Email Sadiq Khan: Don’t welcome war criminal Prabowo
November 6, 2024
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan is set to welcome Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto on November 19th 2024.
Prabowo is an unrepentant war criminal who is complicit in numerous massacres in East Timor and West Papua. The Free West Papua campaign is asking Londoners to email Mayor Khan, asking him to cancel his upcoming meeting with President Subianto.
We have created a template email for you to send to Mayor Khan at mayor@london.gov.uk:
_____________
Subject line: Cancel your meeting with Prabowo Subianto
[YOUR ADDRESS AND POSTCODE]
Dear Mayor Khan,
I’m writing to express my deep concern at your proposed upcoming meeting with new Indonesia President Prabowo Subianto. Prabowo is an unrepentant war criminal who is complicit in genocide in Timor-Leste and occupied West Papua. As a London resident, I urge you to cancel your meeting and show that Prabowo is not welcome in our city.
Prabowo has been described by a former U.S. Ambassador as “perhaps the greatest violator of human rights in contemporary times among the Indonesian military”. As a commander in the Indonesian Special Forces unit Kopassus, he was implicated in the Kraras massacre in September 1983, during which Kopassus troops murdered over 230 civilian men, women, and children. Kopassus recruited and trained the pro-Indonesia militias who were responsible for some of the worst violence committed during the East Timorese genocide, while Prabowo’s infamous hooded “ninja” gangs terrorised the rural population. He was later banned from Australia and the U.S. for human rights violations.
East Timorese civilians have also accused Prabowo of personally torturing them. According to one victim testimony, “For two hours [Prabowo] broke every conceivable thing over my body. He threw beer crates, a petrol lamp, beat me with sticks and punched and kicked me.” Later, during the fall of the dictator Suharto in 1998, Kopassus troops under Prabowo’s command committed the mass rape and murder of at least 160 Chinese-Indonesian women and girls.
In Indonesia-occupied West Papua, Prabowo was responsible for the Mapenduma hostage incident, which led to the death of eight Papuan guerrillas despite them offering to peacefully hand over their hostages. He also led subsequent reprisal attacks in the Papuan Highlands, during which a military helicopter fired on villagers while disguised as a Red Cross vehicle. Since becoming President, Prabowo has renewed Indonesia’s ‘transmigration’ settlement programme to West Papua, which has made indigenous black Papuans a minority in their own land.
As Mayor, you declared a climate emergency and have made tackling climate change one of your highest priorities. Yet Indonesia’s ongoing destruction of the West Papuan rainforest – the third largest on earth – is one of the gravest threats our planet faces. Prabowo is currently ramping up development on the largest deforestation project ever launched: a network of sugarcane plantations set to destroy an area more than 12 times the size of London.
If London is truly a ‘pro-climate and pro-human rights’ city, we must show that people like President Prabowo are not welcome here. I therefore urge you to cancel your upcoming meeting.
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Yours Sincerely
[YOUR NAME]