Conflict in Indonesias Papua Region

Papua is Indonesias poorest region

Indigenous peoples rely on their land for their survival and therefore any incursion onto their land creates serious problems for any community, Sophie Grig, a senior campaigner for Survival International, a UK-based indigenous rights advocacy organization, told IRIN. These incursions in West Papua generally also involve the presence of the military to protect the project [which] leads to human rights violations.

Over the past four years, at least 74 people have died in the village of Baad alone - one of more than 160 across Merauke- due to infighting between communities created by disagreements over the sale of land to agribusinesses, and police brutality, according to Leonardus Maklew, a Baad resident who has been representing nine Malind villages in negotiations to defend their land from an Indonesian sugar cane plantation since 2010.

The most serious consequences have been human deaths. Up until now, the police, companies, and military never tried to understand our needs and our struggle, said the 35-year-old ethnic Malind man.

Police and military personnel routinely accompany companies when they come to ask the Malind to sell their land. It is a form of intimidation, said Sophie Chao, a project officer with the Forest People's Programme (FPP), a non-profit organization registered in the Netherlands that campaigns for the rights of indigenous peoples of the tropical forest facing environmental destruction and human rights violations.

Since 2009, when the local government initiated planning for the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE), a mega development project aiming to convert more than a million hectares of forest to agribusinesses in Papua, at least 12 corporations have moved into areas inhabited by an estimated 116,500 indigenous peoples generally known as the Malind, who are struggling to survive in increasingly degraded, deforested environments. Tribal leaders co-opted?

While police and military brutality against indigenous Papuans is nothing new in this resource-rich, former Dutch colony, violence between communities on this scale is unprecedented, residents say.

The government says we are just a hot-headed people, always fighting, but it is worse now. Tools that used to be used for hunting are now used against one another, said Maklew, explaining that bows and arrows, and knives, are all commonly drawn during fights, which have occurred at least once a month since corporations started (in 2009) trying to convince villagers individually to sell their land, bypassing customary collective decision-making processes.

Company spokespeople of PT Anugerah Rejeki Nusantara (ARN), a sugar cane plantation owned by the Wilmar International Group (WIG) headquartered in Singapore, often co-opt tribal leaders, paying them a salary to convince the other villagers to sell their land, according to the FPP, and without giving full information to communities that they will not see their land again, according to Rainforest Foundation Norway, an NGO that campaigns for the protection of rainforests and their inhabitants. WIG strongly denies the charge.

Wilmar pledges to respect and recognize the long-term customary and individual rights of indigenous and local communities,stated WIG in a public statement on 5 December 2013.

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Conflict in Indonesias Papua Region