One half of the larger island of Papua, West Papua remains one of the most contested regions in the Asia-Pacific region. Currently, West Papua is a part of Indonesia, despite the fact that West Papuans are ethnically and culturally distinct from Indonesians, sharing closer ties with Indigenous Melanesian populations in Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Fiji, and the Solomon Islands. The story of how West Papuans ended up integrated into a nation in which they have no historical connection is tumultuous, bloody, and worryingly unheard of.
Despite Indonesia’s independence in 1945, the Netherlands retained control of West Papua until the 1962 New York Agreement. No West Papuan representatives were present at these negotiations. The agreement established a United Nations-supervised transitional administration, the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA), to prepare the West Papuan population for an assessment of self determination. UNTEA landed in West Papua on 1 October 1962 and stayed for only nine months. Passed around like a ball in a game, with no regard for the countless Papuan nationalist groups rallying for their independence from the moment the UN landed on their shores, the UN handed sovereignty of West Papua to Indonesia on 1 May 1963. West Papuans would have to wait another six years until The Act of Free Choice, the key UNTEA mandate mechanism for assessing their desire for self determination.
Upon UN departure, Indonesia quickly shut the region off from the outside world, banning foreign journalists, UN workers, and missionaries, to hide the growing violence. President Sukarno outlawed all West Papuan political parties and nationalist activity. Local authorities enacted this on the ground, banning books, flags, and even songs tied to Papuan identity.
But nationalism doesn’t die when books are burned and laws are passed.
By 1965, the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM) had formed, calling for independence. Indonesia responded with airstrikes and the burning of activists’ homes. By 1968, state-sanctioned mass killings of dissenters were underway. This was an era defined by legal violence.
The UN’s representative to West Papua, Fernando Ortiz-Sanz, failed the people he was sent to protect. Convinced by a lethal mix of racism, ignorance, apathy, and pro-Indonesian bias, he decided that West Papuans were too uneducated and disorganised for a typicalone-person-one-vote system in the upcoming Act of Free Choice. Yet all around him were organised, informed West Papuan activists demanding self determination.
Indonesia’s penchant for violence soon bled into politics. In preparing for the vote, authorities handpicked pro-Indonesian Papuans as representative voters and silenced dissent through torture, intimidation, and isolation. Many who resisted simply disappeared. Indonesia exploited the UN’s vague language in the mandate, which never specified a “plebiscite” or “referendum”; a falsification of democracy. The Act of Free Choice went ahead and showed a totally artificial full favour towards Indonesian control of the region.
When presented to the UNGA as such on 19 November 1969, the mandate was satisfied, and the UN wiped their hands of West Papua.
West Papua was officially under the control of Indonesia.
Since then, West Papua has suffered decades of violence, displacement, and systematic cultural erasure. Indonesia has been particularly focused on the systematic displacement of West Papuan people, erasure of their culture, and undermining of traditional ways of life. Often at the benefit of the wider Indonesian populace and economy.
In 1967, major American mining company Freeport struck a deal with the Indonesian government, granting them lucrative access to West Papua’s unique natural resources, particularly gold, with no provisions for compensating indigenous landowners or protecting the sacred environment. Local communities were disenfranchised, losing access to their traditional lands and abilities to sustain themselves through traditional means of eating, clothing, and shelter. By the late 1980s, Jakarta had received over $10 billion in tax revenue, at the expense of West Papuans living displaced, under the watchful eye and harsh hand of the mine’s armed guards, populated by Indonesian military officers. Today, Freeport continues to operate under similar unrestricted terms in West Papua.
Beginning in 1984, the Indonesian government implemented a transmigration program to West Papua, and it was enforced through violence. For example, the military launched Operation Clean Sweep, attacking villages, raping, murdering, and capturing West Papuans, and seizing their homes and lands to make way for transmigration settlements. Year after year, thousands of Javanese families were relocated to West Papua, placed on ancestral lands, eventually creating a majority population over the indigenous people. Dispossessed and removed from their traditional lands, West Papuans were forced to live in artificial compounds under unsafe and unhealthy conditions, facing high mortality rates, widespread disease, and low life expectancy. This was a cultural assault, with government, business, home life, education, and media designed by and for the Javanese newcomers, systematically marginalising Melanesian culture and ensuring Javanese dominance over the now-subjugated indigenous population.
But this is not a problem of the past.
Much of the activism for West Papuans has largely rested on the shoulders of concerned external actors, including NGOs, news outlets, and academics. In 2001, NGO Liberation submitted a statement to the UN detailing human rights violations and calling for support. In 2003, the NGO Commission of Churches also expressed concerns over human rights abuses it had witnessed since 1998 and urged for help. Perhaps most importantly, a paper prepared in 2014 by Yale Law School for the Indonesian Human Rights Network classified the situation in West Papua as genocide conducted by Indonesia. In 2018, The New York Times reported on arrested, jailed OPM fighter Yano Awerkion. In 2020, Amnesty International released a full report detailing human rights violations in West Papua, calling for change to ensure the right to freedom, and The Lowy Institute produced a report about West Papua, documenting military control, West Papuan nationalist sentiment, human rights abuses, and international activism.
Closer to the UN, in 2022, the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner issued a press release detailing the human rights abuses in West Papua, urging for humanitarian aid, independent investigations, and unrestricted access. This was reiterated as recently as 2024, but still, the UN remains unmoved.
Despite decades of violence, displacement, and cultural erasure, the United Nations remains largely silent, shielded by the very bureaucratic precedents it created. Having “ticked the box” of decolonisation, it has insulated itself from accountability. Meanwhile, powerful interests continue to profit at the expense of West Papuans. Our responsibility is clear—our concern should be for the safety, rights, and self determination of the people, not for the structures of the UN. How many more generations will suffer before justice is finally achieved?
Written by Jessica Hall, Edited by Sarah Jiayi Drogies
Photo Credit: Ambrosius Mulalt (uploaded December 19, 2022) on pexels.
