The official crossing between Southeast Asia and the South Pacific is at a place called Skouw, on the north coast of New Guinea. From the nearest big town to the west, Jayapura, it’s reached by a two-hour drive that starts around spectacular bays and hills and ends in a straight run through thick jungle. At Skouw there is a collection of customs and immigration buildings and beyond them an archway notifying you of your exit from Indonesian territory. On a rise a bit further on, the jungle has been cut back, yielding glimpses of a blue sea to the left and green mountains to the right. A wire mesh fence marks the start of Papua New Guinea. A sign declares it a nation guided by Jesus Christ. Another, in Tok Pisin, urges care against HIV infection: Lukautim yu, yet lukautim famili.
Asymmetries abound. On the Indonesian approaches are the base camps and forward posts of an army battalion, one of four kept along the border with Papua New Guinea, on rotation from other parts of Indonesia. Indonesian officials and army officers drive around in new-model luxury four-wheel drives. On the Papua New Guinean side, at Vanimo, the nearest town, is a single company drawn from one of the only two battalions in the entire Papua New Guinea defense force. The company’s forward deployment is a platoon of a dozen soldiers, stationed at the village of Wutung, near the border post. The official vehicles are basic Toyota Land Cruisers with bench seats.
Although Papua New Guinea has only 7.2 million people, compared to the 240 million of Indonesia, its border post flies a more diverse array of flags: the national flag, with its bird of paradise and the Southern Cross, flaps above the flags of the country’s twenty provinces. Along the Indonesian perimeter every flagpole hoists the same emblem: the red and white of the Negara Kesatuan Republic Indonesia. In this “unitary state,” symbols of regional loyalties are seen as a threat, even if they are tolerated for the time being at the other end of the archipelago in Aceh.
The border itself—the result of Dutch, German, and British officials far away in Europe drawing a line down the 141st meridian of longitude on a map in the late nineteenth century—is not much of a barrier. Every day, hundreds of people walk from Papua New Guinea through the Skouw border post into Indonesia, flashing a local identity card, so they can tend food gardens on their traditional lands or buy household supplies at cheaper prices than in Vanimo’s shops, while many Indonesian peddlers cross the other way.
Further south, the border’s line has few markers or fences. People cross it along tracks worn by bare feet over thousands of years. Among them, from time to time, are armed rebels from the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM, Free Papua Movement), which opposes Indonesian rule over the western half of the island of New Guinea. There has been little to prevent them evading Indonesian army attacks or regrouping, and they find plenty of cover in the rugged terrain and thick jungle. A cross border raid in 1984 by a Kopassus unit, led by Prabowo Subianto, ended without result in a logistical debacle.
Thousands of civilians have also fled into Papua New Guinea over recent decades, escaping fierce sweeps by the Indonesian military. Over 10,000 remain in camps along the border between the central Star Mountains and the Torres Strait, and a smaller number around Vanimo near the north coast. The OPM still fights on, deep inside the Indonesian half of the island. The fiercest of four splinter groups is led by a man named Goliat Tabuni (after the Biblical giant, Goliath), who claims to be supreme commander of all.
When the cross border road was finished in 2006, Papuan New Guineans joked nervously about the “invasion highway.” Their consul general in Jayapura was confidentially briefing US diplomats that the Indonesian military was supporting illegal logging by two companies at Wewak (far from the border, including with unauthorized flights), that it was importing cannabis for distribution within Indonesia, and that it was selling “red cards,” the permits supposed to be restricted to local border communities.
Recently, though, the array of Indonesian troops along the border has looked more superfluous than ever. The Indonesian authorities have adopted a soft-power approach toward their Melanesian neighbors. An annual “fun run,” in which hundreds of young people from both sides compete in a ten-kilometer race across the border, started in 2011. Indonesia is offering to hook up Vanimo and other towns along Papua New Guinea’s north coast to its power grid, at rates presumably linked to its highly subsidized domestic energy prices, though the offer is being looked at warily as giving Jakarta too much leverage.
At the diplomatic level, the Indonesian foreign minister, Marty Natalegawa, initiated overtures in 2013 to the Melanesian Spearhead Group, a regional grouping in the southwest Pacific. The grouping and its members were being invited to visit Papua and see developments for themselves. Jakarta counts its two largest members, Papua New Guinea and Fiji, as being reconciled to Papua’s inclusion in Indonesia. Two smaller ones, Vanuatu and the Kanak representation from French-ruled New Caledonia, are sympathetic to the Papuan separatist cause, with Vanuatu the sole government in the world that is trying to put it back on the UN agenda. The Solomon Islands, the fifth member state, is seen as wavering, but in mid-2013 it sent a delegation on an all-expenses-paid inspection.
Yet the gates to Indonesia’s Papua are hardly being thrown open. Entry by foreigners is tightly controlled. A “clearinghouse” of officials from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Home Affairs and from the police and the intelligence agencies meets every Thursday in Jakarta to vet applications from diplomats, journalists, aid agencies, and activist groups to visit Papua. Some are repeatedly knocked back for years. Inside Papua, the BIN, the police, and the military command have agents tracking the meetings of such approved visitors, as well as looking out for unapproved reporters and investigators who might have slipped in among the smallish flow of adventure tourists. Officials weakly defend the policy as necessary because of journalists and activists who will report atrocities and “genocide,” regardless of what they actually see.
In 2006 this “intel” network quickly caught up with two Americans from an NGO called Land Is Life, who innocently came in on tourist visas after being invited at short notice to a conference held by an indigenous rights body, the Dewan Adat Papua (DAP, Papua Traditional Council). They were detained, taken back to Jakarta, and then expelled. As the then American ambassador, Lynn Pascoe, commented in a cable to Washington, rather than letting the pair attend the completely legal event and draw their own conclusions about the conditions in Papua, the Indonesian government had “reinforced its image as a repressive and paranoid regime, at least as far as Papua is concerned. We assume that the two Land Is Life staffers’ experiences will spread among Papua watchers in the NGO community and on Capitol Hill.” In October 2013, this writer gained approval for a four-day visit just to the Papuan provincial capital, Jayapura, but was denied clearance to visit the towns of Wamena, Merauke, and Timika for reasons that were not explained.
