Introduction
The Indonesian-ruled territory of West Papua is home to some of the richest biodiversity in the world. The New Guinea rainforest—which spans the Indonesian and the Papua New Guinean part of the island territory—is the largest in the entire Asia-Pacific region and is the third largest in the world after the Amazon and Congo. Whilst the Amazon often commands global attention as the world’s largest tropical rainforest and the largest carbon sink, the significance of the island of New Guinea cannot be understated. Any damage to West Papua’s forests not only compromises the island’s immense capacity to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but it also causes portions of these forests to release even more carbon dioxide into the air, further heating the planet.
West Papua, the western half of the island of New Guinea, was partitioned as a result of European colonial settlement. The West Papuans, an Indigenous Melanesian peoples, have been fighting for their right to self-determination since the Netherlands’ colonization in 1898. When the Dutch finally left the Indonesian archipelago, West Papua was formally handed over to Indonesia through a highly discredited process in which a number of delegates were appointed as proxies of the popular vote—a process still referred to by West Papuans as the “gunpoint referendum” (Glazebrook 2008: 23). Crucially, these colonial politics left West Papua vulnerable to intense industrial extractivism, within a region that, much like the Amazon, plays a vital role in the sustainability of the planet.
Adding to the plight of West Papuans, since the 1980s, Indonesia has embraced a perilous neoliberal economic agenda. More recently, and especially under the leadership of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, the nation’s development approach has been defined by a “normative commitment to an activist state”, in which state interventionism in the economy seeks to “engineer fast economic growth” and “direct industrial upgrading” (Warburton 2018: 355). Whilst the Indonesian government argues that economic growth in the region will produce jobs and increase quality of life, this form of industrial development has dire consequences for Papuans.
Not surprisingly, Indonesia’s aggressive industrial development in gas extraction, gold and copper mining and agricultural plantation has faced strong resistance from local communities. Equally foreseeable, this resistance has provoked a surge in Indonesian state violence and dispossession. As this article will discuss, military actors have employed methods such as arbitrary detention and torture of Papuan dissenters to defend corporate land grabs and highly contentious industrial projects (Brundige et al. 2004). According to the UN Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), between December 2018 and March 2022, some 60,000 to 100,000 Papuans have been displaced (OHCHR 2022). There is little doubt that the escalating displacement and extra-judicial killings in West Papua are directly linked to the form of development facilitated by the Indonesian military.
Highlighting this spike in state violence, in 2022 three UN Special Rapporteurs—Francisco Cali Tzay (Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples), Morris Tidball-Binz (Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions), and Cecilia Jimenez-Damary (Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons)—voiced grave concern about the rise in extra-judicial killings and estimated the overall number of displaced people (OHCHR 2022). These prominent figures further noted the Indonesian government’s persistent denial of access to UN organizations and international relief organizations. Despite such alarming reports, the international community has yet to take any meaningful action to intervene in this conflict. Indeed, refusing external human rights scrutiny stands as one key tactic employed by the state to stifle dissent and maintain the existing power structure.
Of course, “industrial upgrading” will produce jobs for some, but it will also create vast amounts of toxic waste, poison food and water sources, devastate some of the world’s richest coral reefs, destroy biodiversity, and perpetuate the ongoing displacement and oppression of West Papuans. As we shall argue in this article, because the form of industrial development in West Papua is determined by an autocratic form of colonial regime—one that ensures maximum value extraction for predatory foreign investors and the Indonesian government—it has fuelled an independence movement. Indeed, it is precisely because the Indonesian presence is rooted in an extractivist logic that popular resistance to transnational capital and popular support for the right to self-determination are inextricably linked.
Thus, we argue here that demands for the right to self-determination as a form of political autonomy cannot be separated from the struggle to retain basic control over the essential conditions for life in West Papua: the production of food and the protection of water and air quality. Specifically, we will argue that resistance to the Indonesian state in West Papua must be understood as a struggle for autonomy in the widest possible sense: a struggle to assert autonomy over the entirety of social and economic reproduction.
Contested Meanings of “Sovereignty” and “Autonomy”
In this section we set out a framework for reading the basis of the ongoing struggle between the Papuan people and the Indonesian state. This struggle is multifaceted and involves a combination of street protests asserting political autonomy and the right to self-determination, protests against the extension of direct political control by Indonesia, protests and campaigns of resistance against specific industrial sites and specific corporations, and a persistent guerrilla war against the Indonesian military.
In each of these forms of struggle, we see the demand for not just political autonomy, but for autonomy over all of the interlinked conditions that determine the lives of Papuans. This includes Papuans’ relationship with their land and nature; autonomy over cultural practices; autonomy over food production; and, in short, autonomy over the necessary conditions that reproduce social, economic and biological life. In other words, it is impossible to consider political autonomy and sovereignty as some kind of distinct and rarefied domain.
The idea that political autonomy can be viewed as ontologically distinct from the conditions that sustain life, is itself difficult to sustain. The concept of “sovereignty” in Western academic discourse is normally defined as the authority held by a state over a given territory and its people. In this understanding—rooted in the European Westphalian state system—sovereignty is exclusively positioned in political terms. If a particular polity—or group of people—wishes to exert more autonomy over their political system, or even change that political system, then they need to do so within the political realm: either by democratic means or where this is not available to them, by forcing a change in the system through popular mobilization. In the standard story, sovereignty is not understood beyond the realm of the political; social sovereignty and cultural sovereignty are understood as being located in entirely different realms (Latham 2000).
