West Papua’s Green State Vision: Social Movement, Therefore “Terrorism”
Arfak Mountains, the highest point in West Papua. Photograph Source: David Worabay – CC BY-SA 3.0
Apart from the brutality it undergirds, almost always fuelling violence, there’s something truly unhinged about political disinformation, especially in Indonesian-occupied West Papua because it’s so at odds with reality, not to say bizarre. Yet it’s orchestrated at the highest levels of government in Indonesia and readily accepted by powerful governments and transnationals, which have their own systems of disinformation, including peddling Indonesia’s, and lying by commission and omission as a standard activity to advance geostrategic and economic objectives.
In West Papua, disinformation buttresses Indonesia’s hands-on, six-decade, genocidal and ecocidal project. At the global level—where official and corporate-funded lying about the climate catastrophe (which, as anyone can see and feel, is upon us), criminalization of protestors, and harassment and abuse of climate scientists are standard—West Papua is an important part of the story as home to one of the world’s largest rainforests, a crucial factor in any attempt to limit the generalized effects of the disaster. But Indigenous people everywhere who are trying to save their rainforest habitats, who know how to protect them, are being displaced, attacked, and killed. In West Papua, the struggle isn’t about isolated tribes trying to protect their bit of turf, but a nationwide social movement with a comprehensive political platform, the Green State Vision. Since this is diametrically opposed to Indonesia’s brutal policy of what Sartre called “the systematic exploitation of man’s humanity for the destruction of the human”, in which no autochthonous life, vegetable, animal, or human is sacred, it’s labeled “terrorist”. The name-calling, whereby all West Papuans are terrorists (just as all Palestinians threaten the genocidal state of Israel), is no idle trash-talk but structural racism, requiring wholesale destruction of living obstacles to Indonesia’s “development”.
In April 2021, the Coordinating Minister of Politics, Law, and Security of the Indonesian government officially designated the TNPPB-OPM (National West Papua Freedom Army – Free Papua Movement) a terrorist group, an “Armed Secessionist Criminal Group”, “Security Intruder Movement”, and “Armed Criminal Group”. Indonesia, a member of the UN Human Rights Council, may have been given a nimbus of dubious respectability to make such charges (the righteous state embraced by the international “community”, beset by savage terrorists) but the perpetrator of terrorism is Indonesia itself, with its torture mode of governance, if this definition of “terrorism” is applied to its military occupation of West Papua: “Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-)clandestine individual, group, or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal, or political reasons… [The] direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population and serve as message generators.”
The TNPPB-OPM is “terrorist” because it’s tenaciously trying to make known and prevent the ravages of such cataclysmic projects as the 4,300-km Trans-Papua highway and connecting roads, carving up the rainforest to enable extractive projects; palm oil plantations and food estates (just one of which takes an 2.7 million hectares of forest and peat areas, devastating some 200 villages); military-linked gold mining, for example in the Intan Jaya regency; huge mining projects like the Freeport Grasberg mine and BP’s Bintuni gas project, safeguarded under the heading of “vital national projects”; and many smaller projects, also protected by violent “security” forces. All those affected are victims of what’s called “counterterrorism”.
The Green State Vision is particularly threatening, as its reach goes far beyond local or identity politics. It’s of global relevance, universal in spirit, and a blueprint for other social movements around the world which are struggling against the forces that are destroying the possibilities for human life, and most other kinds of life, on planet Earth. It’s the political platform of a well-organized social movement, the United Liberation Movement for West Papua(ULMWP) which brings together “all West Papuans, both inside and outside West Papua”.
A social movement is “an organized effort by a group of human beings to effect change in the face of resistance by other human beings”, to cite anthropologist David Aberle who, in The Peyote Religion Among the Navajo (1966), identifies four different kinds: alterative (seeking partial change through individual behavior, as in recycling); redemptive (often religious movements promising salvation through total personal transformation); reformative (aiming at partial social change, through women’s voting rights, for example); and transformative (seeking to abolish the prevailing system). In this framework, the Green State Vision offered by the ULMWP would be “redemptive” and “transformative”. Although it isn’t religious by nature, it does require an ethical, redemptive understanding of life and the place of humans on Earth, which would fit with transformative goals of leaving the neoliberal system to which the planet is currently subjected. Unlike social movements that seek an improved status quo, the Green State Vision is, by definition, anti-neoliberal, and anti-system. It also differs from most social movements in scope since it’s tackling ecocide and, understanding the interconnectedness of all forms of life on Earth is, therefore, seeking results on a global scale.
