Benny Wenda: The Permanent People’s Tribunal proves that West Papua needs freedom
December 9, 2024
As Interim President of the ULMWP, I welcome the release of the judgment of the Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) on West Papua.
After testimonies from West Papuans on the ground and legal and academic experts, the PPT found Indonesia guilty on all four counts:
- Of taking by various means the ancestral land of the Indigenous Papuan people against their will, employing racial discrimination which leads to the loss of culture, traditions and Indigenous knowledge, erases their history and subsumes them into the Indonesian national narrative;
- of violent repression, including unlawful detention, extra-judicial killing, and population displacement in West Papua as a means of furthering industrial development;
- of organised environmental degradation, including the destruction of eco-systems, contamination of land, the poisoning of rivers and their tributaries and of providing the permits, concessions and legal structure of non-compliance for national and foreign companies to invest in West Papua in a way that encourages environmental degradation;
- of colluding with national and foreign companies to cause environmental degradation, population displacement and sustain violent repression in West Papua.
This judgment is a total vindication of everything the West Papuan liberation movement has been saying for decades. We are not safe with Indonesia. If we continue to be denied our right to self-determination, everything that makes West Papua unique will disappear.
The PPT that the Indonesian state guilty of ecocide, of rapidly destroying our forest and poisoning our rivers through mines, plantations, and huge agribusiness food estates. But not only this: the judges also linked Indonesia’s ecocidal destruction to the systematic destruction of West Papua as a people. As they put it: ‘ecological degradation can’t be disaggregated from State and corporate projects which are tending toward the obliteration of a people, or what was called by more than one witness a “slow genocide”.’ The PPT therefore adds to the large body of evidence, including independent studies from Yale University and Sydney University, arguing that West Papuans are the victims of a genocide.
The PPT found in West Papua everything that the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights will also find – ecocide, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass displacement. That is why Indonesia continues to deny the UN access to West Papua, despite over 110 countries demanding their visit.
The ULMWP considers this judgment a significant step forward in our quest for liberation. The case for self-determination presented by the PPT is comprehensive and undeniable. We already know that our people want freedom – the West People’s Petition for self-determination was signed by 1.8 million Papuans, over 70% of our population. Now the PPT has shown how urgently we need it.
Indonesia knows they have lost the political, legal, and moral argument over West Papua. Their only remaining tactics are brutality and secrecy: brutality to crush our struggle and secrecy to hide it from the world.
Our independence is not only urgent for West Papua, but for the entirety of Planet Earth. Because Papuans are the stewards of the third largest rainforest in the world, the Indonesian occupation is one of the most severe threats to a habitable global climate. If Indonesia continues to destroy our forest at its current rate, there will soon be nothing left to save.
Benny Wenda
Interim President
ULMWP Provisional Government
