KISRUH PAPUA: Mako Tabuni Kena Tembak Kepala Belakang

Kamis, 14 Juni 2012 | 13:03 WIB

JAKARTA-- Wakil Ketua Komite Nasional Papua Barat (KNPB) Mako Musa Tabuni diduga ditembak di otak belakang oleh aparat keamanan sehingga meninggal dunia hari ini. Aksi itu memicu massa membakar sejumlah tempat di Jayapura, Papua.

Aktivis HAM Papua Markus Haluk mengatakan saat itu Mako tengah memakan pinang bersama dengan empat rekan lainnya dan mengetahui kedatangan aparat pada sekitar pukul 09.30 WIT. Mako kemudian menghindari mereka, tetapi akhirnya ditembak aparat.

"Tidak ada surat pemanggilan sama sekali terhadap Mako. Aparat kalau ingin tembak, tembak saja sekarang seperti preman. Ini bukan penegakan hukum," ujar Markus ketika dikonfirmasi Bisnis, Kamis (14/6/2012).

Dia juga mengatakan setelah kejadian itu sejumlah anggota KNPB dan mahasiswa melakukan pembakaran terhadap sejumlah tempat karena marah dan memprotes insiden tersebut. Penembakan terhadap  Mako dilakukan di daerah putaran taksi Universitas Cendrawasih-Perumnas III, Waena Jayapura.

Saat ini, sambungnya, aparat juga tengah melakukan penyisiran di lokasi terkait dengan kejadian tersebut. Menurut Mako, para anggota KNPB dan mahasiswa pun sudah kembali ke tempat mereka masing-masing.

Sementara itu, Human Rights Watch (HRW) mendesak pemerintah Indonesia membuka akses penuh untuk media internasional termasuk ahli hak asasi manusia (HAM)  Perserikatan Bangsa-Bangsa (PBB) untuk memantau pelanggaran HAM dan meminimalisir informasi yang keliru soal Papua.

Direktur Deputi Asia HRW Elaine Pearson mengatakan pemerintah Indonesia seharusnya mengizinkan media asing dan kelompok masyarakat sipil untuk memasuki Papua untuk melaporkan terjadinya praktik kekerasan dan pelanggaran HAM. Selain itu, organisasi tersebut juga mendesak agar Indonesia menerima permintaan Dewan HAM PBB untuk  mengundang para pakar HAM organisasi dunia tersebut.

"Dengan menempatkan Papua di balik tabir, pemerintah Indonesia tengah menumbuhkan impunitas untuk pasukan militer dan kebencian dari orang-orang Papua," kata Pearson dalam rilis media pada Kamis, 14 Juni 2012. "Pemerintah sebaiknya membiarkan media dan kelompok sipil menerangi provinsi tersebut." (arh)

 

http://www.bisnis.com/articles/kisruh-papua-mako-tabuni-kena-tembak-kepala-belakang

Did Timor teach us nothing?

Escalating violence ... a motorcycle is set on fire in Papua. Photo: Reuters

As violence escalates in West Papua, one cannot help but recall East Timor and wonder how much worse it must get before Australia and the international community will act.

Tensions are at breaking point in the easternmost province of Indonesia after the police shooting of independence activist Mako Tabuni.

Human rights activists report Tabuni was unarmed when shot six times by the Australian-trained Detachment 88 forces. Tabuni was deputy chairman of the West Papua National Committee, an organisation advocating independence and the right to self-determination under international law. Tabuni had also been campaigning for an investigation into a recent spate of military killings.

The shooting follows years of violence. At least 16 people have been killed in the past month, according to human rights groups, and hundreds of homes raided, with many burnt to the ground. Thousands are reported to be evacuating, seeking refuge in the forest or heading for refugee camps in Papua New Guinea. Credible reports of human rights violations by Indonesian security forces have emerged, including torture, excessive use of force and extrajudicial killings.

