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How Papuan separatists battle the Indonesian government's bandwidth throttling and internet shutdowns to report on human rights abuses.
The trouble began in 2008, when Piondo villagers found that their land was being taken over by a palm oil company called PT Kurnia Luwuk Sejati. The company was owned by Murad Husain, a powerful local man with extensive interests spanning business and politics. He had plantations, a construction firm, had served as a member of national parliament in the early 2000s and as a treasurer for the political party Golkar — for decades Suharto’s electoral vehicle. The situation escalated dramatically in 2010 when hundreds of soldiers were brought into the area. They were ostensibly there to carry out training exercises. It was a pretext, with the real intention being to intimidate the farmers. Eva Bande, a female agrarian reform activist, assisted the farmers to organize the resistance. She was arrested along with the farmers and jailed.
Hundreds of women in Mollo, East Nusa Tenggara, Timor Island, occupied mining sites that threaten their sacred mountain for months. In a decision that would give the protest its defining identity, they brought their looms to the site, and whiled away the days and weeks by weaving their traditional tenun cloth: a display of indigenous culture at odds with the defilement of their sacred mountains.
In a nation replete with stories of social and environmental injustice, the Kartinis of Kendeng captured the public attention when they set their feet in cement outside the presidential palace in Jakarta. It was a visceral display of protest that powerfully symbolized the desperation of wong cilik, the “little people,” in their struggle against investors backed by powerful politicians.
The anti-racist protests in the United States have helped inspire movements against oppression and discrimination in many parts of the world. One striking example comes from West Papua, which has been ruled as a province of Indonesia since the 1960s, with Jakarta’s security forces clamping down hard on agitation for independence or autonomy. The slogan “Papuan Lives Matter,” modelled directly on the African-American struggle, has become a rallying cry for Papuan activists. Although it is little known in the United States, Washington played a key role in the annexation of West Papua, as the architect of the 1962 New York Agreement that paved the way for the Indonesian takeover and the “Act of Free Choice.” The US government approached the question of West Papua from the standpoint of the Cold War in the Pacific region.
Today, Indonesia is in the grips of a coal boom. The country is one of the world’s biggest exporters of the commodity. Plans are also in the works to ramp up domestic consumption, with dozens of new coal-fired power plants scheduled for construction as part of President Joko Widodo’s electricity drive. So far, mining has been concentrated on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo. There, companies operating amid lax government oversight have torn down rainforests, polluted water sources and grabbed land from indigenous communities. But a growing hunger for cheap energy, paired with an increasing drive to bring the country’s easternmost provinces more firmly under control of the central government, has brought renewed attention to the Papua region’s coal reserves. An investigation into the coal industry in Horna, on the Bird’s Head Peninsula of the island of New Guinea, reveals that a company granted exploration rights in the area is closely connected to local and national power players.
The path that led Benny to the United Kingdom began long before he was even born. Until 1961, West Papua was a Dutch colonial territory. On 1 December 1961, West Papua declared its independence from the Netherlands. Indonesia, however, had claimed West Papua as part of its territory. Following the declaration of independence, it invaded and occupied West Papua. In 1969, it secured United Nations recognition for its claim via a rigged referendum process—the “Act of Free Choice”—where 1,026 tribal leaders, supposedly representing 800,000 Papuans, were forced under severe duress to accept integration into Indonesia. Since then, West Papua has been under de facto Indonesian military rule, and those who resist have experienced surveillance, harassment, imprisonment, and violence. Many Papuans have resisted Indonesian rule, some taking on more active roles in pushing for independence through groups such as the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), a coalition of three major pro-independence organisations. Today, the chairmanship of the ULMWP rests on the shoulders of Benny Wenda. The Indonesian government often paints a picture of Benny Wenda as a recalcitrant, manipulative traitor, a demagogue and subversive who aims to cleave Indonesia in two.
Dian Yulia Novi was meant to be the first female suicide bomber for the Islamic State (ISIS) in Indonesia. She’d planned to detonate a bomb in a pressure cooker at the Indonesian presidential palace, but the scheme was foiled when the police raided her boarding house in Bekasi on the eastern border of Jakarta in December 2016. While the prosecution pushed for a 10-year sentence, the East Jakarta District Court sentenced her to seven-and-a-half years in prison after she confessed. She was the first woman in Indonesia to be convicted for planning such an attack, and ended up in a small room in Mako Brimob with two female police officers assigned to guard her.
According to data from the Jayapura branch of the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), there were 10 cases of violence against journalists between February 2017 and May 2018, of which five involved members of the police or the military as perpetrators. In two of these five cases, the journalists were Melanesian. In 2017, another Tabloid Jubi journalist and a reporter from the banned Suara Papua newspaper, were arrested while covering a rally held by the National Committee for West Papua (KNPB), a pro-independence organisation in Papua. They were accused of being members of KNPB, simply because they had the same skin colour and frizzy hair as the rally attendees—the authorities tend to view all Melanesians as “separatists”.
The Mentawai people, long the victims of disastrous government policies that attempted to "modernize" the islands, have survived decades of forced relocations, military crackdowns, and religious persecution. Today, the indigenous peoples of Siberut island—the largest of the Mentawais—have been pushed into an area that occupies roughly 8 percent of the island. The rest has been seized by the state and either turned into a national park or sold off to renewable energy and timber companies. Now another controversial plan to turn some 20,000 hectares of ancient forest into an energy source is the latest battleground for the future of the island. PT Biomass Andalan Energi, the renewable energy company at the center of this fight, was awarded a concession to convert the forest into biomass plantation—a burnable renewable plant-based energy source. Much of the concession overlaps with lands that have historically been the home of local Mentawai communities.