West Papua Weekly update⋅January 22, 2016

US ambassador concerned about West Papua abuses

Radio New Zealand

Fresh from a trip to West Papua, the United States Ambassador to Indonesia reportedly expressed concern about human rights abuses in the country’s …

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Plan to set up West Papua office here

Solomon Star

A member of the Solomon Islands Solidarity Group for West Papua Lily Chekana told the Sunday Star an office space was already allocated for West …

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Radio New Zealand

US signals concern about West Papua forests

Radio New Zealand

The US Ambassador to Indonesia has visited West Papua and indicated American interest in helping to keep the endangered forests of Papua region …

US concerned about keeping Papuan forests intact – Radio New Zealand

Britain supports Jokowi`s efforts to speed up development in Papua – ANTARA

Full Coverage

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The Australian (blog)

A decade on, asylum-seekers’ struggle for West Papua

The Australian (blog)

Under cover of darkness, 43 West Papuan asylum-seekers clambered aboard a dugout canoe at midnight. The cue to flee Indonesian persecution in …

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Pressenza International Press Agency

Free West Papua – we testify

Pressenza International Press Agency

It contains the voices of many of the people of West Papua Jason* has collaborated with and is in part based on a similar testimony developed for the …

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West Papuans testify

On Line opinion

We have come to testify. There is much that we want the world to know. We want you to travel with us to the remote places of Papua-Wamena, Paniai, …

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Radio New Zealand

MSG Chair to facilitate Indo-Papua discussion

Radio New Zealand

… Liberation Movement for West Papua. West Papua has seen a low-level separatist war since Jakarta took over the former Dutch colony in the 1960s.

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Abbott and Turnbull make Howard look compassionate

Crikey (registration)

The controversial move angered Indonesia and was seen as a gesture of support by the Australian government for West Papua’s independence …

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Constitutional Court to Issue Rulings on Regional Election Disputes

Jakarta Globe

… (South Kalimantan), South Halmahera (North Maluku), Sula Islands (North Maluku), Memberamo Raya (Papua) and Bintuni Bay (West Papua).

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One Papua New Guinea

PNG to help Tonga rebuild Teufaiva Stadium & High Performance Center

One Papua New Guinea

In the bilateral dialogue, the topics of West Papua, Climate Change, Pacific Regional Cooperation, and strengthening diplomatic ties were discussed.

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WEB

Bali and West Papua

Blurb

Buy Bali and West Papua book by author Joan Hunting. Preview and learn more about this self-published Travel book.

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Filed under: Articles, Uncategorized, ambush, features, public opinion, TNI Terror

Ambush and Arre​st of KNPB in Timika​, West Papua​

From: “Victor F. Yeimo”
Date: 19 October 2012 1:21:28 PM AEDT
To: undisclosed recipients: ;
Subject: Ambush and Arrest of KNPB in Timika, West Papua
Reply-To: “Victor F. Yeimo”

Dear people in the world,

I’m writing this letter under the threat of ambush and arbitrary arrests by Indonesian Police and Detachment 88.

This down morning (19/10) at 5.00 A.M (local time), 5 members of KNPB, including KNPB chairman of Timikia Region, Steven Itlay and the vice chairman of West Papua National Parliament in Timika, Romario Yatipai already being arrested by Dethacement 88 and Police without any clear reason. They were ambushed while sleeping and treated like terrorists.

This crackdown is happening while KNPB is preparing peaceful demo to express the right of self determination and to support the meeting of International Parliamentarians for West Papua [IPWP] at Parliament House London on next October 23 this week.

Please be announce that my people of West Papua is under the threat of terror due to the maintaining the struggle of independence. We need international pressure on the emergency situation in West Papua. We need international media to monitor all the Indonesian propaganda to eliminate struggle movement with the terrorist issue -as i said that KNPB is now under my leadership never had any plan or program to make acts of terror with bomb as Indonesia is now use that issue to degrade our peaceful struggle.

