DOCUMENT: UN-WPAP1.TXT U N I T E D N A T I O N S STATEMENT ON THREATENING DEVELOPMENTS CONCERNING THE HUMAN RIGHTS OF THE WEST PAPUAN PEOPLE TO: THE WORKING GROUP ON INDIGENOUS POPULATIONS FOURTH SESSION JULY/AUGUST 1985 GENEVA OF: THE SUB-COMMISSION ON THE PREVENTION OF DISCRIMINATION AND PROTECTION OF MINORITIES OF: THE UNITED NATIONS COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS ------------------------------------------------------------------ We thank you and we feel grateful that we - for the second time - have got access to this International Forum to share with all of you our increasing concern of what is happening to our people: the West Papuans. We - a small delegation - are here today as refugees. We fled away from the country we love so dearly, and we cannot go back. But that is the only way to be able to stand here before you and to speak out freely about the severe oppression our people is facing under Indonesian colonial rule. We feel that to flee from our country is the price we have to pay to be the voice of our people. A voice full of sadness and grief but also full of anger and resistance. A voice that desperately needs to be heard by the world community. Since 1962 until today, our Papuan people lives under military occupation. This means a large-scale use of military force against defenseless citizens which caused the deaths of more than 200,000 West Papuans. Evidence of this has been piled up for instance in the report of the Anti-Slavery Society on the situation in West Papua, presented in 1983 to this very UN Subcommission. Our country, West Papua, formerly the Dutch colony of West New Guinea, is now an Indonesian colony. It was handed over in spite of Papuan demands that an exercise of self-determination should precede any decision about our country's fate. These demands of our people were swept aside as United States pressure forced Holland to abandon the cause of Papuan independence. The solution reached in August 1962 - The New York Agreement - that was ratified by the UN General Assembly - quite simply ignored the opinion of us, Papuans and placed us at the mercy of the new rulers. Up to now, the Indonesian military rulers leave nothing undone to force us to give up our own cultural identity. Indonesians call us "Irianese" and our country West Papua is called "Irian Jaya". To pronounce the word "Papua" is enough to be put under arrest and to be harshly interrogated. But we are proud of being Papuans, so some gave their new born children the christian name of "Papua". But in the christening ceremony the clergyman did not even dare to pronounce that name..... The Indonesian authorities look upon us, Papuans as "primitive and ignorant" and they treat us like second-class citizens in our own country. We are forced to become Indonesians, preferably Javanese and every expression of our own Papuan culture is suspected of subversion. A real personification of Papuan culture was Arnold Ap, cultural anthropologist and curator of the ethnological museum in the capital Jayapura and most stimulating leader of the Papuan cultural dance - and music group "Mambesak". His work caused a revaluation and a revival of real Papuan culture from under the repression and that aroused fear among the Indonesian rulers so he and many other members of "Mambesak" got killed by the Kopassandha elite troops after several months of detention without any accusation. Beside all these violations of human and cultural rights and this colonial military oppression of our people there is an even greater threat, and that is called: TRANSMIGRATION. Transmigration is really the world's largest colonisation programme in history carried out by the Indonesian government and largely funded by international agencies. It is the forced resettlement of millions of people from the overpopulated islands like Java and Madura, to "other thinly populated parts of Indonesia". Critics claim that this is no more or less than an invasion programme in disguise. Last year the Indonesian government announced that "Irian Jaya (West Papua) was to be the main target for the next phase of the transmigration programme". Our people consisting of about 1.2 million will be outnumbered by more than 1.5 to 2 million Javanese within the next five years. For us it is sufficiently clear what the Jakarta generals have in mind with this political shifting with people: To make their presence in this reluctant colony legitimate. For if "Irian Jaya" really is an Indonesian province, it shall be actually inhabited by Indonesians. The three official purposes of the transmigration are: * to decrease the overpopulation of Java * to increase the well-being of the receiving areas * to increase the food production Since none of these purposes are being achieved, there must be other, hidden purposes: namely to break down the resistance we, the Papuans, offer against this foreign military occupation of our country ever since 1962 with our Liberation Movement OPM (Organisasi Papua Merdeka, which means Free Papua Movement). Other hidden purposes are: to make us Papuans a minority in the land of our ancestors, and to overrule our culture and way of life by the dominant culture of the massive influx of Javanese transmigrants. This transmigration is having a devastating effect on us, the Papuan people: Our land is taken away from us. For us, like for so many other tribal peoples, present here, land has an eternal value and it is really unthinkable to see our land as a saleable property. The land belongs to our ancestors and we have only the right to use it to live and to survive. But transmigration needs the land and it is taken away by force. This is only possible under heavy military repression. If the transmigrants did not have the army to protect them, we would have driven them away from our land. In 1981 the customary law concerning land property is suspended, which means that the Indonesian government claims all the land. If we, Papuans, want to keep our land, we have to buy it from the government and if we have no money to buy it, we will be driven away from our lands, our huts and gardens will be burnt down and if we resist we will be shot by the Indonesian army. General Benny Murdani, Commander-in-Chief of the Indonesian army said in March this year: "The Armed Forces must be involved in the selection of resettlement sites. The removal of "obstacles" to land availability needs to be given special attention to ensure effective "territorial management". The "obstacles" to which General Murdani is referring are we, the tribal Papuan peoples, not even receiving compensation for the huge areas of land we are losing. Our living environment with which we have always lived in harmony, is being destroyed: the jungle in which we live and gather our food is to be "cleared away". Thousands of hectares of virgin rainforest are knocked down by small but strong bulldozers. Giant-trees are at the spot sawn to rafters and boards and within a short time the bare plain is full of immense rows and rows of exactly the same houses. The transmigrants can move in, erosion of the soil has free play and intensive