not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
Why else do you think WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange continues to molder in jail for daring to blow the whistle about the U.S. government’s war crimes, while government officials who rape, plunder and kill walk away with little more than a slap on the wrist?
This is how it begins.
We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.
In the wake of the January 6 riots at the Capitol, “domestic terrorism” has become the new poster child for expanding the government’s powers at the expense of civil liberties.
Of course, “domestic terrorist” is just the latest bull’s eye phrase, to be used interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist,” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”
This unilateral power to muzzle free speech represents a far greater danger than any so-called right- or left-wing extremist might pose. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.
Watch and see: we are all about to become enemies of the state.
For starters, we need to remember that we’ve all got rights, and we need to exercise them.
Most of all, we need to protect the rights of the people to speak truth to power, whatever that truth might be. Either “we the people” believe in free speech or we don’t.
Fifty years ago, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas asked:
“Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet… [A]t the constitutional level, speech need not be a sedative; it can be disruptive… [A] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.”
In other words, the Constitution does not require Americans to be servile or even civil to government officials. Neither does the Constitution require obedience (although it does insist on nonviolence).
Somehow, the government keeps overlooking this important element in the equation.
The Solomon Islands government has ordered the country’s national broadcaster to self-censor its news and other paid programmes and only allow content that portrays the nation’s government in a positive light.
Staff at Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC) confirmed to the ABC that acting chairman of the board William Parairato met with them last Friday to outline the new requirements.
They include vetting news and talkback shows to ensure they did not “create disunity”.
Parairato had earlier attended a meeting with the Prime Minister’s office, the SIBC journalists said.
Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare has become increasingly critical of the public broadcaster, accusing SIBC of publishing stories that have not been verified or balanced with government responses.
The government defended the reclassification, saying it had a duty to protect its citizens from “lies and misinformation”.
It is unclear whether SIBC — which plays a vital role as a government watchdog — will be able to publish any news or statements from the opposition under the new regime.
Critics are concerned the new rules resemble media policies adopted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and could essentially make SIBC a mouthpiece for the government.
The ABC Four Corners investigative journalism report on China and the Solomon Islands this week.
“It really doesn’t come as a surprise,” she told the ABC.
“This is one of the things which we are fearful of for the past month or so now.
“We’ve been vocal on this issue, especially when it comes to freedom of the press and media doing its expected role.”
Solomon Islands’ Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare shaking hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping … local reporters say the government has become less inclined to answer media questions since the country signed a security pact with China. Image: Yao Dawei/Xinhua via Getty/ABC
What impact will it have? Honiara-based Melanesian News Network editor Dorothy Wickham said it was unclear how the development would play out.
Dorothy Wickham says she is not surprised by the move, given the government’s ongoing criticism of the media.
“We haven’t seen this happen before,” she said.
Journalist Dorothy Wickham … she isn’t surprised by the SIBC move, given the government’s ongoing criticism of the media. Image: ABC Pacific Beat
“If the opposition gets on SIBC and starts criticising government policies, which every opposition does … would the government disallow SIBC to air that story or that interview? That is the question that we’re asking.”
Officials have denied taking full control of SIBC’s editorial policy, saying it just wants the broadcaster to be more responsible because it is a government entity.
But University of South Pacific journalism associate professor Shailendra Singh said the government’s intentions were clear.
“There seems to be no doubt that the government is determined to take control of the national broadcaster, editorially and financially,” he told ABC’s The World.
“I don’t think there’s any way the government can be stopped.
“This latest move by the government, what it has done with the SIBC, is bring it closer to media in a communist system than in a democracy.”
Wickham said the media did not have issues with governments in the past, adding that since the security pact had been signed with China, the government had been making life harder for the press.
“I don’t think this government actually restricts us, I think it’s controlling their information more than they used to,” Wickham told ABC’s The World.
“The government has been concerned that the negativity expressed by a lot of Solomon Islanders is affecting how the government is trying to roll out its policies.”
When China’s foreign minister toured the country in May, Solomon Islands local media boycotted a press conference because they were collectively only allowed to ask one question — to their own Foreign Minister.
They also struggled to get information about the timing of the visit and agreements being signed between the two countries.
Instead, his minders escorted him to a nearby vehicle, with police blocking reporters from getting close to the Prime Minister.
Dr Singh warned that the country’s democracy would suffer as a result of less media freedom.
“Media is the last line of defence, so if the media are captured, who will sound the alarm? It’s happening right before our eyes. It’s a major, major concern,” he said.
Solomon Islands police blocking the ABC from speaking to Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare. Image: Adilah Dolaiano/ABC News
‘A wake-up call’
Kekea said SIBC staff should be able to do their job freely without fear and intimidation.
