The Pacific Elders’ Voice has expressed deep concern about reports of deteriorating human rights in West Papua and has appealed to Indonesia to allow the proposed UN high commissioner’s visit there before the Bali G20 meeting in November.

A statement from the PEV says the reports suggest an “increased number of extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances and the internal displacement of Melanesian Papuans”.

The Pacific Elders said that they recalled the Pacific Island Forum Leaders’ Communique made in Tuvalu in 2019 which welcomed an invitation by Indonesia for a mission to West Papua by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“The communique strongly encouraged both sides to finalise the timing of the visit and for an evidence-based, informed report on the situation be provided before next Pacific Island Forum Leaders meeting in 2020,” the statement said.

“Despite such undertaking, we understand that the Indonesian government has not allowed UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit West Papua.

“We find this unacceptable and believe that such behaviour can only exacerbate the tensions in the region.”

The Pacific Elders said Indonesia must “take responsibility for its actions and abuses and make amends for the harm” caused to the Indigenous people of West Papua.

The statement said the elders urgently called for the Indonesian government to allow the UN High Commission for Human Rights to visit West Papua and to prepare a report for the Human Rights Council.

“We call on all members of the Human Rights Council to pass a resolution condemning the current human rights abuses in West Papua,” the statement said.

“We further call on the Human Rights Council to clearly identify the human rights abuses in Indonesia’s Universal Periodic Review and to identify clear steps to rectify the abuses that are taking place.

“We further note that the next G20 Heads of State and Government Summit will take place [on November 15-16] in Bali. We call on all G20 member countries to ensure that a visit by the UN High Commission for Human Rights is allowed to take place before this meeting and that the HCHR is able to prepare a report on her findings for consideration by the G20.

“We believe that no G20 Head of State and Government should attend the meeting without a clear understanding of the human rights situation in West Papua” .

Pacific Elders’ Voice is an independent alliance of Pacific elders whose purpose is to draw on their collective experience and wisdom to provide thought leadership, perspectives, and guidance that strengthens Pacific resilience.

They include former Marshall Islands president Hilde Heine, former Palau president Tommy Remengesau, former Kiribati president Anote Tong, former Tuvalu prime minister Enele Sopoaga, former Pacific Island Forum Secretariat secretary-general Dame Meg Taylor, former Guam University president Robert Underwood, former Fiji ambassador Kaliopate Tavola, and former University of the South Pacific professor Konai Helu Thaman.

‘State terrorism’ over special autonomy
Meanwhile, United Liberation Movement of West Papua (ULMWP) interim president Benny Wenda has detailed “disturbing reports” of increased militarisation and state terrorism in a recent statement about the region.

“Our people have been taking to the streets to show their rejection of Indonesia’s plan to divide us further by the creation of 7 provinces and to demonstrate against the imposition of ‘special autonomy’,” Wenda said.

“Peaceful protestors in Nabire and Jayapura have been met with increasing brutality, with water cannons and tear gas used against them and fully armed police firing indiscriminately at protesters and civilians alike.

“This is state terrorism. Indonesia is trying to use their full military might to impose their will onto West Papuans, to force acceptance of ‘special autonomy’.

The pattern of increased militarisation and state repression over the past few years had been clear, with an alarming escalation in violence, said Wenda.

Last month two protesters were shot dead in Yahukimo Regency for peacefully demonstrating against the expansion of provinces.

“History is repeating itself and we are witnessing a second Act of No Choice. West Papuans are being forced to relive this trauma on a daily basis,” said Wenda.

“The same methods of oppression were used in 1969, with thousands of troops harassing, intimidating and killing any West Papuans who spoke out for independence.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Pacific Media Centre

Chinese authorities are systematically harassing Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic groups even after they have left the country, according to new testimonies gathered by Amnesty International.

Uyghur New Zealanders were among those interviewed, despite the threat of further intimidation.

The case studies, published online today, reveal how Chinese authorities target members of the Uyghur and other Chinese diaspora communities across the globe through pressure from its embassies abroad, as well as through messaging apps and threatening phone calls.

READ MORE: Uyghur harassment – Nowhere Feels Safe

Amnesty International Aotearoa New Zealand executive director Meg de Ronde says it is part of an ever-growing body of evidence of the Chinese government’s attempts to control and repress people speaking out about continued human rights abuses both inside and outside China.

“Governments have a responsibility to ensure people are free to practise their beliefs, whatever they may be,” she says.

“In China, the government is using tactics like enforced disappearances, intimidation and detainment to prevent these freedoms. The Chinese government is not only preventing them from practising their religious beliefs, they’re extending this to other countries as well.”