Ecocide
Ecocide affects, to a greater or lesser—and certainly worsening—extent, all human and non-human life. It is a crime of global extractivist politics, escalating from early industrialization, through colonialism, to neoliberalism. Since it is worldwide in reach, combatting it requires a solution of the same magnitude. In terms of social justice, the principle that promotes the “happiness of the whole of the community”, as the nineteenth-century Irish philosopher William Thompson put it, the only doctrine covering all humans is universal human rights, because human is a universal category. However, as scientists are learning more and more about interdependence in what evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis called the “symbiotic planet”, it’s also now obvious that the “community” must include all life forms.
In its dictionary definition, ecocide seems straightforward: “the destruction of large areas of the natural environment as a consequence of human activity”. But not the activity of all humans. It’s a direct and indirect crime of a minority of humans against the majority, extending beyond human victims to all living things and the elements that sustain them (soil, rocks, air, vegetation, oceans, landforms, mountains, hills, valleys, mounds, berms, deserts, watercourses, water bodies, springs, wetlands, forests, jungles, and so on). “Eco”, from the Greek oikos, contains the idea of place and, in particular, home or household, while “-cide” is from the Latin caedere (to demolish or kill). Ecocide has consequences for all living and non-living beings and their home, this now-endangered planet. It’s more destructive than genocide, which is confined to certain human groups, global in spread and globalizing in consequences. Piecemeal measures against ecocide will never suffice.
States, which control economic, political, social, and ideological approaches to ecocide (and increasingly often severely punishing demonstrators against its causes like fossil fuel dependence), protect the interests of their powerholders. This entails covering up the fact that ecocide produces, “great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health”, which is listed as a crime against humanity by the International Criminal Court. More than five hundred years ago, colonialism established states built on plunder, whose “legitimacy”, backed by property laws and governmental institutions (and, more recently, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and “development” banks), depends on the profits of despoiling “underdeveloped” lands to fund lavish trappings of power and provide “developed” populations with large infrastructure projects presented as an alluring dream of modernity. Subduing the earth means much more than grabbing certain resources here and there. It’s a whole economic system of marauding and dispossession, an ideology profoundly affecting social and human/nature relations. Plunder occurs in “enclaves”, but the benefits go international. The misery caused is extensive and the profits are highly concentrated.
Ecocide is related with genocide but differs in magnitude and political consequences. Indigenous peoples have long been decimated by genocide perpetrated by colonial and postcolonial governments, and national and multinational corporations, but it’s often swept under the diplomatic rug of “national sovereignty”, a political stance of non-interference. Unspoken racism underlies indifference to genocide because it’s not occurring in the West. However, ecocide does affect the West, and does affect planet Earth as a whole, as the present climate crisis is showing. Stop Ecocide International is seeking to introduce ecocide as a fifth international crime (after genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression) into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). It defines ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts”. Inclusion of the crime of ecocide into the Rome Statute could contribute to a global “change of consciousness” as well as offering a more effective legal framework for safeguarding the future of planet Earth.
Understanding “ecocide” means questioning Western notions of separate species and human exceptionalism. Taxonomising nature into species, as if making an inventory of human possessions, gives a false idea of independent existences. As Lynn Margulis famously pointed out, symbiosis constantly brings together different life forms in such a way that “individuals” generate new symbiotic forms at growing and evermore inclusive levels of integration. All life depends on the microbial world, the “source and well-spring of soil and air”. There’s still much to be learned about the interrelationships of the different parts of nature in fast-changing environments where large groups of lifeforms are becoming extinct. The present climate catastrophe constitutes a global laboratory scarily demonstrating the truth of Margulis’s theory of the deep interdependence of species. However, Margulis wasn’t the first person to understand this for it’s a core notion of Indigenous cosmologies.
West Papua and the Global Order
Indigenous habitat defenders have cosmologies that couldn’t be less extractivist, less capitalist. This is expressed in language too, for example in circular concepts of time entailing care and responsibility rather than the deadly “arrow” that “progresses” into a future by ripping up a past and present; or, often with few numbers, emphasizing quality over quantity (and the ultimate perversion of algorithms that control human existence). If Indigenous peoples have always understood their natural habitat as a world, a cosmos, a well-ordered whole, they also know that damaging an environment, a sea, a lake, a forest, a savanna, a desert, means damaging the world, perhaps beyond repair. Benny Wenda, Interim President of the ULMWP Provisional Government, expresses it thus: “If you want to save the world, you must save West Papua”.
