As part of an Indonesian-backed disinformation and troll campaign against West Papuan pro-independence advocates, a Facebook page has emerged making bitter and slanderous attacks on campaigners, Papuan exiles and media people in the Pacific region.

Among the targets for this page — dubbed “View Information”, purportedly based in the Vanuatu capital of Port Vila — are Pacific Council of Churches general secretary Reverend James Bhagwan over a “false campaign” on Papua, and Australian-based Indonesian human rights lawyer Veronica Koman who is accused of being “an imposter”.

Other targets include London-based United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) president Benny Wenda for allegedly “masterminding the Wamena riots” in 2019, Canberra-based youth advocate and activist Ronny Kareni for “cultural mockery” and New Zealand academic and journalist David Robie.

• READ MORE: West Papuan rebels condemn NZ for ‘collusion’ with Indonesia, risks to hostage pilot safety
• Papuan church leaders call on Jokowi to stop military ops over NZ pilot
• ‘I’m alive, healthy . . . stop the bombs,’ says kidnapped NZ pilot in new West Papua video
• Other West Papua reports

I am accused of “continuously meeting” Benny Wenda to discuss issues relating to Papua and of “ignorance and prejudice”.

True, I did meet Benny when we hosted him at the Pacific Media Centre during his New Zealand visits in 2013 and 2017 and our team interviewed him at the time. Indeed, he was interviewed by several journalists and appeared on a number of programmes such as RNZ Pacific.

He does an extremely impressive job as a tireless and impassioned advocate for his indigenous people and independence.

One of the regular themes of the View Information page is the plight of the New Zealand pilot, Philip Mehrtens, being held hostage since February 7 by pro-independence fighters of the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB-OPM).

Broker negotiations
Originally the fighters wanted New Zealand to broker negotiations with the Indonesian government in Jakarta, but the military and political authorities have refused to talk, endangering the life of the Susi Air pilot.

“Philip Mark Mehrtens is a human being and deserve[s] medical attentions [sic] as we do not know under what conditions he is living in. This sepratist [sic] are abusing his freedom and holding him against his consent and will,” says View Information.

“Isn’t this an abuse of human rights?

“[These] separatists are abusing his right to freedom from being held as a captive for unreasonable grounds. He is treated as some kind of product in a grocery store.”

About the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC), View Information page claims: “PCC considers Papuans as [a] product or commodity in grocery stores.” That phrase again!

“PCC has become a parody conquistador for the religious groups in the Pacific and a sign of betrayal to the Papuans.

“Papuans are this cheap that the PCC has to sell them for money.

“Say no to PCC before it is too late.”

Riots ‘mastermind’
About the 2019 rioting in Wamena and across the region characterised by advocates of an independent West Papua as the “Papuan Rising” and likened to the Arab Spring: “The Papua Extremist Group (ULMWP) led by Benny Wenda is the mastermind behind the West Papua riots.

“They were designed a riot exactly one day before the UN General Assembly (24/9) began with student access campaign.”

Like most of the other claims on this FB page, there is not a single source given in any attempt to back up the hostile statements. Genuine information about the ULMWP is available here.

About the United Nations, View Information claims: “The UN has never declared there is genocide taking place in Papua or West Papua. It has addressed issues of civilians being killed by the armed separatists in Nduga Regency.”

This another lie. The UN has reported about allegations of “slow genocide” in Papua in 2014 and on other occasions, and last year UN special rapporteurs reported on the “shocking abuses against Indigenous Papuans”. There have been countless such reports and a 2018 agreement by Jakarta for the UN Commissioner for Human Rights to visit Papua to make an independent report has never materialised.

A feature of this propaganda page is the wild and sweeping statements and allegations without a shred of evidence. No information about the “publishers” or “writers” is divulged, although it claims to provide “factual, balanced, quality and fair reporting”.

Jakarta causing confusion
Jakarta’s misinformation campaign that has been causing confusion throughout the world has been stepped up in recent months.

“Indonesian intelligence has allocated considerable funds globally, especially in Oceania, to target and discredit any person or institution sharing information about the genocide in West Papua,” says Yamin Kogoya, a regular contributor and commentator for Asia Pacific Report.

“The same thing is happening inside West Papua – the spreading of fake, false information often under the names of OPM, ULMWP and other groups advocating for a free West Papua.

