July 6 was the anniversary of one of the shameful events in Australia’s relationship with Indonesia. In July 1998 on Biak—a tiny island just north of Australia—the Indonesian military carried out a massacre of more than 100 people, mostly women. And to Australia’s shame, despite an intelligence investigation confirming that it happened, the Australian government refused to condemn the massacre, and to this day has refused to release the report.
I was in Biak last year and although the island is visually a tropical paradise, the experience was disturbing. The scars of the horrific events that took place on July 6, nearly five years ago, have not healed. Nor have the scars of 40 years of constant, and at times deadly, intimidation by the Indonesian police and military. In Biak, perhaps more than any other place I visited in West Papua, the fear of Indonesian intimidation and violence is palpable. As I travelled around Biak with my wife, I felt it was eerily unlike other places we had been. Teenage girls and young women did not engage us with their eyes or a smile. Fear and shame were written on their faces.
West Papua, less than 200 kilometres from Australia, was handed over to Indonesia in 1963 following the New York Agreement. This ended a long-running dispute between the Netherlands and Indonesia over the former Dutch colony. In 1969 a hotly disputed vote by just 1025 Indonesian-picked Papuans confirmed that West Papua would remain part of Indonesia. This vote was recently called a ‘whitewash’ by the United Nations Under-Secretary-General who supervised the hand-over of West Papua to Indonesia.
The Papuan Women’s Solidarity Group was established to support victims of the massacre. At a meeting of the group in Biak town, I was told that all Biak women live with the very real threat of physical or sexual violence every day of their lives, and they have done so for 40 years. The women described the monthly dances in remote villages, organised by the military, that every young woman, including those who are married, must attend. At these dances, or after, often at their homes, the women are raped by the soldiers—and the families and husbands are powerless to do anything.
The day after this meeting, on a crowded public taxi driven by an off-duty member of Indonesia’s paramilitary police, Brimod, I witnessed a minor example of the sort of everyday harassment that’s commonplace