While last week hundreds of Papuan activists were showing their dissent in front of the US Embassy in Jakarta, demanding a referendum on the independence of West Papua from Indonesia, Human Rights Watch released a report on Indonesian police abuses against the population in the separatist province.

Fighting since the 60s. For almost forty years Irian Jaya – that name was given to the former Dutch colony after the annexation in 1963 – has been the combat area of the separatist guerrilla carried on by armed (mainly with bows, arrows and old rifles) natives of the Free Papua Movement (OPM) and the leading cause of death for 100,000 people, killed by the special force units of the Indonesian army. The core issue is the control of the enormous local mineral resources (in particular the gold and copper mines of the Usa Freeport McMoran company; they pay the army to protect their reserves from rebel attacks).

In 2001 the government granted a limited economic freedom to the province but the Opm refused the proposal, holding it as a trick and going on with their fight for independence.

Jakarta, supplied with new US and UK weapons, reacted with a new military campaign engaging special force units of the army and the notorious Mobile Brigade police (Brimbob) who are terrifying the local population in the highlands of the island inland.

 

Murders, tortures and rapes. The HRW’s report says that “soldiers and especially police go on with indiscriminate mopping-up operations in the villages looking for possible pro-independence activists and treating badly, often brutally, sometimes lethally the local population”. Murders, tortures and rapes are highly frequent. HRW reported fourteen. “I wanted to shout but he kept his hand on my mouth while he was raping me” a sixteen-year-old girl describes the way she was raped by a policeman. “He hurt me so much: I hadn’t been able to walk for days. Then I told me not to say a word about it, otherwise he would come and kill me”.

“The police act above the law, totally unpunished” Joseph Saunders, a HRW researcher, says. “This is the first report we do on this region, so we can’t make out any trend. Anyway the situation is serious so we ask the Indonesian Government to allow outside observers’ access to the region”.