Image Source: Human Rights Monitor 2025 Report – CC0 1.0

The patterns of genocide, or the various ways humans go about killing large groups of other humans and their attempted justifications for doing so, are so sadly predictable or systematised that, in the case of West Papua, if you take just a small sample, say the last three months, about 2.5% of 60-plus years of Indonesian mass slaughter and environmental destruction, the fragmentary forms are recognisable enough to produce a picture of the ghastly whole. Very few people talk or protest about the genocide in West Papua, and this is one more element of the general picture: the coverup by the so-called international system because the frame of the West Papua mosaic extends way beyond the outline of the island of New Guinea.

Isolated incidents are sometimes mentioned in the mainstream press, a village bombed here, a couple of teenagers shot there, rainforest (as if it were simply a bunch of trees) devastated, but the real context isn’t given. The real context is genocide and ecocide, but experts tend to pussyfoot around their own cognitive dissonance with tricky questions about whether there’s intent. The action of genocide is discussed more than its effects, which are many forms of appalling pain. But trying to come to grips with that would mean recognising the victims and giving them voice as fellow and equal human beings. The patterns of the mosaic scream intent and the screams are those of real people, the victims. Every single fragment, if you understand it’s not alone, screams intent, and not just intent of the immediate perpetrators but of all their enablers.

Before dawn on 15 October last year, Indonesian troops surrounded a men’s communal house in Soanggamavillage, in the Intan Jaya regency (site of the huge, heavily militarised Wabu Block gold ore deposit with, needless to say, active and retired military among its prominent investors) destroyed it and shot and killed eight people. They also captured, tortured, and murdered other men, as well as torturing and raping a woman who tried to flee but drowned in the Hiabu river. This kind of assault is no novelty in West Papua where, inscribed in the annals of brutality, are similar raids in Wamena 2003 (25 villages attacked, arbitrary arrests, torture, evictions after which 42 died of starvation, and other physical violence), Wasior 2001 (four dead, 39 tortured, some to death, one rape, five disappeared, destruction of property), Biak 1998 (approximately 150 killed, where “the sky was on fire”, where one victim declared, “A lit candle was penetrated inside me, they cut off my clitoris and they raped me”, and further evidence from villagers was apparently destroyed by the Australian Department of Defence), Abepura 2000 (three students killed, a hundred people detained, and dozen beaten and tortured), Wamena 2023 (nine dead, seventeen shot), and many other episodes of violence. Immediately after the attack on Soanggama last October, four members of the West Papua Liberation Army were killed in a drone attack in Kiwirok, which was also bombed in October 2021, after which at least 200 displaced people died of starvation. These atrocities, actual or their always-looming possibility, violence and feared violence, are part of everyday life.

And what happened? After all these crimes, which have displaced more than 100,000 people, the response has been silence from political leaders everywhere, despite video evidence, for example that provided by the Ngalum Kupel people of the Star Mountains. For years, West Papuan leaders have been seeking foreign policy support from Pacific nations for their country’s independence, as well as full membership status (which the non-Melanesian nation Indonesia has) in the Melanesian Spearhead Group, international support for UN access to West Papua, cancellation of bilateral agreements with Indonesia, and sponsorship of the West Papua case in the International Court of Justice. All in vain. On the other half of the island, shared by the same Melanesian people, many of them close relatives in areas sliced through by the colonial border, the prime minister, James Marape says that Papua New Guinea, independent since 1975, has “no right at all, to encroach into the sovereignty issue discussion [regarding West Papua]”, which is his version of a legalese cover for genocide.

Meanwhile, in the wider world, Australia, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia are negotiating a trilateral defence pact with the purported aims of improved cooperation on “border management, maritime security, intelligence sharing, counter-smuggling and crisis preparedness”. The Indonesian representative, General Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin is well knownfor serious crimes (including murder, mass sexual violence, enforced disappearances, torture, displacement of populations, and arbitrary arrests) against human rights in East Timor (1976 and 1990), Aceh (1980), and West Papua (1987). Great Britain has........

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