The experience of the Papuan people, however, does not correspond to this neatly arranged and delineated view of sovereignty and autonomy. The Westphalian view of the nation-state is, by definition, a European construction, based upon the emergence of the European nation-state system. Alternative ways of thinking, from different traditions, do not project sovereignty and autonomy in such narrow terms. In fact, social movements that foregrounded economic sovereignty—the capacity to organize economies outside capitalist and imperialist structures of power—have their roots in the anti-colonial third-world movement and re-emerged in the Zapatista-inspired “anti-globalization” movement of the 1990s (Harvey 2015). Relatedly, calls for “food sovereignty”, organized by small-scale farmers and social movements in resistance to the colonization of seed technology and the imposition of industrial, chemical-based food production, have played out in myriad ways (Rosset 2003; Via Campesina 2007). Similarly, a crisis in water supply and the integrity of water sources faced by many states in the Global South, often affecting the most marginalized within those states, has sparked debates about “water sovereignty” and the right to preserve water sources from predatory industrial and colonial practices (O’Donnell 2023). Those very different accounts have one thing in common: they propose that food and water sovereignty depend upon direct democratic participation and decision-making that require an end to the use of food and water as a weapon of policy, and suggest instead a need to base all policy on a respect for life in lakes, rivers, seas and on land (Patel 2009). Together, those accounts present a wholly different understanding of the meaning of sovereignty and autonomy that are rooted not in the imperatives of commodification and value extraction “from above”, but find their power to act in community solidarity networks and collective practices “from below”.
What’s important, then, is that understandings of autonomy and sovereignty “from below” do not tend to delineate political sovereignty from other forms of economic and social sovereignty. Nor do they artificially separate the demand for the right to self-determination from sovereignty over biological life and social reproduction.
In the Papuan context, the term “survivance sovereignty” is used to describe the means of restoring Papuan traditions of managing the land, food production and healthcare (Webb-Gannon and Rumkabu 2023; Munro and Baransano 2023). This term explicitly refers to anti-colonial and anti-corporate strategies aimed at defending livelihoods against the encroachment of industrial development. Papuan women especially engage in practices of “survivance sovereignty”. When Indigenous Papuans lose forests and their tropical gardens to palm oil plantations, women in particular lose a major source of food, medicine, spiritual connection, relationship development, creative knowledge, social and economic capital, and a site of cultural transmission. “Guerrilla gardening”—or the practice of creating gardens in public or borrowed patches of land—is one such mechanism of “survivance” that Papuan women have deployed to reclaim their customary roles and power (Webb-Gannon and Rumkabu 2023).
Another central aspect of the historical and contemporary exclusion of the Papuan people is the everyday racism that they face. Indeed, for many Papuans, Indonesian sovereignty over their territory represents a systematic attempt to erase Papuan lives and culture. Papuan civil society commonly refers to the racist effects of land grabbing and the loss of food sovereignty, as well as the marginalization of Papuans by the Indonesian introduction of migrant workers, known as transmigration (Kusumaryati 2021c).
As we discuss later, in West Papua, struggles for political autonomy and sovereignty cannot be dissected from struggles for power over the conditions of life, of social reproduction and economic production. Yet, this conceptualization of sovereignty as embracing real power over the conditions of life, of social reproduction, as a basis for economic production, stands in stark contrast to the very specific language and political construction of “autonomy” imposed on West Papua by the Indonesian state.
The Indonesian “Special Autonomy” laws are important in this respect. Those laws claim to offer a measure of devolved political autonomy in West Papua, and at the same time are a part of the state narrative that West Papua is governed consensually. The Special Autonomy Law in West Papua was first enacted in 2001 as a compromise, in response to growing demands for independence and following the demise of President Suharto’s New Order regime (Bertrand 2019). It is designed to reverse the marginalization of Papuans.
Whilst the law provided for some political autonomy, it fell short of the promise of the original draft, for example, a process for a referendum on independence and provisions to revisit the 1969 Act of Free Choice. It did introduce new powers and resources to Papua and created a new forum for representation of Indigenous Papuan groups, the Papuan People’s Assembly (MRP), to promote and protect the rights and customs of Indigenous Papuan people. Yet its powers were limited to consultation, and the process, as we shall see below could be easily ignored. As Bertrand (2019: 14) has concluded: “Papuans therefore obtained a Special Autonomy law that the central government imposed. Although the drafting committee consulted several groups, the law was neither a product of negotiation nor of broad consultation, and it was not a faithful reflection of the original draft”.
The Special Autonomy has now been extended for another 20 years, with some concerning new amendments. In 2021, 18 articles of the Special Autonomy law were amended, and two articles were added, with serious implications for issues of decentralization and autonomy. According to Article 76, the central government can decide on the creation of new regencies and districts. This has been opposed by many West Papuans because it could lead to further marginalization and militarization (CIVICUS 2021). Two sections of Article 28 were omitted, which removed the right to form local political parties. A new rule is now in place that the Vice President will have an office in the provinces to oversee the implementation of the Special Autonomy Law. In 2022, the House of Representatives approved legislation for the creation of the new provinces of South Papua, Central Papua and Papua Central Highlands (State of Indonesia 2023). Crucially, the MRP was excluded from the amendment discussions and the new provinces, despite its inclusion in consultations being explicitly required by the law. The MRP had stated that the renewal is not the wish of the West Papuan people. The Papuan People’s Petition (Petisi Rakyat Papua/PRP), which consists of 112 mostly Indigenous groups, collected 714,066 grassroots West Papuans’ signatures against the amendments and against the Special Autonomy law (CIVICUS 2021).
