The horror of South Papua...why didn't I know about this?
I read this on facebook, with a picture of native men made to walk in a line: "Herded up like cattle and led away onto Indonesian army trucks to be tortured and then murdered.
This is the reality of life in occupied West Papua. A land where over 500,000 people have been murdered by the Indonesian army, and thousands more have 'disappeared', been raped, tortured and imprisoned."
So I searched DU then the web for info and found this:
The people of West Papua have been calling for self-determination for half a century – a struggle for liberation from an Indonesian military occupation that has seen as many as 500,000 Papuans killed. A recent development in this long campaign is the suspicious death of a commander of the rebel Free Papua Movement (OPM), Danny Kogoya, on December 15. The cause of death, as described in the medical report, was liver failure, bought on by the presence of “unusual chemicals in his body,” raising concern that he was poisoned.
At the time of his death, Kogoya was at Vanimo hospital, in Papua New Guinea (PNG), receiving treatment for his leg. His leg was amputated in 2012 – without his consent – at a police hospital in Jayapura, West Papua, after Indonesian security forces shot him during an arrest. According to the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), a doctor at Vanimo hospital alleged that the chemicals were administered while Kogoya was at the police hospital in Jayapura and that he had been slowly poisoned to death by the Indonesian state authorities.
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Geographically, West Papua sits beside PNG, forming the western half of the resource-rich island of New Guinea, about 300 km from the northern tip of Australia. The West Papua region is split into two provinces: West Papua and Papua. Its indigenous people have Melanesian roots, making them culturally and ethnically similar to their counterparts in PNG, but the formers’ turbulent colonial history and ongoing struggle for self-determination sets them starkly apart from their neighbors.
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The shocking prevalence of torture by Indonesian security forces was revealed by a recent study, which found on average, one incident of torture has taken place every six weeks for the past half century. Of the 431 documented cases reviewed, just 0.05 percent of those tortured were proven to be members of militias – the vast majority of victims were civilians, most commonly farmers and students.
http://thediplomat.com/2014/01/the-human-tragedy-of-west-papua/
First time I learned of this horror.
= new reply since forum marked as read