De Ronde says Uyghurs living in New Zealand, a majority of whom have fled persecution in the autonomous territory of Xinjiang in northwest China, have to maintain a low profile for their own safety.

“The situation for Uyghurs living in New Zealand is very delicate. We urge anyone working with this community to be mindful of their safety and what information is shared on what platforms to ensure they are not inadvertently putting anyone at risk.

“Uyghurs must be given autonomy over any processes undertaken with government departments or external organisations, their freedom over their own lives here must be protected.”

She adds the New Zealand government must monitor and protect against attempts to repress people living within New Zealand.

“It’s incredibly important that the government takes measures to protect the Xinjiang diaspora living here because the threats of further intimidation and oppression are very real for those living in fear.

“Everyone has the right to live in peace with the religion they choose. Amnesty International is also calling on Chinese authorities to allow UN human rights experts access to the region to conduct an independent investigation into the situation in Xinjiang.”

The Nowhere Feels Safe report
For the Nowhere Feels Safe report, Amnesty International collated information from approximately 400 Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Uzbeks and members of other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups living in 22 countries across five continents over the course of a year between September 2018 and September 2019.

Their accounts reveal the harassment and fear being experienced by these communities on a daily basis.

Several Uyghur interviewees told Amnesty International that local authorities in Xinjiang had targeted their relatives back home as a way to suppress the activities of Uyghur communities living abroad.

Others said the Chinese authorities had used social messaging apps to track, contact and intimidate them.

The testimonies illustrate the global scope of China’s campaign against Uyghurs, Kazakhs and others originally from Xinjiang, with Chinese embassies and consulates tasked with collecting information about members of these ethnic groups residing in other countries.

Since 2017, China has pursued an unprecedented campaign of mass detention of Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang. An estimated one million or more people have been held in so-called “transformation-through-education” or “vocational training” centres where they have endured a litany of human rights violations.

Earlier this week, a 137-page Chinese government document leaked to several international media outlets listed the personal details of people from Xinjiang, including their religious habits and personal relationships, as a means of determining whether they should be interned in “re-education” camps.

The leaked details supported evidence of violations previously documented by Amnesty International.

An estimated up to 1.6 million Uyghurs live outside China, according to the World Uyghur Congress.

Significant diasporic communities of Uyghurs can be found in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

Smaller communities live in other countries, including Afghanistan, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Norway, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, the Netherlands, Turkey and the United States.

Republished from an Amnesty International media release.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Grasberg mine in the Indonesian region has been a source of untold wealth for its owners, but, writes Susan Schulman, local communities say it has brought poverty and oppression

In 1936, Dutch geologist Jean Jacques Dozy climbed the world’s highest island peak: the forbidding Mount Carstensz, a snow-covered silver crag on what was then known as Dutch New Guinea. During the 4800m ascent, Dozy noticed an unusual rock outcrop veined with green streaks. Samples he brought back confirmed exceptionally rich gold and copper deposits.

Today, these remote, sharp-edged mountains are part of West Papua, Indonesia, and home to the Grasberg mine, one of the biggest gold mines – and third largest copper mine – in the world.

Majority-owned by the American mining firm Freeport McMoRan, Grasberg is now Indonesia’s biggest taxpayer, with reserves worth an estimated $100bn (£80bn).

But a recent fact-finding mission (by the Brisbane Archdiocese’s Catholic Justice and Peace Commission) described a “slow-motion genocide” (pdf) taking place in West Papua, warning that its indigenous population is at risk of becoming “an anthropological museum exhibit of a bygone culture”.

Since the Suharto dictatorship annexed the region in a 1969 UN referendum largely seen as a fixed land grab, an estimated 500,000 West Papuans have been killed in their fight for self-rule.

Decades of military and police oppression, kidnapping and torture have created a long-standing culture of fear.

Local and foreign journalists are routinely banned, detained, beaten and forced to face trial on trumped-up charges. Undercover police regularly trail indigenous religious, social and political leaders.

And children still in primary school have been jailed for taking part in demonstrations calling for independence from Indonesia.

“There is no justice in this country,” whispered one indigenous villager on condition of anonymity, looking over his shoulder fearfully. “It is an island without law.”

****

Dozy had not set out to find gold in 1936; his goal was to scale the region’s highest glacial peak. But his discovery sparked the interest of Freeport Sulphur – later to become Freeport Minerals Company and then, through a 1981 merger with the McMoRan Oil and Gas Company, Freeport McMoRan – whose board of directors included the well-connected Godfrey Rockefeller (serving from 1931 until the early 1980s) and Henry Kissinger (1988-1995).

