West Papua and the Genocide Mosaic

The patterns of genocide, or the various ways humans go about killing large groups of other humans and their attempted justifications for doing so, are so sadly predictable or systematised that, in the case of West Papua, if you take just a small sample, say the last three months, about 2.5% of 60-plus years of Indonesian mass slaughter and environmental destruction, the fragmentary forms are recognisable enough to produce a picture of the ghastly whole. Very few people talk or protest about the genocide in West Papua, and this is one more element of the general picture: the coverup by the so-called international system because the frame of the West Papua mosaic extends way beyond the outline of the island of New Guinea.

Isolated incidents are sometimes mentioned in the mainstream press, a village bombed here, a couple of teenagers shot there, rainforest (as if it were simply a bunch of trees) devastated, but the real context isn’t given. The real context is genocide and ecocide, but experts tend to pussyfoot around their own cognitive dissonance with tricky questions about whether there’s intent. The action of genocide is discussed more than its effects, which are many forms of appalling pain. But trying to come to grips with that would mean recognising the victims and giving them voice as fellow and equal human beings. The patterns of the mosaic scream intent and the screams are those of real people, the victims. Every single fragment, if you understand it’s not alone, screams intent, and not just intent of the immediate perpetrators but of all their enablers.

Before dawn on 15 October last year, Indonesian troops surrounded a men’s communal house in Soanggamavillage, in the Intan Jaya regency (site of the huge, heavily militarised Wabu Block gold ore deposit with, needless to say, active and retired military among its prominent investors) destroyed it and shot and killed eight people. They also captured, tortured, and murdered other men, as well as torturing and raping a woman who tried to flee but drowned in the Hiabu river. This kind of assault is no novelty in West Papua where, inscribed in the annals of brutality, are similar raids in Wamena 2003 (25 villages attacked, arbitrary arrests, torture, evictions after which 42 died of starvation, and other physical violence), Wasior 2001 (four dead, 39 tortured, some to death, one rape, five disappeared, destruction of property), Biak 1998 (approximately 150 killed, where “the sky was on fire”, where one victim declared, “A lit candle was penetrated inside me, they cut off my clitoris and they raped me”, and further evidence from villagers was apparently destroyed by the Australian Department of Defence), Abepura 2000 (three students killed, a hundred people detained, and dozen beaten and tortured), Wamena 2023 (nine dead, seventeen shot), and many other episodes of violence. Immediately after the attack on Soanggama last October, four members of the West Papua Liberation Army were killed in a drone attack in Kiwirok, which was also bombed in October 2021, after which at least 200 displaced people died of starvation. These atrocities, actual or their always-looming possibility, violence and feared violence, are part of everyday life.

And what happened? After all these crimes, which have displaced more than 100,000 people, the response has been silence from political leaders everywhere, despite video evidence, for example that provided by the Ngalum Kupel people of the Star Mountains. For years, West Papuan leaders have been seeking foreign policy support from Pacific nations for their country’s independence, as well as full membership status (which the non-Melanesian nation Indonesia has) in the Melanesian Spearhead Group, international support for UN access to West Papua, cancellation of bilateral agreements with Indonesia, and sponsorship of the West Papua case in the International Court of Justice. All in vain. On the other half of the island, shared by the same Melanesian people, many of them close relatives in areas sliced through by the colonial border, the prime minister, James Marape says that Papua New Guinea, independent since 1975, has “no right at all, to encroach into the sovereignty issue discussion [regarding West Papua]”, which is his version of a legalese cover for genocide.

