“All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”
– International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 1.1
“All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources without prejudice to any obligations arising out of international economic co-operation, based upon the principle of mutual benefit, and international law. In no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence.”
– International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 1.2
West Papua has been under military occupation since 1963, when the UN handed control over the province to Indonesia without consulting the indigenous people. I’ve discussed the topic before, but here is a very brief outline of the background to the conflict:
`Prior to 1961, West Papua was a Dutch colony, but in 1952 the Netherlands recognised the West Papuans’ right to self-determination in accordance with Article 73 of the United Nations Charter. Indonesia felt differently and claimed the territory for itself. However, it declined the Netherlands’ invitation to stake its claim before the International Court of Law. A West Papuan government was set up in May 1961, tasked with the preparation of the country for full independence in 1971.
Seventeen days later, Indonesia launched a small paratroop invasion. The invaders were arrested by the West Papuans. In January 1962, Indonesia provoked a small naval battle, but again the fledgling West Papuan state survived. Unfortunately for the West Papuans, however, Indonesia had some powerful friends.
In the `New York Agreement` of 1962, the U.S. forced the Netherlands to surrender West Papua to Indonesia and the Australians to reverse their policy of supporting West Papuan independence. The Agreement, conducted without the presence of a West Papuan representative, effectively transferred control of West Papua to Indonesia.’
Indonesia assumed control of West Papua in 1963. The New York Agreement stipulated that a act of self-determination, involving all adult West Papuan men and women, would be held to determine the final status of West Papua. Indonesia finally got round to organising the referendum in 1969 – its policies in the intervening years were described in 1968 by a U.S. Consular official:
“The Indonesians have tried everything from bombing them [the West Papuans] with B-26s, to shelling and mortaring them, but a continuous state of semi-rebellion persists. Brutalities are undoubtedly perpetrated from time to time in a fruitless attempt at repression.”
Eliezer Bonay, Indonesia’s first governor of West Papua, estimated in 1981 that 30,000 West Papuans were killed in the six years of Indonesian occupation prior to 1969 `Act of Free Choice’. It was obvious to everyone that a free and fair act of self-determination would result in an overwhelming vote for independence. The U.S. ambassador to Indonesia observed (.pdf) at the time that “85 to 90 per cent” of the population was “in sympathy with the Free Papua cause”, whilst a secret 1969 British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) briefing stated,
“Privately, however, we recognise that the people of West Irian (West Papua) have no desire to be ruled by the Indonesians who are of an alien (Javanese) race”.
West Papuan independence was unacceptable to Indonesia and its allies (including the U.S. and Britain). As a 1969 British Foreign Office communication put it,
“The plain fact is that there is no other solution than for Indonesia to keep West Irian; no one is thinking in different terms; and no Government is likely to complain so long as the decencies are carried out.”
Indonesia carried out the “decencies” alright – in George Monbiot’s words, “1,022 men [or a fraction of 1% of West Papua’s population of 800,000] were selected by Indonesian soldiers, taught the words “I want Indonesia”, then lined up at gunpoint. One man who refused to say his lines was shot. Others were threatened with being dropped out of helicopters. This rigorous democratic exercise resulted in a unanimous vote for Indonesian rule”. This so-called “Act of Free Choice” was in reality a complete sham, and moreover it was a sham actively colluded in by the United States, Australia, Britain and the United Nations. Whereas the UN mission to organise and monitor the 1999 elections in East Timor consisted of over 1,000 individuals, including hundreds of police and electoral officials, only 16 UN workers (including administrative staff) were sent to West Papua – a territory many times the size of East Timor – in 1969 to monitor the act of self-determination. As John Saltford writes,
“the comparison demonstrates the immense difference between a genuine attempt to monitor a democratic referendum and one that was not genuine.”
Indeed, no one was under any delusion that Indonesia would permit a free vote – in May 1968, the U.S. Ambassador to Jakarta reported (.pdf) that, `It is the opinion of most observers in the area that Indonesia will not accept independence for West Irian and will not permit a plebiscite which would reach such an outcome.’ An Indonesian member of Parliament declared, “We are going through the motions…But West Irian is Indonesian and must remain Indonesian. We cannot accept any alternative”, and Henry Kissinger advised (.pdf) President Nixon to “avoid” discussing the “act of free choice” on his trip to Indonesia in 1969.