Today, indigenous tribes such as the Kamoro and the Amungme claim their communities have been racked with poverty, disease, oppression and environmental degradation since the mine began operations in 1973.

“We are a coastal people, and we depend on the environment,” says the Kamoro’s chief, Hironimus Urmani, in Tipuka, a lowland village down-river from the Grasberg mine.

“Nature is a blessing from God, and we are known by the three Ss: sago [trees], sampan [canoes] and sungai [rivers]. But life is very difficult now.”

Urmani motions to the river opposite, languishing green and motionless. He claims that tailing sediment from the mine has raised the riverbed, suffocating the fish, oysters and shrimp on which the Kamoro diet and economy are traditionally based. A 2012 report from Earthworks and MiningWatch Canada (pdf) asserts that mine waste from Grasberg has “buried over 166 sq km of formerly productive forest and wetlands, and fish have largely disappeared”.

‘We need to earn money’
Although most Kamoro still try to eke out a living fishing and foraging for food, they struggle to find paid work, says Urmani. “We need to earn money. But now we face major competition from non-Papuan migrants.”

Locals fear that the government’s controversial transmigration programme, which resettles Indonesians from high-density islands such as Java to low-population areas, is wiping out their population completely. Indigenous Melanesian Christians – they comprised 96 percent of the population in 1971 (pdf) – now make up a 48 percent minority, with numbers expected to fall to 29 percent by 2020 if migration rates continue.

Clashes between the indigenous Christians – and migrant Indonesian Muslims – have also resulted in riots, fires and injuries.

“Land has been taken away, directly by Freeport … and indirectly, as the Indonesian settlers have appropriated it,” says Dr Agus Sumule, professor of agricultural socio-economics at the University of Papua.

“The stresses [on indigenous people] are intense,” says Sumule. “They have been very negatively impacted.”

The Indonesian government signed over to Freeport the right to extract mineral wealth from the Grasberg site in West Papua in 1967. A 2002 report (pdf) from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) details that land agreements were not negotiated with the Amungme until 1974, a year after the mine opened, and with the Kamoro in 1997.

The compensation paid for Kamoro and Amungme land has been mainly in the form of communal benefits, such as the building of homes, schools and places of worship. The IIED report notes, “Perceptions of land rights and historic compensation claims are a continuing source of dissatisfaction and conflict in the mining area.”

Recent census data shows Papua’s GDP per capita at $3510, compared to the Indonesian average of $2452. Yet Papua has the highest poverty rate in the country, nearly three times the national average. It also has the highest infant, child and maternal mortality rates in Indonesia, as well as the worst health indicators, and the poorest literacy rates.

Scale of destitution
The scale of destitution is best observed from the highland Amungme village of Banti, just 20 miles down from the Grasberg mine.

Estimates from Earthworks suggest that Freeport dumps as much as 200,000 tonnes of mine waste, known as tailings, directly into the Aikwa delta system every day. The practice has devastated the environment, according to Earthworks and locals, turning thousands of hectares of verdant forest and mangroves into wasteland and rendering turgid the once-crystal waters of the highlands.

The tailings from the Grasberg mine are so rich with ore that Papuans walk for as long as a week to get here. Crowding the length of the river and the delta wasteland, thousands of unlicensed panners shore up small sections to slow the river’s flow and dig into the thick sediment on the side.

Although some of these panners are located within Freeport’s official mining operations, they are not evicted or controlled in any way, they said. Instead, they claim they sell their findings to the police and military who work as security on the mine. (An anonymous Freeport source also confirmed this).

One of the panners, Martine Wandango, 25, bends over her pail of water as she filters out rocks and searches for ore. “You can only survive with money, and you can only find money from gold,” says Martine, who followed her husband to the delta 15 years ago by walking 60 miles over the mountains from their remote highland village.

“I work really hard as I want to give my children better lives, so they can go to school. But it isn’t enough, so she helps me here mining,” says Martine of her daughter, nine, who swings a gold pan in her hands. “On a good day, I can get three grammes, which I sell either to the police or [to buyers] in Timika.”

A tiny village when Freeport arrived here 40 years ago, Timika is now a boom town dotted with bars, brothels, gold-processing shops and various military personnel. Under Indonesian law, Freeport is a designated “strategic industry”, which mandates that external security for the mine, its access roads and its pipelines all be provided exclusively by Indonesia’s security forces.