Meanwhile, in the wider world, Australia, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia are negotiating a trilateral defence pact with the purported aims of improved cooperation on “border management, maritime security, intelligence sharing, counter-smuggling and crisis preparedness”. The Indonesian representative, General Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin is well knownfor serious crimes (including murder, mass sexual violence, enforced disappearances, torture, displacement of populations, and arbitrary arrests) against human rights in East Timor (1976 and 1990), Aceh (1980), and West Papua (1987). Great Britain has a large economic stake in West Papua through companies closely connected with deforestation, mining, and gas production, including Prudential, HSBC and Legal & General (backing palm oil production in Merauke, the world’s largest deforestation project), Barclays, the Railways Pension Trustee Company, and Royal London (shares in the Freeport-McMoRan mine, which discharges some 300,000 tonnes of untreated waste into local rivers every day), the British-Australian mining company Rio Tinto, and then—no show without Punch—there’s BP, lead owner of the Tangguh LNG facility, which has displaced local villages, trashed mangrove forests, and will generate more than 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon emissions in its operative lifetime. The EU is no slouch either when it comes to dressing genocide complicity as business. In September, despite severe criticism, it signed the Indonesia-EU Economic Partnership Agreement in its attempts to limit reliance on the United States, especially after the imposition of Donand Trump’s tariffs.

One of the worst aspects of the overall picture is that it’s almost impossible to depict the real suffering of the actual people and other forms of life that are also being tortured—for example cassowaries and orangutangs (the name in Malay, orang hutan means “person of the forest”) and thousands of other species dying deprived of a habitat—because one of the bits of the mosaic is an almost total gagging of any firsthand expression of what the inhabitants of West Papua have been subjected to all these years. Papua Food Estate, a recent documentary about the huge-scale destruction of human and natural habitats in West Papua for monocropping, gives some idea. And giving an idea through the voices of affected people, it also gives another idea of how much isn’t allowed to be said. The fragmentary form of news items over the last three months of 2025 are further proof of this.

West Papua is assaulted in “small” ways with attacks on individuals, groups, and villages, and in large ways dressed up as feeding people or clean energy, as with Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto’s food estates. In September he issued presidential instructions for an eight billion dollar deforestation project of 250,000 hectares of palm oil plantations for biodiesel around the Merauke Food Estate, plus 180 hectares for a new airport, as well as a new highway. One supporter of the project is Brazil’s supposedly progressive president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who, not ignorant of what the environmental and human consequences are, and instead of focusing on the dire state of the Amazon rainforest, has offered to help Indonesia to develop fuels mixed with bioethanol via agreements worth $5 billion. There are many more politicians and business moguls who are attacking this ecosystem of more than 70 million years old, rainforests that constitute one of Earth’s most diverse biomes.

Further plans include pet projects of East Timor-born Joao Angelo De Sousa Mota, former president-director of the state-owned food company Agrinas Pangan Nusantara and recipient of an award given by none other than Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin for service to “national unity” (involving killing almost 40% of the East Timorese population using starvation, sexual violence, and chemical weapons, operations overseen by Prabowo Subianto and carried out by Sjafrie Sjamsoedin). His plans include 200,000 hectares of rice and cassava estates in West Papua. An important aspect of this destruction is that Prabowo is mobilising the army and his connections with oligarchs (for example, Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin’s cousin Andi Syamsuddin Arsyad, founder of the Jhonlin Group conglomerate, into coal mining and palm oil, one of Southeast Asia’s leading deforesters, and known for using armed forces to intimidate journalists and activists) to push it through. Indonesian troops are not only protecting construction workers and land-clearing machinery, but are actively razing rainforest. A total of three million hectares have already been earmarked for industrial agriculture. Prabowo’s Minister for Forestry, Raja Juli Antoni, says that twenty million hectares will undergo industrial conversion but has not disclosed where. His plans augur ill for West Papua, especially after the recent deforestation-caused Sumatra floods that took more than 1,100 lives and left 1.2 million homeless.

