CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Death of a Bush Pilot…Among All the Others

Photograph Source: Robert Frola – Flickr – GNU FDL

On 2 July, 29-year-old Nicholas F. Gosselin, an American pilot, was shot and killed by members of the TPNPB (West Papuan Liberation Army) when he landed a light aircraft of the company PT AMA (Associated Mission Aviation) in Balinggalinggama in the remote mountain zone of Yahukimo, West Papua. His seven Indigenous passengers were unharmed but the plane was torched. It’s difficult to know much about this young man because the media has turned him into a cardboard cutout for sensationalist (and, yes, cynically racist) reports about an American killed by “restive” natives.

The Daily Mail is a good example with “American pilot working in Indonesia KILLED by armed separatist group looking to send a ‘message’ after he landed in small mountain village”. It gets his name wrong (“Goselin”); has him working in “Indonesia” (a very moot point—in terms of international law); capitalises KILLED, thus suggesting that a murdered corpse is more relevant than the real man; has him KILLED by “an armed separatist group”, which could also be described as Indigenous people fighting for their lives in what is literally a genocide (plus ecocide), though hardly anyone knows about it (thanks to the good offices of news outlets like the Daily Mail); casually mentions, after a reference to a spike in “decades-old insurgency” that, “The rebels have especially targeted foreign pilots”, and that the TPNPB says that the aircraft violated their no-fly zone (but wouldn’t no-fly make it hard to target foreign pilots?); has the “armed separatist group” wanting to send a “message” but doesn’t say what; skims over the fact that the “armed separatist group” says that “civilian aircraft … are assisting military operations in the region”; and sets the scene in a “small mountain village”, as if it’s some out-of-the way place where, except for a pilot being shot dead, nothing ever happens there.

If the tabloid Daily Mail were taken out of the general context of the misinformation cesspit, a reader might shrug and think “par for the course”. But we have a whole spectrum here. By its own lights at least, The Guardian is another matter: “The Guardian has something many news organisations today don’t: guaranteed independence. With no billionaire or large corporate owner, our journalists are free to report without interference. Our role is to hold power to account, not answer to it”. Really? Did it show “guaranteed independence” when reporting the death of the young bush pilot, Nicholas F. Gosselin? It didn’t. It went with the herd. “Separatist rebels in Indonesia’s restive easternmost region of Papua have shot dead an American pilot and set a civilian ⁠plane on fire” [my emphasis]. Nobody reading that “attacks by independence fighters have grown deadlier and more frequent as they have procured better weaponry” would have the faintest idea of why “restive” natives are destroying “civilian planes” and getting “deadlier”. But wouldn’t being victims of genocide make people “restive”?

It took Facebook, quoted by the Daily Mail (getting the name wrong when Facebook gets it right) to give an idea of who “American pilot” Nicholas F. Gosselin actually was. Mainstream press wasn’t interested in who he was or why he was killed because that kind of inquiry leads to questions that need to be gagged. According to his Facebook friend Kenneth Jagers, Gosselin was in West Papua because “it was the roughest bush flying in the world”. He loved adventure. He didn’t obey the no-fly demand because it “harms the people of Papua” so, in other words, he thought the “restive” natives of a small remote village were harming their own people. If he was ignorant of who is really harming the people, he would have got his non-information from corporate media, and billionaire-managed social media, which then raises the question of media responsibility for his death and the grief of the people who loved him (not to mention all the other deaths—the genocide—the media glosses over). Jagers writes that Gosselin’s last trip was an example of “selflessness and an example of humanity at its finest”. Whatever the accuracy of the friend’s description, at least a sense is given of Gosselin as a real person, a young, naïve, adventure-loving person, and not just an ideological construct of American pilot.

Gosselin’s life was one more life tragically and terribly taken among thousands and thousands of other lives tragically and terribly taken in murder on a vast scale, which can properly be called genocide. He might have been the fine, selfless young man his friend describes, but he must have been ignorant too if he decided to ignore a TPNPB no-fly order. Unless you’ve lost the ability to see, or you don’t want to see, you can’t be long in highly militarised West Papua without noticing that something terrible is happening there. Frightened strangers approach you and beg you to speak for them. Even from the air, fifty years ago, you could see the tremendous scale of the ecocidal destruction of Indigenous habitat (and therefore people). Destroyed rainforest, the hard-baked, lifeless........

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