Thank you

Sincerely yours,

————————-
Victor Yeimo
Chairman of KNPB

Filed under: State-Terrorism, ambush, Human Rights, KNPB

Four dead in separatist unrest in Indonesia: police

Suspected separatist rebels killed four people including an army officer in Indonesia’s restive Papua province on Monday, the first such attack in almost four months, police said.

Papuan activists protesters in Jakarta. Suspected separatist rebels have killed four people including an army officer in Indonesia’s restive Papua province, the first such attack in almost four months.

The unidentified attackers blocked a road near the provincial capital Jayapura, opened fire on passing vehicles and then attacked the shocked passengers with machetes, police said.

An army officer and three others were killed, while seven were injured, Papua provincial police spokesman Wachyono told reporters.

“According to intelligence information, the Morning Star flag was found thrust into the ground by the roadside,” he added, referring to the outlawed flag of Papuan independence.

Jayapura police chief Imam Setiawan said authorities suspected the pre-dawn attack was the work of the rebel Free Papua Movement (OPM), which has been fighting for independence for decades.

But Papuan Customary Council chairman Forkorus Yaboisembut, a community leader, said he believed the police or military were responsible.

“This is the work of some other group that seeks to discredit the OPM. I suspect the police or military could be behind this,” he told AFP.

The attack came a day after election-related mayhem left 17 people dead in Puncak district, hundreds of kilometres (miles) southwest of Jayapura. Police said the two incidents were not related.

Armed with machetes, rocks and arrows, mobs of people affiliated to rival candidates for the job of district chief clashed in the remote town of Illaga, local police chief Alex Korwa said.

“We’ve deployed dozens of police and military to secure the area. The situation is tense but under control,” he said, adding that investigations were ongoing.

The recently created district, which is only accessible by plane, is scheduled to hold its first local elections on November 9.

The ambush near Jayapura was the first of its kind since April, when two people were killed and two were injured in separate incidents involving vehicles belonging to US mining giant Freeport McMoRan.

An Australian employee of Freeport and a local security guard were shot dead in July 2009 on a road near the company’s operations in Mimika district.

The Freeport mine sits on some of the world’s richest gold reserves and is the largest single taxpayer to the Indonesian government. It has also paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to military and police officers in Papua.

US diplomatic cables released by anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks last year said the Indonesian military allegedly ran a “virtually autonomous governmental entity within the province”, with links to illegal logging.

Pro-independence militants have waged a long-running insurgency against Indonesian rule in Papua.

The rebels claim the process by which Indonesia annexed Papua in 1969 was illegitimate, and accuse Jakarta of exploitation and oppression.

Indonesia rejects the allegations and has tried to address Papuan concerns by granting the region special autonomy.

Published: 1/08/2011 at 11:32 AM
http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/asia/249929/papuan-rebel-chief-denies-deadly-ambush

Filed under: Campaigns, ambush, war in tingginambut

Deadly Political Violence in Indonesian Province

By AUBREY BELFORD

JAKARTA — At least 22 people were killed in separate outbreaks of political violence in the remote Indonesian province of Papua in recent days, officials said Monday, in the latest spasm of bloodshed in a murky, decades-long conflict.

Four people, including one soldier, were hacked to death in a predawn ambush outside the provincial capital, Jayapura, on Monday morning, the police said, just hours after the police had managed to quell two days of interclan rioting that killed 18 people in the province’s central highlands.

More than 10 men armed with knives and guns blocked a road in the village of Nafri outside Jayapura and attacked stopped cars on the eve of large protests planned for Tuesday to demand independence from Indonesia, said Col. Wachyono, a spokesman for the provincial police, who goes by a single name.

The nighttime attack left another nine people wounded and left little indication of the assailants’ identities — except for a Morning Star flag, the banned symbol of Papua’s independence movement, the display of which is a crime punishable by prison sentences as long as life. But it was too early to conclude that the attack was the work of the Free Papua Movement, a fractious rebel organization that has fought a four-decade insurgency against Jakarta, Colonel Wachyono said.