Despite some visible successes in stonewalling and dissipating the pro-independence “Papuan Spring” that had flowered after Suharto’s fall, the ten-year presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was ending with only slightly increased confidence about the loyalty of Papuans to Indonesia. Indonesians, or at least the political class in Jakarta, still seemed unwilling or unable to apply the lessons of their own independence struggle to the Papuans: their knowledge that a deep sense of subordination and historical injustice can’t be bought off easily with lectures about lagging capabilities or economic promises and ornamental political institutions.
The fire is still smoldering, says Neles Tebay, a widely respected Catholic priest in Jayapura who has been urging a dialogue to address these fundamental grievances. “The call for independence is like smoke from a fire,” he says, sitting in the garden of the theological college he runs close to Papua’s Cenderawasih (Bird of Paradise) University, a perennial hot spot of protest against Indonesian rule; the slogan “Free West Papua” is daubed on several walls. “To dispel the smoke, you have to kill the fire.”
The fire was lit in 1944 when the Dutch regained control over Western New Guinea in the wake of General Douglas MacArthur’s island-hopping campaign toward the Philippines. As the historian Pieter Drooglever has recounted (in a book commissioned by the Dutch government in 2000, as Papua’s accession to Indonesia came under intense challenge), the modern world came late to the territory. Its fringes had been touched sporadically by traders, explorers, and scientists. The Netherlands’ East Indies government set up its first administrative centers around the coast in 1898, not having much hope of economic return. The idea was guardianship, the goal to “turn savages into people,” as one of the first resident commissioners put it. The work proceeded steadily, augmented by intensified missionary work by Protestant churches along the north coast and by Catholics in the south.
Then came the cataclysm of the Japanese sweep through the island in 1942, leaving the Dutch and their allies with only a toehold around Merauke in the southwest. Unlike in many other parts of the Indies, the Japanese found no friendly nationalist movement to foster. When they freed a restive local leader named Stephanus Simopyaref from a Dutch jail in Biak, he set up a movement called Amerika-Babo (New America) under a flag similar to the Stars and Stripes: a single star on a red field, adjacent to horizontal blue and white stripes. The Japanese killed Simopyaref, but his flag eventually became the emblem of Papuan resistance, known as the Bintang Kejora (Morning Star).
Then came the Americans themselves, who used many local workers to build vast bases in the main town, Hollandia (as Jayapura was then named), and a long airstrip on Biak island. They accidentally penetrated the highlands when a joyriding flight of twenty-four airmen and nurses in May 1945 crashed in the Baliem valley. The three survivors were plucked out of the valley in a glider, which was retrieved in a “live capture” by a low-flying tug aircraft. The Americans, and the Japanese before them, were a stunning vision of modernity and power for those Papuans who saw them. The sight of African Americans in technical roles showed that this modernity did not necessarily exclude them.
A strong-willed Dutch commissioner, greatly taken with the Melanesian world, persuaded his political masters to make an exceptional case of New Guinea as they fought and negotiated with the Indonesian nationalists between 1945 and 1949. They were persuaded by the argument that the Papuans had a very low level of development, an entirely different “national character” from the Indonesians, and little or no Indonesian nationalistic sentiment; indeed, the Papuans were suspicious of the “Amberi,” as they referred to the Malay race, even though the Malay language was becoming the territory’s lingua franca. “A supplementary argument,” wrote Drooglever, “was that the Indonesia-born Dutch would be able to have their own place in the tropical sun here, even after the Dutch flag had ceased to fly over the rest of the archipelago.”
The territory was put to the side when the final transfer of power over the rest of the Indies came in December 1949, its disposition to be decided by negotiation within a year. Talks got nowhere. The Dutch felt they had agreement on transitional rule until western New Guinea was ready to decide its future under UN auspices. While the Papuans felt no tug of Indonesian nationalism, the pre-1942 exile of so many of their freedom fighters to Boven Digul and an even harsher prison camp at Tanah Merah reinforced the idea of an Indonesia that stretched “from Sabang to Merauke”—in other words, from the northern tip of Sumatra to the farthest corner of western New Guinea—as a central one for the Indonesian leadership. The idea of cultural difference cut no ice: Indonesia already had plenty of part Melanesians in places such as Ambon and Timor. “Unity in Diversity” allowed respectful space for all. The option of a halfway house within Indonesia had all but vanished when the nation dumped its Dutch-inspired federal structure six months after the 1949 transfer of sovereignty.
The two sides were set on a collision course. For seventeen years from 1945, the Dutch put effort and funds into training Papuans as administrators, teachers, medical staff, and technicians, and eventually about 4,000 were employed in middle- and low-ranking government jobs. “The Papuan world of 1962 differed radically from that of 1950, let alone 1900,” Drooglever summarized. “Broad development had taken place and a small but high calibre upper class had been formed, who would, if given the chance, be able to lead society as a whole in the long term.”
Meanwhile, the breakdown of talks in 1956 led Sukarno to step up his anticolonialism crusade, with the appropriation of Dutch property throughout the archipelago. The point of no return came in 1961 when the Dutch foreign minister, Joseph Luns, proposed a UN-supervised plebiscite in 1970. A legislature, the New Guinea Council, was installed, and on December 1 that year, the Bintang Kejora flag and an anthem were made the territory’s emblems. The “Luns Plan” won a majority vote at the UN General Assembly, but not the two-thirds required for it to become a ruling. Nevertheless, it was promptly approved by the new Papuan legislature.
Sukarno responded that same December by setting up a trikora (threefold) command: to thwart the creation of a “puppet state,” to plant the red and white flag in Papua, and to prepare for national mobilization. General Suharto was appointed to lead the campaign. Within a month, a significant naval clash occurred, with the Dutch sinking Indonesian torpedo boats that were heading for the territory, and in 1962 small Indonesian paratroop units were dropped into the jungles—although they didn’t encounter any of the popular support they expected. The arrival of the Dutch navy’s aircraft carrier meant that, for the time being, the Indonesians were outgunned.