Those laws are the foundation of Indonesia’s system of government in West Papua. They set the political framework in the provinces for administering and setting the pace of industrial development; and for denying Papuans the capacity to meaningfully influence the direction of development. In this sense, Special Autonomy, as a set of political governance tools, effectively enables the eradication of the social and economic autonomy of Papuans, as well as their political autonomy. Before embarking on an understanding of how this plays out in contemporary forms of industrial development, the next section provides some political context to the “post-colonial” settlement that brought us to this point.
A Little More Anti-Communism, a Little More Aid: Settler Colonialism in West Papua 1
The island of New Guinea is split into two by one of those arbitrary straight dividing lines that characterized the European carve-up of colonial territories. As a whole, the island was colonized by three different powers: the Germans in the north-east, the British (and then the Australians) in the south-east, and the Dutch in the west. After the World War I, Australia took control of the German colony, holding possession of the entire eastern half of the island, with the Dutch remaining as occupiers of the western half.
During the colonial period, West Papua was regarded by the Dutch as an entirely separate colony to Indonesia not only for administrative purposes but, indeed, the distinctive cultural, ethnic, and linguistic traditions of West Papua were recognized throughout the colonial period (NSF 158). Indonesia secured its independence in 1949; however, it was not until the 1960s that West Papua effectively became its colony as a result of geopolitical horse-trading. In 1961, a New Guinea Council was elected in anticipation of independence from the Dutch. The Council began to act as a de facto government (Webster 2013: 11) and near the end of 1961, it raised the national flag—the Morning Star—in expectation of West Papua’s coming independence (Glazebrook 2008: 1).
However, the United States rejected the authority of the New Guinea Council, deeming it to be a conflict with their “larger responsibilities in Asia” (Webster 2013: 14). With the Asia-Pacific region a battleground for influence during the Cold War, the balance of power in the region was being closely monitored by the US, whose modus operandi was and remains the protection of the interests of non-communist (or more specifically non-Soviet Union aligned) “free world”.
Throughout 1961, US discussions surrounding West Papua took the form of assessing how the government could effectively maintain relations with the Dutch whilst assuring that Indonesia would not fall into the Soviet bloc. Internal US security intelligence documents referred to President Sukarno as “obnoxious” and an “anathema” (NSF 144). But at the same time they also employed what they called the “carrot technique” (NSF 152). Thus “[i]f Indo armed forces [were] effectively anti-Communist, we would reward this by limited amount of assistance, then stand back [to] observe results. A little more anti-Communism, a little more aid, etc”. (ibid.)
On multiple occasions, US internal communications acknowledged that West Papuans are distinctively not Indonesian, thus raising questions about the legitimacy of Indonesia’s governance over West Papua. More importantly, the documents revealed US anxiety over supporting a movement for self-determination that the majority of the world could view and rally behind as an anti-colonial movement (NSF 189). Crucially, towards the end of 1961, US internal communications repeatedly stated that West Papua was “one of the most backward areas of the world” (NSF 215). They also expressed that the principle of self-determination for Papuans was “rather meaningless” because these “stone age” people could not be prepared for meaningful self-determination during any feasible UN trusteeship period; “the problem will not sit still for that long” (NSF 197). In a memorandum to the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, the National Security staff wrote that the US had a “general interest in eliminating this irritant in international relations involving two free-world countries” (NSF 215).
By the end of 1961, the US changed approaches to make it clear to the Dutch that in the event of a military confrontation with Indonesia, they would not have US military support (ibid.). After many months of diplomatic visits, backroom negotiations, and internal strategizing, in August of 1962, the New York Agreement was signed by the Dutch and the Indonesians at the UN Headquarters. This document transferred administrative control of West Papua to a UN Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA) and subsequently on to Indonesia with the provision that a vote for self-determination would follow soon afterwards. This vote was to take place in 1969 and was called the Act of Free Choice. However, to West Papuans, it is commonly referred to as the Act of No Choice (FWP 2017; Stalford 2003). Whilst the New York Agreement stated that all adult West Papuans were to participate in the vote, in the end, the Indonesian government presided over a delegate system in which delegations amounting to 1,024 individuals—less than 1 per cent of the population—were actually included (UN 1969). The unanimous “yes” vote was accepted by the UN. West Papuan accounts of the circumstances surrounding the vote report bribery and intimidation with the threat of physical violence, and some still refer to it as the “gunpoint referendum” (Glazebrook 2008: 23). Some have argued that this period effectively gave birth to a West Papuan independence movement, which strengthened a unified resistance against colonial machinations. As Webster notes: “Born in 1961 as a nation-of-intent, West Papuans are, in their own minds, ‘already sovereign.’ A nation-state is not yet in the offing, but the decolonization of the mind begun in 1961 is complete: a West Papuan ‘notion-state’ already exists” (Webster 2001: 528). Yet, as we shall see, this distinctly Westphalian formulation of an aspiration for “statehood” does not come close to capturing the deeper meaning of sovereignty in this context.