“We can’t yet conclude that it was the TPN-OPM or not,” he said, referring to the group by a common acronym. “What’s clear is that this was a purely criminal act because most of the victims were civilians.”

That attack appeared to be unconnected to earlier fighting over the weekend in the mountainous district of Puncak, Colonel Wachyono said, where clan members supporting rival candidates for district chief clashed with arrows and spears and burned down homes in a dispute over registration for local elections scheduled for November.

But activists in Papua disputed the official version of both events. The West Papua National Committee, or K.N.P.B., which had planned protests for Tuesday across Papua, accused elements of the security forces of fomenting unrest to discredit calls for independence. The protests are planned to coincide with a conference of parliamentarians and nongovernmental organizations in Britain on Papuan independence.

“We reckon that methods like leveling the accusation that the Morning Star was there at the killing of these people is just a trick to add more military forces or to make Papuans scared to go out, to keep them away from the K.N.P.B.’s protest,” said Oktavianus Pogau, the secretary general of the committee’s self-styled consulate in Jakarta.

Markus Haluk, the secretary general of the Central Highlands Papuan Student Association, disputed the police account of the violence in Puncak, saying that witnesses there said that the violence had worsened when the police fired into the rioting mob on Saturday, killing three. “We don’t know if they fired warning shots or not, but during the conflict the police shot three civilians in the crowd,” said Mr. Haluk, who has clan links in the region.

Claims and counterclaims of meddling by the security forces are common in the conflict in Papua, which sits on the western end of the island of New Guinea and has been under Indonesian sovereignty since the 1960s, after a U.N.-backed vote of handpicked delegates that has been dismissed by independence advocates as a sham. The Indonesian government tightly controls access to the resource-rich region by foreign journalists and nongovernmental organizations, which, combined with vast distances and shaky communications, makes it difficult to verify information independently.

Understanding of the conflict is made even more difficult by the existence of splits between the various rebel factions and ethnic groups, and sporadic eruptions of violence between members of the police and military.

Many Papuans seethe at Jakarta’s control of Papua, where the authorities are frequently accused of human rights abuses and where vast natural wealth — and billions of dollars in recent government spending — has done little to curb widespread poverty.

August 1, 2011

Filed under: Current, ambush, violence

Police urged to find actors behind armed civilian attacks

1) Police urged to find actors behind armed civilian attacks
2) READERS FORUM Letters: Fauna in Foja Mountains
3) Native tribe figure to lead Freeport: Scholar

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Markus Makur, The Jakarta Post, Timika | Sat, 05/22/2010 1:14 PM | The Archipelago

Puncak Jaya Regent Lukas Enembe says that intellectual activists might be behind a series of attacks by armed civilians in the regency and has urged the military and police to arrest them.

“Thanks to the attacks, many of the development activities in Puncak Jaya regency have been stalled,” Lukas told reporters in Timika, Mimika regency, Papua, before leaving for Jakarta to attend a Democratic Party congress.
A group of armed civilians have been terrorizing local residents with guns that were obtained from the military and police in previous ambushes. Recently, he said, armed civilians had burned people’s houses and shot at the workers at the site of a bridge construction project, causing the work to be suspended.

A joint team comprising of the military, police mobile brigade (Brimob) personnel and antiterror squad officers, shot dead Werius Telengen, chairman of the Kampung Yambi group, who was blamed for an attack on residents last Monday.
Lukas said that efforts to involve the community in curbing the violence had not been effective because the activists had consistently provoked the community.

Nesco Wonda, the speaker of the Puncak Jaya legislative council, said that armed civilians had been attacking residents and destroying public facilities including school buildings, health centers and bridges.

“Apparatus from the TNI *military* and police, therefore, must stay on guard in the regency as there are many illegal guns being used by armed civilian groups,” he said.

He said the Puncak Jaya administration had given more attention to the community by offering fees to the youth and tribal heads, but security disturbances had not been abated.

He suggested the administration provide clear procedures for security forces entering villages in the regency in search of members of armed groups to prevent them from shooting at residents.

