Recent videos depicting the barbaric torture of an indigenous Papuan man by Indonesian soldiers have opened the wounds of West Papua’s suffering, laying bare the horrifying reality faced by its people.

We must confront this grim truth — what we witness is not an isolated incident but a glaring demonstation of the deep-seated racism and systematic persecution ravaging West Papuans every single day.

Human rights defenders that the videos were taken during a local military raid in the districts of Omukia and Gome on 3-4 February 2024, Puncak Regency, Pegunungan Tengah Province.

Deeply proud of their rich ethnic and cultural heritage, West Papuans have often found themselves marginalised and stereotyped, while their lands are exploited and ravaged by foreign interests, further exacerbating their suffering.

Indonesia’s discriminatory policies and the heavy-handed approach of its security forces have consistently employed brutal tactics to quash any aspirations for a genuine self-autonomy among indigenous Papuans.

In the chilling footage of the torture videos, we witness the agony of this young indigenous Papuan man, bound and submerged in a drum of his own blood-stained water, while soldiers clad in military attire inflict unspeakable acts of violence on him.

The state security forces, speaking with a cruel disregard for human life, exemplify the toxic blend of racism and brutality that festers within the Indonesian military.

Racial prejudice
What makes this brutality even more sickening is the unmistakable presence of racial prejudice.

The insignia of a soldier, proudly displaying affiliation with the III/Siliwangi, Yonif Raider 300/Brajawijaya Unit, serves as a stark reminder of the institutionalised discrimination faced by Papuans within the very forces meant to protect civilians.

This vile display of racism underscores the broader pattern of oppression endured by West Papuans at the hands of the state and its security forces.

These videos are just the latest chapter in a long history of atrocities inflicted upon Papuans in the name of suppressing their cries for freedom.

Regencies like Nduga, Pegunungan Bintang, Intan Jaya, the Maybrat, and Yahukimo have become notorious hotspots for state-sanctioned operations, where Indonesian security forces operate with impunity, crushing any form of dissent through arbitrary arrests.

They often target peaceful demonstrators and activists advocating for Papuan rights in major towns along the coast.

These arrests are often accompanied by extrajudicial killings, further instilling intimidation and silence among indigenous Papuans.

Prabowo leadership casts shadow
In light of the ongoing failure of Indonesian authorities to address the racism and structural discrimination in West Papua, the prospect of Prabowo’s presidential leadership casts a shadow of uncertainty over the future of human rights and justice in the region.

Given his controversial track record, there is legitimate concern that his leadership may further entrench the culture of impunity. We must closely monitor his administration’s response to the cries for justice from West Papua.

It is time to break the silence and take decisive action. The demand for the UN Human Rights Commissioner to visit West Papua is urgent.

This is where the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), with its influential members Fiji and Papua New Guinea, who were appointed as special envoys to Indonesia can play a pivotal role.

Their status within the region paves the opportunity to champion the cause and exert diplomatic pressure on Indonesia, as the situation continues to deteriorate despite the 2019 Pacific Leaders’ communique highlighting the urgent need for international attention and action in West Papua.

While the UN Commissioner’s visit would provide a credible and unbiased platform to thoroughly investigate and document these violations, it also would compel Indonesian authorities to address these abuses decisively.

I can also ensure that the voices of the Papuan people are heard and their rights protected.

Let us stand unyielding with the Papuan people in their tireless struggle for freedom, dignity, and sovereignty. Anything less would be a betrayal of our shared humanity.

Filed as a special article for Asia Pacific Report.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA) has joined media freedom groups supporting Julian Assange, an Australian citizen whose unjust prosecution continues to undermine press freedoms and human rights.

In light of recent developments and mounting concerns over Assange’s deteriorating health, JERAA said in a statement it had urged the United States to drop all charges against Assange and facilitate his immediate return to Australia.

Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been the subject of relentless persecution by the US government for his efforts to expose war crimes and government misconduct.

Assange received a Walkley Award in 2011 for outstanding contribution to journalism through Wikileaks, which included the release of the 2010 “collateral murder” video and the publication of classified US diplomatic cables, shedding light on atrocities committed by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It is concerning that Assange faces up to 175 years in jail if found guilty of espionage charges — a sentence that would effectively silence whistle-blowers and journalists worldwide,” JERAA said.