But the best thing the media can do is uphold the principles of journalism, stressing that “we must do our jobs properly”.
“It’s a wake-up call for SIBC to really look at how they have gone over the years, how they format their programs, the quality control they have in place,” Kekea said.
“It’s really a wake up call for every one of us.”
She said the media landscape had changed over the years and standards had been dropping, but the government also needed to respect the role of journalist and be more open to requests for information.
The Prime Minister had repeatedly said he was available for questions and calls, but local media complained they were continuously left unanswered, she said.
“They do not have the courtesy to respond to our emails. Even if we want to have an exclusive it gets rejected,” Kekea said.
“So it’s time governments should also walk the talk when it comes to responding to the media when they ask questions.”
The ABC has contacted Solomon Islands’ Prime Minister’s office and SIBC for comment.
YouTube Reporter Dorothy Wickham tells The World it’s still unclear what this means for the public broadcaster.
Annika Burgess is a reporter for ABC Pacific Beat.Republished with the permission of Pacific Beat.
Reporter Dorothy Wickham tells The World it is still unclear what the SIBC move means for the public broadcaster.
On 14 July, the Department for Education (DfE) published new guidance on strip searching children in schools. This follows the safeguarding review on the strip search of schoolgirl Child Q, which urged the department to revise its guidance for schools.
The new guidance urges school staff to advocate for pupils and to consider their mental and physical wellbeing when thinking about calling the police. But its allowance of strip searches on school grounds undermines its purported goal of keeping children safe.
We must demand an end to the police’s use of this degrading and humiliating practice, especially against children. Ultimately, we need to seek safe and supportive ways to deal with the issues that impact children’s lives.
Child Q
In March, a safeguarding review revealed that two Metropolitan Police officers conducted a strip search against a Black schoolgirl, known as Child Q, while she was on her period. The search took place on school grounds with her teachers’ knowledge but without an appropriate adult present.
Police stripped the child and forced her to expose her “intimate body parts”. They made the child remove her sanitary pad, and didn’t let her wash before returning to an exam.
Teachers and police subjected Child Q to this dehumanising treatment because school staff wrongly suspected her of carrying cannabis. The safeguarding review concluded that “Child Q should never have been strip searched”.
Speaking to the devastating impact of her experience, Child Q told the safeguarding review panel:
I don’t know if I’m going to feel normal again… But I do know this can’t happen to anyone, ever again.
In May, it was revealed that Met police also strip searched a 15-year-old mixed-race Black girl. This girl, known as Olivia, was also on her period at the time. Olivia attempted to take her own life following this traumatic incident.
The researcher found that Black people were overrepresented in those targeted with strip search. Kemp also noted a concerning number of children included in these figures.
And in July, an FoI request by LBC found that from 2019 to 2021, police strip searched 799 minors who were not in custody. They were between the ages of 10 and 17.
The figures reveal extreme racial disproportionality in officers’ use of the degrading tactic. Over half of the children strip searched during this period were Black. 75% – amounting to 607 children – were from racially minoritised backgrounds. Only one in five were white.
As was the case for Child Q, police conducted most of these searches due to suspected criminalised drug offences. Officers took no further action in just under half of these cases. This reflects the harmful and ineffective nature of racist ‘gangs’ and ‘county lines’ policing, which racially minoritised young people bear the brunt of.
But the new guidance creates an alarming narrative that in some cases, it’s ok for police to strip search a child.
Garden Court Chambers barrister Michael Etienne told The Canary:
the guidance presumes that the use of strip searches is something that should even be allowed in schools.
The barrister raised concerns that the guidance sets out vague recommendations for school staff. For example, the guidance states that staff should “advocate for pupil wellbeing”. But it offers no guidance on how teachers can actually enact this.
Etienne told The Canary::
Once the police have been called and arrive at the school gates, the guidance puts teachers in the passive position of merely “advocating” for the safety of the pupil but offers no explanation for what that means.
The barrister was keen to note that head teachers have statutory powers to refuse entry to the police and can order officers to leave school grounds. This vital information is not included in the DfE’s guidance.
‘Criminal justice responses to issues of child safety’
Etienne added that the guidance does little to clarify the difference between a strip search (the removal of outer clothing) and an intimate search (the exposure and/or inspection of intimate parts of the body).
He said:
That is particularly important given that some of what is reported to have happened to Child Q is likely to amount to an intimate search.
The guidance also fails to mention the adultification bias – the racist perception and treatment of Black children as adults. Adultification played a key role in Child Q’s devastating case.