Everyone knew that the “Act of No Choice” (as West Papuans sometimes refer to it) was a fraud. C.V. Narasimhan, the then-UN Under-Secretary General responsible for overseeing the New York Agreement, has described the Act of Free Choice as “a whitewash. The mood at the UN was to get rid of this problem as quickly as possible….nobody gave a thought to the fact that a million people had their fundamental rights trampled.” In July 1969, the U.S. Embassy described (.pdf) the process as “unfolding like a Greek tragedy, the conclusion preordained.” The telegram continued:
“The main protagonist, the GOI [Government of Indonesia], cannot and will not permit any resolution other than the continued inclusion of West Irian in Indonesia. Dissident activity is likely to increase but the Indonesian armed forces will be able to contain and, if necessary, suppress it.”
In other words, West Papua was illegitimately annexed to Indonesia, with the entire international community (bar a few African states) doing nothing as the UN shamefully “took note” of the farcical `plebiscite’ and recognised as legitimate Indonesia’s colonisation. The reason for the international community’s collaboration with Indonesian aggression was expressed bluntly by Robert Kromer, CIA advisor to John F. Kennedy, who explained that,
“A pro-bloc, if not communist Indonesia, is an infinitely greater threat … than Indo possession of a few thousand miles of cannibal land.”
The international community was always going to recognise the result of the act of self-determination regardless of its legitimacy because, as J.M. Sutherland put it in a secret April 1968 internal UK Foreign Office memo, “no other power is likely to conceive it as being in their interests to intervene”. Sutherland continued, “I cannot imagine the US, Japanese, Dutch, or Australian Governments putting at risk their economic and political relations with Indonesia on a matter of principle involving a relatively small number of very primitive people.” According to a representative of the UK mission to the UN in 1969,
“the great majority of United Nations members want to see this question cleared out of the way with the minimum of fuss as soon as possible… the Secretariat, whose influence could be important, appear only too anxious to get shot of the problem as quickly and smoothly as possible.”
The British had long recognised that Indonesia was an important country, both strategically and economically. As the Foreign Office put it in 1958, Indonesia is “a country with a vast population and great potential wealth, and one in which United Kingdom interests are by no means negligible” (Mark Curtis, Unpeople; p. 191). They were not about to risk a valuable relationship with Indonesia over a small, unimportant dispute over a bunch of “primitive” tribespeople. It was important for Britain to keep Indonesia on side, in part because Indonesia itself presented great economic opportunities for Britain and in part because an “unstable” Indonesia threatened Britain’s post-colonial interests in Malaysia. A now-declassified 1964 Foreign Office document called for the “defence” of Western interests in South-East Asia, a “major producer of essential commodities. The region produces nearly 85 per cent of the world’s natural rubber, over 45 per cent of the tin, 65 per cent of the copra and 23 per cent of the chromium ore.” (John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World; p.30)
Likewise, the U.S. was worried that Indonesia might align itself with the Communist bloc (it had just a few years earlier assisted General Suharto in massacring up to a million suspected Communists), and in any case it didn’t want to jeopardise the exclusive 30-year mining license (extended by another 30 years in 1991) Indonesia had sold to U.S. company Freeport-McMoRan to extract West Papua’s valuable natural resources just a few years earlier in 1967. John Pilger writes,
“In November 1967, soon after Suharto had consolidated his seizure of power, the Time-Life Corporation sponsored an extraordinary conference in Geneva. The participants included the most powerful capitalists in the world, led by the banker David Rockefeller. Sitting opposite them were Suharto’s men, known as the “Berkeley mafia”, as several had enjoyed US government scholarships to the University of California at Berkeley. Over three days, the Indonesian economy was carved up, sector by sector. An American and European consortium was handed West Papua’s nickel; American, Japanese and French companies got its forests. However, the prize – the world’s largest gold reserve and third-largest copper deposit, literally a mountain of copper and gold – went to the US mining giant Freeport-McMoRan. On the board is Henry Kissinger, who, as US secretary of state, gave the “green light” to Suharto to invade East Timor”.
