Benny Wenda: Jokowi leaves a legacy of failure and bloodshed in West Papua
July 24, 2024
As Jokowi’s Presidency comes to an end, it is time to reflect on his legacy in West Papua: ecocide, military impunity, and a total failure to address the root causes of our issue.
On his fifteenth visit to West Papua, Jokowi posed with ethnic Indonesians wearing Papuan headdresses – only days after his soldiers murdered three innocent young men. This is cultural appropriation during an ongoing genocide. Jokowi’s latest insult to West Papua characterises his ten years in power: he is dancing on top of our graves.
Jokowi was elected on a promise to prosecute soldiers who murdered Papuan children in Bloody Paniai, but in power let the only culprit ever tried for the massacre walk free. As President, he has treated West Papua like a holiday home while his soldiers kill and torture our people. He signs deals with big corporations to destroy our ancestral forest, at the same as he plays with Papuan children and appropriates our culture for a photoshoot.
Every Indonesian President since Suharto has broken their promises in West Papua, but Jokowi is the worst hypocrite of them all. He presents himself as a reformer, but has refused to take on the TNI in West Papua. He claims to be an environmentalist, but has ramped up construction on the Trans-Papua Highway. He claims to be a civilian President, but has chosen the war criminal Prabowo as his successor. He says he stands for justice, but has presided over the bloodiest period in recent Papuan history. Since he came to power in 2014, over 100,000 West Papuans have been displaced, more than 1200 of us have been killed, and countless Papuans – men, women, and children – have been tortured or suffered arbitrary arrest.
Jokowi’s environmental politics are a sham, as shown by the new sugarcane plantation he launched this week in Merauke. What he describes as ‘food security’ for Indonesia is really the continued exploitation of stolen West Papuan land. By building the Trans-Papua Highway he has connected MIFEE, Freeport, and Tangguh, securing permanent corporate investment in West Papua and ensuring that even more destructive plantations and mines will be built in the future. West Papua is securing Indonesia’s green transition at the barrel of a gun.
Indonesia is a criminal in West Papua. Whether a fake reformer like Jokowi, or an unrepentant war criminal like Prabowo, every President has continued their illegal war on our land. Their presence there is not an internal matter or a question of Indonesian sovereignty. It is a colonial occupation backed up by violence and colonial attitudes. West Papua never consented to being part of Indonesia, and we have resisted their illegal occupation every day since the invasion in 1962.
Jokowi has betrayed West Papua and lied to the world about what is happening there. His final gift is to leave us with a genocidal war criminal. West Papua is not safe under Indonesia, under any President. I hope that Melanesian leaders take note of what has happened over the past decade and give the ULMWP a seat at the MSG table. Only then we will be able to defend ourselves.
Benny Wenda
President
ULMWP