Reports on harm to local communities, Indigenous population displacement, human rights abuse, land grabbing, deforestation, destruction of Indigenous food systems, ecological damage, and labour exploitation are ignored because, as happened in the Sumatra floods, the worst effects of the resulting climate breakdown crush powerless people who have done least to cause it, people taking the brunt of the disaster, Indigenous peoples, and especially women and girls. And they lack the means to protest or, rather, to be heard. Meanwhile, in the first three days of 2026, the world’s richest 1% exhausted its “carbon budget” (as if they really did “budget”, which is just another example of coverup language). Exploiting resources from countries like West Papua, these powerful people are contributing a huge piece of the genocide mosaic, the part that’s always decked out in elegance, luxurious houses, cars, clothes, jewellery, makeup, coiffing, good manners, important contacts, and celebrity circles. To quote from Shakespeare’s Richard III, their entitlement and the suffering they cause make them “unfit for any place but hell”. And that’s what they might get if they end up in their climate catastrophe bunkers.

There used to be a few niceties about genocide, if trying to hide it could be called a “nicety”. But, now in the age of Trump, niceties have become blatancy, bragging even. Just check out his recently published National Security Strategy. The threat that anything goes is barely concealed in this vision of diplomacy: “The purpose of foreign policy is the protection of core national interest”. Pushing things further, Trump declares he doesn’t need international law because he has his “own morality”. He changes the meaning of words like morality (“principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour”) so that when “morality” is magicked into a dictator’s “morality” it’s no longer possible to say that genocide is wrong because it’s right for the dictator.

Not to be outdone in unfitness for any place but hell, the Indonesian president, war criminal Prabowo Subianto, has named his former father-in-law, Suharto—whose regime, it is reliably estimated, killed between 500,000 and a million people in 1965-1967 and imprisoned almost two million more without trial—a “national hero” (a dictionary hero being “a person who is admired for their courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities”). Maybe Prabowo felt the need to puff up his connections with the Suharto family (looted wealth, some $35 billion, almost 220 times Prabowo’s fortune, as estimated eleven years ago) through his former wife Titiek, Suharto’s second daughter, politician, businesswoman and still ally, but more important is the message he wants to convey. If kleptocrat, mass murderer Suharto is named a national hero, massacres will inevitably follow. This “strongman” is a symbol of mass murder. Look at his record. Look at who named him a hero and you’ll find all the patterns of genocide, corruption, and not just in money terms but of all values. Genocidaires don’t kill only for money but for greed and power, whatever the cost to anyone or anything else. And they turn the evil of their amorality into “morality”.

A genocide needs connections and Prabowo is almost certainly reminding the “international system” of the favours his “hero” former father-in-law did for the system’s oligarchs. The Suharto dictatorship secured US interests in Southeast Asia (during the Vietnam War years) once the purge-by-mass-murder of the Indonesian Communist Party  was consummated in favour of the US capitalist strategy of crushing communism, no matter where, no matter how. And Suharto’s legacy remained. The whole system he built on the Dutch colonial repressive apparatus, Sukarno era decrees like Eradicating Subversive Activities (1963), his own KOPKAMTIB (Operational Command for the Restoration of Security and Order) Cleansing Decision (1968), and GOLKAR the dictatorship party, sometimes with new names (and sometimes not, just to remind people what happens if they protest), remained equally operative through the so-called “reformation”, the so-called civilian governments of Abdurraman Wahid (1999-2001), Megawati Sukarnoputri (2001-2004), Yudoyono (2004-2014), and Joko Widowo (2014-2024). Almost every village and family in Indonesia was affected by the crimes of Suharto’s coup d’etat but, evidently no justice was or will be done in a system where a kleptocratic mass murderer can be named a national hero. Joshua Oppenheimer’s devastating film An Act of Killingmakes this terribly clear.

Franz Neumann observes in Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944 (first published in 1942),

When it becomes ‘political’ justice breeds hatred and contempt among those it singles out for attack. Those whom it favours, on the other hand, develop a profound contempt for the very value of justice; they know it can be purchased for the powerful. As a device for strengthening one political group at the expense of others … law then threatens the fundamental convictions upon which the tradition of our civilization rests.