The association said it believed that Assange’s indictment set a dangerous precedent and posed a grave threat to the fundamental principles of press freedom and freedom of expression.

‘Enough is enough’
JERAA commended Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for his support in calling for Assange’s release and said it echoed his sentiment that “enough is enough.”

PM Albanese’s recent vote in the federal Parliament for a motion demanding Assange’s return to Australia underscores the legitimacy of our demand. The motion, which received overwhelming support, leaves no room for ambiguity — it is time to bring Assange home.

The WikiLeaks 2010 “collateral damage” video.         Video: Al Jazeera

As the UK High Court prepares to rule on Assange’s appeal against extradition in a two-day hearing next week (February 20-21), and with Prime Minister Albanese’s continued efforts to advocate for Assange’s release, JERAA has urged the US to heed the calls for justice and drop all charges against Assange.

It is imperative that Assange’s rights as an Australian citizen be respected, and that he be afforded the opportunity to return home.

JERAA president Associate Professor Alexandra Wake said that while some members might not agree with all Assange has done in his life, it was clear that his work was central to our “understanding of press freedoms and human rights”.

“JERAA upholds the principles of a free and independent press. It is time to end the trial of global media freedom,” she said.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has hailed the news that Narges Mohammadi — an Iranian journalist RSF has been defending for years — has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her “fight against the oppression of women in Iran,” her courage and determination.

Persecuted by the Iranian authorities since the late 1990s for her work, and imprisoned again since November 2021, she must be freed at once, RSF declared in a statement.

“Speak to save Iran” is the title of one of the letters published by Mohammadi from Evin prison, near Tehran, where she has been serving a sentence of 10 years and 9 months in prison since 16 November 2021.

She has also been sentenced to hundreds of lashes. The maker of a documentary entitled White Torture and the author of a book of the same name, Mohammadi has never stopped denouncing the sexual violence inflicted on women prisoners in Iran.

It is this fight against the oppression of women that the Nobel Committee has just saluted by awarding the Peace Prize to this 51-year-old journalist and human rights activist, the former vice-president of the Defenders of Human Rights Centre, the Iranian human rights organisation that was created by Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer who was herself awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003.

It is because of this fight that Mohammadi has been hounded by the Iranian authorities, who continue to persecute her in prison.

She has been denied visits and telephone calls since 12 April 2022, cutting her off from the world.

White Torture: The infamy of solitary confinement in Iran with Narges Mohammadi.

New charges
At the same time, the authorities in Evin prison have brought new charges to keep her in detention.

On August 4, her jail term was increased by a year after the publication of another of her letters about violence against fellow women detainees.

Mohammadi was awarded the RSF Prize for Courage on 12 December 2023. At the award ceremony in Paris, her two children, whom she has not seen for eight years, read one of the letters she wrote to them from prison.

“In this country, amid all the suffering, all the fears and all the hopes, and when, after years of imprisonment, I am behind bars again and I can no longer even hear the voices of my children, it is with a heart full of passion, hope and vitality, full of confidence in the achievement of freedom and justice in my country that I will spend time in prison,” she wrote.

She ended the letter with a call to keep alive “the hope of victory”.

RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said:

“It is with immense emotion that I learn that the Nobel Peace Prize is being awarded to the journalist and human rights defender Narges Mohammadi.

At Reporters Without Borders (RSF), we have been fighting for her for years, alongside her husband and her two children, and with Shirin Ebadi. The Nobel Peace Prize will obviously be decisive in obtaining her release.”

On June 7, RSF referred the unacceptable conditions in which Mohammadi is being detained to all of the relevant UN human rights bodies.

During an oral update to the UN Human Rights Council on July 5, the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran expressed concern over the “continued detention of human rights defenders and lawyers defending the protesters, and at least 17 journalists”.

It is thanks to Mohammadi’s journalistic courage that the world knows what is happening in the Islamic Republic of Iran’s prisons, where 20 journalists are currently detained.

They included three other women: Elaheh Mohammadi, Niloofar Hamedi and Vida Rabbani.

Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

As protests in Iran drag on into their fourth week over the violent death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, there are two central questions.

The first is whether these protests involving women and girls across Iran are different from upheavals in the past, or will simply end the same way with the regime stifling a popular uprising.

The second question is what can, and should, the outside world do about extraordinarily brave demonstrations against an ageing and ruthless regime that has shown itself to be unwilling, and possibly unable, to allow greater freedoms?

The symbolic issue for Iran’s protest movement is a requirement, imposed by morality police, that women and girls wear the hijab, or headscarf. In reality, these protests are the result of a much wider revolt against discrimination and prejudice.

Put simply, women are fed up with a regime that has sought to impose rigid rules on what is, and is not, permissible for women in a theocratic society whose guidelines are little changed since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979.

Women are serving multi-year jail sentences for simply refusing to wear the hijab.

Two other issues are also at play. One is the economic deprivation suffered by Iranians under the weight of persistent sanctions, rampant inflation and the continuing catastrophic decline in the value of the Iranian riyal.

The other issue is the fact Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old whose death sparked the protests, was a Kurd.

The Kurds, who constitute about 10 percent of Iran’s 84 million population, feel themselves to be a persecuted minority. Tensions between the central government in Tehran and Kurds in their homeland on the boundaries of Iraq, Syria and Turkey are endemic.

A BBC report  on the Mahsa Amini protests.

Another important question is where all this leaves negotiations on the revival of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The JCPOA had been aimed at freezing Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.

Former President Donald Trump recklessly abandoned the 2015 agreement in 2018.

The Biden administration, along with its United Nations Security Council partners plus Germany, had been making progress in those negotiations, but those efforts are now stalled, if not frozen.

The spectacle of Iranian security forces violently putting down demonstrations in cities, towns and villages across Iran will make it virtually impossible in the short term for the US and its negotiating partners to negotiate a revised JCPOA with Tehran.

Russia’s use of Iranian-supplied “kamikaze” drones against Ukrainian targets will have further soured the atmosphere.

How will the US and its allies respond?
So will the US and its allies continue to tighten Iranian sanctions? And to what extent will the West seek to encourage and support protesters on the ground in Iran?

One initiative that is already underway is helping the protest movement to circumvent regime attempts to shut down electronic communications.

Elon Musk has announced he is activating his Starlink satellites to provide a vehicle for social media communications in Iran. Musk did the same thing in Ukraine to get around Russian attempts to shut down Ukrainian communications by taking out a European satellite system.

However, amid the spectacle of women and girls being shot and tear-gassed on Iranian streets, the moral dilemma for the outside world is this: how far the West is prepared to go in its backing for the protesters.

It is one thing to express sympathy; it is another to take concrete steps to support the widespread agitation. This was also the conundrum during the Arab Spring of 2010 that brought down regimes in US-friendly countries like Egypt and Tunisia.

It should not be forgotten, in light of contemporary events, that Iran and Russia propped up Syria’s Assad regime during the Arab Spring, saving it from a near certain end.

In this latest period, the Middle East may not be on fire, as it was a decade or so ago, but it remains highly unstable. Iran’s neighbour, Iraq, is effectively without a government after months of violent agitation.

The war in Yemen is threatening to spark up again, adding to uncertainties in the Gulf.

In a geopolitical sense, Washington has to reckon with inroads Moscow has been making in relations with Gulf States, including, notably Saudi Arabia.

The recent OPEC Plus decision to limit oil production constituted a slap to the US ahead of the mid-term elections in which fuel prices will be a potent issue.

In other words, Washington’s ability to influence events in the Middle East is eroding, partly as a consequence of a disastrous attempt to remake the region by going to war in Iraq in 2003.

A volatile region
Among the consequences of that misjudgement is the empowerment of Iran in conjunction with a Shia majority in Iraq. This should have been foreseen.

So quite apart from the waves of protest in Iran, the region is a tinderbox with multiple unresolved conflicts.

In Afghanistan, on the fringes of the Middle East, women protesters have taken the lead in recent days from their Iranian sisters and have been protesting against conservative dress codes and limitations on access to education under the Taliban.