Drooglever’s archival searches unearthed a gloomy intelligence assessment that the arrival of massive Soviet and American military equipment for the Indonesia forces meant Jakarta would soon have the capability to land large forces in New Guinea. The new US administration of John F. Kennedy also saw itself on the losing side of Cold War competition for influence in Jakarta, if Washington continued to support the Dutch. The US diplomat Elsworth Bunker pulled the rug from under The Hague, and allies, such as Australia, duly stepped back. In an agreement signed in New York in August 1962, the Dutch agreed to a UN interregnum of seven months, starting on October 1 that year, with the territory to be handed over to Indonesian administration on May 1, 1963. However, they won the inclusion of an article providing for an act of self-determination—“in accordance with international practice”—in which all adult Papuans had the right to participate. Further provisions required UN officials to remain in New Guinea to prepare for an act of self-determination by the end of 1969, and Indonesia to guarantee freedom of speech, movement, and assembly for the Papuans.
Almost all these stipulations were abused, a British researcher, John Saltford, found in his own archival exploration in 2003. Indonesia refused to allow UN officials to remain; as the UN eventually reported, the Indonesian administration “exercised at all times a tight political control over the population.” Infused with a sense of triumph, Indonesian military personnel were the dominating component of the new occupation of a territory renamed Irian Jaya (meaning “Victorious Irian”; the origins of the name “Irian” are unclear). As Drooglever told the US Congress in 2010:
In the beginning at least, they enjoyed taking over a comfortable colonial administration. The typewriters, the hospital equipment, and other elements of the basic infrastructure were taken away. Jobs of the Papuan elite were taken over, the education system graded down, and the civil society of West Papua slipped down the road toward greater misery. After General Soeharto became president of Indonesia, the new minister of foreign affairs, Adam Malik, visited the territory. Malik was shocked by the desolation he found there. The Javanese civil servants had robbed the country blind. Embitterment reigned everywhere, in the words of this Indonesian minister on his return to Jakarta.
The displaced Papuan elite seethed with a sense of betrayal by the world community, which was worsened by the arrogant and harsh treatment meted out by Indonesian soldiers and officials. Several Papuans went into exile, including Nicholas Jouwe, the vice chairman of the former New Guinea Council.
In July 1965 rebellion broke out, with raisings of the Morning Star flag in several places and attacks on any Indonesian personnel who tried to prevent them. The newly formed OPM mounted its first big attack, with 400 fighters seizing an army barracks in Manokwari and taking control of the town for several days. The reaction was the first of several large-scale army sweeps, which intensified as the act of self-determination approached in 1969. One of the biggest was mounted after General Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, who had led the Special Forces in the massacres of communists across Java and Bali in 1965–66, became the regional commander in 1967, with the mission of securing a vote for Indonesia. According to a recent investigation by Jakarta’s own National Commission on Human Rights (known as Komnas-HAM), Operasi Wibawa (Operation Authority) saw 6,200 troops parachuted and landed into several inland regions, supported by strafing from the air, with “hundreds” of lives lost among the local peoples. A longer campaign called Operasi Tumpas (Operation Destroy) ran from 1967 to 1970 in three districts, resulting in “mass killings.”
With this reign of terror in the background, Suharto assigned the task of organizing the Act of Free Choice itself to his trusted assistant Ali Murtopo and his Opsus unit, after publicly warning that a vote to leave Indonesia would be “treason.” It was decided that because of the lack of political sophistication among the Papuans and logistical difficulties, a “one man, one vote” system would be inappropriate; indeed, the New York agreement did not contain the words “plebiscite” or “referendum.” Instead, the system chosen by Jakarta would be musyawarah, described as a “process of consultation” that would lead to the formation of consensus, although the New York agreement authorized this process only for the decision on the method of the self-determination act, in which all adult Papuans were to be able to take part.
The United Nations returned only a year before the ballot, with Bolivian diplomat Fernando Ortiz-Sanz and sixteen other officials deployed. Their efforts to hold a ballot at least in the coastal areas were pushed aside. In the event, between July 14 and August 4, 1969, while the world was transfixed by the first moon landing, the Opsus team chose 1,022 representatives from around the territory, who were rendered compliant by threats and bribery and kept in isolation while they rehearsed their unanimous “acclamation” to stay with Indonesia. Ortiz-Sanz duly reported that the procedure had been carried out “in accordance with Indonesian practice” (rather than “international” or the United Nations’ own standards), a fudge that, despite the worries of some African member states, the General Assembly voted to approve. Only two years later, in 1971, Opsus was actively running the Papuan part of national elections—in which, miraculously, Papuans were now qualified and able to vote.
The OPM continued its resistance, as an amorphous organization that kept splintering and reforming under a succession of leaders, and encompassed both armed activities in remote areas and underground politics in the towns. Among the earliest of its military leaders was Seth Rumkoren, an educated man from Biak who had initially joined the Indonesian army before defecting to the jungle, where he made a unilateral declaration of independence in July 1971. With just a few score firearms, the OPM’s fighting wing managed only limited ambushes, kidnappings, and hit-and-run attacks, and mostly stayed close to the Papua New Guinea border. Even so, it provoked a series of nine major counterinsurgency and sweeping operations through to the end of the New Order, sending waves of refugees into Papua New Guinea.
