West Papua: Where Transmigration Means Genocide, Ecocide and, in the End, Suicide

Julie Wark

 November 22, 2024

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Sugar-cane planting ceremony in Merauke, West Papua, July 2024. Indonesian presidential office handout/Muchlis Jr.

“By way of transmigration … the different ethnic groups will in the long run disappear because of integration…and there will be one kind of man.”

– Martano, Indonesian Minister of Transmigration, March 1985

“Brigadier-General Ali Murtopo told us in 1969 that if we want to be independent we should write to the Americans and ask them if they would be good enough to find us a place on the moon.”

– West Papua People’s Front

Indonesia’s new president, war criminal Prabowo Subianto, couldn’t even wait to be sworn in. He established a “strategic initiative” of five “Vulnerable Area Buffer Infantry Battalions” in the Keerom, Sarmi, Boven Digoel, Merauke, and Sorong Regencies of West Papua to “enhance security” with an additional 5,000 troops as backup for the 25,000 already there. According to the Armed Forces Chief, General Agus Subiyanto, “the main goal of the new battalions is to assist the government in accelerating development and improving the prosperity of the Papuan people”. He didn’t mention a possible future presence of militias, which is Prabowo’s way of dealing with populations that resist military-improved prosperity. On 21 October, just one day after Prabowo’s inauguration, Muhammad Iftitah Sulaiman Suryanagara, Minister for Transmigration, announced plans to resume the government’s transmigration programme in West Papua. It was needed, he said “for enhancing unity and providing locals with welfare”. Prabowo himself hotfooted it to West Papua on 3 November to check out a programme aiming to create three million hectares (an area about as big as Belgium) of food estates across the country. Reuters calls this a “self-sufficiency drive”. Forest, wetland, and savannah will be turned into rice farms (in which Indonesia’s military has a major stake), sugarcane plantations, and other infrastructure, which would include military installations to guard the sequestered land. This “key food programme” is actually ecocide. In net terms, it will add approximately 392 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere.

For the past six decades, Indonesia has been an occupying colonial power in West Papua. The United Nations is responsible for this and its atrocious consequences, as John Saltford meticulously details in his account of the 1969 UN-orchestrated handover of West Papua to Indonesia in a so-called Act of Free Choice, which was nothing more than “a ridiculous and overtly manipulated denial of West Papuan rights”. Ever since, overt manipulation of the reality of the West Papuan people has been the order of the day in the international arena. The murderous farce is officially blessed as Indonesia has been a member of the UN Human Rights Council since 2006. The UN has refrained from confronting Indonesia about its refusal to allow an official visit to West Papua, although more than a hundred countries have demanded it. After all, investigating crimes against humanity committed by one of its leading human rights “defenders” might be awkward. “Universal” human rights law turns out to be for some but not for others. And “some” can kill and otherwise destroy “others” with impunity.

The transmigration equation is actually this: moving people in = moving people out. Whether they want to move in or want to move out. Some people don’t have the right to decide these things. That transmigration in West Papua comes with so many troops, that it is so highly secretive, is enough to suggest that “enhancing unity” and “providing welfare” are not the agenda at all. In both origin and destination, transmigration is not voluntary but more due to deceit and brute force, respectively. In itself, it’s another form of militarisation because there are many former military personnel secreted among transmigrants, especially in border areas. As the Free Papua Movement (OPM) leader James Nyaro warned, “Don’t think of these settlers as ordinary civilians. They are trained military personnel disguised as civilian settlers”.

Since West Papua with its torture mode of governance isn’t open to independent observers it’s almost impossible to get accurate figures of the numbers in the equation but a recent estimate puts the total number of internally displaced people at about 80,000. This displacement means denial of the basic rights needed for survival: food, shelter, health, freedom from suffering, torture, inhuman treatment, danger, and from fear, freedom of movement, liberty, and security. Genocide Watch reports that some 500,000 West Papuans have been killed since the Indonesian occupation began and, in 2015, the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization calculated that West Papua’s population was approximately 4.4 million, but only around two million were Indigenous West Papuans. The figures show that Indonesian settlers outnumber West Papuans by some 10% and that about 25% of the population has been murdered. In 2004, a Yale University study concluded that the evidence “… strongly suggests that the Indonesian government has committed proscribed acts with the intent to destroy the West Papuans as such, in violation of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the customary international law prohibition this Convention embodies.” Twenty years later, the evidence of genocide is even more compelling but even more hushed up.