The Freeport mining corporation operates Grasberg, the largest single gold deposit in the world and the third largest open-cut copper mine. It is one of the, if not the, biggest single sources of revenue for the Indonesian government, paying generous royalties – which, together with taxes and dividends, totalled $1.6 billion last year – in return for subsidies and protection by the TNI (the Indonesian gangster-army), described by Pilger as “among the world’s most seasoned terrorists”. A joint statement by 12 human rights organisations in March 2003 concluded,
“The payment of money by Freeport to the armed forces and the fact that the armed forces have been able to make use of transnational facilities when violating human rights and committing violence means that the transnationals are themselves directly involved in and contribute towards this violence and these abuses.”
Freeport Indonesia is almost 10% owned by the Indonesian government, and reported revenue of $5.79 billion last year. With this volume of money involved, we should not be surprised when our governments stampede to get a slice of the pie, trampling on human rights and international law in the process.
Fast-forward to today, and the Indonesian occupation of West Papua is still going strong. More than 100,000 West Papuans, or 10% of the population, have been killed, whilst an illegal “transmigration” programme, supported by the World Bank, has resulted in over 750,000 Indonesians, many subsidised, re-settling in West Papua, where they now constitute around 40% of the population, and are the majority in the capital city and many other urban locations. Freeport-McMoRan has been given virtual free rein to resettle indigenous tribes that get in the way of its mining activities – the highland Amungme tribe, in particular, has suffered, with their displacement to the lowlands causing many to die of malaria. Freeport has extensively damaged the West Papuan environment (.pdf):
“The ecology of West Papua is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, with up to 7% of all plant and animal species being found there. Freeport’s mining operation in West Papua has destroyed this environment, which the Amungme and Kamoro hold sacred and subsist on. The mine has taken 120 meters off of the top of a sacred Amungme mountain. Freeport dumps millions of tons of silt-like tailings into the local river system, polluting it with metals and turning a miles-wide lowland river area into a dead, barren landscape. The river is now almost entirely devoid of any life. They pile toxic waste rock thousands of feet high at dumpsites in the surrounding area including at a sacred lake used by the Amungme. Filling valleys with mine waste that leaches copper, acid, and mercury into the ground, they have polluted springheads tribal people miles away use for drinking water. The rainwater run off from these toxic landfills has resulted in even more pollution. Local people have died when Freeport poisoned the water people drink, and the piles of waste have resulted in landslides.”
There is this myth that the Indonesian human rights violations in West Papua stopped with the fall of General Suharto in 1998. In reality, although the situation has improved somewhat, the oppression and the crimes continue. In February, Human Rights Watch reported that at least 18 West Papuans are serving sentences in Indonesian jails in violation of international law for the “crime” of peacefully expressing their opinions by raising the West Papuan flag, or attending meetings on self-determination, etc. etc. Such activities are labelled “treason” or “spreading hatred” by the Indonesian government. Amnesty International reported in 2005 that at least 62 prisoners of conscience have been convicted and sentenced to prison terms in Indonesia since 1998. On December 1 2004 (West Papuan `Independence Day’), some 200 people gathered to peacefully raise the Morning Star flag, a symbol of West Papuan freedom and therefore banned by Indonesia. Indonesian police descended on the crowd, firing rubber bullets and beating people with batons. They arrested and beat Filep Karma and Yusak Pakage, and charged them with treason for having “betrayed” Indonesia by raising the flag. They were convicted in May 2005 to 15 and 10 years in jail respectively. Amnesty International considers the two men to be prisoners of conscience.
In 2002, Amnesty International stated that human rights violations in West Papua are a “daily reality”, whilst in 2006 Human Rights Watch reported,
“[a]n ongoing, low-level armed insurgency in Papua, in the easternmost part of Indonesia, has resulted in crackdowns by Indonesian security forces with ensuing human rights violations. Since 2005, there has been a visible build-up of troops in the province with reports of widespread displacement of civilians, arson, and arbitrary detention in the central highlands region.”
The U.S. State Department summarised Indonesian violations of West Papuan rights in 2004:
“The Government’s human rights record remained poor; although there were improvements in a few areas, serious problems remained. Government agents continued to commit abuses, the most serious of which took place in areas of separatist conflict. Security force members murdered, tortured, raped, beat, and arbitrarily detained civilians and members of separatist movements, especially in Aceh and to a lesser extent in Papua.
