West Papuans rally for independence poll

Several thousand West Papuans have marched through Jayapura demanding an independence referendum.

Papuan students demanding an independence vote rally near the presidential palace in Jakarta on Wednesday. Picture: AP

Several thousand West Papuans marched through the provincial capital, Jayapura, yesterday demanding­ an independence refer­endum, a day after protests turned deadly with at least two ­civilians shot dead and one soldier killed after he was attacked with arrows and machetes.

Calls for a referendum have been mounting this month after a racist attack on Papuan students that has triggered some of the biggest­ demonstrations in years across Papua and West Papua, Indonesia’s easternmost provinces.

Authorities confirmed that at least three people died in Wednesday’s violence outside a local government office in the Papuan highlands regency of Deiyai. ­Papuan police spokesman Anton Ampang said initially small and peaceful protests turned violent after 1000 people in traditional dress, carrying weapons including machetes, joined the protest and began “blindly attacking” security officers with stones and arrows.

Two civilians were killed — one from a gunshot wound and one from an arrow wound to the stomach — while one soldier was killed and five security officers wounded by arrows, he said.

But local pastor Santon Teg­eke, who was at the rally, said he saw five dead and “tens of wounded” after violence erupted when someone in the crowd was shot and protesters began seizing police and military shields.

“I don’t know where the shot came from (but) … the people got enraged. The police became angry too that people were taking their shields,” he told The Australian.

Police fired teargas to disperse the crowd, he said, but then began firing bullets in fear the crowd would attack as they chanted a traditional “waita”, or rallying cry.

Both accounts are impossible to verify, given that communic­ations in parts of Papua and West Papua — known collectively as West Papua by independence supporters — have been blocked along with 32,000 pieces of “provocative content” about Papua.

Among the blocked content is a satirical video by Australian film company The Juice Media, which portrays the Indonesian government as colonisers and the Aust­ralian government as complicit.

Protests have been escalating since August 17, when a mob ­attacked a Papuan student dorm­itory in Surabaya and shouted racist­ slurs at students accused of disrespecting the Indonesian flag.

Government offices, a jail and a market have since been torched in West Papua, and hundreds displaced­. President Joko Widodo has called for unity and “forgiveness” on both sides, but that has failed to quell rising demands for an independence vote.

Regional military command spokesman Eko Daryanto said about 1000 protesters carrying the banned Morning Star flag had joined the march yesterday: it had been “infiltrated by ele­ments” of the pro-independence National Committee for West Papua.

The growing momentum for an independence referendum coincides with the 20th anniversary today of East Timor’s plebiscite in which 78.5 per cent of the former Portuguese colony voted to separate from its Indonesian occupiers. Australia risked relations with Jakarta by supporting the referendum, and leading a peacekeeping force after the vote.

The cost of that support was a commitment from Canberra, under the 2006 Lombok Treaty, to respect Indonesia’s territorial integrity, including its sovereignty over the Papuan provinces.

But human rights lawyer Veron­ica Koman said the right to self-determination under international law “stood above such treaties” and called for Australia to support West Papua.

West Papua was a Dutch colony­ until 1963, when Indon­esia was granted temporary ­authority until an independence referendum could be held. When that occurred in 1969, 1025 men and women picked by the Indon­esian military voted unanimously for Indonesian control.