Supported by Judith Nielson Institute
Jo Chandler in Kiunga
@jo_m_chandler
Sat 30 Nov 2019 21.00 GMT
It’s 35 years since Agapitus Kiku decided he didn’t want a future without freedom.
As a young man he’d been pressed into a work gang, bristling under the watch of Indonesian soldiers whose authority over his tribal country, in the south-east corner of the vast contested province then called Irian Jaya, he refused to recognise.
He saw no prospects for finding the work he wanted in forestry or mining. Those jobs went to soldiers, he says, or to the Javanese settlers pouring in through the transmigration program which the Dutch administration had begun and the Indonesians continued.
In February 1984, an uprising by Melanesian nationalists in the provincial capital of Jayapura ignited months of brutal retaliations. Kiku, his wife, and their two small children started walking toward the Papua New Guinea border. So did most of their village and some 11,000 other Papuans, trekking on foot or navigating the coast in outrigger canoes – a seismic exodus of political protest that continued over nearly 18 months, triggering deployments of UN aid workers and international journalists, and upsetting regional sensitivities. Indonesia was not to be messed with.
Kiku’s family walked for a week, hiding at night from the soldiers. One child, aged two, died along the way. They crossed the Fly River where its wandering course bulges through the colonial cartographer’s best effort to carve up the island of New Guinea with a neat vertical rule. Here, in the middle of nowhere, the refugees declared they would not go home until they had “merdeka” – a word heavy with the promise of liberation, independence, freedom.
And still they wait, separated from their homeland by the wide, brown, infamously despoiled river that has served as the drain for the toxic sludge of the Ok Tedi mine for as long as they’ve been here. The more formidable and baffling barriers are the ones they can’t see, but which continue to mire the cause of West Papuan independence 50 years after the malodorous “Act of Free Choice” delivered the province to Indonesia.
‘They have their own agenda – freedom’
At last count, in 2014, the number of people living in refugee villages along the Fly was 5,500. A PNG immigration official who has lately been on the ground, part of a government team collecting registrations for long-awaited citizenship, suspects the population may be closer to 7,000. These are the hard-core stayers from within the 1984 movement, most of them from the Muyu tribe whose customary land straddles both sides of the border, plus their children and grandchildren.
They dug in when others drifted back, and refused relocation to the United Nations refugee agency’s settlement situated – diplomatically, and invisibly – well inland from the border.
“When I was with UNHCR we tried our best to pull them out of the villages to go to East Awin [settlement],” recalls Robin Moken, himself a Muyu man and former official in the provincial capital of Kiunga. “They said ‘no, we are fighting for our rights, and we stay here’. They remain there, they have their own agenda – freedom.”
For this they’ve paid a high price, forfeiting powerful inducements like recognition, schools and health care.
Kiku, now a wiry 68-year-old, secures our dinghy to the muddy bank below his village and brokers introductions to the people emerging, curious, from a cluster of stilt huts and the surrounding bush.
The past few months have been anxious ones for the West Papuan diaspora. Despite media constraints including internet blackouts, horrific stories float over the river as another violent eruption of independence activism and retaliation plays out. There are questions around what that might mean along this wild, porous frontier, and how those ructions might be felt more widely.
UNHCR and UNDP representatives have recently visited Kiunga, reportedly working with local authorities and refugee representatives on their preparedness to receive a new wave, though neither agency would confirm these reports.
Western Province Bishop Giles Cotes has confirmed that 13 families have reportedly crossed the Fly River north west of Kiunga. There is a committee forming to organise care for those who come across.
‘We don’t want to fight’
To smooth the way in exploring these delicate issues, our delegation to two refugee villages also enlists a guerrilla veteran of the ‘70s jungle struggle and two next generation activists.
One of them, Toni Sapioper, like Kiku, was part of the 1984 wave, though he was just three when his mother smuggled him and his six siblings across the sea border from Jayapura into Vanimo. He grew up in East Awin settlement and proudly claims lineage as a nephew of the late Seth Rumkorem, a founding leader of the Free Papua Movement (Organisasi Papua Merdeka, or OPM), who proclaimed the Republic of West Papua in 1971.
The villages remain OPM strongholds. Refugee communities have two fervent articles of faith – independence, and Catholicism.
Damianus Warip, 62, is at church with most of the other elders praying the rosary when we arrive. Another veteran of the jungle conflict says he worries that the escalation in clashes on “the other side” will bring more Indonesian military to the border. He crossed the river in 1983, ahead of the main wave, determined “to stay and to fight for merdeka”. That refrain punctuates his answers to every question: “The only thing is merdeka, the only thing”. But it must be realised peacefully, he says. Through a translator, he asks that “Indonesia hear our peaceful demands … we don’t want to fight against Indonesia”.
In the next village, another grey-haired warrior who today himself as the region’s OPM commander-in-chief is more belligerent. In an hour-long, impassioned oration to a closely attending audience of younger men he speaks of how he wants West Papuans over the border to rise up again this 1 December, urging them to “come and join, because this is our opportunity to rise to our destination, our idea … what we want is international community support when we do this, like [Timor Leste]”.
“We want everyone to arise,” he says, adding his people are “out of patience” and have suffered enough.
Refugees on their own land
The sufferings of West Papuans over the border are often hard to know due to the lack of access for outsiders, including media, though the glimpses that break through are horrifying. On this side, remoteness and disinterest cloak the less dramatic, grinding hardships of displacement, compounded by layers of cruel luck and circumstance.
The combination of vast distances, lack of infrastructure and corrupted budgets mean health services are shatteringly scarce across PNG, and in Western Province, they are worse than even the national average. For decades, Fly River refugees have relied almost entirely on basic health patrols by nuns from the Catholic missions. There’s a lot of sickness – malaria, tuberculosis, elephantiasis, chronic malnutrition, says a village leader, Robert Maun. In his community two teachers instruct more than 100 elementary students divided into four classes.
Melanesia News 