Some police officers occasionally used excessive and sometimes deadly force in arresting suspects and in attempting to obtain information or a confession. Retired and active duty military officers known to have committed serious human rights violations occupied or were promoted to senior positions in the Government and the TNI. Prison conditions remained harsh.
The judicial system was corrupt, which contributed to the failure to provide redress to victims of human rights violations or hold perpetrators accountable. Security force violators sometimes used intimidation and bribery to avoid justice. Land disputes generated numerous human rights abuses. These frequently involved forced evictions, some accomplished with lethal force. As in previous years, the Government jailed some peaceful antigovernment protestors for “insulting the President” or “spreading hatred against the Government”…
Komnas HAM [the Indonesian Human Rights Organisation] concluded that military forces tortured villagers and committed other gross human rights violations. The Government did not report any progress in prosecuting those responsible for this or other acts of torture committed in Papua in 2003 or 2002, including the torturing to death of Yanuarius Usi…
In areas of separatist conflict, such as Aceh and Papua, police frequently and arbitrarily detained persons without warrants, charges, or court proceedings…
Although the Papua Special Autonomy Law permits flying a flag symbolizing Papua’s cultural identity, police prohibited the flying of the Papuan Morning Star flag, identified with the armed separatist struggle…
During the year, indigenous people remained subject to widespread discrimination, and there was little improvement in respect for their traditional land rights. Mining and logging activities, many of them illegal, posed significant social, economic, and logistical problems to indigenous communities. The Government failed to stop domestic and multinational companies, often in collusion with the local military and police, from encroaching on indigenous people’s land.”
In recent weeks, large numbers of Indonesian soldiers have been deployed to the Punkak Jaya region of West Papua, causing an estimated 5,000 tribespeople to flee into the jungle. A similar operation was conducted in 2004, with 6,000 West Papuans fleeing their homes, and 23 dying of starvation. Independent human rights NGOs are almost totally banned from West Papua, as are foreign journalists, so it’s often difficult to determine the extent of the atrocities committed by Indonesian forces during the course of operations like these.
In 2001, the Indonesian government negotiated a “Special Autonomy” law which aimed to appease the growing West Papuan drive for independence without actually granting them independence. It allowed West Papuans to exercise democratic rights to a greater extent than previously, and gave them a greater share of the profits of West Papua’s natural resources. Unfortunately, Indonesia never properly implemented it, opting instead to divide the province into three, adopting the age-old strategy of “divide and rule“. Of the extra money (.pdf) that has been given to West Papua, a lot of it “goes back to Jakarta or outside Papua, via individual or institutional means.” According to Rev. Socratez Sofyan Yoman, President of the Fellowship of Baptist Churches of West Papua,
“Special Autonomy has brought only great misfortune and is not very different from the `Act of Free Choice 1969′ (PEPERA 1969). Special Autonomy is PEPERA 1969 Volume II. Accordingly, killings and systematic violence have increased significantly using the excuse of OPM membership and separatism. Violence by the Indonesian military forces has increased. West Papuan people have been pursued, detained, terrorised, intimidated, imprisoned, tortured, raped, killed and disappeared.”
ELSHAM, a leading human rights NGO in Papua, agrees that the Special Autonomy law has not brought significant benefits to the majority of West Papuan people. “During the five years since the enactment of Special Autonomy, there has been no significant change and the human rights situation has only got worse with an increase in the number of violations”, it reports.
Despite West Papua’s valuable natural resources, West Papua is one of Indonesia’s poorest regions, and within the province the indigenous people are gnerally poorer than the migrants. More than 50% of children under five are malnourished, whilst the literacy rate is 44 per cent for women, and 58 per cent for men. The maternal mortality rate is three times greater in West Papua than in the rest of Indonesia.