Why is this horrible case of genocide, ecocide and, in the end, human species suicide (“unwitting suicide, causing one’s own death while pursuing other ends”) being ignored? One explanation comes from Edward S. Herman. There are “good and bad genocidists”. In the “first fine careless rapture” of Indonesia’s New Order (military dictatorship), its genocidal project and mechanisms were lauded and assisted by the World Bank, “development aid” bodies like the IGGI (Inter-governmental Group on Indonesia), and funded by World Food Program, the EEC, Asian Development Bank, Islamic Development Bank, West Germany, France, the Netherlands, the United States, and the UNDP. After throwing West Papua to wolves in New Order clothing, the “international community” has, by omission and commission, embraced this as a “good” genocide, perpetrated by our genocidists and it has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to stop it. Underlying this fact is racism, murderous, systemic racism.

Transmigration comes with a lot of baggage. You only have to look at the history of transmigration in West Papua to understand how transmigration, European and settler colonial in origin, belongs to the “good” genocide package. It began in Dutch colonial times, in the early nineteenth century, when poor settlers sent to the outer islands were forced to provide plantation labour, with very high mortality rates. The standard—a very low bar for the rights of some—was set. After independence, Sukarno continued the programme, now planning to transport millions of people from the islands of Java, Madura, Bali, and Lombok to less densely populated settlement areas in Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and West Papua. His original plan, announced in 1949, was to move 48 million people over 35 years, thereby reducing Java’s population from 54 million to 31 million. However, the targets of this immense social engineering endeavour (the World Bank’s “most irresponsible project” in the words of Survival International) were never achieved. Between 1979 and 1984, the peak transmigration years during Suharto’s New Order military regime, 535,000 families (almost 2.5 million people) were moved.

The rights of transmigrants themselves, many of them poor peasants who are either tricked or coerced into leaving their homes, are also violated, as transmigration is a matter of “national security”. They are moved to state- or privately-owned estates, where the company concerned, often a military asset, cultivates twenty percent of the land while the transmigrants, now a de facto coolie labour force, must cultivate the rest and sell the crops to the company. They are promised eventual ownership of 1.5 hectares of cultivable land and 0.5 hectares for a house and garden but, when crops are eventually produced some years later, they must pay for the land by reimbursing some the bank credit used for the company’s initial investment. They live in compounds far from the land they’re allocated, and are also in danger from attacks from the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) or displaced local people.

For West Papuans, the arrival of transmigrants was preceded by forced displacement as the rule in transmigrant areas was one Papuan family to nine non-Papuan families. By 1984, about 700,000 hectares of land had been confiscated (about a third of the size of Belgium, to stay with the earlier comparison) without any compensation. In 1981, the counterinsurgency “Operation Clean Sweep” (suggesting that West Papuans were rubbish to be cleared away, like their rainforest) came with the slogan Biar tikus lari kehutan, asal ayam piara dikandang (Let the rats flee to the jungle so the chickens can breed in the coop), which also says a lot about the almost captive status of transmigrants.

It’s been known for more than forty years that transmigration is a fiasco within its own framework of the benign “development project”. Costing an average of US$7,000 per family in the mid-1980s, it was an economic disaster that gobbled up almost 40% of the economic development budget of the outer islands. Rather than alleviating poverty there, transmigration aggravated it and spread it more widely. Most transmigrants were worse off after moving. Population pressure in Java wasn’t relieved. The environmental calamity it caused was clear from the start. Yet, with World Bank and Asian Development Bank loans, plus bilateral financial aid, transmigration kept expanding so that, from 1980 to 1990, ten times more people were moved than in the previous seven decades. By 1991 forest loss was estimated at 1.2 million hectares per annum.

Transmigrasi has strategic and economic (cash crop) goals other than the mostly stated aim of reducing population pressure. In 1987, the Department of Transmigration was fairly honest for once: ‘‘the frontier regions of Kalimantan, Irian Jaya, East Timor have the priority for migrating military people for the purpose of Defense and Security’’. The idea was to seed active and retired military personnel into transmigration settlements and administration to create buffer zones in “trouble spots”. When he headed the Cendrawasih/ XVII Regional Command in West Papua, Brigadier-General Sembiring Meliala referred to ‘‘The Basic Pattern of Territorial Management Specific to Irian Jaya, Employing the Method of Community Development Centers.’’ By this he meant camps to which the Indigenous peoples of West Papua would be moved after being ejected from their traditional villages, where they were to be “Javanised” with special courses of ‘‘guidance and instruction.’’ In fact, transmigrasi is a depraved plan that aims to strengthen “national defence and security” (read: military benefits) by means of mass murder and at the price of global warming with all its planet-wide consequences: après moi le déluge.