“The internationalisation of West Papua’s issue has been Jakarta’s primary concern, knowing how they stole it — West Papua’s sovereignty — 60 years ago.”

• Report the propaganda View Information page to Facebook
  

Lawyer and human rights activist Veronica Koman has spoken out about the worsening health of Papuan activist Victor Yeimo who has been detained at the Mobile Brigade command headquarters detention centre (Rutan Mako Brimob) for the last three months, reports Suara Papua.

“Victor Yeimo will not be safe if he remains behind [the bars] of a colonial prison. Colonialism will continue to demand political sacrifices,” wrote Koman on her Facebook on Monday.

Koman said that Yeimo’s imprisonment is part of the colonisation of the Papuan people’s dignity which had been going on for decades.

• READ MORE: Other Victor Yeimo reports

“The imprisonment of Victor is a problem of trampling on the West Papuan people’s dignity: The West Papuan people aren’t allowed to fight racism, the West Papuan people aren’t allowed to speak about self-determination — even in a peaceful manner,” she wrote.

Koman believes that moving Yeimo, who is in a weak condition, to Abepura prison is the same as moving him from one “tiger’s den” to another.

“The Abepura prison is over-capacity, so it’s a nest of covid-19. Because of this, [we must] unite in the demand: Release Victor Yeimo right now!” said Koman.

Yeimo, who is the West Papua National Committee (KNPB) international spokesperson and spokesperson for the Papua People’s Petition (PRP), was arrested by police in the Tanah Hitam area of Abepura in Jayapura city on May 9.

He was detained at the Papua regional police headquarters before being transferred to the Brimob detention centre.

Since his arrest there have been ongoing calls for his release from the charges against him. The charges and lack of access to lawyers and family are considered not to be in accordance with the law.

Because of this, the government of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo is being urged to immediately release Yeimo along with all Papuan students and people from prisons in Indonesia.

“Victor Yeimo is not the perpetrator of racism. He is in fact a victim of racism. He was not involved in the [August-September 2019] riots in Jayapura city.

“Why after three months is he still being held at the Papua Brimob? His health is deteriorating. We are asking that he be released immediately from prison,” said Sam Gobay, who is on the management board of the Mee ethnic group traditional council in Mimika regency.

From information received by Gobay, Yeimo’s health had deteriorated drastically.

“There is no access to healthcare for Victor Yeimo. He’s ill, he’s not being allowed treatment. He also isn’t being given food. All access is restricted.

“What is the plan for Victor Yeimo? We’re asking for Victor’s immediate release”, he said.

The arrest of detention of Yeimo is seen as part of curbing democratic space and even an effort to criminalise Papuan activists.

“What kind of legal basis is there for the state to discriminate against Victor Yeimo. He is not a perpetrator of racism, let alone labeling him as committing makar [treason, rebellion, sedition].

“Everyone knows that Victor Yeimo was not involved in the demonstrations which ended in riots in Jayapura city,” said Gobay.

“The Papuan people are urging Bapak [Mr] Jokowi to immediately urge the Indonesian police chief and the Papuan regional police chief to release Victor Yeimo from the Brimob detention centre,” said Gobay.

A similar statement was made by KNPB general chairperson Agus Kossay in a press release on Monday.

The KNPB is urging the Papuan regional police and the Papua chief public prosecutor to immediately release Yeimo. According to Kossay, Yeimo had been detained without legal basis and his health continued to deteriorate.

“For the sake of humanity and the authority of the Indonesian state, immediately release Victor Yeimo and all Papuan independence activists who have been arrested without [legal] grounds, evidence or witnesses. The Papuan people are not the perpetrators of racism,” said Kossay.

KNPB spokesperson Ones Suhuniap, meanwhile, said that if Yeimo was not released then the KNPB would call on all Papuan people and all KNPB activists to get themselves arrested by police.

He also believes that the Papua regional police and the prosecutor’s office have violated Indonesian law.

“Victor Yeimo must be released for the sake of the law because based on the KUHP [Criminal Code] the 60 day period of detention has already passed, but the addition of 30 more days detention for Victor Yeimo violates the law itself,” said Suhuniap.

Earlier, Yeimo’s lawyer Emanuel Gobay, who is from the Papua Law Enforcement and Human Rights Coalition (KPHHP), urged the Papuan and Jayapura chief prosecutors to respond to their call to transfer Yeimo from the Brimob detention centre to Abepura prison.