One of Earth’s most betrayed and castigated countries, West Papua, the western half of the Melanesian island of New Guinea, shares a colonially imposed border (slashed through the center of the island, dividing tribes and lands), with independent Papua New Guinea. With a mountainous interior, forest lowlands, large mangrove swamps, as well as many small islands and coral reefs, West Papua has some 230 tribes, with unique cultures and languages. They are the rainforest’s stewards, observing ancient, small-scale agricultural practices of cultivating yams, sweet potatoes, and pigs in the highlands, or a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with a diet largely based on sago and fish in the lowlands. West Papua’s biodiverse forests cover about 34.6 million hectares, of which more than 27.6 million have been designated as “production” (read: for plundering) forest. The plunderers are the Indonesian military and their transnational corporate partners.
Indonesia’s settler colonial project in West Papua is built on structural racism. Like the forest, the people protecting the land must be chopped down and cleared away. They’re an obstacle to “progress”. Since 1963, when it invaded West Papua, it has carried out a huge social engineering (transmigration or Indonesianisation) project, bringing well over a million (the number is a state secret) poverty-stricken people from several islands to live in camps cut into the rainforest. It seems that Indonesians now outnumber West Papuans. Then there are direct, murderous attacks on West Papuan villages. As Benny Wenda describes it, “Indonesia tried to build development on the bones of our people. The international community must stop the genocide and ecocide of my people in order to protect planet earth”. He also observes that the politics of social justice doesn’t come in separate boxes where you tick one (like save the trees) but forget the rest (like all the forest’s living beings, like universal human rights).
Protection of rainforests can’t happen without recognition that the peoples who live in them are agents with a leading role as their custodians. Their voices must be heard, not only when bearing witness to the crimes committed against them but also when sharing their knowledge of cohabitation in and with nature, which is now so essential for the planet’s survival (at least as a human habitat). Yet, when the West Papuan leaders presented the Green State Vision at COP26 in Glasgow it was largely ignored, then and since.
One of the reasons why this valuable, constructive document presented by rainforest caretakers was not gratefully welcomed and widely circulated is that, in geopolitical terms, it would mean condemning six decades of genocide in West Papua. Not only Indonesia is responsible. Genocide is also the result of a sham UN-supervised referendum in 1969, after which the General Assembly formally “took note” that it did not represent the will of the people, but went ahead anyway to recognise Indonesian sovereignty, and then to help cover up the killing of up to (or more than) ten percent of the population. Indonesia’s allies, including the United States, European countries, and Australia (and if you want an idea of how complicit Australia is, watch this documentary on its 1975 oil-and-gas-motivated coverup of Indonesia’s murder of five of its journalists in Balibo, East Timor), are “strategically aligned” accomplices. Why? Because, to give one geopolitical reason, Indonesia crucially occupies a position at the intersection of the Pacific Ocean, the Malacca Straits, and the Indian Ocean. More than half the world’s shipping passes through Indonesian waters, including US nuclear attack submarines going to taunt China with their might.
To sum up, the Green State Vision challenges the imperially based Westphalian system in embracing the idea of Indigenous systems that recognise interdependence between political actors and the land itself. Any state-level support for the West Papuan project would entail enraging the Indonesian regime and its big western backers. There is much talk of a global system which, logically, should include everyone, but the words usually refer to the G8, or maybe the G20. They tend not to include ordinary, and especially Indigenous people. Rainforests and all their species won’t be protected if the human rights of their Indigenous inhabitants—5% of the world’s population caring for 85% of its biodiversity—aren’t included and recognised as leaders in the project of saving rainforests. Their human rights are crucial for those of everyone else.
The Green State Vision: Education and Politics
If West Papuan resistance is ever discussed, the OPM (Free Papua Movement) tends to be mentioned, often demeaned as primitive and exotic. Consisting of various groups armed with bows and arrows, machetes, axes, and some rifles and revolvers, it has existed since the 1960s. The political and diplomatic wings of the struggle are usually ignored in the mainstream press. They’re essential because they’ve achieved a nation-wide social movement, the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (UMLWP) with a political programme, the Green State Vision. Focused on protecting the West Papuan rainforest, this represents what the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide calls a change of consciousness. Drafted with the help of international lawyers, it’s a quintessentially West Papuan document but of global significance. It’s an ethical statement of intention, spelling out how “to restore, promote and maintain balance and harmony, amongst human and non-human beings, based on reciprocity and respect toward all beings”. Understanding that social justice fosters the “happiness of the whole of the community”, the West Papuan people have organised a government-in-waiting and, not only that, but an official plan for “Making Peace with Nature in the 21st century”.