During the UN transitional administration, the Indonesian government began implementing a policy known as “transmigration” in which they would subsidize families to move from different parts of Indonesia to West Papua. Transmigration, also known as “Indonesianization”, “is predicated on the assumption that inculcation of the Indonesian world-view through contact with what are considered ‘more advanced’ and ‘civilized’ Javanese, will ultimately strengthen national unity …” (Gietzelt 1989: 201).
Until 2000, West Papuans faced this intentional and systematic form of settler colonialism. As a government-sponsored programme, hundreds of thousands of people were aided in relocating from other parts of Indonesia to a wide range of areas in West Papua. Between 1969 and 1989, the government helped ~730,000 families from other parts of Indonesia relocate to so-called less inhabited parts of their territory. This was seen as a way of diluting the ethnic concentration of West Papua and undermining the Papuans’ claim to their land (ibid.). Families that relocated were also given land on which to build and farm, leading to the reallocation of tens of thousands of hectares of land.
Today, the urban centres and coastal towns of West Papua are dominated by Indonesians who moved there with the promise of economic opportunities through tourism, mining and logging (Stott 2011). In stark contrast, some of the highest poverty levels in Indonesia are in the highlands and rural areas of West Papua where the increasingly disenfranchised and internally displaced peoples have been forcibly concentrated (Halmin 2006: 49).
The history and present of colonization in West Papua is one that has, at every turn, marginalized the Papuan people and subordinated any residual political rights to the geopolitical interests of the US, supported by a client relationship with the Indonesian government. As we shall see, the biggest prize in this endeavour was the Grasberg mine opened in 1967, which operated by the US mining company Freeport-McMoRan. According to Mining Technology magazine, it is the second-largest gold mine and the 10th-largest copper mine in the world, as measured by production and reserves. 2 The centrality of Grasberg to our analysis will be developed later in this article. We simply note here that the mine was at the heart of the political horse-trading described in this section and that, as Indonesia’s single largest source of tax revenue (International Coalition for Papua 2020), is central to the story of sovereignty and industrial development that this paper tells.
The Plantation Economy
The economic agenda embraced by Indonesia since the 1980s intertwines neoliberal values with the elements of nationalism and a deference to the entrenched power structures of Indonesia’s historical oligarchs and predatory state actors. More recently, as we note above, Indonesia’s approach to development, especially that nurtured by President Joko Widodo, is defined by a high degree of state interventionism to propel economic growth. The state’s objectives, ultimately aimed at enhancing Indonesian self-sufficiency and the nation’s global economic standing, are articulated in the Master Plan for Acceleration and Expansion of Economic Development 2011–2025 (MP3EI) (although this plan has been somewhat tweaked and rebranded under the Widodo administration) (Warburton 2018: 355). The MP3EI has served as a pivotal policy outlining Indonesia’s vision for swift economic transformation through proactive state intervention. It divides the Indonesian archipelago into six economic corridors, with the goal of promoting core economic activities within these corridors and facilitating local and regional connectivity.
The MP3EI is rooted in the global food and energy crises of 2007–2008. As such, the policy reinforces Indonesia’s broader commitment to achieving national food and energy security. Over the last decade or so, the nation’s specific aim to “increase production and productivity of food, energy, and minerals” has led to a particular focus on the expansion of corporate agribusiness and the designation of “special agricultural zones” (Ito et al. 2014: 40). Under the current administration, extensive construction and modernization of the country’s physical infrastructure has become central to the state’s industrial vision and its aspiration to become one of the world’s top 10 economies by 2025. Several key reforms and initiatives have been initiated for these purposes: such as new laws expediting land acquisition processes for industrial development; measures to cut red tape and streamline bureaucratic procedures for state and foreign investors; and efforts to finance state-owned construction companies and global consortia (Ito et al. 2014; Warburton 2018).
Thus, we can see how industrial/plantation development has been articulated within the language of Indonesia’s own agricultural sovereignty. Most critically, Presidential Instruction 5/2007 on the Acceleration of Development in Papua and West Papua and Government Regulation No. 39/2009 on Special Economic Zones has designated West Papua as a strategic site to advance Indonesia’s national development agenda (Ginting and Pye 2013). The region has become pivotal for realizing state goals of food security, corporate agriculture, local and regional connectivity, and rapid economic growth (ibid.). A clear example of this is the construction of the Trans-Papuan Highway. By penetrating remote areas, this vast 2,700-mile network of roads aims to increase state–corporate access to minerals, timber, palm oil plantations, and other exploitable natural resources (Laurance 2019).
For West Papuans, Indonesia’s development objectives have had particularly severe consequences—especially as they relate to palm oil production. Indonesia’s alarming rates of forest loss place the nation among the highest globally, with estimates indicating a staggering loss of ~10.2 million hectares of primary forests between 2002 and 2022 (Global Forest Watch 2023). In fact, a report by the Indonesian-based Center for International Forestry Research found that around 83 per cent of palm oil expansion has led directly to the destruction of forests (Kesaulija et al. 2014). The same report ominously points out that the Indonesian government has encouraged oil palm plantations in West Papua to expand to twice the size of those in other parts of the country (ibid.).