This call, according to Gobay, is based on the fact that Yeimo had been incarcerated at the Brimob detention centre since May 10 and his rights as a suspect had not been met.

“When the prosecutor questioned Victor Yeimo in relation to matters that he wished to convey, Victor asked to be transferred from the Rutan Mako Brimob to the Abepura prison in consideration of meeting his rights as a suspect.

“Victor argued that since the start of his detention at the Papua regional police Mako Brimob he has been neglected because of the Mako Brimob’s standard operating procedures. Also because of his psychological condition as a result of being left alone in a stuffy cell which could endanger his health,” explained Gobay.

Unfortunately, said the director of the Papua Legal Aid Foundation (LBH), the prosecutor failed to respond professionally to Yeimo’s request.

“The Papua chief public prosecutor [must] immediately instruct the Papua chief public prosecutor supervising prosecutor acting as the Jayapura chief public prosecutor supervising prosecutor to examine the prosecutor who received the dossier of the suspect in the name of Victor F Yeimo which was not conducted in accordance with the instructions of Article 8 Paragraph (3) b of Law Number 8/1981,” he said.

Also, the head of the Papua representative office of the Ombudsman of the Republic of Indonesia has been asked to supervise the Jayapura district attorney’s office in its implementation of Yeimo’s rights as a suspect which is guaranteed under Law Number 8/1981.

This call was made after the Papua regional police investigators handed Yeimo’s dossier over to the Jayapura district attorney’s office on August 6.

Translated by James Balowski for IndoLeft News. Abridged slightly due to repetition and for clarity. The original title of the article was “Ini Pendapat Veronica Koman Terhadap Kondisi Victor Yeimo”.

It is an unlikely combination: the white stars of the West Papuan and Myanmar flags, side by side.

“West Papua Stands with Myanmar,” the sign said, posted by Indonesian human rights lawyer Veronica Koman. In another poignant picture, a small group of West Papuans stand at Simora Bay at the port town of Kaimana holding a sign that reads: “We Stand With Myanmar.”

Popular activist Twitter account @AllianceMilkTea responds: “And solidarity with you West Papua!”

• READ MORE: Asia Pacific Report articles on West Papua

The latest member of the Milk Tea Alliance is a little-known region in ASEAN, south of the Pacific Ocean and bordered by the Halmahera, Ceram and Banda seas.

West Papua is better known for its Raja Ampat or “Four Kings” Islands, the majestic archipelago which contains the richest marine biodiversity on earth. But, like other members of the Milk Tea Alliance, it is a region scarred by subjugation and tyranny.

While the brutality of Min Aung Hlaing’s army is horrifyingly public, West Papuans protest killings and an independence movement that has largely been erased from history.

In December 2020, Benny Wenda, a political exile in Britain, declared himself head of West Papua’s first government-in-exile under the Papua Merdeka “Free West Papua” movement. That same month, the United Nations Human Rights Office called on all sides – West Papuan separatists and the Indonesian security forces – to de-escalate violence in the territory that has seen the deaths of activists, church workers and Indonesian officials.

As the Papua Merdeka campaign picks back up, this article surveys the history and recent state violence in the region. Flickers of a “Papuan Spring” seem faint in a March that has emboldened Southeast Asian dictators. But that the voices of a region long suppressed are being heard is an achievement in and of itself.

fascinating (and inspiring) article on the Milk Tree Alliance https://t.co/tLSVWCYz9m

— Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) October 15, 2020

History of West Papuan independence claims
History is always a fraught tool in the battle between states and their challengers. Indonesian claims to control over West Papua date back to the “restoration” of the region to the Republic of Indonesia in a pivotal 1969 referendum, the ironically named “Act of Free Choice” (AFC).

Central to the AFC’s controversy was the musyawarah (consultation) system, agreed upon by the Foreign Ministers of Indonesia and Netherlands, which decreed that the vote for West Papuan “restoration” would be conducted by a select group of representatives rather than the entire West Papuan population.

The AFC was overseen by representatives from the UN Secretary-General’s team, giving the Indonesian government its desired stamp of international legitimacy.

Yet, as studies produced by the University of Sydney show, since 1963 President Suharto’s military government worked to deliberately quash expressions of a unique Papuan identity. Shows of Papuan culture were declared “subversion”, West Papuan nationalists were placed under detention, and representatives were carefully selected for what the musyawarah.