The largest of these was Operation Koteka (named after the penis gourd worn by highland men) in 1977–78 under regional commander Imam Munandar, which saw thousands of troops deployed into the villages of the Baliem valley, the Jayawijaya mountains to the east, to the suspected OPM headquarters just south of Jayapura, and to the area around the Freeport mine (after an OPM group cut the slurry pipeline). The Komnas-HAM investigation found widespread killings of hundreds of suspected OPM supporters and other civilians, torture “without concern about sex or age,” and cases of Papuans being forced to dig their own graves before being shot. A Hong Kong–based volunteer organization, the Asian Human Rights Commission, said in October 2013 that it had identified 4,146 of those killed, in fourteen districts across the central highlands. Many had been killed by ground units after being rounded up and tortured, some by machine-gunning, rockets, or napalm bombs from OV-10 Bronco aircraft and helicopters. Further partial collaboration has come from the Baptist missions active in the region and from Australian Air Force personnel who were temporarily based at Wamena’s airport while conducting a mapping project.
Meanwhile, the process of making Papua and its people Indonesian quickened, as did the extraction of its natural resources. The American mining company Freeport had reached its agreement with Jakarta on its gold and copper mine at Ertzberg two years before the vote and had evidently not been worried by any political risk. By 1973 it was extracting ore from an outcrop 3,500 meters above sea level, bringing it by aerial tramway to a crushing mill and township at an altitude of 2,750 meters, and then sending a concentrate in slurry form down a pipeline that crossed 116 kilometers of jungle and swamp to the coast. Within two years the operation was yielding huge profits for Freeport’s shareholders and a large flow of tax receipts for Jakarta.
In 1988, with the Ertzberg deposit reduced to an open pit two kilometers wide, Freeport announced that its activity would shift to the even larger Grasberg ore body, which contained the world’s largest known gold deposit (an estimated 91.4 tons), as well as 32 million tons of copper, with estimates of its value running to $80 billion. With the fiftieth anniversary of the company’s mining permit approaching in 2017, Jakarta’s politicians started agitating for a bigger share for the state. Amid rioting in 2009 by illegal miners, who were extracting remnant gold from the mine’s dumps of waste rock, Freeport executives privately accused political figures, such as Amien Rais and even unnamed Saudi-financed Salafists, of stirring up trouble as part of a shakedown.
Logging also got underway, supervised and taxed informally by the military, while significant oilfields were opened around the “Bird’s Head” extremity in the west. Eventually, in the first decade of the new century, the large-scale Tangguh liquefied natural gas field, operated by BP in Bintuni Bay, started exporting to China.
In early 1969 Suharto had announced a lavish long-term development program to make up for the earlier looting, but the beneficiaries were largely the migrants who began to flood in from other parts of Indonesia, either as “spontaneous” self-starters from places like Makassar or the quarter-million participants in the government’s transmigration scheme to reduce population pressures and poverty in Java and Bali. While the Papuan population grew at a moderate annual rate of 1.84 percent, rising from 887,000 in 1971 to 1.5 million in 2000, the migrant population grew from 36,000 in 1971 to 708,000 in 2000, an annual growth rate of 10.8 percent. At that point, the Central Statistics Bureau stopped making the indigenous-migrant breakdown because it was becoming embarrassing; in the 2010 census, it simply reported a total population of 3.61 million. Extrapolating from the previous three decades of respective growth rates, the Australian scholar Jim Elmslie has calculated that the Papuan population would be 47.9 to 49.6 percent of the total. Papuans have become a minority in their own land.
Migrants from outside Papua now make up two-thirds or more of the population in Jayapura and many other big towns. In Jayapura the migrants have most of the jobs in formal-sector commerce: the shops and restaurants, the taxis and ojek (motorcycle taxis), the hotels, the security posts. Papuans appear at dusk, laying out offerings of pinang (betel nut) on pavements and boxes. Papuan women sell vegetables and fish in a night market while their men play cards. In the administration, the elected political jobs are largely now filled by Papuans, but in the ranks of senior and middle officialdom there are many non-Papuans.
The condition of the bulk of the ethnic Papuans, located in the hinterlands, is still reported to be miserably poor, half a century after the start of Indonesian rule. In 2013 the Jayapura branch of Komnas-HAM was reporting scores of deaths during the year from starvation and treatable diseases. Like neighboring Papua New Guinea, Papua has a serious HIV/AIDS epidemic, spread in the African pattern by heterosexual encounters with prostitutes, combined with poor hygiene. Preventive campaigns have been inhibited by the unwillingness of some religious authorities to accept the reality of widespread casual sex. Outside the large towns, the extension of education and health services is undercut by the absenteeism of staff. In Wamena in 2006, a visiting US embassy team could find no one manning the civilian government offices. Anecdotal reports say Wamena is swarming with unaccompanied minors, billeted with relatives and clan affiliates, sent by parents desperate for them to get an education.
Large-scale army operations tapered off from the mid-1980s and were replaced by a murkier kind of small-unit warfare that used semiclandestine special forces and local paramilitaries, some of them masquerading as OPM groups. Yet the memory of past mass killings, the high rate of mortal illness and food shortages, the perceived tokenism of cultural representation, and the steady displacement by migration and plantation projects have combined to maintain the Papuans’ sense of “slow genocide”—an uncomfortable accusation for the more perceptive senior government officials.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, until the fall of Suharto, a growing number of highly educated Papuans tried balancing a form of cultural politics with engagement in the institutions, professions, and businesses created under the New Order’s development orientation. But they also supplied their martyrs. Arnold Ap, an anthropologist at the ethnological museum at the Cenderawasih University (which is filled with the marvelous collection of artifacts assembled by Michael Rockefeller before his 1962 disappearance in Papua’s southern jungles), led a cultural revival movement through traditional music. He was killed while in detention in 1984. Outbreaks of reckless messianism continued to grip the Papuans periodically. In 1988 Thomas Wanggai, the holder of an American doctorate and degrees from Japan, unfurled the Morning Star flag and declared independence at a football stadium in Jayapura. Sentenced to twenty years for subversion, he died in a Jakarta jail in 1996. The return of his body set off widespread rioting and destruction around Jayapura.
As Suharto’s grip weakened in 1997 and ended in May 1998, repressed Papuan sentiment was set to explode, as it did in East Timor, but without the unified leadership already formed by the Timorese resistance groups. Eventually, a “Team of 100”—comprising intellectuals, religious figures, students, and members of the provincial legislature—went to see the new president, B. J. Habibie, in February 1999. Having already decided to let the Timorese have a plebiscite on their future, Habibie was shocked to learn that the Papuans were demanding the same thing and urged them to reconsider.
