Up to 41 Dead After Riots in West Papua

A group of West Papuan activists participates in a peaceful demonstration, which are regular occurrences but are often overshadowed by violent clashes. (Flickr)

Violence swept the Indonesian province of West Papua last week, leaving as many as 41 people dead following riots in the town of Wamena.

The unrest comes after claims that a migrant teacher insulted a native Papuan student by calling him a “monkey,” a racial slur that also sparked riots last month following a similar incident. Police disputed the veracity of those claims, and President Joko Widodo appealed to the province at large to “not be provoked by a hoax.” Indonesia’s national news agency claimed that rioters and police killed "no less than 16 non-native Papuans and one native Papuan resident," while indigenous activists and witnesses claimed that the native death toll was much higher. 

The relationship between West Papua and the rest of Indonesia has always been uneasy. Indonesia unilaterally took control of the region in 1963 following the evacuation of Dutch colonial authorities and confirmed its control in a controversial referendum in 1967. Papuan independence leaders have dismissed the referendum as illegitimate, and Indonesia has battled a low-level insurgency in the province for more than half a century. A partial grant of autonomy and an increase in funding for the region the late 1990s failed to ameliorate the situation. The heavy-handed tactics of Indonesian security forces have also been a point of contention, and eyewitnesses describe the current riots as a continued pattern of brutality. “There was a shootout and we fought back with rocks and arrows. The police shot at the Papuans. There were about 16 to 20 people who died directly on the street that I saw,” recounts one anonymous student protestor.

The current violence stems from indigenous Papuan resentment of migrants from other parts of Indonesia, who they feel are participating in a system of oppression and exploitation that the government in Jakarta perpetuates. Much of the property damage in the recent riots was from indigenous protesters torching migrant shops, and the government claims that a majority of fatalities were migrants trapped in burning buildings or beaten to death. West Papua has more natural resource wealth than any other province but also the poorest population. Many migrants were resettled in the area by former-dictator Suharto—often on indigenous land without compensation—but the flow of migrants moving to the area has not stopped in recent decades. 

The migrants are often attracted by the opportunities that increased government funding has brought to the region, which itself is often caused by the fabrication of population data. One administrative subdivision created in 2002, for example, initially had four sub-districts and ten villages, compared to 46 and 545 today. This artificial inflation also exacerbates tensions by facilitating the illicit funding of rebel groups and obscuring the true population breakdown of the region, making it difficult to tell how many migrants are actually in the province.

The plight of West Papua has elicited some support from regional leaders in the past, and the majority-Muslim victim count of the current riots has attracted the attention of Muslim activists. But, some argue that there seems to be little structural change on offer from Jakarta, and the lack of any end in sight will serve to damage Indonesia’s international standing at a critical moment for the country as it prepares to move its capital.