West Papua and Pity the Indigenous (Indonesia)
Kanako Mita, Noriko Watanabe, and Lee Jay Walker
Modern Tokyo Times
Spare more than a passing thought for the Indigenous Papuans, who for over six decades have endured systematic persecution in their own homeland under Indonesian rule. This is not merely neglect — it is an ongoing colonial project, sustained by foreign governments that continue to arm Jakarta and legitimised by the shameful silence of regional powers including Australia, China, Japan, and others who accept Indonesia’s authority without meaningful challenge.
President Benny Wenda of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) stated with devastating clarity: “We are murdered, tortured, and raped, and then our land is stolen for resource extraction and corporate profit when we flee.”
The Papuan people are overwhelmingly Christian and ethnically Melanesian — distinct from the Javanese elite that dominates Indonesia’s largely Muslim state. Yet for decades the international community has looked away while Papuans are massacred, their villages militarised, their culture marginalised, and their ancestral lands handed over to corporations. This is colonialism in plain sight.
Indonesia’s major trading partners — including the United States, China, Japan, India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Philippines — remain largely silent in the face of this human rights catastrophe. Australia, meanwhile, prioritises military cooperation and geopolitical convenience over justice, frequently turning a blind eye to Papuan suffering even while voicing outrage over abuses in distant conflicts such as Ukraine. The hypocrisy is glaring.
As The Guardian reports, West Papua occupies the western half of New Guinea, home to the world’s third-largest rainforest and vast reserves of gold, copper, gas, minerals, and timber. It is precisely this extraordinary wealth that fuels Jakarta’s grip on the territory.
West Papuans themselves say more than 500,000 of their people have been killed during six decades of occupation, while millions of acres of sacred ancestral land have been destroyed for corporate profit.
Papuan civilisation — its culture, ethnicity, spirituality, and history — bears little resemblance to that of the Indonesian state that continues to impose control. Without urgent international intervention, Papuans face not only continued repression but the slow erasure of their identity as an Indigenous people.
The people of West Papua are not asking for charity. They are demanding their fundamental right to self-determination — freedom from military occupation, freedom from resource plunder, and freedom from a system that treats them as expendable obstacles to profit.
As Benny Wenda puts it plainly: “Indonesia doesn’t want the West Papuan people — they only want our resources.”
The documentary Paradise Bombed by Kristo Langker lays bare this brutal reality, exposing villages targeted by Indonesian airstrikes and showing how food deprivation, displacement, and terror are deliberately used to crush resistance and break community spirit.
This is not a forgotten tragedy. It is a living one.
The continued silence of powerful nations makes them complicit. Justice for West Papua is long overdue — and every day of delay deepens the injustice.
Paradise Bombed – Video documenting the hidden West Papua (Important video to watch about West Papua)
https://www.ipwp.org The International Parliamentarians for West Papua (IPWP)
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