Meanwhile, the devastating effects of oil palm have been well documented by researchers and local communities. These include soil erosion, the depletion and poisoning of local water supplies, and the destruction of biodiversity. Palm oil plantations also contribute to the depletion of forest cover, which serves as a major carbon sink and habitat for endangered species. There is also evidence of increased disease, air pollution, and crop pests because of heightened palm oil production (Thomas et al. 2015).
These environmental impacts underscore the destructive trajectory of industrial development, despite Indonesia’s rhetorical commitments to environmental protection and the establishment of a green economy. In September 2023, Indonesia launched the country’s first carbon emission credit trading scheme with the aim of becoming a major player in the global carbon trade (Sulaiman 2023). The much-vaunted “OPEC for Rainforests” alliance between Brazil, Congo, and Indonesia is one example of how Indonesia may be looking to expand those growing markets in carbon credits and offsetting (Nugent 2022). Yet the effectiveness of the country’s environmental and climate-related policies is a constant subject of concern. Some of these concerns stem from issues of corruption within line ministries tasked with the protection of Indonesia’s forests and natural resources. Others arise from the growing observation that global carbon markets are actively attempting to exploit and integrate West Papuan and Indonesian forests into their initiatives (Ginting and Pye 2013: 174). Further concerns relate to the expansion of sugar cane plantations, largely for the production of “green” biofuels. In June 2024, the Indonesian government signalled this expansion with the announcement of plans to convert 5 million hectares of customary forest into sugar cane plantations in the Merauke region of Southeastern West Papua (Jong and Lahay 2024).
The plantation economy’s destructive and exclusionary impacts have mobilized strong opposition within many communities, leading to an intensification of state violence. On one hand, there continue to be several documented cases of the arbitrary arrest, harassment and criminalization of farmers and villagers peacefully protesting the theft of their land and its transfer to palm oil companies (CIVICUS 2024). On the other hand, efforts to curb the rapid expansion of palm oil estates have led to legal challenges, such as those undertaken by the affected Awyu and Moi communities. These communities’ recent environmental and land rights lawsuit against the Indonesian state calls upon the Supreme Court to revoke permits issued to palm oil companies and return stolen land to Indigenous communities (Al Jazeera 2024). Despite ongoing threats of state surveillance and oppression, a broad coalition of local and global NGOs, church leaders, student groups, and Indigenous representatives have joined forces to resist the allocation of permits for palm oil development on customary land and to protect local land rights (Ginting and Pye 2013).
Mineral Extraction
The environmental impact of commercial extractivism—particularly mining for metals and the extraction of oil and gas—has had very similar impacts on the plantation economy. Although the region is extremely rich in gold, copper and nickel, and its gas reserves are increasingly significant to the Indonesian economy, the extractive industries arrived relatively late in West Papua. Previously, New Guinea served as a buffer zone between colonial powers, deemed too difficult to exploit for natural resources until oil exploration began in the early 20th century (TAPOL 1988). Whilst significant oil and copper deposits were discovered in the 1920s, the full extent of West Papua’s natural resources remained hidden during the political horse-trading of the 1960s (described above) (Eichhorn 2022). Therefore, it wasn’t until after the Second World War that development in West Papua gained momentum.
Currently, the most prominent site in the extractive industries is the Grasberg mine, one of the world’s largest open-air gold and copper mines. Until recently, the mine was 90 per cent owned by the US mining giant Freeport-McMoRan. Today it is owned by PT Freeport Indonesia, a joint venture between Freeport and the Indonesian Government. The mining operations have caused major destruction of the local ecosystem, as well as mass displacement of the Amungme, Sempan, and Komoro people, the traditional custodians of the land (Kuum, n.d.; International Coalition for Papua 2020). For the Amungme tribe, the mountain is considered to be a sacred place, where the spirits of their ancestors live. They describe the mountain (now entirely destroyed) as “the sacred head of their mother”, and its rivers as their milk (Eichhorn 2022: 9). Such perspectives show how the people of West Papua have a connection to the land that cannot be ontologically separate from their existence, or from their own being (Chao 2022). And yet, over half a century, Freeport has cleared, dredged, and hollowed out the mountains and land without the consent of the traditional landowners.
Toxic tailings, estimated at 300,000 tonnes per day, are deposited daily from the Grasberg mine into the local river systems as part of this destructive force (Kuum, n.d.; International Coalition for Papua 2020). Disturbingly, the tailings are not captured for storage and disposal, but pumped straight into the Ajkwa river. Once in the water system, those deposits have affected a large and complex network of rivers and their estuaries. Based on an analysis of satellite images, at least 130 square kilometres of water and land have been affected (International Coalition for Papua 2020), with samples from three different river locations showing concentrations of Phosphate, Cyanide, Iron, Copper, and Zinc (ibid.). As a consequence, local people have been poisoned from their contact with the toxic rivers, and fish stocks have been devastated by suspended particulate matter (SPM) and copper toxicity. This pollution of water and land ultimately forces people to travel long distances to hunt for animals and harvest sago (ibid.). Furthermore, river transportation using traditional boats has halted due to the build-up of toxic sediment deposits (ibid.).
During local protests against mining and other activities, Indonesian forces have utilized water cannons and rubber bullets to disperse protestors. They also routinely fired upon crowds engaged in peaceful protests, resulting in civilian casualties (CIVICUS 2023). Corporations are asked to directly compensate the Indonesian military for safeguarding their operations and assets (Aglionby 2005). A prominent example in this regard is the payment made by a local subsidiary of Freeport-McMoRan to Indonesia’s security forces for guarding the Grasberg mine (Aglionby 2005), linked to subsequent mass human rights violations (Brundige et al. 2004).
