West Papua

Lord Bishop of Oxford Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2013 Grand Committee

Asked By

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the human rights situation in West Papua.

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth]

My Lords, violations of basic human rights in West Papua are not only continuing but becoming more frequent. In 2012-13 there were numerous incidents of West Papuans being shot, arrested and tortured simply for taking part in peaceful demonstrations. Leaders of the West Papua National Committee—the KNPB—are particularly targeted. To give just one example, at a peaceful demonstration on 1 May this year, three Papuans were shot—killings which were rightly condemned by both the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, and Amnesty International. A list of 30 such incidents involving arrests for peaceful protests in just two weeks in April and May this year was sent to the OHCHR in Geneva by TAPOL on behalf of eight international organisations concerned with West Papua.

It will therefore be no surprise to learn that in 2012 alone there were some 200 political arrests and that there are at least 40 political prisoners in jail. Raising a West Papuan flag, for example, can lead to a charge carrying a life sentence. At the same time, sweeping operations by the Indonesian military in the highlands of West Papua continued throughout 2012-13, displacing thousands of villagers, with homes being burned and subsistence crops destroyed, as reported by the Asian Human Rights Commission. Despite the fact that foreign reporters and NGOs are severely restricted in their attempts to enter and report on what is going on —an issue that other noble Lords will raise—these facts are becoming ever more widely known in the world outside.

I know that our Government are aware of and concerned about these human rights abuses, as they have made clear in their Answers to several Parliamentary Questions. However, is it not also a matter of concern that an Indonesian counterterrorism unit, Special Detachment 88, trained by the UK, is believed to be operating in Papua, targeting leaders of the independence unit? We know that the training for this detachment includes issues of human rights, but we do not know whether that has had any effect at all on its operations. In view of the fact that human rights abuses are increasing, will the Minister ask the Foreign Office to undertake, as a matter of urgency, an impact assessment of the training that this detachment is receiving to see whether in fact it is making any difference at all?

Juan Mendez, the UN special adviser on the prevention of genocide, wrote in 2008 that West Papua was among those countries whose populations were “at risk of extinction”—a very serious charge. With the huge influx of Indonesians from Jakarta, the West Papuans are in danger of becoming a minority in their own country.

What are the Indonesian Government and the Indonesian elite in West Papua doing about this very serious situation? The policy in recent years has been to divide the country into two provinces, West Papua and Papua, give a degree of local autonomy to each one, deliver economic benefits and hope that this will lead to an end to the increasing unrest. The International Crisis Group, in its thorough and balanced 30-page report of last August, provided as part of the Library’s helpful briefing for this debate, evaluated that policy in these words:

“To date the law has failed to produce either improvement in the lives of most Papuans or better relations with the central government”.

Because even the Indonesian Government can see the failure, a special organisation, the Unit for the Acceleration of Development in Papua and West Papua, called UP4B, has been set up through presidential decrees to achieve what its name suggests. The polite language of the International Crisis Group’s report, in the chapter entitled “UP4B: Good Intentions, Diminished Hopes”, cannot disguise the fact that this policy continues to fail very badly. There is failure at the economic level—very little of the huge wealth being generated in this oil and mineral-rich country is being channelled to the people whose land it is—and there is a fundamental failure at a political level to engage in a political process with representative leaders of the indigenous people. Does the Minister agree that there is no serious chance of progress in West Papua unless the Government in Jakarta set up a serious process of engagement with West Papuan leaders, and will they urge them to do so?

I know that Indonesia is an important ally in the worldwide fight against terrorism and has made big strides in recent years towards genuine democracy in some parts of its legitimate territory. Our own country, like Australia, has important business links with it. West Papua has vast oil and mineral wealth; BP alone has a £7.5 billion stake in it. We can all understand the pressures of realpolitik coming from both Governments, to whom we need to relate, and international capitalism, whose money is needed for development.

However, the truth cannot be hidden forever. The 1962 New York agreement signed between the Netherlands, Indonesia and the United Nations guaranteed an “act of self-determination” for the people of West Papua. In 1969 that so-called Act of Free Choice took place. On 13 December 2004, when I was Bishop of Oxford, I asked the Minister at the time, the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, about what happened in 1969:

“Is she aware that Suharto’s Indonesia handpicked a little more than 1,000 people, out of a population of 800,000, and forced them to vote 100 per cent for union with Indonesia? Is she further aware that the secretariat of the UN advised the UN Assembly to accept the result of that vote as fair, even though it had agreed to be a guarantor of the fairness of the election? Does she agree that the present unrest in West Papua and the violence by the Indonesian Government are in part responses to the failure at that time?”.

On behalf of the Government, the Minister replied:

“I agree with the right reverend Prelate’s summing up of the position … He is right to say that there were 1,000 handpicked representatives and that they were largely coerced into declaring for inclusion in Indonesia”.

Sometimes, a chink of truth comes through. In her reply, the noble Baroness went on to say that the largely coercive vote was 35 years ago and that since then,

“the 2002 special autonomy legislation has been passed … It grants, for example, 70 per cent of oil and gas royalties originating in Papua—as well as 80 per cent of forestry, fishery and mining royalties—to the people of Papua”.

She concluded by saying that,

“these measures ought to be given a chance to imbed in order for us to see whether the greater autonomy thereby granted eases the situation”.—[Official Report, 13/12/04; cols. 1084-85.]

The first question that arises in my mind is whether that 70% and 80% of the royalties has been going to the West Papuan people. Is there any evidence of this? More fundamentally, the special autonomy measure has now been in place for 13 years. It has had plenty of time to embed and show results. What is revealed is the total failure of the policy itself, because it fails to address the fundamental issue, namely the political aspirations of the indigenous people. Given that the former UN Under-Secretary-General, Chakravarthi Narasimhan, admitted publicly in 2004 that the 1969 so-called Act of Free Choice was in effect a sham, will the Government join with International Parliamentarians for West Papua and International Lawyers for West Papua in asking the UN to conduct an inquiry into what happened in 1969 and then to instigate a referendum on the issue in West Papua itself?

Given the 2010 referendum on self-determination in South Sudan and the upcoming referendums on independence in New Caledonia—Kanaky—Bougainville and Scotland, and bearing in mind what happened in East Timor, would it not be prudent, as well as absolutely right, to press for a true, internationally monitored referendum? This issue is certainly not going to go away, however much the Indonesian Government might wish that it would.