Examines the aims, capacity, leadership and activities of both the armed units of the Free Papua Organisation (Organisasi Papua Merdeka, OPM) and the various political groupings supporting independence in Papua and abroad.
Executive summary
Indonesia’s approach to the independence movement in Papua has been to try to crush it, repress it, persuade it, co-opt it, divide it, dilute it or smother it in a process called development. Nothing has worked, and it has proved impossible to eradicate. It is too powerful an idea, backed by too much history and too many differences with the rest of Indonesia. The best policy the Indonesian government could adopt now would be the equivalent of “do no harm”, taking measures that will avoid further radicalisation. The most urgent is to invest in better policing.
At the same time, the movement itself, generically known as the Free Papua Organisation (Organisasi Papua Merdeka, OPM) has been so resistant to unification, so riven by clan and personal interests, that to this day, it has never constituted a serious threat, militarily or politically, to the Indonesian state. It consists of three elements: a disparate group of armed units, each with limited territorial control, that does not answer to a single commander; several groups inside Papua that through demonstrations and protests give expression to a much more widespread sense of injustice and resentment; and a small group of leaders based abroad, in the Pacific, Europe and the U.S., who try to raise awareness of Papuan issues with a view toward generating international support for independence.
The political fronts have never been able to direct the armed units, and the armed units themselves have generally tended to work out a wary co-existence with local governments, headed by directly elected Papuans. The conflict is of such low intensity that the government can easily live with it. The guerrillas have never done enough damage for the government to seriously consider negotiations, and many parties have an interest in sustaining the low-level threat.
Faced with this situation, the political groups have adopted different tactics. The largest, most radical, and most dynamic, the West Papua National Committee (Komite Nasional Papua Barat, KNPB) has consciously tried to follow what it sees as the lessons of East Timor: provoke violence on the part of security forces and hope that international outrage over human rights violations resulting will change international reluctance to intervene, much as a massacre in East Timor in 1991 changed the political dynamics there. Any repressive action by the Indonesian government thus plays directly into the KNPB’s hands. (As one KNPB leader said, “That’s exactly what we want, lots of police abuses against us.”)
Others would prefer to follow the Aceh model: press the Indonesian government for negotiations, mediated by an international third party. But the conditions in Aceh that produced a peace agreement in 2005, ending a three-decade insurgency, were vastly different to those in Papua, and Indonesian agreement to an outside mediator is unthinkable.
The diaspora elites have only rarely managed to overcome longstanding divisions that date back to the early 1970s, but determination to become a member of the Melanesian Spearhead Group, an association of Pacific nations, gave them a clear short-term goal, resulting in the formation of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) in December 2014 (and eventual observer status, not membership, in 2015). The unity may be temporary, but for the moment it has given a new confidence to the movement; whether it can set other equally practical short-term goals and deliver remains to be seen.
The same could be said of the Indonesian government. President Jokowi has made a point of trying to show he cares about Papua by making repeated visits, releasing a few political prisoners and promising to free more, and committing the central government to several major development projects. But the president and his advisers need to understand that these steps, however welcome, will not necessarily translate into support for the government. More roads, schools and houses, while desirable on their own terms, will not make pro-independence sentiment disappear.
In the face of an emboldened and at least temporarily united political movement, the government also needs to understand some of the drivers of radicalisation and avoid exacerbating them. They include ineffective policing, where a frequent default response to any sign of trouble is to open fire; impunity for security forces, which fuels the sense of injustice; and a practice of undermining local customary institutions if they are suspected of pro-independence sympathies.
Ultimately, Jakarta needs to learn to live with an independence movement that may be best managed by not trying to destroy it