Regardless of the extractive activity in question, security discourses are routinely deployed to suppress local community gatherings intent on discussing and mobilizing action against “development” initiatives that aim to extract maximum profit from West Papua’s natural resources, whilst leaving communities more marginalized and impoverished. These violent and repressive acts are further supported by an elaborate system of state surveillance, with activists, clergy, students, local politicians, and customary leaders often targets of intense military intelligence gathering and reporting (Human Rights Watch 2011). Papuan activists and leaders have been apprehended and charged with engaging in criminal conduct based on their pro-independence social media posts and activity (Kusumaryati 2021c). Amendments to Indonesia’s counter-terrorism law have also been used to sanction arbitrary detention of dissenters and restrict rights of freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly (Papuans Behind Bars 2021).
This is the context for the development of a new major gold ore mine, Wabu Block. Struggles around this development have led to the militarization of the area, with heightened security presence and multiple NGOs warning of the potential for increased state violence against local populations. Since 2019, Amnesty International (2022) has documented up to 12 suspected cases of unlawful killing at the hands of security forces as well as incidents of routine arrests and beatings related to Wabu Block.
It is also the context for local opposition to the Tangguh liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility at Bintuni Bay in the far west of West Papua, another major asset in Indonesia’s extractive drive. The facility is owned by a consortium led by BP which also includes CNOOC and Mitsubishi Corporation. According to BP, Tangguh currently produces around 20 per cent of Indonesia’s natural gas. An ongoing expansion of the facility—which includes two offshore platforms and 13 new production wells—will increase the total LNG production by ~50 per cent. Once it is complete, it is expected to supply 35 per cent of Indonesia’s gas. The field has gas reserves estimated at 800 billion cubic metres (BP 2023).
The BP site has disrupted fishing, banning locals from ancestral fishing grounds. In essence, BP’s presence has disrupted ecological and social interdependence and replaced it with a commercial dash for gas. Beyond this, a huge influx of workers has rapidly inflated the prices of food brought in from outside the area, whilst overcrowding villages. Relatively few long-term jobs have employed local people. An investigation by the Guardian found that, of the 6,000 people employed in constructing the plant, fewer than 500 were retained after construction, and only around 50 were Papuan (Vidal 2008). The latest expansion project, beginning in 2023, includes two offshore platforms and 13 new production wells—this will increase the total LNG production by ~50 per cent and has involved 13,500 workers. Again this has led to long-term jobs for only a small number of Papuan workers (BP 2023).
Since the early days of production BP has been accused of “siding with the Indonesian authorities against native Papuans who are engaged in a long struggle for independence” (Vidal 2008). Certainly, the company works closely with the same security forces that are committing human rights violations and extra-judicial killings and are displacing local populations. BP relies on locally employed Papuan security guards at the plant; however, it does at times call in the police and the military (McKenna 2015). BP makes payments to both for this protection (Hickman and Barber 2011; Kirksey 2012). In one famous incident, John O’Reilly, then senior Vice President of BP, visited the plant around the time of an attack on the Indonesian police that killed several officers. Operation “Sweep and Crush”, the response to the killings resulted in a situation where “over 140 people were detained, tortured or otherwise ill-treated”, and seven people were killed in extra-judicial killings (Kirksey 2012). In 2006, the Indonesian government established a new military base near Tangguh. One investigation in 2018 revealed that the private company which manages BP’s local security force is “run by retired Indonesian army and police” and that this has led to “targeting peaceful social movements in Bintuni Bay” (Gillard 2018).
The Indonesian military continues to use force to clear areas for industrial development. A report published recently by the PNG Integral Human Development Trust (Jamieson 2023) has documented sustained military attacks on the Ngalum Kupel people, a distinct linguistic ethnic group who are customary owners of the highland mountain valleys, on tributaries of the Sepik River, adjacent to Kiwirok in the Pengunang Bintang region of West Papua. The attacks started in October 2021 and included airborne rockets and bombing attacks on villages around Kiwirok conducted by drones and helicopters. Due to the severity of the initial attack and continued military activity, including sniper fire targeting individuals, shootings and torture of community members, the Ngalum Kapel people have fled their villages and have been unable to return to their homes, subsistence gardens and land. They are now living in exile in the mountains with limited access to food. The report recorded the names of 284 community members reported to have died of starvation since fleeing their village in October 2021. The motivation is the opportunity to develop gold and copper mines. Thus:
The region is considered prospective for gold and copper mining, with the Ok Tedi mine adjacent across the border in PNG. Indonesian rights advocates describe linkages between the operation of Indonesian military forces, retired Police and ex-Military leadership, who are now Government Ministers, seeking to expand mining interests, which is the driver of conflict with traditional landowners in highland areas of Papua. (Jamieson 2023: 8)
Even so, intense repression by Indonesian security forces has not stopped West Papuans from mobilizing against state development plans, destructive corporate projects, and trends in state-sponsored land grabbing (Rutherford 2012; Chao 2022; Stanley 2012). Rather, in the face of sustained violence, killings, and repression orchestrated by Indonesian forces, which are invariably aligned with state objectives of resource extraction and “development”, West Papuan civil society has continued to challenge the state and market forces perpetuating severe land inequality and the depletion of their sacred lands.