“It’s not just the task of Puncak Jaya administration, but also that of the province’s and the central government’s to discipline the activists,” he said.

Pages: 1 2 3

Filed under: Roundups, ambush, Mimika, police terror

SLAINED LEADER WILL SPUR RESISTANCE TO INDONESIAN OCCUPATION AND HEIGHTEN CALL FOR FREEPORT MINE CLOSURE WPNCL CLAIMED

WEST PAPUA NATIONAL COALITION FOR LIBERATION

P.O. Box 1571, Port Vila, Republic of Vanuatu, ph: + 678 40808; +61414247468; +6785616733

E-mail: morningstar@vanuatu.com.vu, awulkeweng@yahoo.com, rexruma@hotmail.com

For immediate release 17 December, 2009

SLAINED LEADER WILL SPUR RESISTANCE TO INDONESIAN OCCUPATION AND HEIGHTEN CALL FOR FREEPORT MINE CLOSURE WPNCL CLAIMED

The much wanted Suprime commader of the West Papuan National Liberation Army (TPN) of the OPM, General Kelly Kwalik, was ambushed and killed on 16 December 2009 by the Indonesian Police forces who serves the Freeport interest in the mining area. It was 3.00 am in the morning when the troops stormed his hideout. The troops might have been tipped by some one who had detailed knowledge of Kwalik’s movements and resting time. How he died was a mystery because no witnesses were allowed to survive the ordeal. There is strong indication that he might have died from sadist torture. Eight of Kelly’s men were also slain in the attack. We lost a great Papuan leader.

Kelly Kwalik was well known for two inherent issues. As land owner he opposed the Freeport Mine because of the human rights abuses it had caused his people and the irreparable environmental destruction it had created to the land. Also as a Commander in the Military Arm of the Independence Movement, the OPM he advocates for Independence. He joined the OPM in 1974 after finishing teacher college in Waena, Jayapura . He was one of the pioneers who joined a long march from North to south and Western West Papua in 1977 opening new frontiers that is known as Commander of Papuan Independent Expeditio(ESKOPME). He is a principle leader with high dignity and well respect Papuan leader. He had been in the jungle for 37 years.

The late Commander Kelly Kwalik as member of West Papuan National Coalition for Liberation,had actively promoted peaceful dialogue as a viable alternative to conflict resolution. As member of The officials from the West Papua National Coalition for Liberation, Dr. John Ondawame, Vice Chairman and Rex Rumakiek, Secretary General condemned the killing as a deliberate action to undermine any peaceful solution to the West Papuan issue.

Dr. John Ondawame, Vice Chairman of WPNCL who is also land owner of Freeport Mining concession area confirmed the killing after cross checking with the people on the ground. He fears the worst because his people held high regard for Kelly Kwalik. The people are still in shock. There could be back lash as well from the Papuan people in general because of Kwalik’s uncompromised position on the call for Independence. This killing will hardened the call for Independence and for the closure of the Mine. This is a very unfortunate situation. Whether the action was authorized by SBY government or not it is a very bad and unwise policy. Dr. Ondawame said, there would be a grace period to show respect to Kelly but what might happen after the burial is any body guess. Emotions would be high with traditional pledges that “one Kelly has fallen but a thousand more Kellies will take his place.” We call on our members not to respond to any provocation for violence by the Militias. We will stick to our road map for peaceful solution.

The Secretary General, Mr. Rex Rumakiek warned that the hope by the Civil Society to make Papua a land of peace could be in jeopardy. When Civil Society and Religious Institutions made the declaration in 2001, the Security Forces refused to be part of it. The Military Arm of the Independence Movement, the TPN on the other hand had endorsed the declaration and abides by it. It was an uneasy situation ever since the declaration with continued Military build up and increased Militia activity. These all went hand in hand with the carving up of West Papua into more Provinces that eventually will have their own Military Divisions Mr. Rumakiek said. He has called on stakeholders to remain calm and focus on the road map to resolving the issue through peaceful means.

