West Papuan independence advocate Octo Mote is in Aotearoa to win support for independence for West Papua, which has been ruled by Indonesia for over 60 years.
Mote is the vice-president of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), and is being hosted in New Zealand by the Green Party, which Mote said had always been a hero for West Papua.
Leading independence campaigner Benny Wenda has alleged more than 500,000 Papuans have been killed since the occupation, and millions of acres of ancestral forests, rivers and mountains have been destroyed or polluted for “corporate profit”.
The struggle for West Papuans
“Being born a West Papuan, you are already an enemy of the nation,” Mote said.
“The greatest challenge we are facing right now is we are facing the colonial power who live next to us.”
If West Papuans spoke up about what was happening, they were considered separatists, Mote said, regardless of whether they were journalists, intellectuals, public servants or even high-ranking Indonesian generals.
“When our students on the ground speak of justice, they’re beaten up, put in jail and [they - Indonesians] kill so many of them,” Mote said.
Mote is a former journalist and said, while he was working, he witnessed Indonesian forces openly fire at students who were peacefully demonstrating their rights.
“We are in a very dangerous situation right now. When our people try to defend their land, the Indonesian government ignores them and they just take the land without recognising we are landowners,” he said.
The ecocide of West Papua
The ecology in West Papua was being damaged by mining, deforestation, and oil and gas extraction. Mote said Indonesia wanted to “wipe them from the land and control their natural resources”.
He said he was trying to educate the world that defending West Papua meant defending the world, especially small islands in the Pacific.
West Papua is the western half of the island of New Guinea, bordering the independent nation of Papua New Guinea. New Guinea has the third-largest rainforest after the Amazon and Congo and is crucial for climate change mitigation as they sequester and store carbon.
Mote said the continued deforestation of New Guinea, which West Papuan leaders were trying to stop, would greatly impact the small island countries in the Pacific, which were among the most vulnerable to climate change.
Mote also said their customary council in West Papua had already considered the impacts of climate change on small island nations and, given West Papua’s abundance of land, they said by having sovereignty they would be able to both protect the land and support Pacific Islanders who needed to migrate from their home islands.
In 2021 West Papuan leaders pledged to make ecocide a serious crime and this week Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa submitted a court proposal to the International Criminal Court to recognise ecocide as a crime.
Support from local Indonesians
Mote said there were Indonesians who supported the indigenous rights movement for West Papuans. He said there were both NGOs and a Papuan Peace Network founded by West Papuan peace campaigner Neles Tebay.
“There is a movement growing among the academics and among the well-educated people who have read the realities, among those who are also victims of the capital investors, especially in Indonesia when they introduced the omnibus law.”
The omnibus law was passed in 2020 as part of the president’s goals to increase investment and industrialisation in Indonesia. The law was protested because of concerns it would be harmful for workers due to changes in working conditions, and the environment because it would allow for increased deforestation.
He said there was an “awakening” especially in the younger generations who were more open-minded and connected to the world, who could see it both as a humanitarian and an environmental issue.
The ‘transfer’ of West Papua to Indonesia
“The Dutch [traded] us like a cow,” Mote said.
The former Dutch colony was passed over to Indonesia in 1963 but ULMWP calls it an invasion.
From 1957, the Soviet Union had been supplying arms to Indonesia and, during that period, the Indonesian Communist Party had become the largest political party in the country.
The US government urged the Dutch government to give West Papua to Indonesia in an attempt to appease the communist-friendly Indonesian government as part of a US drive to stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia.
The US engineered a meeting between both countries, which resulted in the New York Agreement, giving control of West Papua to the UN in 1962 and then Indonesia a year later.
The New York Agreement stipulated that the population of West Papua were entitled to an act of self-determination.
The ‘act of no choice’
This decolonisation agreement was titled the 1969 Act of Free Choice, which is referred to as “the act of no choice” by pro-independence activists.
Mote said they witnessed, “how the UN allowed Indonesia to cut us into pieces, and they didn’t say anything when Indonesia manipulated our right for self-determination.”
The manipulation Mote refers to is for the Act of Free Choice. Instead of a national referendum, the Indonesian military hand-picked 1,025 West Papuan “representatives” to vote on behalf of the 816,000 people. The representatives were allegedly threatened, bribed and some were held at gunpoint to ensure a unanimous vote.
Leaders of the West Papuan independence movement assert that this wasn’t a real opportunity to exercise self-determination as it was manipulated. However, it was accepted by the UN.
Pacific support at UN General Assembly
Mote has came to Aotearoa after the 53rd Pacific Island Leaders Forum meeting in Tonga and has come to discuss plans over the next five years. Mote hopes to gain support to take what he calls the “slow-motion genocide” of West Papua back to the UN General Assembly.
“In that meeting we formulated how we can help really push self-determination as the main issue in the Pacific Islands,” Mote said.
Mote said there was focus on self-determination of West Papua, Kanaky/New Caledonia and Tahiti. He also said the focus was on what he described as the current colonisation issue with capitalists and global powers having vested interests in the Pacific region.
The movement got it to the UN General Assembly in 2018, so Mote said it was achievable. In 2018 Pacific solidarity was shown as the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and the Republic of Vanuatu all spoke out in support of West Papua.
They affirmed the need for the matter to be returned to the United Nations, and the Solomon Islands voiced its concerns over human rights abuses and violations.
What needs to be done
He said in the next five years Pacific nations needed to firstly make the Indonesian government accountable for its actions in West Papua. He also said President Joko Widodo should be held accountable for his involvement.
Mote said New Zealand was the strongest Pacific nation that would be able to push for the human rights and environmental issues happening, especially as he alleged Australia always backed Indonesian policies.
He said he was looking to New Zealand to speak up about atrocities taking place in West Papua and was particularly looking for support from the Greens, Labour and Te Pāti Māori for political support.
The coalition government announced a plan of action on July 30 this year, which set a new goal of $6 billion in annual two-way trade with Indonesia by 2029.
“New Zealand is strongly committed to our partnership with Indonesia,” Foreign Affairs Minister Winston said then.
“There is much more we can and should be doing together.”