A 2003 Yale Law School report (.pdf) states,
“Since Indonesia gained control of West Papua, the West Papuan people have suffered persistent and horrible abuses at the hands of the government. The Indonesian military and security forces have engaged in widespread violence and extrajudicial killings in West Papua. They have subjected Papuan men and women to acts of torture, disappearance, rape, and sexual violence, thus causing serious bodily and mental harm. Systematic resource exploitation, the destruction of Papuan resources and crops, compulsory (and often uncompensated) labor, transmigration schemes, and forced relocation have caused pervasive environmental harm to the region, undermined traditional subsistence practices, and led to widespread disease, malnutrition, and death among West Papuans. Such acts, taken as a whole, appear to constitute the imposition of conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the West Papuans. Many of these acts, individually and collectively, clearly constitute crimes against humanity under international law.“[my emphasis]
The paper concluded, “the historical and contemporary evidence set out above strongly suggests that the Indonesian government has committed proscribed acts with the intent to destroy the West Papuans as such, in violation of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”. In other words, Indonesia has committed genocide against the West Papuan people.
International complicity in the occupation of West Papua continues today. The United States has consistently provided Indonesia with vast quantities of arms – roughly $1.25 billion’s worth since 1975, when Indonesia invaded East Timor with the approval of the Ford administration and proceeded to massacre 100,000 people (out of a population of 700,000) in five years. 90% of Indonesia’s military arsenal was made in the U.S. Since the killing of 271 unarmed and peaceful democracy demonstrators in 1991, the U.S. has imposed various degrees of military sanctions on Indonesia. A total ban on defence exports to the country was imposed after the killing spree in 1999, which left over a thousand East Timorese dead and destroyed 70% of the country’s infrastructure. The Bush administration ended the ban last year, calling Indonesia a “strategic partner”, despite Indonesia’s ongoing human rights abuses, and despite the fact that not one officer responsible for the 1999 massacre has spent a single day in jail.
Australia has also cooperated extensively with brutal Indonesian governments. The Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) briefly summarises Australian involvement:
“The Australians have long been complicit in providing diplomatic and military support to Indonesia’s regime, partly due to their desire to obtain allies against Communist influence in South-east Asia from Vietnam and China, and partly due to their desire to exploit the rich natural resources around Timor and the Indonesian archipelago. The economic motive for Australia has become more significant in recent years as China’s increasing energy shortages have made the need to ensure protection of such resources for Australian exploitation more urgent.
Until recently, Australia had always turned a blind eye to the brutal Indonesian actions in East Timor. In January 1978 Malcolm Fraser’s government gave de facto recognition to Indonesia’s annexation, allowing drilling in the oilfields of Challis and Jabiru in the Timor Gap to begin. In 1985 the Labour government under Bob Hawke recognised the integration of East Timor into Indonesia, and in 1989 Australia and Indonesia signed a treaty dividing the Timor area into zones with exploration rights allocated to each country. Between 1986 and 1991 the Australian government gleaned AUS$31 million from the sale of permits to oil companies to exploit natural resources in the region.
In May 1997, Australia and Indonesia agreed a $1 billion military package to protect the Natuna gasfield in the South China Sea, including provision for airborne early-warning systems, maritime patrol aircraft, frigates, SAMs and air-surveillance radar. The Australians had already sold the Indonesians 20 Nomad maritime patrol aircraft which arrived in January 1997.
In November 1997 military ties between the two countries were increased with the expansion of the exchange scheme of Indonesian and Australian officers for training purposes, as well as the holding of joint naval exercises with the Germans in the same month. The IISS listed Australian military aid to Indonesia in 1996 as worth US$4 million, in 1997 it was worth US$4.5 million and in 1998 US$3.5 million.”
The Australian government has explicitly stated many times that it respects Indonesia’s “territorial integrity” (i.e. it respects Indonesia’s right to steal West Papuan land and abuse West Papuan rights), and last year the two countries signed a security treaty, which involved “significant military-to-military co-operation, intelligence sharing and joint naval and surveillance patrols. Ties between armed forces will be strengthened by exchange and training programs.”
Britain, too, is heavily complicit in Indonesian war crimes. As historian Mark Curtus points out, “Britain has extensive business interests in West Papua, with Rio Tinto, the world’s largest mining company, set to own 40 per cent of the Freeport copper and gold mine, the world’s largest, and BP set to initiate a large gas project in the territory.” (Mark Curtis, Web of Deceit; p. 197) Hence, in June 2001 British ambassador Richard Gozney made a statement supporting Indonesian military operations in West Papua, since they would ensure protection for a BP site there. Hence, Defence Minister Geoff Hoon said that the Indonesian government should “respond appropriately to separatist movements”. Hence, Tony Blair pledged British support for Indonesia’s “territorial integrity” in February 2000. (Ibid.) Britain continues to sell BAE Hawk aircraft to Indonesia, in the full knowledge that they may well be used to perpetrate war crimes or human rights abuses. Indonesia has used Hawk aircraft in the past to oppress the people of West Papua, Aceh and East Timor, but that apparently means nothing to the arms dealers in Whitehall.