His replacement later in the year, Abdurrahman Wahid, had more to offer. Having come to experience the dawn of the new millennium in Indonesia’s easternmost province, Wahid announced that the territory would be named “Papua” rather than “Irian Jaya,” and promised it extensive autonomy within Indonesia. Wahid’s announcement encouraged hopes at a Musyawarah Besar (Mubes for short, meaning “Grand Consultation”), attended by thousands of delegates in February 2000 to discuss the “correction of history.” This, in turn, led to the calling of a “second” Papuan People’s Congress (regarded as the successor to a meeting in 1961 under Dutch auspices) at the end of May 2000.
To lead its executive, known as the Papuan Presidium, the congress chose a political figure, Theys Eluay, whose career suggested opportunism. In the 1960s he had helped the Indonesian military track down and eliminate oppositionists, and he had then voted for Indonesia as one of the 1,022 handpicked delegates in the Act of Free Choice. His shift toward the pro-independence camp had been a recent development; even while declaring himself the “Great Leader of the Papuan People” and forming his own security force of young volunteers, he still maintained close contact with the Indonesian security apparatus.
By this time, according to reports said to be based on a leaked document, the military was moving to subvert Wahid’s conciliatory policies, stepping up its maneuvers to decapitate the Papuan movement with a version of the militia violence used in East Timor the year before. When Wahid was impeached and replaced by Megawati Sukarnoputri in July 2001, the plan was put into action.
A Kopassus unit invited Eluay to a dinner at its base near Jayapura. On his way home, he was escorted by Kopassus soldiers who had been ordered by their unit commander to talk Eluay out of making his planned declaration of independence on December 1, the anniversary of the 1961 unfurling of the Papuan flag. With Eluay insisting that mere autonomy was a lost cause, an enraged private soldier leaned forward and strangled him from behind. A following vehicle took the soldiers back to camp and Eluay’s body was left in the car for police to discover.
The uproar following Eluay’s death forced a court-martial, which was held in distant Surabaya in early 2003. It sentenced seven Kopassus officers and soldiers, including the three backseat passengers and their unit commanders, to jail for terms ranging between two years and three and a half years. It was not until 2013, a decade later, that Komnas-HAM in Jayapura managed to get a copy of the court finding to pass on to Eluay’s family. Whether the Kopassus soldiers actually served their sentences, or in what circumstances, the human rights agency cannot say. Among their colleagues, they were regarded as having carried out their patriotic duty. The man who was the army chief in 2003, Riyamizard Ryacudu, declared that “for me, they are heroes because the person they killed was a rebel leader.” Eluay’s young driver, Aristoteles Masoka, disappeared and is presumed to have been murdered that same night. The soldiers claimed he ran off into the night.
By the time Eluay was murdered, the Indonesian legislature had passed a special autonomy law (abbreviated as Otsus in Indonesian) for Papua. A panel of eminent Papuan personalities had sent a draft proposal for the law to the MPR in April 2003. When the central government sent its version to the MPR later, it looked similar: the provincial governor still had to be an indigenous Papuan; the province’s share of mining royalties was still 80 percent, and of oil and gas taxes 70 percent; there was the creation of a Papuan People’s Council, which would protect traditional customs; and the creation of new provinces had to be approved by both the provincial legislature and the MRP.
Yet it had been significantly watered down. There was no right to self-determination if a special historical commission found the 1969 process illegal; there was no regional police force; the Papuans had no control over inward migration, apart from a veto over any further official transmigration; a regional flag could have no connotations of sovereignty (ruling out the Bintang Kejora); and there were many more caveats on the transfer of powers. Nor did the law come into force immediately: this and many delegations of powers awaited enabling decrees and regulation. As the Australian scholar Richard Chauvel wrote, Otsus had become a battleground between the “old” authoritarian Indonesia and the “new” Indonesia of the reform and democracy era. The law itself expressed the more accommodating new Indonesia; its implementation, the old.
Before it came into force, Megawati signed a decree in January 2003 that split Papua into two new provinces, West Irian Jaya and Central Irian Jaya, in what was officially described as a process of pemekaran (flowering). It was a stunning act of bad faith that resonates to this day, seen as a classic divide-and-rule effort pushed by the intelligence community in Jakarta. “The damage the division did to Jakarta-Papua relations, let alone the idea within the Papuan elite that autonomy was an acceptable alternative to independence, is incalculable,” commented Sidney Jones, a leading analyst of Indonesian security conflicts.
The westernmost province came into being, but the central one was put aside after fierce local protest. The Papuan governor, Jaap Solossa, supported a legal challenge to the division in the new constitutional court. The court ruled in November 2004 that the decision to create West Irian Jaya had indeed been unconstitutional, but since it was already in operation, it should be allowed to continue. Yudhoyono, who had recently become president, was happy to accept this convenient compromise. A Papuan former one-star general in the marine corps, and later an official in the BIN, Abraham Atururi, became governor of this new province, which was confusingly renamed “West Papua.” Yudhoyono vowed to grant special autonomy to the two provinces, with a focus on improving the welfare of Papuans and using political rather than military means to solve problems.
Nonetheless, Otsus began inauspiciously and was suspect from the start among the Papuans. It was not long before ordinary Papuans and their leaders began wondering aloud what had changed. The flow of extra revenues seemed to stop among the portly politicians and senior officials of the two provinces and the ever-expanding number of districts. Many spent an inordinate amount of their time traveling lavishly outside the provinces, holding conferences, and equipping themselves with vehicles and other perquisites of office.
Dissidence and the repression of perceived challenges to Indonesian sovereignty continued. In 2005 a Papuan leader named Filip Karma earned a fifteen-year jail term for raising the Morning Star flag. As we have seen, in 2006 a boatload of dissidents, including a son of Thomas Wanggai, crossed the Torres Strait to seek political asylum in Australia, causing a serious diplomatic crisis and setting off a new security crackdown inside Papua.
