Asia Pacific Report
A leader of a major West Papuan political movement has praised the recent judgment of the Permanent People’s Tribunal on the Melanesian region colonised by Indonesia for the past 63 years.
“Indonesia knows they have lost the political, legal, and moral argument over West Papua,” said United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) interim president Benny Wenda.
“Their only remaining tactics are brutality and secrecy — brutality to crush our struggle and secrecy to hide it from the world.”
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Saying he welcomed the release of the judgment of the Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) on West Papua, he added: “Our independence is not only urgent for West Papua, but for the entirety of Planet Earth.”
After testimonies from West Papuans on the ground and from legal and academic experts, the tribunal found Indonesia guilty on all four counts:
- Taking by various means the ancestral land of the Indigenous Papuan people against their will, employing racial discrimination which leads to the loss of culture, traditions and Indigenous knowledge, erases their history and subsumes them into the Indonesian national narrative;
- Violent repression, including unlawful detention, extra-judicial killing, and population displacement in West Papua as a means of furthering industrial development;
- Organised environmental degradation, including the destruction of eco-systems, contamination of land, the poisoning of rivers and their tributaries and of providing the permits, concessions and legal structure of non-compliance for national and foreign companies to invest in West Papua in a way that encourages environmental degradation; and
- colluding with national and foreign companies to cause environmental degradation, population displacement and sustain violent repression in West Papua.
The Hague,has hosted a Climate Change gathering prior to hearing the ICJ meeting where Koteka Wenda, fwpc spoke person from West Papua spoke, about WP being the 3rd largest rainforest after the Amazon and the Congo. “If you save West Papua, you save the lungs of the world” pic.twitter.com/aUJzV354qG
— Benny Wenda (@BennyWenda) December 7, 2024
“This judgment is a total vindication of everything the West Papuan liberation movement has been saying for decades. We are not safe with Indonesia,” said Wenda.
“If we continue to be denied our right to self-determination, everything that makes West Papua unique will disappear.”
Guilty of ‘ecocide’
The PPT had found the Indonesian state guilty of ecocide, of “rapidly destroying our forest” and “poisoning our rivers” through mines, plantations, and huge agribusiness food estates.
“But not only this: the judges also linked Indonesia’s ecocidal destruction to the systematic destruction of West Papua as a people,” said Wenda.
“As they put it: ‘ecological degradation can’t be disaggregated from state and corporate projects which are tending toward the obliteration of a people, or what was called by more than one witness a ‘slow genocide’.”
The PPT found in West Papua everything that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights would also find — ecocide, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass displacement, said Wenda.
“That is why Indonesia continues to deny the UN access to West Papua, despite more than 110 countries demanding their visit.”
Wenda said thde ULMWP considered this judgment a “significant step forward in our quest for liberation”.
‘Nothing left to save’
“The case for self-determination presented by the PPT is comprehensive and undeniable. We already know that our people want freedom — the West Papuan People’s Petition for self-determination was signed by 1.8 million Papuans, more than 70 percent of our population.
“Now the PPT has shown how urgently we need it.,” Wenda said
“Our independence is not only urgent for West Papua, but for the entirety of Planet Earth.
Because Papuans are the stewards of the third largest rainforest in the world, the Indonesian occupation is one of the most severe threats to a habitable global climate.
“If Indonesia continues to destroy our forest at its current rate, there will soon be nothing left to save.”
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
APR editor | Radio Free (2024-12-10T04:26:13+00:00) West Papuan leader praises People’s Tribunal ruling as proof of ‘need for freedom’. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2024/12/10/west-papuan-leader-praises-peoples-tribunal-ruling-as-proof-of-need-for-freedom/
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