This returns us to the moral issue of the extent to which the outside world should support the protests. In this, the experience of the “green” rebellion of 2009 on Iran’s streets is relevant.

Then, the Obama administration, after initially giving encouragement to the demonstrations, pulled back on the grounds it did not wish to jeopardise negotiations on a nuclear deal with Iran or undermine the protests by attaching US support.

Officials involved in the administration, who are now back in the Biden White House, believe that approach was a mistake. However, that begs the question as to what practically the US and its allies can do to stop Iran’s assault on its own women and girls.

What if, as a consequence of Western encouragement to the demonstrators, many hundreds more die or are incarcerated?

What is the end result, beyond indulging in the usual rhetorical exercises such as expressing “concern” and threatening to ramp up sanctions that hurt individual Iranians more than the regime itself?

The bottom line is that irrespective of what might be the desired outcome, Iran’s regime is unlikely to crumble.

It might be shaken, it might entertain concerns that its own revolution that replaced the Shah is in danger of being replicated, but it would be naïve to believe that a rotting 43-year-old edifice would be anything but utterly ruthless in putting an end to the demonstrations.

This includes unrest in the oil industry, in which workers are expressing solidarity with the demonstrators. The oil worker protest will be concerning the regime, given the centrality of oil production to Iran’s economy.

However, a powerful women’s movement has been unleashed in Iran. Over time, this movement may well force a theocratic regime to loosen restrictions on women and their participation in the political life of the country. That is the hope, but as history has shown, a ruthless regime will stop at little to re-assert its control.

Dr Tony Walker is a vice-chancellor’s fellow, La Trobe University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

When Nanaia Mahuta was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, there were hopes for a change in government thinking towards the struggles of indigenous people. The minister said she hoped to bring her experience and cultural identity as an indigenous woman to her role on international issues.

Palestine, West Papua and Western Sahara are places where the indigenous people are struggling for freedom and human rights and early on there was hope New Zealand would join the 138 member states of the United Nations that recognise Palestine.

However the hope has faded and Mahuta finally spoke on Tuesday, via a tweet, saying she was “deeply concerned” about the deteriorating situation in Jerusalem and Gaza. She called for a “rapid de-escalation” from Israel and the Palestinians, for Israel to “cease demolitions and evictions” and for “both sides to halt steps which undermine prospects for a two-state solution”.

Speaking with reporters later she said she did not want to apportion blame and in a further statement on Thursday said New Zealand officials had raised Israel’s “continued violation of international law and forced evictions occurring in East Jerusalem” with the Israeli ambassador.

Mahuta speaks as though there was some kind of political or military equality between Israel and Palestinians. But there isn’t.

In reality, it means the minister is appeasing the highly militarised state of Israel, with which we have extensive bilateral relations, against a largely defenceless indigenous Palestinian population that lives under Israeli occupation and/or control.

She is addressing only the symptoms of the problem. The heart of the problem is that for the past 53 years Israel has run what the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organisation Human Rights Watch has called “crimes of apartheid and persecution” against Palestinians.

Their detailed 213-page HRW report on Israel’s systematic abuses of Palestinians across the entire area of historic Palestine was released earlier this year.

With tensions rising, Israel this month mounted an extraordinary brutal attack on Muslim worshippers as they were praying in the Al Aqsa mosque in occupied East Jerusalem. This mosque is the third holiest site for Muslims and this was seen around the world as an outrage against all of Islam.

From there the Hamas leadership in Gaza, after issuing an ultimatum to Israel to withdraw security forces from Al Aqsa, began firing rockets into Israel, which has responded with heavy bombing of the densely populated Gaza strip.

I have a T-shirt that says “The first casualty of war is truth, the rest are mostly civilians” and so it has been this past week, with Palestinians bearing the brunt of casualties with many dozens killed, including at least 60 children.

Despite all this, anyone reading the minister’s comments would think both sides are equally to blame when the problem lies with Israel’s denial of human rights to Palestinians over as many decades as the issue has remained unresolved.

So what should a small country at the bottom of the world do to influence events in the Middle East? The answer is simple. New Zealand should implement its existing policy on the Middle East and give it some teeth.