Highlighting the need for cultural and structural transformation to ensure that what happened to Child Q doesn’t happen again, Etienne said:
Overall, the guidance will do nothing to change the culture of deference between schools and police officers. Teachers are essentially cast as observers. That is typical of the culture that enabled the strip search of Child Q.
He concluded:
The DfE’s response is rushed, superficial and still stubbornly rooted in a dependence on criminal justice responses to issues of child safety.
Strip search can never be safe
In the wake of Child Q’s humiliating experience, a coalition of groups working to end strip search emerged.
Even when ‘safeguards’ are in place, like parents being notified or an appropriate adult acting as a witness, the strip search experience is still one of trauma. A child is always traumatised, whether protocol is followed or not.
It adds:
Nothing a child could hide in their body is worth them being sexually assaulted. Whether something is found or not, a child is harmed in a way that has deep ramifications for their mental health, and their future. There is no justification.
Indeed, there are no circumstances in which a child can be protected from harm while being strip searched – or even threatened with strip search – by police. With this in mind, the allowance of strip searches in schools in the DfE’s new guidance undermines the very concept of child safeguarding.
How you can help
We must call for an immediate end to the traumatic and dehumanising practice of strip search, particularly against children. Those looking to join the campaign can sign up for updates on actions, events and opportunities to get involved via the End Strip Search website.
In the meantime, it is vital that adults are prepared to limit children’s contact with police, and to fiercely advocate for children during police interactions when they happen.
Teachers – don’t invite police onto school grounds. Police are not equipped to prevent harm or to deal with the complex social issues that impact children’s lives. Their job is to criminalise.
For the rest of us, this means resisting the presence of police in schools and intervening in every police stop we witness on the streets. It means withdrawing consent from all forms of policing. And it means demanding funding for specialist services that support vulnerable children and young people.
More broadly, we must create a culture in which we keenly listen to children’s experiences of policing – and believe them. It’s time we start treating children with respect, not suspicion.
Solving unsolved crimes is a noble objective, but it occupies a lower place in the American pantheon of noble objectives than the protection of our people from suspicionless law-enforcement searches… Make no mistake about it…your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason… Perhaps the construction of such a genetic panopticon is wise. But I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.
Whatever skeletons may be lurking on your family tree or in your closet, whatever crimes you may have committed, whatever associations you may have with those on the government’s most wanted lists: the police state is determined to ferret them out.
In an age of overcriminalization, round-the-clock surveillance, and a police state eager to flex its muscles in a show of power, we are all guilty of some transgression or other.
No longer can we consider ourselves innocent until proven guilty.
Now we are all suspects in a DNA lineup waiting to be matched up with a crime.
It’s getting harder to hide, even if you think you’ve got nothing to hide.
Armed with unprecedented access to DNA databases amassed by the FBI and ancestry website, as well as hospital newborn screening programs, police are using forensic genealogy, which allows police to match up an unknown suspect’s crime scene DNA with that of any family members in a genealogy database, to solve cold cases that have remained unsolved for decades.
By submitting your DNA to a genealogical database such as Ancestry and 23andMe, you’re giving the police access to the genetic makeup, relationships and health profiles of every relative—past, present and future—in your family, whether or not they ever agreed to be part of such a database.
That simple transaction—a spit sample or a cheek swab in exchange for getting to learn everything about one’s ancestral makeup, where one came from, and who is part of one’s extended family—is the price of entry into the Suspect State for all of us.
Whereas fingerprint technology created a watershed moment for police in their ability to “crack” a case, DNA technology is now being hailed by law enforcement agencies as the magic bullet in crime solving, especially when it helps them crack cold cases of serial murders and rapists.
After all, who wouldn’t want to get psychopaths and serial rapists off the streets and safely behind bars, right?
For instance, a 68-year-old Pennsylvania man was arrested and charged with the brutal rape and murder of a young woman almost 50 years earlier. Relying on genealogical research suggesting that the killer had ancestors who hailed from a small town in Italy, investigators narrowed their findings down to one man whose DNA, obtained from a discarded coffee cup, matched the killer’s.
Victims of past crimes are also getting added to the government’s growing DNA database of potential suspects. For instance, San Francisco police used a rape victim’s DNA, which was on file from a 2016 sexual assault, to arrest the woman for allegedly being involved in a property crime that took place in 2021.
In this way, “guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in a technological age in which one is just a DNA sample away from being considered a person of interest in a police investigation. As Jessica Cussins warns in Psychology Today, “The fundamental fight—that data from potentially innocent people should not be used to connect them to unrelated crimes—has been lost.”
Until recently, the government was required to at least observe some basic restrictions on when, where and how it could access someone’s DNA. That was turned on its head by various U.S. Supreme Court rulings that heralded the loss of privacy on a cellular level.