Freeport never implicated
Freeport has never been implicated in any human rights abuses allegedly committed by the Indonesian military in Papua.

Freeport McMoRan, based in Phoenix, Arizona, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The company’s website defends its method of disposal of tailings at Grasberg, managed by PT Freeport Indonesia (PTFI), an affiliate company: “PTFI’s controlled riverine tailings management system, which has been approved by the Indonesian government, uses the unnavigable river system in the mountainous highlands near our mine to transport tailings to an engineered area in the lowlands where the tailings and other sediments are managed in a deposition area.”

A 2009 report by the company says it utilises levees to contain tailings in the deposition area, and that the tailings management programme costs Freeport McMoRan $15.5m (£12.7m) each year. According to the report, company monitoring of aquatic life in the rivers found that fish and shrimp were suitable for consumption, as regulated by Indonesian food standards, while water quality samples met Indonesian and US Environmental Protection Agency drinking water standards for dissolved metals. In a 2011 BBC report (pdf) on alleged pollution in the area surrounding Grasberg, the company says that the tailings management method was chosen because studies showed the environmental impact caused by its waste material was reversible.

Elsewhere on its website, the company says: “We are committed to respecting human rights. Our human rights policy requires us (and our contractors) to conduct business in a manner consistent with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and to align our human rights due diligence practices with the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UN Guiding Principles).”

The company also emphasises its work with indigenous people in West Papua. A 2015 Freeport McRoRan report on working towards sustainable development said: “PTFI has engaged with indigenous Papuan tribes for decades, including through numerous formal agreements to promote workforce skills training, health, education and basic infrastructure development … In 2015, PTFI continued to evaluate the effectiveness of alternate options for Kamoro community members whose estuary transport routes are impacted by sedimentation associated with the controlled riverine tailings management system. Provision of smaller sized boats, in addition to 50 passenger vessels, for route flexibility as well as additional local economic development programmes were identified as additional mitigation measures during the year.”

Back in the area surrounding the Grasberg mine, many Papuans, struggling for work, find themselves pulled into the bar and sex industries that cater to the miners, particularly around the highland village of Banti. Here brothels and bars line up side by side, allegedly with help from the Indonesian military, who are said to supply sex workers and alcohol, according to a Freeport source who wished to remain anonymous.

Newfound promiscuity
Indigenous chiefs have watched as a newfound promiscuity has brought sexually transmitted infections that have ravaged their communities. “Traditional Papuan culture forbids free sex, but alcohol makes our communities vulnerable,” says the Amungme chief, Martin Mangal. “And brothels make it easy to contract HIV.”

HIV rates in West Papua are of “epidemic” proportions, according to the UN, 15 times higher than anywhere else in Indonesia. Driven almost entirely by unsafe sex, HIV is also far more prevalent among indigenous Papuans. Yet the existence of only one hospital – built by Freeport – means that most people, particularly those in remote highland villages, don’t get the help they need.

Late last year, the Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, claimed he was willing to work towards a “better Papua”: “I want to listen to the people’s voices.”

However, human rights violations have actually increased since Widodo took power, according to Indonesia’s Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence (Kontras), which has logged 1,200 incidents of harassment, beatings, torture and killings of Papuans by Indonesian security forces since his election in 2014.

The Indonesian government did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The country’s military has consistently denied any wrongdoing in Papua.

Despite everything, there have been small glimmers of hope. This summer, Dutch human rights law firm Prakken D’Oliveira submitted a formal legal complaint against Indonesia to the UN Human Rights Council, accusing the government of “long-term, widespread and systematic human rights violations” and the “complete denial of the right to self-determination of the people of West-Papua”.

Later this year, West Papua is expected to be granted full membership of the Melanesian Spearhood Group, an important sub-regional coalition of countries including Fiji, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea.

The Brisbane commission, which warned of the risk of genocide, is calling on Indonesia to allow Papua, once and for all, the right to self-determination.

Yet some fear the opportunity for change in Papua is long gone.

“Is healing even possible?” asked Professor Agus Sumule, shaking his head. “It could be too late.”

Susan Schulman is an award-winning video/photojournalist. She moved from her native New York to London in 1990. During the past 10 years she has chronicled many of the world’s forgotten tragedies, from the horrors of childbirth in Sierra Leone and child soldiers in Sudan to the wretched plight of gold miners in the Amazon basin. This article was first published in The Guardian and has been republished here with the permission of both the author and The Guardian. Go to The Guardian for full images and resource links.

How mining and militarisation led to an HIV epidemic in Papua