Yet Indonesia's State Intelligence Agency chief, Lieutenant-General Marciano Norman, placed blame on the Free Papua Movement, ''foreign agents'' and local residents for the violence. The President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, played down the events. As Indonesia obfuscates and Australia remains silent, West Papua bleeds. While most Australians are proud of our role in ending 24 years of bloody Indonesian occupation in East Timor, we should not forget it came after a long history of accepting Indonesian assertions of sovereignty while ignoring human rights abuse on our doorstep.

After East Timor, we cannot claim any wide-eyed innocence regarding West Papua.

Australia is now bidding for a place on the United Nations Security Council on the basis of our alleged ''human rights-based foreign policy'', highlighting our role in East Timor while trying to keep a lid on our history of inaction there.

The federal Attorney-General has refused freedom of information requests for the release of diplomatic cables dating to the 1970s - cables that a University of NSW professor, Clinton Fernandes, says will show Australian complicity in concealing the mass starvation of Timorese.

Are we now making the same mistakes with West Papua? Few are aware of Australian and UN involvement in West Papua 30 years before the intervention in East Timor. Like East Timor, West Papua was annexed by Indonesia in circumstances that violated international law. Comparisons are made, and with good reason. Both territories are made up of distinct minorities. Both are rich in natural resources. Both have struggled for self-determination. Like East Timor, West Papua had a UN vote for self-determination, only the outcome could not have been more different.

In 1999, East Timor got a proper vote and won independence (not before an estimated 200,000 Timorese had died). But in 1969, West Papua got a sham vote and became part of Indonesia.

Last month, East Timor celebrated 10 years of independence or, as the Timorese say, 10 years since the international community recognised their independence. But an estimated 400,000 Papuans have now been killed after more than 40 years of Indonesian oppression and abuse.

This year, Indonesia faced international condemnation for the imprisonment of West Papuan leaders for peacefully calling for independence. When asked if Australia had raised concerns with Indonesia, the Foreign Affairs Minister, Bob Carr, responded by admitting that ''before I could raise the subject … the Indonesian Foreign Minister nominated that they have a clear responsibility to see that their sovereignty is upheld in respect of human rights standards'', and Carr ''was impressed by that''.

In responses eerily similar to statements made by Gareth Evans about East Timor during Indonesian rule, Carr warned members of Parliament ''against foolishly talking up'' West Papuans' right to self-determination because it ''threatens the territorial integrity of Indonesia'' and ''would produce a reaction'' towards Australia. It would be a foolish foreign affairs minister who did not learn from our mistakes in East Timor.

Australia should, at a minimum, reconsider military aid to Indonesia and call for them to allow media and international organisations access to West Papua to investigate abuses and facilitate peaceful dialogue.

East Timor should remind us of the hefty price of turning a blind eye to repression in the mistaken belief that it serves stability in our region. As a Deakin University academic, Scott Burchill, has long argued, it is not only ''a dereliction of our ethical duty, it is politically short-sighted and usually results in blowback''.

Jennifer Robinson is an Australian human rights lawyer in London.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/did-timor-teach-us-nothing-20120623-20uvi.html#ixzz1zzgQn4Bn

The last frontier

Jun 30th 2012 | from the print edition

THE flight from Bali to Jayapura, in the Indonesian half of Papua, offers a stunning view. The planes stop at Timika soon after dawn to connect with helicopters leaving for Grasberg, the largest gold mine and third-largest copper mine in the world. As the sun rises, a vast expanse of lush forest emerges. From the air it is a vision of Eden. But on the ground, these are dark days.

Ever since 1969, and a ludicrously misnamed “Act of Free Choice”, when a decision by 1,025 selected Papuans was deemed an act of self-determination accepting Indonesian sovereignty over the former Dutch colony, simmering, low-level resistance has persisted. After the fall in 1998 of the dictator, Suharto, and the flowering of Indonesian democracy, the region was granted “special autonomy” in 2001 and renamed Papua (from Irian Jaya). In 2003 it was split into two provinces—Papua and West Papua. But Indonesia continues to rule the region in the Suharto style, through shadowy parts of the security forces. This year a spate of unexplained deaths has raised tensions. At least 17 people have been killed since May. Jayapura’s usually bustling streets are deserted after nightfall. Anonymous text-messages warn people to stay indoors, recalling memories of previous crackdowns.