Later that year, at a resettlement camp for Papuans inland from the Fly River in Papua New Guinea, this writer met Paulus Samkakay, a young activist from Merauke whose story seemed to epitomize Indonesia’s policy failure to that point. His late father, Boneffasius Samkakay, was one of the 1,022 delegates chosen for the Act of Free Choice in 1969. Paulus showed me the certificates of appreciation given to his father by Suharto and General Wibowo. But the son had joined protests against Indonesian rule as soon as he reached adulthood, earning a spell of detention, and when the Papuan Spring erupted in 1998, he became an organizer of students and dock workers in Merauke.
Later, his activities were closely surveilled, and after the Torres Strait crossing, he too decided to try to reach Australia, by walking along the coast and finding a canoe to cross. He succeeded but was promptly returned by Australian officials to Papua New Guinea, where his wife and two surviving children waited, their youngest having died during the jungle trek. Not surprisingly, his bitterness was intense. “I came to the land of the kangaroo with big hopes,” Samkakay told me, his eyes filling with angry tears.
For the 2,500 Papuans placed in dispersed clusters of self-built houses at the same place, East Awin, the remoteness of their surroundings signified the disinterest of neighboring countries and the world in their struggle. To reach the area required an expensive flight to the little town of Kiunga, a two-hour trip up the Fly River, and then a three-hour truck ride through axle-deep mud, and finally a twelve-kilometer walk when the road became impassable for normal vehicles. The flat, green scrubland and the lowering clouds varied little. The place appeared to have been chosen to be out of sight, out of contact. The exile must have seemed endless.
The people’s hope was kept up with hymns and unfurlings of the Bintang Kejora flag, while the forced togetherness of such groupings—which included people from many of Papua’s tribes—might in fact have been creating a bit of the unity that had eluded the resistance. An older woman, Afonsina Hambring, who had spent three years in the jungle with her husband, an OPM commander, before crossing the border in 1988, was taking a group from the women’s association she leads out to do repairs on the road. “Every second we pray that God will start a war to change us,” she said. “To make us one. Let’s not get to the position of East Timor, fighting against each other.”
Two strands of politics continued inside Papua—three, if the armed struggle by remaining OPM bands is counted. One was the nonviolent campaign for independence, or at least for some recognition of Papuan sovereignty and the right to a more convincing act of self-determination. That continues but has been dogged by division of effort between several organizations, one of the biggest among them the National Committee for West Papua (known by its Indonesian initials as KNPB). A second Mubes was convened by the newly formed Papuan People’s Council in June 2010. The gathering symbolically “returned” the special autonomy law to Jakarta, called for tighter restrictions on inward migration, and demanded a new referendum.
Open demonstrations in support of these goals, especially the referendum, continue at the various anniversaries of events of the 1960s—most notably, the December 1 declaration of Papuan sovereignty under the Dutch and the May 1 arrival of the Indonesian administration. They are marked by small-scale violence, often with fatalities on both sides, as police try to prevent the flying of the Papuan flag. Then comes a trickle of cases through the courts, with judges handing out stiff sentences for sedition and assault. In one case, when a defendant retracted a confession he claimed had been made under torture, the judge ordered him to be charged with perjury.
In the structure of the Indonesian state, by contrast, the Papuans are being flooded by politics. What was just one province with ten kabupaten (districts) and municipalities in 1999 had by 2013 become two provinces with forty-two districts and townships. In August 2013 the relevant committee in the national parliament approved a plan to create three more provinces and twenty-two more districts, although Yudhoyono has been resisting any further provincial division, as has the Papuan provincial government and the Papuan People’s Council, whose consent is now required under the Otsus law. But already the pemekaran process has created a revolving class of about 1,000 elected politicians, drawn in many cases by access to the Otsus flow of revenue, while the bureaucratic ranks have grown from 37,000 in 2000 to around 115,000. It is a staggering drain on financial resources and is dispersing the limited talent. The push continues to create more subregional governments because of automatic funding arrangements for them. Since these transfers are based on population figures, there is an incentive to inflate the number of inhabitants. Not surprisingly, many of the regional administrations in Papua are ranked as Indonesia’s worst performers in delivering services.
The creation of the new districts in the interior tipped the balance of electoral politics in Papua away from the coastal and island people of the north coast and toward those of the highlands, embodied in the stocky figure of Lukas Enembe, who ousted his longtime coastal rival Barbabas Suebu to become governor in January 2013. With the electoral rolls apparently inflated by 30 percent more than the estimated number of voters, authorities had increasingly set them aside and resorted to a system known as noken, after the string bag traditionally used by village women to carry supplies, babies, and piglets. It allows community leaders to allocate all their votes in a block, supposedly after the widespread formation of a consensus. In this environment, Enembe won a landslide of votes. (The noken system was outlawed by authorities running the 2014 national elections, though its use in local ballots may still stand.)
Out of the fifty-six members of the provincial legislature, thirty are now highlanders. The mountain people pride themselves on being more practical and ready to work hard, because of their precarious traditional livelihood, which is based on cultivation—in contrast to that of the coastal people, who, they say, only have to pick fruit from trees and put a line or net into the sea. Whether this results in more effective governance or a version of the sometimes negative “big man” politics of the Papua New Guinea highlands remains to be seen.
For his part, Enembe is anxious to be viewed as an achiever. At a late-night meeting in Jayapura in October 2013, he addressed a visiting delegation from the national parliament about a $200-million-a-year scheme to build 6,000 kilometers of roads into the interior, including the long-envisaged trans-Papua highway linking the north and south coasts, through mountain ranges up to 4,500 meters high. “This will help our people living in remote areas, those left behind, to get out from poverty and underdevelopment,” he told this writer later that night, at the provincial government building on Jayapura’s waterfront. “It will let their produce be marketed outside. Now they can’t do that, because there’s no infrastructure access. They have to take flight to do that.”
