West Papua Tensions on the Rise

On March 2, a group of technicians working for Telkomsel, Indonesia’s largest telecommunications provider, were dispatched to fix a cellphone tower in a rugged tract of Puncak Regency, a thickly forested part of Papua province in the country’s far west. It was there, while fixing the tower’s transceiver, that the group was ambushed by separatist rebels. Eight of the technicians were killed, and one managed to flee the scene.

According to some reports, credit for the attack was later claimed by the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB in its Indonesian-language acronym), the military wing of the Free Papua Organization (or OPM), which has been waging a struggle for independence in Papua and West Papua provinces since the 1960s. The Indonesian authorities pointed the finger in the same direction. According to the Associated Press, Papua military spokesperson Colonel Aqsha Erlangga described the attack as “an extraordinary crime by the armed separatist criminal group amid the government’s efforts to bring economic development” to the remote region.

The attack reflected the worsening security situation in Papua, which has involved a mutual escalation of the conflict on both sides. Last month, three independent United Nations experts detailed instances of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, torture, and the enforced displacement of at least 5,000 Papuans between April and November 2021. They added that “urgent action is needed to end ongoing human rights violations against indigenous Papuans.”

Since President Suharto’s New Order annexed Papua and West Papua following a flawed referendum in 1969, the region has seen a simmering separatist conflict. The Indonesian state’s attempts to quash the OPM and its insurgency have for years resulted in extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, restrictions on movement and freedom of expression, and even drawn accusations of engineering a “slow-motion genocide.” The U.N. experts claimed that an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 people have been internally displaced in Papua since December 2018, when TPNBP fighters killed 16 laborers working on the Trans-Papua Highway, which transects the rugged but resource-rich regions of the Papuan highlands.

The killing of the Telkomsel workers is just the latest indication that Papuan rebels are not just targeting members of the Indonesian armed forces but also those building the infrastructure that is extending the state’s presence into hitherto remote parts of highland Papua. In his 2020 book “The Road,” Australian journalist John Martinkus examined how the 4,300-kilometer Trans-Papua mega-highway has become a flashpoint for a number of long-running concerns about Indonesia’s governance of the region.

These concerns include environmental destruction, the presence of Indonesian troops, and the arrival of migrants from other parts of Indonesia, which have dramatically shifted the region’s demographic balance. In a 2018 report, researchers from James Cook University concluded that the construction of the highway would likely accelerate degradation of Papua’s forests and increase social conflicts.

Another pressing issue is the activities of domestic and foreign mining companies, whose operations the Trans-Papua highway is in large part designed to facilitate. The most prominent example is the gargantuan Grasberg gold and copper mine in Puncak Jaya Regency, which is majority-owned by the American mining firm Freeport McMoRan.

Grasberg has had concrete impacts on local populations, such as the environmental effects of waste and chemical effluents from the mine, but in a wider sense it also symbolizes the stripping of Papuan resources for the benefit of foreign shareholders and the Indonesian state, only a small amount of which is reinvested in Papua. According to The Guardian, Grasberg – one of the world’s biggest gold mines, and its third-largest copper mine – is now Indonesia’s biggest source of tax revenue, with reserves worth an estimated $100 billion. At the same time, poverty rates in Papua are the highest in Indonesia, as are its rates of infant, child, and maternal mortality. Literacy levels are among the lowest.

In a briefing published late last month, Amnesty International described the similar tensions that are beginning to surround Wabu Block, a considerable deposit of gold ore in Intan Jaya Regency, which is located in rough proximity to Grasberg. Since at least February 2020, the government has expressed its intention to develop mining activities in Wabu Block, whose deposits are collectively about the size of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.

But according to the London-based rights group, this all takes place in the context of a rapidly deteriorating political and security climate that the mining operation will almost certainly inflame. Amnesty’s report claims that Intan Jaya, which borders Puncak in the western region of the Papuan uplands, has become a  “hotspot for conflict and repression” since October 2019, when members of an armed pro-independence group killed three motorcycle taxi drivers, whom they accused of being spies. 

As in Puncak, Intan Jaya has in the two years since seen an “alarming build-up of security forces” in the area, which has been matched by increased armed clashes and human rights violations. Based on interviews with 31 people, including Indigenous Papuans, local authorities, human rights defenders, and representatives of civil society and religious organizations, the Amnesty report claims that Papuans have been subject to increasing restrictions on freedom of movement as well as routine beatings and arrests, while security forces have allegedly carried out 12 unlawful killings.

The development of Wabu Block has long been opposed by communities living in the vicinity. As one community member told the rights group, “We don't want and don't allow anyone to mine gold in Wabu Block because we know that, if there is mining, we will have no land for gardening; livestock will not get fresh fruit directly from the forest; and even our grandchildren will lose customary land.”

In the context of the broader conflict, a loss of land and livelihoods is very likely to worsen the already febrile political situation. “By disregarding the needs, desires and traditions of Indigenous Papuans, the planned development of Wabu Block risks aggravating a rapidly deteriorating human rights situation,” Usman Hamid, the executive director of Amnesty International Indonesia, said in a statement accompanying the report’s release. “Simply put, Wabu Block could be a recipe for disaster.” 

The Indonesian government has shown few indications of heeding this or any criticisms about its economic activities in Papua, let alone reconsidering the broader contours of how it governs the region. Having decreed that those resisting its rule are “terrorists,” the increasing penetration of the Indonesian state spells a period of increased tension and the continuation of one of the world’s longest-running, and least understood, conflicts.