Dr. John Ondawame and Mr. Rex Rumakiek called on the Australian government and members of the Pacific Islands Forum to insist on Indonesia opening up West Papua for International access. Especially, the Red Cross must be allowed to resume its work in the Territory and also allow foreign journalists to have access in the country, particularly during the burial of the late Papuan Leader, Kelly Kwalik. International access is crucial for transparency and prevention of further violence. Furthermore, the two officials from WPNCL renewed their call for peaceful dialogue to resolve the decades old issue of West Papua. If Jakarta undermine these calls, we call all West Papuan Papuans to unify and stand together in demanding for Independence of West Papua. We also call to take immediate action to close down Freeport mining activities in the area because it becomes clear that Freeport Security Forces were directly involved in the killing of the Papuan leader, the late Kelly Kwalik.

For more information please call, Dr. John Ondawame, phone: +678 5616733 and Mr. Rex Rumakiek on 0414247468

Filed under: State-Terrorism, ambush, dialogue, State-Terrorism

Indonesian soldier wounded in attack at Freeport

Police say a gunman fired on an Indonesian military truck near a U.S.-owned gold mine in eastern Papua province, wounding a soldier.

Chief of Papua police Maj. Gen. Bagus Ekodanto said Thursday the truck was carrying food and supplies to troops deployed near the world’s largest gold mine, operated by Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc of Phoenix, Arizona.

A string of attacks near the Grasberg mine since mid-July has left three dead and injured more than 20. The mine is a source of tension in the remote, impoverished region.

Police were searching for the latest attackers, who fled into the jungle Wednesday after shooting the soldier in the leg. His condition was unclear.

The shooting came a day after two mine workers were injured by gunfire nearby.

Filed under: Terrorism, ambush, Freeport-McMoRan, violence

Indonesian soldier wounded in attack at Freeport

Police say a gunman fired on an Indonesian military truck near a U.S.-owned gold mine in eastern Papua province, wounding a soldier.

Chief of Papua police Maj. Gen. Bagus Ekodanto said Thursday the truck was carrying food and supplies to troops deployed near the world’s largest gold mine, operated by Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc of Phoenix, Arizona.

A string of attacks near the Grasberg mine since mid-July has left three dead and injured more than 20. The mine is a source of tension in the remote, impoverished region.

Police were searching for the latest attackers, who fled into the jungle Wednesday after shooting the soldier in the leg. His condition was unclear.

The shooting came a day after two mine workers were injured by gunfire nearby.

Filed under: Terrorism, ambush, Freeport-McMoRan, violence

Two injured in shooting incident near Freeport mine in Papua

Two people have been injured in another shooting incident at the Freeport gold and copper mine in Indonesia’s Papua province.

The Jakarta Post reports two employees of the US company were shot and wounded yesterday morning near the world’s largest gold mine.

Papua Police say the mine workers were hit when a busload of 60 employees came under fire in the restive Papua province.

It says the victims are in stable condition, with one shot in the thigh and arm, and the other hit in the hand and waist.

In the same area, an Australian, an Indonesian security guard, and a policeman died in ambushes earlier this year.

News Content © Radio New Zealand International
PO Box 123, Wellington, New Zealand

Filed under: Terrorism, ambush, Freeport-McMoRan, shooting, violence

Two shot in mine ambush

JAKARTA

GUNMEN have shot and wounded two employees of US company Freeport as their bus travelled along a road to the world’s largest gold mine in eastern Indonesia.

The two miners were hit yesterday when the security-escorted bus carrying 60 employees was attacked in restive West Papua province, police spokesman Agus Rianto said. The injured men were in stable condition after being taken to a hospital.

”A group of unidentified men ambushed Freeport’s bus,” said Mr Rianto.

”Police are still searching for the perpetrators who ran into the dense jungle.”

Freeport has been targeted in a string of shootings since mid-July that have left three dead.

On July 11, gunmen using military-issue weapons killed Freeport’s Australian project manager, 29-year-old Melbourne man Drew Grant.

AP

Filed under: Terrorism, ambush, Freeport-McMoRan, shooting, violence