Discussion: Resistance, Racism and Autonomy
In response to the plantation economy, extractivism, and other forms of industrial development, resistance and international solidarity take diverse forms, encompassing narratives of independence, human rights, environmentalism, anti-racism, and the protection of Melanesian peoples. Beyond organized campaigns for Papuan independence, local communities, dispossessed of their lands, have sometimes resorted to spontaneous and direct actions against corporations responsible for their situation. These actions have taken the form of protests or blockades, which disrupt harmful corporate operations and are accompanied by demands for restitution and just compensation for stolen land (Ginting and Pye 2013: 169). Armed resistance is also a core feature of Papua’s landscape of dissent, reacting to the ways in which global corporations have transformed rural landscapes into an “industrial, militarised space” (Kusumaryati 2021a: 903). Indeed, armed insurgencies, at times, have forced corporations to halt their operations for days with significant losses in property and operational costs (ibid.).
It is clear that in both land grabs for agricultural/plantation development and for mining, we see a very complex and comprehensive undermining of the autonomy of Papuans. There is no sense in which a concept of political self-determination is enough to understand what is being undermined. Yes, it is the capacity to reproduce cultural practices, to produce local foods, and to live in traditional ways in harmony with nature that are being threatened here. But when we look to both industrial agriculture and mineral extraction, we do not just see a way of life being undermined, we see it being completely and utterly decimated. The economic organization being driven by these industries is structured in such a way that it destroys the very capacity of Papuans to live and exist as they have for generations. The question at hand, then, is one of sovereignty and autonomy. But it is a very deep-rooted question that touches upon how the economy—the production of value from the harvesting of nature—is being organized in a form that breaks the capacity of Papuans to exist as Papuans.
There is a deeply racialized dimension to this struggle. It is unavoidable that the political identity of West Papua is closely bound to a cultural and racialized heritage. Melanesian people identify with other Indigenous Melanesians and in the West Papuan context see Asian culture as the cultural heritage of the oppressor. At the same time, the rise of the Asian anti-colonial movement in Asia had very specific consequences for the articulation of political resistance that was not wholly disconnected from a process of racialization. It was Sukarno’s particular articulation of his claim to West Papua as an anti-colonial struggle against Dutch imperialism that aided this rendering of the West Papuan struggle invisible (Swan 2018). In his article “Blinded by Bandung”, Quito Swan (ibid.: 59) explores how the historic legacy of the Bandung Conference and the role that Indonesia played as the host, produced a dissonance in the anti-colonial movement, causing “Black movements to be hesitant to criticize Indonesia”.
For Eichhorn (2022), the form that industrial development takes is necessarily predicated on new forms of (racist) civilizing claims. This may not be the classic construction of West Papuan primitivism and cannibalism, but they are not far off:
The culture and livelihoods of Indigenous West Papuans are framed within both violence and oppression, adding to the sense of racialised difference, and thereby racism. This identity is both misrepresented and appropriated by the colonising companies carrying out the resource extraction. Furthermore, in more recent times a far more subtle form of structural racism has been at play, where the colonising organization gets to decide what amounts to “environmental protection” of Indigenous rights, with programmes set up and controlled by conglomerates of mining companies themselves, and power structures with underrepresentation of dissenting voices. (ibid.: 18)
Thus, new forms of racist colonial tropes, portraying Papuans as primitive “warmongers” and morally inferior, are generally deployed to justify Indonesian control and the containment of communities actively resisting these dynamics. These stereotypes connect with those used during Dutch colonialism, and today serve to legitimize state violence and repression against those challenging the status quo. Indonesian and military forces have consistently labelled Papuan bodies as “polluted, dangerous, and uncontrolled”, providing a pretext for ongoing repression and state intervention (Chao 2020: 5; see also Eichhorn 2022; Tilley 2020; Woodman 2023).
Accordingly, anti-racism has also become a defining feature of Papuan social movements (Kusumaryati 2021b). In recent years, both West Papua and other parts of Indonesia have witnessed a wave of anti-racist protests spotlighting the systemic racism experienced by West Papuans. These movements have adopted slogans like #PapuanLivesMatter, calling for an end to the racial colonial order perpetuated through militarization, institutional racism, and widespread human rights abuses (Kusumaryati 2021c). Whilst these protests have made a resounding statement against Indonesian occupation and its racialized underpinnings, they have also resulted in intensified state brutality against protestors. Indonesian state responses to anti-racism protests in 2019 led to the deployment of several thousand additional police and military soldiers to West Papua, who in turn, levied charges of treason and other offences carrying lengthy prison sentences against protestors and activists (Chao 2020; Amnesty International 2021). Between the period of October 2020 and September 2021, the Papuans Behind Bars project recorded 418 new political prisoners being held in Indonesian jails, and 118 new incidents of arbitrary arrest and detention related to uprisings against ongoing injustices (Papuans Behind Bars 2021). Many of those arrested and detained were charged with treason offences under Indonesia’s penal code (ibid.). Additionally, activists can find themselves faced with charges of defamation and “hate speech” under Indonesia’s Electronic Information and Transaction Law and Penal Code (CIVICUS 2023).