We should not be at all surprised at this overt support of Indonesian oppression. Britain was complicit in General Suharto’s murder of up to a million suspected Communists in 1965, and was a major arms supplier to Indonesia throughout its genocide in East Timor, in which 200,000 people (or a third of the population) were slaughtered. Britain sold General Suharto – described variously as “one of our best and most valuable friends” by Margaret Thatcher, “our kind of guy” by Bill Clinton, “the man of the world of the second half of this century” by then-Australian Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer (John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World; pp. 22-3) and the man who oversaw “one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century” by the CIA – Scorpion tanks, Heckler and Koch machine guns, armoured cars and water cannons, as well as Hawk aircraft, knowing full well the repression and massacres he was committing with them.
Ironically, during Labour’s first year in government, Britain was the world’s leading supplier of arms to Indonesia, when, despite the late Robin Cook’s “ethical foreign policy” speech, Blair used the Official Secrets Act to approve 11 arms deals with Indonesia. During the first three years of the Labour Government, 83% of Indonesia’s arms imports were from the UK. In 2003, the government approved a 20-fold increase in arms sales to Indonesia, despite guidelines preventing weapons sales to countries where they could be used for internal repression (as they undoubtedly have been in Aceh and West Papua). Here’s what the U.S. State Department had to say about Indonesia that same year:
“The Government’s human rights record remained poor, and it continued to commit serious abuses. Security force members murdered, tortured, raped, beat, and arbitrarily detained civilians and members of separatist movements…
In the easternmost province of Papua, where separatist sentiment has been strong for decades, there was no improvement in the human rights situation. The most serious violations took place in the Central Highlands, where at least one, and perhaps as many as 10, extrajudicial killings occurred, in addition to numerous acts of torture and politically motivated arson.”
In December 2004, the British government finally acknowledged that the 1,022 West Papuan “handpicked representatives” in the `Act of Free Choice’ were “largely coerced into declaring for inclusion in Indonesia”, but of course they’ve known this for decades. The 1969 British FCO briefing, cited above, reported that “the process of consultation did not allow a genuinely free choice to be made”. Bizarrely, despite accepting that the right of self-determination has so far been denied to the West Papuan people, it remains British government policy to support the Indonesian occupation. As Baroness Royall put it in a recent House of Lords debate,
“the UK does not support independence for Papua. Like the vast majority of other international players, we respect Indonesia’s territorial integrity and have never supported Papuan independence.”
At least she’s honest. Lord Harries of Pentregarth explained the reason for this morally bankrupt stance:
“A number of powerful countries have strong economic ties to Indonesia, not least in the arms trade, and will be only too anxious not to make a fuss about this matter, as they were anxious not to make a fuss about it at the time of the so-called “Act of Free Choice” in 1969. We are, of course, one of those countries.”
Britain has continued to fuel and facilitate Indonesia’ oppression of the people of West Papua and Aceh, even as it claims to be fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan to “liberate” their people from tyranny. This reveals a lot about the sincerity of the official humanitarian justifications for the invasion of Iraq. Supposedly, it was necessary to launch a full-scale military invasion, with a massive human cost, in order to save the Iraqi people from the Saddam Hussein’s repression. In contrast, all it would take to free the West Papuans from Indonesian oppression is to cease participating in it. Apparently, however, halting arms sales to Indonesia is neither “realistic” nor “practical” (then-Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, speaking in July 1997), unlike the hugely expensive and strategically disastrous invasion of Iraq.
Both Britain and the U.S. were complicit in Saddam’s genocidal campaign against the Kurds, Suharto’s genocide of the East Timorese and in the genocide of close to a million Iraqis through the post-Gulf war decade of sanctions. Today, we continue to facilitate the genocidal Indonesian occupation of West Papua. Continuing Western complicity in the oppression of the West Papuan people speaks volumes about the true extent of our supposed commitment to human rights, democracy and freedom.
Cross-posted at The Heathlander