In Indonesia, the nature and scale of the carnage and the fake trials “all but destroyed the ‘juridical person’ … Justice is perverted when it is confined to a call for procedural norms against such a background of mass murder”. And one result is that mass murder continues. So, genocidal actions should be understood not only as the specific crimes that are perpetrated but as the whole system that allows, encourages, and repeats them for the benefit of the few who run it. The principle extends beyond Indonesia and its dictatorial structures, which were seen as a promising investment for other powers. For example US aid quadrupled to US$546 million in 1968 after which it shot up to $1.22 billion in 1972.

In The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-1966, Geoffrey B. Robinson writes of horrific events that occurred sixty years ago.

“Bound and gagged, they were then lined up and shot at the edge of mass graves, or hacked to pieces with machetes and knives… Many were subjected to sexual abuse and violence before and after their killing; men were castrated, and women had their vaginas and breasts sliced or pierced with knives. Corpses, heads, and other body parts were displayed on roads as well as in markets and other public places” (p.7).

He continues, “[…] most died in isolated killing fields—in plantations, ravines, and rice fields, or on beaches and riverbanks—in thousands of rural villages dotted across the archipelago.” (p.123). The same patterns are recognisable in West Papua today, although some of the weapons used against the Indigenous people are now more sophisticated than the “knives, sickles, machetes, swords, ice picks, bamboo spears, iron rods, and other everyday implements” Robinson describes. And like the IDF forces in Palestine forces, the TNI troops in West Papua make videos trying to normalise the atrocities they’re committing.

Genocide isn’t just about episodes of killing and how many died. The usually overlooked or hidden point is the means of it—and here I refer to the so-called international system, the Godfather of it all—and why, by whom, and for whom. When, after his attack on Venezuela and kidnapping its president and its wife, and killing nearly eighty people in doing so, Trump gloated on Fox News, “This incredible thing last night … We have to do it again [in other countries]. We can do it again, too. Nobody can stop us”, he gave the context in which all crimes against humanity, all crimes against the planet itself, must be understood. In The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped our World (2020), Vincent Bevins shows how Washington saw the “Jakarta method” as a blueprint for other crimes in other countries. The threat which, for three years, painted on walls or written on postcards sent to Allende’s colleagues in the Popular Socialist party, heralded the 1973 Pinochet coup in Chile, was “Jakarta is coming”, and those to whom it was addressed understood the message of a coming terrible violence. In Brazil, the 1970s US-supported plan of the military dictatorship to eliminate the communist party (PCB) and other leftists was called Operação Jacarta (Operation Jakarta).

The consequences, though apparently unconnected, never stop rippling out. With the tourist boom that followed when the Suharto regime privatised communal land and wallowed in foreign investment, a Bali killing field in Seminyak became a chic beach club. But atrocities attract more atrocities. The tourist boom has gobbled up traditional rice paddies, strained infrastructure, choked the island with traffic and waste, and caused cultural conflict. The bombing attack of 12 October 2002, which killed 202 people in the adjacent Kuta area, is just one indirect and not so distant result of Suharto’s “heroism”.

The antecedents are all documented and, now with all the outright bragging, it’s not difficult to identify the perpetrators who are pulling everyone and everything into their system. “Genocide”, especially after the open depravity of Israel’s destruction of Gaza, isn’t a serious word anymore. It’s not serious because it’s been stripped of its real meaning: the immense, the unspeakable physical suffering, mental torment, and grief inflicted on vast numbers of our fellow humans. The bitter truth is that, whether genocide is blatant or dressed up as “food estates”, the capitalist system has created a world in which it’s acceptable. For decades now, the genocide mosaic has been coming together in small and large pieces, but few want to read its real shape, let alone create a different caring mosaic of a world that’s truly democratic and free. Basically, modern civilisation has converted into genocide what, long ago, was called human sacrifice, the ritualistic killing of humans and animals to appease deities or fulfil elite social obligations. Now the altars are those of mammon, and the deities are the tiny percentage of the world’s population that controls everything, people for whom no crime is too abhorrent. This is the terrible message of the mosaic they’re making.

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