For West Papuans, this coupling of Indonesian state control and exploitation represents a systematic attempt to erase the basis for autonomy in West Papua. They serve to eradicate West Papuan lives and culture. Indeed, the ongoing forced separation of people from their land has been closely intertwined with influxes of non-Papuan migrants to the region, and subsequent ethnic subjugation, as well as cultural assimilation, growing poverty and food insecurity, intergenerational displacement, and the loss of livelihoods (Chao 2022). This is why Papuan civil society commonly refers to a “structural and systemic genocide” being perpetrated through these dynamics of land alienation and the loss of food sovereignty, as well as through the marginalization of Papuans by influxes of migrant labourers (Ginting and Pye 2013: 172). This has been summed up as the “obliteration of the West Papuan people” (TAPOL 1988), prompting some to define this process as a “cold” or “slow-motion” genocide (Anderson 2015; Elmslie and Webb-Gannon 2013). Certainly, this settler colonial project contains within it the “blunt physicality of determined and sustained attempts at mass extermination” (Banivanua-Mar 2008: 583). And this must necessarily be read in racialized terms.
Indeed, the entirety of the industrial development project must necessarily be read as a racialized project, as it renders Papuan lives disposable and ultimately killable. We call it industrial racism, because this racism is advanced as part and parcel of an industrial project. At one level, we have articulated a racialized struggle that characterizes all settler colonial projects, with features of the conflict irrevocably bound to commodified property relations, militarism and the imposition of predatory forms of value extraction. It is an extreme form of extractivism that has led one commentator to describe what is happening in West Papua as “killing in the name of development” (Giay 2000; MacLeod 2015: 63). This is not to say that the industrial racism deployed against West Papuans is of a purely instrumental character. Rather, it is to say that we cannot understand the origins and the proliferation of racism without understanding the particular mode of industrial development that it has been developed to fit.
In short, we see Papuans being removed from the land and excluded from politics and economic life precisely because their autonomy and collective power stands in the way of Indonesian state control over their land and territory. In West Papua, struggles for sovereignty seek community autonomy over the most basic conditions of life, of social reproduction and economic production.
Thus far, efforts to hold global companies accountable for their environmentally destructive activities and their complicity in human rights abuses in Papua have encountered significant challenges. Claims for political autonomy, requests for protection from the Indonesian government and from predatory investment practices have been repeatedly ignored by international bodies and governments. In addition, Indonesia has systematically denied both the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous Peoples and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Food entry into West Papua, despite impassioned pleas from civil society for an independent report examining Indonesia’s development strategy and its detrimental impacts on the rights and well-being of West Papuans (Ginting and Pye 2013: 168). More recently, the Indonesian government has rejected calls for an independent inquiry into the massacres, torture, and large-scale displacement of civilians resulting from Indonesia’s indiscriminate response to West Papua’s armed resistance movement (Gerrard 2023).
In June 2024, the authors were involved in the organization of the 53rd Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) on State and Environmental Violence. The PPT is an organization based in Rome, which seeks to provide a forum for communities harmed by states and corporations to express their grievances in public. In the absence of international legal or political intervention in a particular situation, the PPT holds its own “hearings” in which they examine evidence from witnesses and experts and present judgements and recommendations.
The charges that were set out in the indictment put before the PPT sought to do exactly what this article has sought: to understand the complex interconnections between the suppression of the right to self-determination, state violence and the destruction of West Papua’s forests and its biodiversity. At the time of writing, the Tribunal has not yet issued its verdict, but the initial statement asserted that:
National and international public opinion must be won over to the cause of the West Papuan people. The Peoples’ Permanent Tribunal has a role to play here, as an instrument of resistance to oppression and affirmation of rights and justice. It is a space for people to speak out and join together to weave and strengthen solidarity. The judges are convinced that the joint effort put into the realisation of this session will offer new visibility and, we hope, more opportunities to connect with other organisations and peoples.
We put the argument to the PPT that a number of measures could be taken by the international community to address the ongoing situation. The most prominent of those is our “call for a fully resourced UN fact-finding mission to investigate human rights abuses and environmental crimes, involving relevant special representatives/rapporteurs and UN agencies with relevant competencies, and to seek to develop/open up pathways to justice, in consultation with the Papuan people”.
Yet one of the problems we face is that such a mission would, due to its institutional position, only be able to delineate the West Papuan demand for autonomy in very particular ways. The UN bureaucracy is organized around very specific mandates. And it would therefore be forced to treat separately the claims that the right to self-determination is being violated from the human rights violations that a UN visit might want to investigate. Moreover, the question of control over the production and supply of food and water would be reduced to secondary questions of whether access to adequate food and water was being restricted, or whether this access might be framed as a particular form of Indigenous right. In other words, the UN is organized in a way that forces it to investigate a series of different “rights” claims that are limited by the text of a particular agreement or mandate. In this sense, there may be scope for investigating various forms of environmental damage, and locating those in the context of land rights, but there is little scope in the UN system to challenge a mode of industrialization that relies upon large-scale external investment. It is the latter that is the driving force behind all of the attacks on sovereignty and autonomy that this article has described. It is therefore impossible to imagine an adequate solution in international law.
The only way to precipitate the kind of change that might give control over the conditions of life to Papuan people will be a complete disruption of the social forces that exert sovereignty over political, economic, social and biological life. And at the moment this will not be handed down from international agencies or governments, or indeed from the formal sovereign power, the state of Indonesia. This is only likely to come from the autonomous organization and resistance of the West Papuan people.