For instance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Maryland v. King that taking DNA samples from a suspect doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment. The Court’s subsequent decision to let stand the Maryland Court of Appeals’ ruling in Raynor v. Maryland, which essentially determined that individuals do not have a right to privacy when it comes to their DNA, made Americans even more vulnerable to the government accessing, analyzing and storing their DNA without their knowledge or permission.
It’s all been downhill since then.
Indeed, the government has been relentless in its efforts to get hold of our DNA, either through mandatory programs carried out in connection with law enforcement and corporate America, by warrantlessly accessing our familial DNA shared with genealogical services such as Ancestry and 23andMe, or through the collection of our “shed” or “touch” DNA.
This has been helped along by Congress (which adopted legislation allowing police to collect and test DNA immediately following arrests), President Trump (who signed the Rapid DNA Act into law), the courts (which have ruled that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime), and local police agencies (which are chomping at the bit to acquire this new crime-fighting gadget).
For example, Rapid DNA machines—portable, about the size of a desktop printer, highly unregulated, far from fool-proof, and so fast that they can produce DNA profiles in less than two hours—allow police to go on fishing expeditions for any hint of possible misconduct using DNA samples.
All 50 states now maintain their own DNA government databases, although the protocols for collection differ from state to state. Increasingly, many of the data from local databanks are being uploaded to CODIS, the FBI’s massive DNA database, which has become a de facto way to identify and track the American people from birth to death.
Even hospitals have gotten in on the game by taking and storing newborn babies’ DNA, often without their parents’ knowledge or consent. It’s part of the government’s mandatory genetic screening of newborns. In many states, the DNA is stored indefinitely. There’s already a move underway to carry out whole genome sequencing on newborns, ostensibly to help diagnose rare diseases earlier and improve health later in life, which constitutes an ethical minefield all by itself.
The ramifications of this kind of DNA profiling are far-reaching.
At a minimum, these DNA databases do away with any semblance of privacy or anonymity.
The lucrative possibilities for hackers and commercial entities looking to profit off one’s biological record are endless. It’s estimated that the global human identification market is projected to reach $6.5 billion by 2032.
These genetic databases and genomic technology also make us that much more vulnerable to creeps and cyberstalkers, genetic profiling, and those who would weaponize the technology against us.
Unfortunately, the debate over genetic privacy—and when one’s DNA becomes a public commodity outside the protection of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures—continues to lag far behind the government and Corporate America’s encroachments on our rights.
Moreover, while much of the public debate, legislative efforts and legal challenges in recent years have focused on the protocols surrounding when police can legally collect a suspect’s DNA (with or without a search warrant and whether upon arrest or conviction), the question of how to handle “shed” or “touch” DNA has largely slipped through without much debate or opposition.
We all shed DNA, leaving traces of our identity practically everywhere we go… In fact, the garbage you leave for curbside pickup is a potential gold mine of this sort of material. All of this shed or so-called abandoned DNA is free for the taking by local police investigators hoping to crack unsolvable cases… shed DNA is also free for inclusion in a secret universal DNA databank.
What this means is that if you have the misfortune to leave your DNA traces anywhere a crime has been committed, you’ve already got a file somewhere in some state or federal database—albeit it may be a file without a name. As Heather Murphy warns in the New York Times: “The science-fiction future, in which police can swiftly identify robbers and murderers from discarded soda cans and cigarette butts, has arrived… Genetic fingerprinting is set to become as routine as the old-fashioned kind.”
Today, helped along by robotics and automation, DNA processing, analysis and reporting takes far less time and can bring forth all manner of information, right down to a person’s eye color and relatives. Incredibly, one company specializes in creating “mug shots” for police based on DNA samples from unknown “suspects” which are then compared to individuals with similar genetic profiles.
Of course, none of these technologies are infallible.
DNA evidence can be wrong, either through human error, tampering, or even outright fabrication, and it happens more often than we are told.
What this amounts to is a scenario in which we have little to no defense against charges of wrongdoing, especially when “convicted” by technology, and even less protection against the government sweeping up our DNA in much the same way it sweeps up our phone calls, emails and text messages.
This week on CounterSpin: In what is being reported as an “abrupt” or “surprise” development, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, whose shtick relies heavily on legislative roadblocking, has agreed to sign on to a package that includes some $369 billion for “climate and energy proposals.”
The New York Timesreports that the deal represents “the most ambitious climate action ever taken by Congress”—a statement that cries out for context.