Three recent incidents, above all, have contributed to the climate of fear. On May 29th a German tourist was shot on the beach at Jayapura. Activists link the shooting to hearings that month at the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, where Indonesia was discussed. Among the countries unusually critical of its record, especially in Papua, was Germany. The suspicion is that parts of Indonesia’s security forces want to show that Papua remains dangerous, blaming the Free Papua Movement, or OPM, a secessionist group that has used guerrilla tactics.

In Wamena, a sprawling town in the highlands, it is wise to take a bicycle rickshaw, not a motorcycle taxi. The cyclists, calves bulging as they labour, are native Papuans and know the way. The motorbikes belong to the Indonesian migrants—from Sulawesi, Madura and Java—who make up 40-50% of the 3.6m population of the two provinces. Migrants own the shops, restaurants and building firms, and man the police and army. Native Papuans sit in the dirt to hawk vegetables and fruit. Women traipse in from the countryside with hand-knotted nets strapped to their foreheads, stuffed with cabbages, piglets and sometimes their babies. To the migrants’ disgust, some men still come into town naked but for their penis gourds. The mainly Muslim settlers and mostly Christian Papuans do not always get along.

Then on June 6th a ten-year-old boy was injured by a motorcycle ridden at high speed by two Indonesian soldiers through a village near Wamena. Angry locals attacked the soldiers, killing one of them. Their comrades came back for revenge on the villagers, setting fire to some of their houses. At least one person died. For critics of the army this was a typical tale of its indiscipline, brutality and impunity. Even after a video seen around the world in 2010 showed soldiers torturing Papuan suspects, the three culprits received jail sentences of just eight to ten months, for insubordination.

In the third incident, security forces in Jayapura on June 14th shot dead Mako Tabuni, a leading advocate of a referendum on Papuan independence. The police say they had reason to suspect him of recent killings, and that he was carrying the gun used to shoot the German tourist. Eyewitnesses, however, have said he was unarmed and doing nothing more aggressive than buying betel nut when he was killed.

All of this is eerily reminiscent of the way Indonesia ruled its former province of East Timor for 24 years. There, too, abusive and mysterious security forces fuelled local resentment. There, too, Indonesia divided to rule, stressing the fissures among the local population. There, too, it would blame unrest on a tiny resistance manipulated by foreign forces. In East Timor Indonesia tried to contain unrest by closing off the territory. Papua is largely off-limits to foreign journalists. Foreign NGOs—even those dealing with an HIV epidemic spread by prostitution—are finding visas for their workers hard to come by. Some feel pressure to leave Papua altogether.

Yet there are reasons to doubt that Papua can follow East Timor into the independence it has now, as Timor-Leste, enjoyed for ten years. First, East Timor’s legal status was different. Through the occupation, Portugal remained, under the UN charter, the “administering” power. Much as the outside world might have liked to forget the problem, there were legal reminders of its existence. The Act of Free Choice, though a flagrant injustice, was nevertheless one to which the UN was party. Second, the Papuan resistance is not as coherent even as the faction-ridden Timorese.

Third, and most important, Timor-Leste’s oil-and-gas income is relatively modest, and started to flow only after independence. Papua is already a treasure-chest. That immense forest is pockmarked in places by isolated lighter-green squares, where the trees have been felled and oil palm planted. And Freeport McMoRan, Grasberg’s owner, claims to be the largest single taxpayer to the Indonesian government. Indonesia is not going to part with such riches easily. It has invested heavily in Papua, buying itself a corps of people with a vested interest in its continued rule.

The SBY effect

Its rule in Papua is a reminder that Indonesia’s current president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, was a general under Suharto, that the army has not cleaned up its act since its atrocities in East Timor and in the conflict in Aceh in Sumatra, and that, in some other respects, too, his regime looks less like the repudiation of Suharto’s Indonesia than its continuation. But Mr Yudhoyono enjoys being feted internationally as the leader of a beacon of democratic moderation. Papua may be the place where that image, already tarnished, is irrevocably stained.

http://www.economist.com/node/21557759