The Green State Vision is conceptually inseparable from the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) which was formalised when leaders from different factions of the independence movement met in Vanuatu in December 2014 to unite the three main political organisations that have long struggled for independence: Federal Republic of West Papua (NRFPB), National Coalition for Liberation (WPNCL), and West Papua National Parliament (PNWP). This initiative meant recognition of one of the strengths of the overall struggle for independence. The fact that there are so many tribes with their own languages and boundaries may, for a westerner, look like fragmentation. However, this is a system of tribal democracy, of centuries-old rules and agreements with neighbouring tribes that has worked for some 50,000 years. People, identifying with their tribes and as West Papuans, have always understood the checks and balances of the system, and the ULMWP plans to conserve them in a nation-wide federal structure.
The Green State aims to provide free education and healthcare to citizens and residents. However, “redemptive” and “transformative” education is happening now, as an ongoing part of the struggle. Keeping traditional values alive, passing down languages and customs means rejecting the system that’s trying to kill them. Education for a future Green Vision happens in daily life through resistance, maintaining the ethos of learning from nature, reinforcing the community, understanding that women—providers of food and educators at village level—are an essential part of the struggle, eschewing individualist consumerism, accepting the responsibilities of customary guardianship, grassroots diplomacy (between tribes), and democratic governance. Since 1963, the political struggle has been the harsh classroom of survival, and the West Papuan people and their leaders have learned not only that their age-old customs are the strongest defence of their national identity but also, as the climate catastrophe wreaks its terrible damage everywhere, that the principles they foster among their own people have worldwide relevance.
The Green State Vision commits, inter alia, to the following:
+ Restoring and promoting harmony, reciprocity, and respect among human and non-human beings, with people accepting responsibility as protectors and carers.
+ Attending to the needs of society and the environment rather than GDP.
+ Acting globally and locally to combat and mitigate the climate emergency, making ecocide a serious criminal offence, and supporting its inclusion as a crime in the International Criminal Court.
+ Serving notice on oil, gas, mining, logging, and palm oil corporations that they must respect international best practices in environmental protection.
+ Providing free education and healthcare to citizens and residents, with robust social policies in general.
+ Restoring guardianship of lands, forests, rivers, and other waters to customary authorities, together with decision-making powers on their occupation and use; providing state support with appropriate laws, policies, technical assistance, funds, and enforcement; and guaranteeing that a substantial and fair proportion of the benefits flow to the local community.
+ Establishing institutional and legal safeguards to ensure that customary powers are not abused, and that the environment is at all times safeguarded in accordance with international standards.
+ Adopting and adapting the best features of the modern democratic state including a representative legislature, an accountable executive government, an independent, impartial judiciary, and other independent institutions and mechanisms to prevent corruption and abuse or misuse of power at all levels (national, regional, and customary); ensuring effective protection of human rights; consulting stakeholders before and while making laws and policies that affect their rights and interests; and cooperating with other states in combatting the climate emergency, pursuing international criminal justice, and other key aspects of global co-operation.
+ Ensuring that the coercive arms of the state do not abuse or misuse their power.
Indigenous Knowledge
One huge stumbling block to westerners’ understanding of how Indigenous people experience their rainforest habitats, source of their sustenance is that, in the West, food is divorced from social life. Sanitised, plastic-wrapped, genetically manipulated, it is flown and trucked in from around the globe to be sold in supermarkets where the cashier barely has time to look up and say hello, and often consumed alone. By contrast, rainforest communities are organized around fishing, hunting, gathering, and planting as social and cultural activities. Their environment is essential for their health, so they love, understand, and care for it. This cosmos is an inseparable part of human nature, language, and culture. Indigenous peoples belong to and are not owners of their environment. Of course, Indigenous knowledge isn’t homogenous. In the world’s different habitats, people interact with their environment in historically diverse ways, which means that general, quick-fix solutions must be avoided, and proper attention given to particular ecosystems which, in turn, will benefit biodiversity in general. Nevertheless, with its solid principles, the Green State Vision can serve internationally as a foundational document for rainforest defenders, for tackling ecocide, as well as setting an example of good political and philosophical practice for Western social movements.
The climate crisis began long ago. For capitalism to exist, beliefs linking people to animals, soil, sun, stars, moon, seas, rivers, and rocks had to be destroyed. It also required a separation of humans and the animals they exploit. Today, contempt for animals and their habitat is at the core of the global system that has caused the climate crisis. In their sterile, high-rise (severed from the earth), air-conditioned offices with fake exotic plants, the people who are making decisions about the fate of the planet are also the most alienated from nature. We need to stop the real perpetrators of terror who are destroying conditions of life everywhere. We need a new system that respects nature, respects human rights, and the West Papuan people are offering an exemplary proposal of a redemptive, transformative social movement that is trying to “effect change”. Vital change.
Raki Ap is spokesperson for the Free West Papua Campaign.
Julie Wark is a translator, CounterPunch columnist and co-author of Against Charity.
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