FLOWERS IN THE WALL Truth and Reconciliation in Timor-Leste, Indonesia, and Melanesia by David Webster ISBN 978-1-55238-955-3 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your university purchase a print copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy yourself. If you have any questions, please contact us at ucpress@ucalgary.ca Cover Art: The artwork on the cover of this book is not open access and falls under traditional copyright provisions; it cannot be reproduced in any way without written permission of the artists and their agents. The cover can be displayed as a complete cover image for the purposes of publicizing this work, but the artwork cannot be extracted from the context of the cover of this specific work without breaching the artist s copyright. COPYRIGHT NOTICE: This open-access work is published under a Creative Commons licence. This means that you are free to copy, distribute, display or perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to its authors and publisher, that you do not use this work for any commercial gain in any form, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build on the work outside of its use in normal academic scholarship without our express permission. If you want to reuse or distribute the work, you must inform its new audience of the licence terms of this work. For more information, see details of the Creative Commons licence at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ UNDER THE CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE YOU MAY: read and store this document free of charge; distribute it for personal use free of charge; print sections of the work for personal use; read or perform parts of the work in a context where no financial transactions take place. UNDER THE CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE YOU MAY NOT: gain financially from the work in any way; sell the work or seek monies in relation to the distribution of the work; use the work in any commercial activity of any kind; profit a third party indirectly via use or distribution of the work; distribute in or through a commercial body (with the exception of academic usage within educational institutions such as schools and universities); reproduce, distribute, or store the cover image outside of its function as a cover of this work; alter or build on the work outside of normal academic scholarship. Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org
SECTION IV Where Indonesia Meets Melanesia: Memory, Truth, and Reconciliation in Tanah Papua
Where Indonesia Meets Melanesia: Memory, Truth, and Reconciliation in Tanah Papua The Indonesian state cannot successfully mediate conflicts to which it is a party. As we saw in the previous chapter, this is true at the local level in Poso. It is truer still at the provincial level, in Tanah Papua, to which we now turn. The Indonesian government has tried to resolve its longest-running conflict through a security approach by cracking down with military force. It has tried to resolve it through a development approach by offering the promise of economic gain to win Papuan hearts and minds. It has tried, most recently, by granting special autonomy within the Indonesian national fold. But it has never accepted the need for dialogue between the Indonesian state and Papuan nationalists. Most relevant to the themes of this volume, it axed the commitment to a truth commission that was promised as part of the autonomy law. What is Tanah Papua? Part of the problem for observers is that there are as many names as there are sides to the conflict. The colonial name was West New Guinea or Netherlands New Guinea. Indonesians demanding the colony be handed over to them called it West Irian. Then for many years it became the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya. Nationalists seeking an independent state referred to it as West Papua. In a move to conciliate rising pro-independence sentiment in 2000, the Indonesian government agreed to rename the province Papua. Just to add confusion, the western third of the province was snipped away (with questionable legality) to form a new province, officially called West Papua to distinguish it from the rest of the island still called Papua. Here we use the term Tanah Papua, the Land of Papua, to recognize the term s growing acceptance among Papuans and to avoid the politics of choosing another name. The territory was part of the Netherlands East Indies. When, in 1949, the Dutch recognized Indonesian independence, they retained control of Papua. Since Indonesia also claimed the territory, that meant confrontation between the two governments, alongside Papuans mobilizing for independence. We often think of colonization, decolonization, and sometimes recolonization, as processes that happen in sequence. In the Papuan case, all three things were happening at once, as simultaneous, linked processes. Indonesia began to prepare for a military invasion. To prevent that, the United States intervened to mediate a resolution to the dispute, 201