agriculture will exhaust the soil within a few years. Our economic system is ruled out by the transmigration. In our traditional culture, we always share whatever we have in our communities and in cooperation we are self-supporting and don't know "poverty". We only become "poor" when we get forced to participate in the money-economy. And the false bottom in this participation is that we are welcome as buyers but not as sellers. The transmigrants rush upon the trade and we are confronted with all kinds of Western goods, which are only obtainable with money, we do not possess. We are pretty able to adjust ourselves to changes if we are allowed to take the time necessary for that. But with the speeded-up flow of transmigrants coming like an invasion, we have no fair chance and we feel that our own economy is employed by a neo-colonial economic system. When we want to sell our vegetables or fish on the market, we are not allowed to do so. Soldiers with guns stop us and force us to give it to them for an extremely low price and what can we do, looking into the barrel of a gun? So they can sell our crops on the market with high profits as addition to their pay. Many of our people have died from transmigrant-imported diseases like influenza, tuberculosis and leprosis against which their bodies had not yet built up resistance. There is a great lack of medical facilities: Indonesian physicians see West Papua as a place of exile and they only want to settle in towns and work only for the rich people who can afford medical care -- not for the Papuans.... West Papua is seen by Indonesia as a vast "empty" land for which it is necessary to become crowded as soon as possible with transmigrants. So how is it possible that especially for our diminishing Papuan people a "family planning" campaign is set up? We are forced to integrate into Indonesian society as "translocals" in transmigration areas where we may form 10-25? of the people settling the new sites and we have to conform to the lifestyle of our invaders. To prohibit our people to live in our own way according to our own culture is really cutting away the ground from under our feet. Culture is the blueprint for survival and this is shown clearly in the areas where we apply our shifting agriculture, which means: we are following our food. Each year another piece of land is cultivated so that the former piece is enabled to recover. After a couple of years we come back on the first place and the cycle can start again. But transmigration is radically disturbing this ecological balance by pressing up the population density and by forcing Papuans to settle down and stay in one place. Severe famines raging in the Kurima in Baliem valley were the result, starting in December 1982. The Indonesian press mentioned 62 deaths in 10 days and 18,000 people's lives at risk, but the villages could not be reached for lack of funds. So how many Papuans actually have died is until now not known. These failures of the Indonesian government can be described as criminal neglect. In these ways the productive capacity of our whole people is affected and we become squatters in our own land. But resistance is everywhere and the hostility against transmigrants is still increasing. More troops are flown in to oppress our people and as many as 12,000 - 15,000 West Papuans have already fled over the border with Papua New Guinea, the other half of the island with the same Melanesian or Papuan people. The only difference is that Papua New Guinea has got its independence in 1975. Among these refugees the International Commission of Jurists (Australian section) has carried out investigations: these refugees had suffered severe harrassment and human rights abuses prior to their flight across the border. Bombing of villages, indiscriminate shooting, imprisonment, torture, rape, the burning of settlements and the killing and stealing of livestock were all documented. Fear of the transmigration programme was one of the main reasons given by the refugees for their flight and for the escalation of violence which preceded it. A highway is under construction from North to South across the island, along the border with Papua New Guinea, as part of a policy of "transmigrasi saptamarga" by which the Indonesian government plans to settle a "cordon sanitaire" of ex-military personnel to seal up and control the border. Although the whole transmigration plan is obviously a grandiose failure (demographic as well as economic and ecological), the Indonesian government aims at stepping up the programme still further. Recently the Ministry for Transmigration announced that it plans to move a further 65 million people over the next 20 years! This transmigration programme is being funded with INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL, two thirds of it via the World Bank and the rest by other major national and international agencies and even the United Nations Development Programme and the World Food Programme are investing large sums of money in a programme that will make obliteration the fate of our entire West Papuan People. Crucial to an understanding of Indonesia's determination to hold on to West Papua (the country, not the people) is the fact that it contains the world's richest copper deposit and some of Indonesia's richest oil-wells. This is also the main reason why Western countries and international agencies so eagerly put their money in transmigration. Since this disastrous transmigration plan is "non-negotiable" according to Transmigration Minister Martono, all attempts to stop it must focus on the mainly Western countries and Banks who provide the money for it. We as representatives, speaking on behalf of our people, urgently request to all of you, Working Group Members as well as delegations present here, to use all the influence possible to stop this large-scale transmigration programme, which will be able to cause a secret Holocaust on our people, the West Papuans. We have spoken to you as to members of the International Community and we hope that you will provide our people with urgently needed sympathy and support so that the plight of our West Papuan people may become known in the International World. And that if one day the injustice done to our people will be shown to the world, we will not stand at the opened mass-graves and say to each other: "Why didn't we know anything about this?" -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :: -= THE FOURTH WORLD DOCUMENTATION PROJECT =- :: :: A service provided by :: :: The Center For World Indigenous Studies :: :: www.cwis.org :: ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Originating at the Center for World Indigenous Studies, Olympia, Washington USA www.cwis.org © 1999 Center for World Indigenous Studies (All Rights Reserved. References up to 500 words must be referenced to the Center for World Indigenous Studies and/or the Author Copyright Policy Material appearing in the Fourth World Documentation Project Archive is accepted on the basis that the material is the original, unoccupied work of the author or authors. 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