It is a policy based on respect for international law and United Nations resolutions. These should be at the heart of our response and direct what we say, how we say it and what we do.

This means the government should demand the following:

• An end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land (UN Security Council resolution 242) and the right of return for Palestinian refugees expelled by Israeli militias (UN General Assembly resolution 194 – reaffirmed every year since 1949).
• The end of the more than 65 laws discriminating against Palestinian citizens of Israel (These are illegal under the crime of apartheid as defined by the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court).
• Israel stop building Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian land (UN Security Council resolution 2334 which was co-sponsored by New Zealand under John Key’s National Government). These settlements are illegal under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Initially Israel will take not a blind bit of notice and these calls will need to be followed by escalating sanctions.

It’s time for the minister to speak up unequivocally for Palestinian human rights and bring Aotearoa New Zealand on to the right side of history.

John Minto is the national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published by The New Zealand Herald and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

By Mahmut Atanur in Jakarta

Indonesian President Joko Widodo visited Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, southwestern district of Bangladesh, as part of his official visit to Bangladesh at the weekend.

During his visit on Sunday, Widodo said his country would continue to support Rohingya Muslims fleeing state persecution in Myanmar.

Earlier in the day, Widodo met Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in the capital Dhaka to discuss bilateral relations and the Rohingya issue.

During his meeting with Hasina, the leader of the largest Muslim populated country said Jakarta would continue its support to resolve the Rohingya crisis.

Indonesia’s attitude towards the solution of the Rohingya crisis in the United Nations and the UN Commission on Human Rights will continue in the international arena in the same manner, Widodo said.

He stressed a peaceful and swift solution of the issue on the basis of bilateral ties between Bangladeshi and Myanmar government.

-Partners-

Five agreements
During his visit, both countries signed five agreements in different sectors, including fishing, trade, diplomacy and energy.

Another agreement was signed between Bangladeshi oil company PetroBanla and Indonesian oil and gas company Pertamina, envisaging import of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Indonesia.

More than 700,000 refugees, mostly children and women, have fled Myanmar since August 25, 2017, when Myanmar forces launched a bloody crackdown.

The Rohingya, described by the UN as the world’s most persecuted people, have faced heightened fears of attack since dozens were killed in communal violence in 2012.

At least 9000 Rohingya were killed in Rakhine state from August 25 to September 24, according to the medical charity Doctors Without Borders.

In a report published on December 12, 2017, the global humanitarian organisation said the deaths of 71.7 percent or 6700 Rohingya were caused by violence. They include 730 children below the age of 5.

The UN has documented mass gang rapes, killings — including of infants and young children — brutal beatings and disappearances committed by security personnel. In a report, UN investigators said such violations may have constituted crimes against humanity.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Al Jazeera’s Inside Story this week features the “blasphemy” trial against Indonesia’s Christian Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama and asks if the 1969 law is being misused against the Jakarta governor.

Rights groups in Indonesia have long accused the government of using the country’s 1969 blasphemy law to persecute religious minorities, but for the first time the law is being used against a high-ranking politician.

A senior Indonesian cabinet minister said the government is not losing the fight against “radicalism” despite the success of Islamic groups in attracting hundreds of thousands of people to protests against the capital’s Christian governor.

Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, who is close to President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, said on Thursday that the government needs to reinforce Indonesia’s founding ideology “Pancasila” – whose five principles include national unity and social justice. He said it has been neglected since the fall of dictator Suharto in 1998 ushered in democratic rule.

Pandjaitan told a Jakarta Foreign Correspondents Club event: “We are not losing control.”

The Jakarta governor, Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama, is on trial for alleged blasphemy and faces up to five years in prison.

A sprawling Southeast Asian nation of 250 million people, Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim country.

Massive protests demanding Ahok’s arrest have challenged the image of Indonesia as practising a moderate form of Islam and shaken the secular government.
Muslims in Indonesia protest over Christian governor

The blasphemy furore has also given a national stage to the Islamic Defenders Front, previously better known as a morals vigilante group with members involved in protection rackets.

Its leader, Rizieq Shihab, told a December 2 protest in Jakarta that Indonesia would be peaceful if there was no blasphemy and other problems such as gays.