and the territory was transferred in stages to Indonesia in 1962 63. The handover was formalized in an act of free choice organized by Indonesian authorities in 1969, in which 1,022 carefully picked electors delivered an unopposed verdict in favour of integration. Indonesia s success in adding Papua to its territory marked the completion of decolonization for the Indonesian government, but the beginning of recolonization for Papuan elites who had thought they were about to receive their independence. Thus an independence movement continued and indeed gathered force under Indonesian rule. After the Suharto regime was toppled in 1998, Papuan nationalism came out of the forests and into the open with renewed vocal calls for independence. Although Indonesian authorities were forced to accept an independent East Timor after 1999, and inked a peace deal with separatist fighters in Aceh province in 2005, they have maintained a harder line against independence sentiment in Papua. Indonesian and Papuan nationalists deploy very different versions of this history. The two clashing historical narratives are not simply different ways of representing the past; these different perceptions of the past are a root cause that helps to constitute the current conflict. Historical dialogue is needed if there is to be any prospect of resolving the conflict. The Indonesian state has deployed a historical narrative of completing national unity by annexing and retaining control of Tanah Papua. Papuan nationalists counter with a narrative of a people on their way to self-determination until outside interference forced the handover of their country to foreign Indonesian rule. These clashing narratives have become tools in the diplomatic arsenals of two competing nationalist movements. They remain so today, in ways that continue to fuel conflict. Conflict in Tanah Papua is spurred by a wide range of factors. Papuans feel at risk of being reduced to a minority in their own homeland as more and more Indonesian settlers arrive and dominate local economies. There are complaints that a resource-rich land is looted to feed the national treasury, while poverty and AIDS among Papuans are well above the national average. Human rights violations and cultural clashes continue to enflame tensions. Indonesian security forces continue to tag any dissent as separatist and to treat that label as sufficient reason for repressive tactics. The democratic governments that emerged in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto offered special autonomy for Papua, a move with the potential to resolve the conflict. In avoiding the symbolic aspects and refusing to 202 Flowers in the Wall
engage in a dialogue of historical narratives, however, it failed to do so. The Special Autonomy Law of 2001 granted a greater share of natural resource revenues and political autonomy, but rejected the symbolic claims and thus ignored the emotive force behind calls for independence. The issue was still framed in terms of uneven economic development, so the solution remained development-oriented. The autonomy law did mandate a truth commission, but no such commission has been formed. These dilemmas are explored in chapter 15, which opens with the issues of clashing views of history and highlights troubles with state-led reconciliation efforts that parallel those in Poso (described in Chapter 14). Tanah Papua is very much in a pre truth commission phase, a period in which calls for truth are embodied in the demand from some civil-society groups to correct the historical record (pelurusan sejarah). What might an eventual Papuan truth commission look like? The question, when asked for Indonesia with respect to the mass killings of the 1960s, suggests that any truth-seeking must also be international. The answer here turns on a respect for Papuan Indigenous reverence for the natural world: a truth process would need to include careful consideration of the living environment (lingkunan hidup), ravaged by resource-extraction capitalism. Indigenous aspects of peace-seeking shine through in chapter 16, which shows the extent to which Papuan cultural identity has rejected assimilation into Indonesia s unity in diversity. Papuan nationalism does not always look like other forms of nationalism. It often sings rather than shouts not an uncommon theme when nationalist aspirations face a repressive government. It sings not just against a government, but against a system of rule in which multinational mining companies are experienced as colonizers and despoilers. As in Aceh, extractive industries based outside Indonesia exacerbate conflict and a local sense of dispossession. The implication is that reconciliation will also have to include international actors the same conclusion we reached in previous sections. Chapter 17 spells this out with a close examination of the human rights discourses used by what is still the dominant outside power, the United States. The US role in forcing Tanah Papua into Indonesian hands, along with the American headquarters of the key mining company in Tanah Papua, imply that the United States has a particular responsibility to resolve a conflict it helped to create. Especially important here is that Western human rights discourses chapter 17 highlights annual human rights Part IV Where Indonesia Meets Melanesia 203
reporting by the US State Department must make space for Papuan and other Indigenous understandings that embrace human rights but expand our understanding of rights. Clashing historical narratives represent different claims to what is true about the past. Different understandings of human rights also make the notion of truth a sometimes contested concept. In Tanah Papua, truth-seeking has to contend with a multitude of barriers. Among them is the challenge of non-truth peddled by the Indonesian state, which the next chapter begins to explore. 204 Flowers in the Wall