Enembe insists he is “Indonesian and proud of it.” His voters would not necessarily feel a contradiction in taking part in elections under Indonesia’s auspices and simultaneously hoping for the right to secede. A more bizarre ambivalence came in the first election held in the new district of Puncak, which was reminiscent of Papua New Guinean politics at their worst. A man from the Dani tribe named Elvis Tabuni registered as a candidate for bupati, representing the Gerakan Indonesia Raya party (Gerindra, Great Indonesia Movement), but a man from the rival Damal tribe, Simon Alom, tried to list for the same party. When his registration was rejected, his supporters attacked with stones and arrows. After twenty-three people had died, including four from police firing, the two sides brought in more muscle. Simon enlisted fellow clansmen from a shadowy militia group, Satgas Rajawali (Eagle Task Force), run by Kopassus in the 1990s to fight the OPM. In response, Elvis called in the OPM group led by Goliat Tabuni. Six more died before lavish compensation payments achieved a ceasefire, allowing the vote to go ahead in February 2013. When Elvis Tabuni lost the election to a third figure, Wellem Wandik, he again apparently called on Goliat Tabuni to intervene, who obliged with an attack on three Indonesian army outposts, killing eight soldiers and four civilians. Despite an appeal by Elvis, Wandik was confirmed as the new bupati.
Goliat Tabuni’s group, operating in the mountains of the deep interior, is the most aggressive of the four main bands of the OPM, whose armed members might not number more than 200. Some are more bandits than guerrillas, says Tito Karnavian, the former head of the Indonesia National Police antiterrorist squad Detachment 88, who became police chief of the region covering the two Papua provinces in August 2012. He cites a group in the Paniai lakes region that had abducted and raped a group of schoolgirls and then demanded ransom.
Since mid-2006 the police have taken charge of security inside Papua, including the fight against the OPM, as consequence of the earlier separation of the police from the armed forces. The military presence is still substantial, according to military sources in Jakarta: about 13,000 troops, including the four battalions (2,500 soldiers in total) and an undeclared detachment of 100 to 200 Kopassus members. Tito insists that their role is border protection and civil aid, not offensive operations. “I see no role for the military in the use of a hard approach,” he said in an interview at his Jayapura headquarters.
The force got off to a shaky start. In mid-June 2006 a battalion of the Mobile Brigade (known as Brimob), a force of infantry-like police, was assigned from Jakarta to take over protection of the Freeport mine from an army battalion, a service that had earned the military many millions of dollars in payments. The Brimob troopers were soon found to be taking bribes from the thousands of illegal gold miners working the mine’s tailings. One of their officers was seen trying to break into a store of gold concentrates using a hijacked bulldozer. Things improved with the unit’s replacement by a locally based battalion after six months.
In December that year, the police showed themselves to be perhaps more effective than the military at tackling the OPM and more sensitive to local feelings. Using mobile phone intercepts, Tito’s Detachment 88 tracked and killed a local OPM leader named Kelly Kwalik, who was responsible for a string of fatal attacks against foreign and local personnel at Freeport. The police then held back as Kwalik’s body was draped in the Morning Star flag, for viewing by his many local supporters and clan members before burial.
In his first year heading Papua’s police, Tito says he has set out to steadily raise the proportion of indigenous officers in the 14,000-strong force from the present 30 to 40 percent to at least 50 percent. Meanwhile, the best Papuan officers are being given preference in sensitive commands, with locals heading the Mobile Brigade and the districts of Jayapura, Wamena, and Mimika. “In hot places I put Papuans,” Tito says. “To make sure that there is no issue of human rights or genocide. Maybe in 1977, when I read that report, but today there is no [such] fact.”
Tito has also called on the New Zealand and Dutch police forces to advise on so-called community policing, which he hopes will further shift the police mind-set from a military approach to a law-enforcement one. The police chief has also applied a version of the “softly, softly” deradicalization approach of his former antiterror command. In early 2013 he secretly hosted the leader of one of the smaller OPM groups—a man from the nearby Keerom district—at his home in Jayapura, after earlier providing medical assistance for the man’s family, though without achieving any immediate change in thinking.
Busting police corruption remains the police chief’s other big task. The 14,000 police in Papua have a budget of only $8.8 million. Their fuel ration is seven liters a day per vehicle. By contrast, a middle-ranking police officer arrested in May 2013 at Sorong for smuggling fuel oil and illegally cut hardwood was found to have had $132 million flowing through his bank accounts, with payoffs to thirty-three colleagues. There was outrage when this officer was acquitted of all the major corruption charges by a court and given only a two-year sentence for illegal logging. The widespread suspicion that military and police officers permit or actually run logging and other illegal activities on an even wider scale throughout Papua has only been deepened by the controls placed on outside monitors.
The gap between the politics of the Indonesian state and those of the Papuan resistance remains like a wildly flowing highland river, a formidable crossing. Yet a few lines have been thrown across. The young activist who had fled Merauke into Papua New Guinea, Paulus Samkakay, returned to his hometown. By 2014 a man of this name was prominent in local newspapers as head of a group called Tim Enam (Team Six) and was standing for the regional assembly. I wanted to confirm whether it was the same person I had met in East Awin and, if so, to find out about this new chapter in his life and what had led him to abandon the life of exile. But the “clearing house” vetoed my request to visit Merauke. E-mails to potential local intermediaries went unanswered. Finally, a telephone call got through to one of Samkakay’s relatives; on a connection cutting in and out, he confirmed it was indeed the same Paulus Samkakay.
Efforts to open a “dialogue” since the 2010 “return” of the special autonomy law, meanwhile, have had little result beyond some vague commitments in Jakarta. The theologian Neles Tebay, an articulate man born in a highland village in 1964 who went on to earn a doctorate at the Vatican, says the word “dialogue” carried a suspicion in Jakarta of signifying a willingness to discuss sovereignty. He insists it is unconditional.