The package is hundreds of pages long, and folks are only just going through it as we record on July 28, but already some are suggesting we not allow an evident, welcome break in Beltway inertia to lead to uncritical cheering for policy that may not, in fact, do what is necessary to check climate disruption, in part because it provides insufficient checks on fossil fuel production.
But journalistic context doesn’t just mean comparing policy responses to real world needs; it means recognizing and reporting how the impacts of the climate crisis—like heat waves—differ depending on who we are and where we live. There’s a way to tell the story that connects to policy and planning, but that centers human beings. We talked about that during last year’s heat wave with Portland State University professor Vivek Shandas.
CounterSpin220729Shandas.mp3
Also on the show: Although it’s taken a media back seat to other scourges, the US reality of Black people being killed by law enforcement, their families’ and communities’ grief and outrage meeting no meaningful response, grinds on: Robert Langley in South Carolina, Roderick Brooks in Texas, Jayland Walker in Ohio.
Anthony Guglielmi
Major news media show little interest in lifting up non-punitive community responses, or in demanding action from lawmakers. So comfortable are they with state-sanctioned racist murder, the corporate press corps haven’t troubled to highlight the connections between outrages—and the system failure they betray.
Exhibit A: Beltway media have twisted their pearls about the US Secret Service having deleted text messages relevant to the January 6 investigation. No one seems to be buying the claim from Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi that the messages were “erased as part of a device-replacement program” that just happened to take place after the inspector general’s office had requested them.
Laquan McDonald
Now, many people, but none in the corporate press, would think it relevant to point out that Guglielmi came to the Secret Service after his stint with the Chicago Police Department, during which he presided over that department’s lying about the 2014 killing of Laquan McDonald. There, Guglielmi claimed that missing audio from five different police dashcam videos—audio that upended police’s story that McDonald had been lunging toward officer Jason Van Dyke, when in fact he’d been walking away—had disappeared due to “software issues or operator error.”
As noted by Media Matters’ Matt Gertz, Chicago reporters following up on the story discovered that CPD dashcam videos habitually lacked audio—Guglielmi himself acknowledged that “more than 80% of the cameras have non-functioning audio ‘due to operator error or, in some cases, intentional destruction,’” the Chicago Sun-Timesreported.
A dry-eyed observer might conclude that Guglielmi was hired, was elevated to the Secret Service not despite but because of his vigorous efforts to mislead the public and lawmakers about reprehensible law enforcement behavior. But I think it’s not quite right to think this means the elite press corps aren’t sufficiently interested in Guglielmi; the point is that they aren’t sufficiently interested in Laquan McDonald.
CounterSpintalked about the case with an important figure in it, writer and activist Jamie Kalven. We hear some of that conversation this week.
National Capital District Metropolitan Police Superintendent Gideon Ikumu has ruled out a proposal to impose a curfew in the capital city Port Moresby in the wake of the recent spate of violence.
He said the situation was expected to return to normal after soldiers yesterday joined policemen on the city streets monitoring the crisis.
A fight started on Sunday evening following a dispute between scrutineers of the Moresby Northeast candidates inside the counting venue at the Sir John Guise stadium.
It spilled onto the main road where men armed with machetes attacked each other.
It continued yesterday morning.
Most business houses told their employees to stay at home yesterday for their own safety.
Vanimo-Green MP Belden Namah called for an immediate declaration of a State of Emergency in troubled zones throughout the country.
Namah calls for ‘state of emergency’
“I am now calling for immediate declaration of the State of Emergency and curfew in Port Moresby, Enga and all the trouble zones,” Namah said.
But Ikumu said a curfew was not necessary as security personnel were monitoring the situation.
He hoped everything would return to normal today.
He said police had rounded up 18 suspects since Sunday.
“Less than 10 [people were] injured. Most didn’t go to the hospital,” Ikumu said.
“No deaths. Police have to link those suspects to the incident.
“They are subject to further investigations.”
Police chief turned to military
Police Commissioner David Manning asked Defence Force Chief Major-General Mark Goina for assistance.
Caretaker Prime Minister James Marape yesterday said the National Capital District was no place for criminals.
Marape said that additional manpower from the Papua New Guinea Defence had been deployed to support the Royal Papua New Guinea constabulary to police the nation’s Capital District.
“If you do not like the results of the counting, take it to the court of disputed returns,” he said.
“And let the Electoral Commission do its job and complete the counting process, send your scrutineers in to witness, and all candidates and supporters stay away from counting sites,” he said.
Marape said that candidates who were contesting to become leaders should not try to take the law into their own hands.
Gynnie Kerois a reporter for The National in Papua New Guinea. Republished with permission.
Police and the PNG Defence Force jointly patrolling the streets in Waigani yesterday. Image: PNGDF
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