Pandjaitan suggested that the government has Shihab in its sights.

“We have quite detailed data about him. We’ll see what happens. We know what we are going to do,” he said. “The president is very brave, to do whatever is necessary for the benefit of this country. No hesitation at all.”

A November 2 protest against Ahok in Jakarta turned violent, with one death and dozens of police and protesters injured.

Critics say Widodo’s government has not done enough to contain the religious and ethnic tension that is mounting in the run-up to a city governor election in February.

Purnama – a Christian and the first ethnic Chinese in the post – will compete for re-election against two Muslims – Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono, a son of former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, and a former education minister, Anies Baswedan.

Ethnic Chinese make up just over 1 percent of Indonesia’s 250 million people, and they typically do not enter politics.

Fear and Desperation: Refugees and Migrants Pour into Greece. Prizewinning footage shot in October 2015 – March 2016, Greece. Video: Rory Peck Awards

Will Vassilopoulos, an Agence France-Presse (AFP) stringer since 2011, has won the Rory Peck award recognising the work of the world’s best freelance video journalists.

Will Vassilopoulos won the award for his coverage of the migrant crisis in Greece.

Since 2015, the country has been one of the main entry points to Europe for hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war, poverty and persecution. Vassilopoulos’s footage shows desperate migrants and refugees arriving in the country from Turkey, having crossed the Aegean Sea in overcrowded, rickety boats and rubber dinghies — and their rescue from open water in the middle of the night.

Vassilopoulos’s entry also includes a sequence from the island of Lesbos, which has seen the highest number of arrivals.  He filmed the arrival of a boatload of refugees on Skala Sykamias beach on 31 October 2015. He followed them to the makeshift, sprawling Idomeni camp on Greece’s northern border with Macedonia – which was evacuated last May.

He depicts demonstrations by refugees at the border post, their catastrophic living conditions and the desperate attempt of several hundred to cross a river a few kilometres from the camp to get into Macedonia on 14 March 2016.

Will Vassilopoulos started his career in text for Japanese news agency Kyodo News before becoming a news anchor at Greece’s state broadcaster ERT.

In 2011, Agence France-Presse financed a training course for Will to learn how to film and he has freelanced for the agency as a video journalist ever since, covering extensively topics such as Greece’s economic crisis, political unrest in Egypt and Turkey and the conflict in Ukraine.

Battle of Aden
News category finalists also included Nabil Hassan, who has freelanced for AFP since 2015. Nabil was nominated for his coverage of the Battle for Aden in which Shiite Houthi rebels opposed pro-government forces.

Will Vassilopoulos succeeds Zein Al-Rifai, who won the news prize last year.

Zein, who works regularly for AFP in Syria, covered the everyday lives of people in the rebel-held areas of Aleppo between 2014 and February 2015.

This is the third consecutive year that AFP has taken away the Rory Peck news award. In 2014, AFP stringer Pacôme Pabandji won for his coverage of the civil war in the Central African Republic.

The Rory Peck Awards were launched in 1995 by the Rory Peck Trust, set up in the memory of freelance journalist Rory Peck who was killed in Moscow in 1993.

The awards recognise the best independent news cameramen, and the awards ceremony is one of the main events through which the trust raises funds to assist freelance journalists.

Rory Peck Trust

By Gwyn McClelland in Melbourne

Today, Martin Scorsese’s Silence will have its premiere at the Vatican, where it will be screened to hundreds of Roman Catholic priests.

The famed director’s first foray into East Asia links to familiar themes of Catholic guilt and redemption, as he portrays the brutal 17th century persecution of Jesuit missionaries and their converts in Japan.

Scorsese’s film, which will open here in January, is an adaptation of Japanese author Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel Silence. It tells the story of two Portuguese Jesuit priests (Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield) who travel to Japan at a time when Christianity was banned to find their mentor (Liam Neeson) and support the local converts.

The pair are imprisoned and tortured.

The characters of the priests Cristóvão Ferreira and Sebastian Rodrigues were based on Portuguese and Italian Jesuits found in the historical record.

Endo’s novel (沈黙）describes the hostile environment that leads to the missionary priests’ relinquishment of faith. They were forced to place their feet on fumi-e （踏み絵) – religious images – to demonstrate that they had given up all faith.