Propaganda is another important aspect. Posters distributed by an organism whose name declares that West Papuans are aliens—Project for the Guidance of Alien Societies of the Directorate General for Social Guidance (Projekt Pembinaan Kemasyarakatan Suku-Suku Terasing)—and text books that were distributed in the early 1980s, by which time twenty-four major transmigration sites had been established on 700,000 hectares of appropriated land, show West Papuans as primitive, dirty and lazy and, depicted beside them, Javanese as neat, clean, civilised, and hardworking. The term Papuan was generally expunged, or Papua and Maluku were lumped together as one geographical, ethnic, and cultural entity. Information like the following was disseminated: “The inhabitants of Maluku and Irian both come from the same ethnic stock: Irianese. … [T]he countryside of Irian has not yet been cultivated because of the lack of people. Even their staple food, sago, just grows wild in the jungle.” The government still refers to transmigration in abandoned land.

This is all part of what settler colonialism scholar Patrick Wolfe calls the “logic of elimination”, whereby Indigenous populations are obliterated to gain control of land and resources. “The deployment of five new battalions in Merauke is best understood in terms of Wolfe’s logic of elimination.” In another word, genocide. But it’s not just a local genocide that the Indonesian military hopes to tuck away behind restricted access to West Papua and a sweeping press ban, because it’s also ecocide. And this affects the whole world.

So far, the results in Merauke, for example, are that Papuans number less than 40% of the population, life expectancy is 35 years for men and 38 for women, and HIV rates are extremely (and suspiciously) high. The Indonesian government, boasting about how it’s strengthening environmental standards, plans to take two million hectares of land in this region for a sugarcane project of five consortiums of Indonesian and foreign companies. Since this—“the world’s biggest deforestation project”—is designated a project of “strategic national importance”, Indonesian law allows the government to expel Indigenous communities from their land. President Prabowo Subianto’s first official visit to “West Papua” wasn’t to West Papua, but to the Merauke food estate, the National Strategic Project, to what, for him, was a part of Indonesia that needs the protection of heavily armed troops against the local Malind people who are protesting the seizure and destruction of their land, customary forests, and villages, without any prior warning, let alone consultation. Destruction of their very lives. West Papuans are fighting back, not only as an organised National Liberation Army but also as groups and individuals armed with bows and arrows or weapons acquired on the black market from low-ranking Indonesian soldiers whose welfare is neglected. Stripped of their identity as ancestral keepers of the land and forest by acts of capitalist violence, in which the agribusiness crops are in themselves part of the destructive machinery, Indigenous people become “terrorists” threatening Indonesia’s national security, and therefore exterminable.

Alien monocrops, affecting both natural forests and peatlands, significantly increase carbon emissions as well as the direct devastation they cause. Rainforests are often described as Earth’s oldest living ecosystems. Some have existed in their present form for at least 70 million years. For example, the Amazon rainforest probably appeared some 55 million years ago during the Eocene era. Rainforests cover only 6% of the Earth’s surface but contain more than half its plant and animal species, so they’re extraordinarily dense with all kinds of flora and fauna which, since they also help to regulate climate, are essential to human wellbeing. They are usually structured in four layers: emergent (top layer, up to 60 metres high); canopy (about five metres thick, forming a roof over the two remaining layers, creating a humid, dark environment below, and protecting topsoil); understory (dark, still, and damp); and forest floor (where decomposers like slugs, termites, worms, and fungi thrive, breaking decaying fallen organic matter into nutrients). Although each layer, with different levels of sunlight, water, and air circulation, has its own characteristics, they belong to an interdependent system. When a tree is cut down, at least four different whole ecosystems are destroyed. And every single species that disappears has knock-on effects on other species including, eventually, humans. In this sense, a single tree can represent the whole forest. The rainforest is many worlds that are unknown to the marauding species—the humans that come to cut them down—who see only cash crops where whole cosmologies have thrived since human time began.

It’s no coincidence that Prabowo has announced a new transmigration programme at the same time as his ecocidal deforestation regime intensifies. These conjoined twins of his agenda are the two sides of Indonesian colonialism in West Papua: exploitation and settlement by dispossession. Benny Wenda, Interim President of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua tells it from his people’s perspective: “Indonesia only wants West Papua’s resources; they do not want our people. The wealth of West Papua—gas from Bintuni Bay, copper and gold from the Grasberg mine, palm oil from Merauke—has been sucked out of our land for six decades, while our people are replaced with Javanese settlers loyal to Jakarta.”