At first, the only receptive listener in Jakarta was Jusuf Kalla, the patron of the Aceh peace accord. Then a wider range of parliamentarians and opinion leaders agreed it was worth a try, since a hardline approach was making no headway. In late 2011 and early 2012, President Yudhoyono declared a willingness for dialogue, nominating Vice President Boediono as a contact and two figures involved in the Aceh peace process, the diplomat Farid Hussein and the retired general Bambang Dharmono, to open contacts with the OPM and to coordinate Papua’s development, respectively. In 2013 Yudhoyono also received the elderly founder of the Papuan resistance, Nicholas Jouwe, who was allowed to return for a visit home from Holland after forty years in exile.
But who should speak for the Papuans? The existing laws on political parties allow no formation of a purely regional party, except in Aceh. In this absence, candidates run under the banners of national parties. The resistance is fragmented. Tebay told Indonesia’s leaders it was no use simply talking to such Papuan figures as the governors, who had already declared themselves for Indonesia. The dialogue had to be with the unreconciled.
Over 2010–11, a Papuan peace conference met and discussed who should start the dialogue. It decided that those who could talk freely and without fear were the exiled spokespeople. The conference nominated the Vanuatu-based John Otto Ondawame, Rex Rumakiek in Australia, Octavianus Mote in the United States, Benny Wenda in Britain, and Leonie Tangama in the Netherlands. The group is thought to have met twice since but has made no known approaches to the Indonesian government or received any from it. In late 2013 Tebay felt that time had run out for Yudhoyono to achieve anything in the remaining months of his presidency. With the 2014 elections looming, Papua had receded from thinking in Jakarta. “It is far away, not just in geographic distance but in their minds,” he said. “Indonesia stops at Makassar.”
Toward the end of Yudhoyono’s two permitted terms and on the president’s invitation, the two Papua governors forwarded drafts for a better administrative system, to be called Otsus-Plus. They proposed several important measures to protect and nurture the indigenous Papuans. The governors should have more control over private-sector activity, including involvement in renegotiating the Freeport contract. Papuan leaders should be given carriage of Indonesia’s participation in Pacific regional forums. The national and provincial governments should work to remove illiteracy within a set time, starting by making schooling free and compulsory up to junior high school, with policies to make sure teachers stayed at their jobs.
Most importantly, the draft by West Papua governor Atururi urged restriction of the right of non-Papuans to settle in the two provinces: they should come as temporary workers. Papuans should be guaranteed half of all employment, and maternal and infant welfare policies should be improved to build the indigenous population. Inside Papua, the reception was tepid: the proposals did not address the fundamental question of the region’s place in Indonesia, students said; political prisoners declared they would reject the clemency urged by Enembe, on the same grounds. By contrast, in Jakarta the ideas were seen as dangerously bold. With the original Otsus still not fully implemented, Otsus-Plus would be left for a new president to consider after the 2014 elections.
For a while, it seemed that the international understandings that had helped Indonesia gain and retain control of Papua were being modified. One was the Cold War rivalry that had made Indonesia such a prize. Another was the conflation of self-determination with decolonization, making colonial boundaries the rule for independent successor states, no matter how arbitrarily they were drawn. Failure of government is becoming a factor for questioning sovereignty in international law.
Since the early 1990s, there have been several cases of self-determination outside decolonization, notes Osaka University’s Akihisa Matsuo. Kosovo was one breakaway state. “The protection of people in Kosovo apparently had more weight than the territorial integrity of Serbia,” Matsuo says. In response, Russia, Serbia’s ally, sought the detachment of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia. More recently came the separation of South Sudan from Khartoum’s rule. “The history of Sudan seems to suggest that lack or low level of integration, natural or historical, between areas ruled by the same colonial power can be a reason for the establishing of a separate state,” Matsuo says. The case of East Timor effectively created a precedent for a population under Indonesian sovereignty to ask the MPR for secession. In theory, Papua could become a reasonably self-sustaining independent state. As Jim Elmslie calculated from 2010 figures on the gross domestic regional product for its two provinces and their population, per capita GDP was $3,510, which was far above the Indonesian average of $2,452 and more than twice that of Papua New Guinea.
The moment for such thinking to pry Papua loose may have passed at the turn of this new century, however, when the New Order lay discredited and the Papuans had a more unified voice. But then Indonesia became a key ally in the West’s fight against jihadist terrorism. It became prominent among the emerging new economic powers and was then courted by Washington for cooperation in the strategic “pivot” to maintain its dominance in Southeast Asia. Its worrying neighbor in the south, Australia, meanwhile, became captive to its politicians’ need for Indonesian assistance in limiting the flow of asylum seekers by boat. As Tito Karnavian puts it, “Indonesia has become a nation with bargaining power.”
Still, Pieter Drooglever, the Dutch historian who turned over the poignant records of his own country’s involvement in Papua, thinks Jakarta does have an interest in making an agreement with the Papuans. In a reflection on his book, he writes:
Indonesia not only has a tradition of military and authoritarian rule, but also of cultured interaction and efforts to provide good government. We can only hope that the latter two aspects gain the upper hand. Finally, there is the consideration that the interests of Indonesia and the Papuans, because they are neighbours and have a shared history, are, in the main, the same. The two primary motives for establishing the administrative centres in 1898 were to secure the eastern border of the archipelago and to develop the Papuans and their country. These can still go together, by hook or by crook. A solution should be found that combines a better future for the Papuans with the proper regulation of the eastern border of Indonesia. It would, however, appear to be difficult to combine an open window onto the Pacific with a grumbling, misunderstood and maltreated population on the Indonesian side of the 141st meridian.
Anthropologists Brigham Golden and S. Eben Kirksey also point out that merdeka (freedom) has a much fuzzier meaning for Papuans than just separate statehood, as Indonesian officialdom understands the word. It can mean freedom from poverty, from racial inferiority, and from the perceived stigma of their “primitive” past, as well as control over their land, food, and water.
There is a scope here for negotiating a way forward, if Jakarta can free itself for a while from its “unitary state” mantra and accept that, in many respects, it is already federal.