Rodrigues (played by Garfield in the film), believes he hears Jesus’ voice telling him to apostatise by stepping on the fumi-e.

‘Hidden Christianity’
The remaining Christians went underground. The persecution continued until the ban against Christians was removed in 1873. But the indigenous Japanese who returned to Catholicism in the 1870s after 250 years of “hidden Christianity” remembered their long period of “betrayal”.

Most descendants of the native Christians lived in Nagasaki during World War II. On the 9 August 1945, when the United States dropped the A-bomb on Urakami, a northern suburb of Nagasaki, 8500 of the 12000-strong Catholic Christian community were among the dead.

The bomb was meant to target Nagasaki city, but because the Americans were low on fuel and clouds opened above the northern suburbs, the eventual Ground Zero happened in Urakami.

Its cathedral – the biggest Catholic church in Asia at the time – was only 500m from Ground Zero.

Nagasaki Catholics remember the A-bomb in particular ways, as I show in my research on memory in Nagasaki. My work has involved interviewing nine Catholic survivors of the atomic bombing, as well as three other non-Catholic survivors, and members of the Urakami community.

The Catholic interviewees explained that their grandparents had been exiled to other regions of Japan in the 1860s and 1870s due to their return to Catholicism after 250 years of “hidden Christianity”.

One interviewee, Matsuo Sachiko, explained that her grandmother was a double survivor, having first survived the Christian exile (referred to as the 4th exile) imposed by the government in 1867-73 and then later, the 1945 atomic bombing. She says:

Bombing survivors
“Yes… my grandmother was one of the Urakami Fourth Exile survivors and at that time there were still some of those survivors who were alive… these people still believed, everyone was able to stick at it and get through… Within their testimony, they didn’t talk about their pain.”

Orphaned Ozaki Tōmei adopted a new name after the bombing, as a novice at a Polish monastery in Nagasaki. Normally Japanese monks would adopt the name of a Western saint, but he selected a Japanese saint, Ozaki Tōmei, who is a child martyr of 1597 from Nagasaki.

Ozaki remembered his mother telling him that the 26 martyrs of 1597 were marched directly past his childhood home in the middle of winter on the way to their execution.

The child martyr Ozaki had been separated from his mother and was marched to Nagasaki from Kyoto. Along the way, he was able to write a letter to his mother, in which he reflected on the “transience of the world”.

My informant Ozaki linked his own experience to this boy of 1597, writing:

“The experience of the atomic bombing was exactly like that. Everything in the world is breakable and vanishes. As far as the atom bomb went, there was nothing to be known of reality which was not destroyed.

“Koware-iku sonzai ni tayotte wa naranai. We cannot depend on a life so fragile. Nonetheless, after that, staring at reality, what I saw was the indestructible God’s existence.

“The Lord God who holds all created things, the source of love and life is the God I know. This is also the source of faith.”

Tragic loss
Despite the destruction around him and the tragic loss of his mother, Ozaki, orphaned monk and survivor of the atomic bombing, held on to the faith of his ancestors.

His resilience might be considered one fruit of the missionaries whose ambivalent lives are depicted by Scorsese in Silence. Ozaki turned 88 this year and continues to write prolifically on his blog.

Silence was originally controversial among Christians in Japan for the perceived faithlessness of its priest protagonists. Nevertheless, Scorsese’s film version – which has taken 27 years to make – is eagerly awaited in Nagasaki, where the descendants of the hidden Christians still continue to be a practising community of faith.

The 26 Martyrs’ Museum, just down the road from the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, frequently posts updates on the progress and making of the movie on its blog.

Meanwhile, another interviewee, Matsuzono (a pseudonym) told me:

“Soon Martin Scorsese will release the movie, so the things we locals talk about will spread around the world…”

Gwyn McLelland is an oral historian and associate, Japanese history, Monash University. He is currently completing his PhD dissertation at Monash University on the basis of oral history interviews conducted amongst Catholic survivors of the atomic bombing. He was the beneficiary of a Japan Study Grant from the National Library of Australia in 2015. This article was first published by The Conversation and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.