Although Rafael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide”, was greatly concerned about colonial genocides, he is generally and mistakenly seen as having a more limited understanding of the word, in “the wake of the Holocaust in order reflect its features as a state-organized and ideologically-driven program of mass murder”. Israel’s present, horrific genocide in Palestine, a moral wound inflicted on all humanity, has laid bare the deep colonial, racist roots of the Westphalian world order, supposedly of equal sovereign states. Rather, it is an order of “unequal subjects; sovereigns and colonized; and of states, empires, settlers, and colonies”. As such, it normalises mass shredding of defenceless people, especially children, and their debasement to unidentifiable body parts in plastic bags. The fact that its victims tend to be dark-skinned is part of an ongoing colonial legacy arising from the destructive forces of European capitalism. The results in terms of international law, including genocide law, are visible in the power of veto used by the United States to block proposals put before the UN Security Council ordering Israel to stop the genocide in Gaza. “The right to veto is not only a privilege of the victors in WW2; it is an advantage given to themselves by the same vanquishers that simultaneously happened to be at the time former and new empires.”

If the international legal system is dominated by old imperial powers and newer transnational companies, every aspect of exploitation, subjugation, and even genocide in former colonies will be ignored, disguised and, in some cases, encouraged. In West Papua, hiding behind innocuous terms like development, enhancing unity, welfare, and sustainability are the facts that directly affect the other people, the original peoples of West Papua.

1) The causes of political and social unrest in West Papua extend far beyond the question of self-determination; the people are not just “rebels” as they’re often depicted but are threatened with extermination.

2) They’re not a “primitive” lesser or alien species but wise human kin who know how to live in harmony with nature and who, protecting their environment (and hence that of everyone), are said to stand in the way of progress (read: destruction).

3) They have no rights as people or as individuals as the international legal order doesn’t protect them, but lets the genocide happen.

4) They’re frontline victims of the civilising lie which, now taking the form of global warming, is telling us what civilisation has done to this planet, humanity’s habitat.

5) West Papua rainforest custodians are subjected to an alien military mindset or, in practice, everyday brutality and devastation. In a detailed study, Yezid Sayigh spells out the scary reality of what military-managed “sustainability” means in Egypt, and the comparison with the Indonesian regime is relevant because the Indonesian military is also heavily involved in extractive sector business.

6) The West Papua people are clearly subject to the “logic of elimination” by occupying forces seeking to gain control of land and resources.

7) Not all genocides are highly organised, high-tech mass killing projects. Genocide can be achieved through gradual dispossession, destruction, and small-scale but constantly repeated killing, as is happening in West Papua, and also against many other Indigenous peoples.

8) As genocide scholar Kjell Anderson asks, if West Papuans “do not regard themselves as Indonesians and are not regarded as such by other Indonesians”, how can they survive as a people in the militarised, hegemonic state of Indonesia?

9) The UN is still dodging its responsibility for the genocide in West Papua even though its own human rights experts express “serious concerns about the deteriorating human rights situation … citing shocking abuses against indigenous Papuans, including child killings, disappearances, torture and mass displacement of people”.

Rafael Lemkin understood genocide as aiming at the annihilation of essential elements of a group’s conditions of life: political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, and moral. Whatever the group and wherever it was. All of these elements were assaulted in European colonial projects around the world, and are being destroyed by Indonesia’s colonial project in West Papua, most recently by the revival of transmigration and deliberate destruction of Indigenous cultures and ways of life. As philosopher Imge Oranlı observes, genocide denial “is a peculiar phenomenon that speaks to the ontology of evil. Here, the evilness of an evil event is not readily evident to the public because the evil in question was socially and politically produced by the same ideology that continues to shape the collective social imagination of that very public.” The western collective and social imagination is shaped by the deeds and ideology that enabled a good part of European “civilisation”. So, some genocides are more acceptable than others. Once again, think of Belgium: what if a European country of about the same size as the recent land appropriation in West Papua was subjected to the same genocidal project. Would the “international community” remain passive and silent?

“Good” or “bad” genocide, the issues are inescapably the same: genocide (humans kill others of their own nature)→ecocide (as part of this project, humans kill nature) and, in the end→suicide (humans kill themselves).