The script is familiar to any observer of Thailand’s equally controversial 2016 “constitutional referendum”. As an AFP correspondent noted in 1969, “Indonesian troops and officials are waging a widespread campaign of intimidation to force the Act of Free Choice in favor of the Republic.”

President Suharto declared that voting against the AFC was an act of treason. Eventually, 1026 voters were chosen of a population of 815,906, all of whom voted unanimously for integration.

In the aftermath of the AFC vote, West Papua was immediately declared a Military Operation Zone. West Papuan historians like John Rumbiak highlighted the military and police repression that soon followed, especially against activists protesting the appropriation of traditional land and forests by mining firms and timber estates.

Thousands of troops were deployed in response to growing protest movements in the 1990s, with planned “black operations” against independence leaders.

Ever since, West Papua has been caught in a cycle of violence. Indonesian armed forces accuse guerillas of inciting separatist violence, justifying their crackdowns on various villages.

Under Indonesian law, raising the West Papuan flag carries a sentence of up to 15 years in prison. Separatists like the armed West Papua National Liberation Army continue to wage a low-key insurgency in their quest for self-rule.

According to rights group Human Rights and Peace in Papua, 60,000 West Papuans have been displaced in the conflict.

“Our independent nation was stolen in 1963 by the Indonesian government,” Wenda said in an interview with the New York Times, “We are taking another step toward reclaiming our legal and moral rights.”

Wenda, like the authors of the University of Sydney study, argues that there is a “silent genocide” taking place in West Papua, as thousands of Indonesians are killed by Indonesian state actors in their battle against West Papuan separatists.

A 2004 Yale Law School report similarly concluded that “the Indonesian government has committed proscribed acts with the intent to destroy the West Papuans,” including subjecting Papuan men and women to “acts of torture, disappearance, rape, and sexual violence.”

This is compounded systematic resource exploitation, compulsory (and often unpaid) labor, as well as the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS and malnutrition.

West Papuan claims to independence date back to 1961, according to then Papua People’s Congress leader Theys Hiyo Eluay.

Eluay, later murdered by Indonesian Kopassus soldiers, insisted that Papua had never been culturally and politically integrated with Indonesia – a claim seemingly reinforced by the ethnic difference of the majority Papua population that inhabit the region.

In the narrative both Eluay and Wenda have shared, West Papua declared sovereignty on 1 December 1961 as the Dutch gave up claims to Indonesia.

“This same vision of West Papua’s history and sovereignty can be found among ordinary Papuan people,” writes academic Nino Viartasiwi.

Papuan Spring? The 2019 Uprising
West Papuans’ newfound alliance with the Milk Tea Alliance is part of its renewed attempt to bring international attention to the violence they have faced at the hands of Indonesian security forces for half a century.

Last year, a #PapuanLives Matter campaign spotlighted the death of a 19-year old student at the hand of security forces as part of the global focus on police brutality. Activists highlighted the racialized elements of the West Papuan struggle.

In the words of UK-born Indonesian actor and activist Hannah Al Rashid, quoted in The Guardian: “I stand in solidarity with Papuan Lives Matter, because…I have observed the way in which people of darker skin [in Indonesia] have been treated unfairly.”

These 2020-2021 movements are smaller resurrections of the larger 2019 West Papua Uprising, or simply, ‘The Uprising.’ From August to September 2019, protests swept 22 towns in West Papua and 3 cities in Indonesia in response to an incident in which Indonesian soldiers shouted ‘monkey’ repeatedly at West Papuan students in Malang.

In response, over 6000 members of the Indonesian security forces were deployed to quell the Uprising. 61 civilians – including 35 indigenous West Papuans – died in the crackdown.

According to TAPOL, a campaigning platform for human rights, peace and democracy in Indonesia, 22,800 civilians were displaced during the Uprising.

The cycle of resistance and crackdown is not new to Southeast Asia. West Papuans face the additional struggle of opposing a security force that they do not claim as their own, but it is an experience the Karen, Kachin, Chin or Wa peoples in Myanmar currently share.

Their solidarity with the Milk Tea Alliance is fitting, drawing on a movement that has built regional solidarity and momentum for other struggles against authoritarianism.

With any luck, the unlikely solidarity across the two starred flags may bring the West Papuan struggle back into the international spotlight. If not, the conflict will continue in the shadows, as it has done since the dawn of the 21st century.

Jasmine Chia is a writer and contributor to the Thai Enquirer.