Australia: Asylum seekers reflect Papua turmoil

Immigration authorities in Australia said they expected to decide in March on the fate of 43 asylum seekers from the Indonesian province of West Papua. The group reached a remote beach in Queensland, northern Australia, on January 18 after a week at sea in a 25-meter dugout canoe. The 43, including independence activists, said they would be in danger from the Indonesian military if Australia sent them back to Papua.

The advocacy group Aceh Papua Maluku Human Rights Online (AHRO, www.ahro.info) urged a worldwide appeal to Australian officials on behalf of the asylum seekers. AHRO maintains that Indonesia has occupied West Papua since 1969 when 1,022 electors, handpicked by Indonesia from a population of about one million, voted to unite with its large neighbor.

Since that time the Indonesian military has fought a persistent independence movement in West Papua. AHRO says Indonesian forces have used torture and murder and have strafed and bombed villages in an effort to stamp out the movement, killing an estimated 100,000 Papuans.

A Special Autonomy Law took effect in West Papua four years ago, but critics say living conditions have not improved. AHRO says HIV/AIDS is spreading, prohibitive school fees prevent Papuans from sending their children for an education, and many schools stand empty because the teachers have not been paid. In addition, large amounts of special autonomy funds have reportedly been used to finance military operations, and AHRO says migrants from elsewhere in Indonesia “are arriving in West Papua on a daily basis and have virtually taken control of the commercial sector.”

The 43 Papuans crossed 425 kilometers (264 miles) of open sea to become only the third boatload of asylum seekers to reach the Australian mainland in four years. (Asylum seekers must reach the mainland to claim refugee status since the federal government excised Australia’s northern islands from the immigration zone.)

Tensions had risen in West Papua with the recent deployment of 10,000 Indonesian troops from Aceh Province. In addition, 12 Papuan nationalists had been arrested, provoking widespread protests; four were subsequently released.

One of the 43, Papuan student resistance leader Herman Wainggai, appealed to the Australian public for protection. He spoke in a video he had secretly recorded on Christmas Island, the remote Australian territory in the Indian Ocean where the asylum seekers were being housed. He said the group feared to return to West Papua because Indonesian authorities there represented “a killer government … a terrorist government.” Nick Chesterfield of the Australian West Papua Association agreed, saying if the activists were returned to West Papua, “[t]he Indonesian military would not hesitate to kill them.”

Indonesia, however, says the 43 should not worry about being sent back. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has guaranteed the group’s safety if they would return, and Ambassador Teuku Mohammad Hamzah Thayeb says the Papuans have nothing to fear from Indonesian authorities. The ambassador also warned that relations between the two countries could be “strained” if the Howard government granted political asylum to the Papuans.

However, Australian Greens Senator Kerry Nettle said the ambassador’s assurances “are not credible. The escalating repression of the independence movement and generalized suppression of the people of West Papua is well documented.”

The question of asylum is a sensitive one. Australia is negotiating a security treaty with Indonesia that calls on Australia to pledge not to interfere in Indonesia’s “territorial integrity.” Granting asylum to the 43 West Papuans might be seen as an admission by the Australian government that they could be persecuted if they returned home.

Nonetheless, Nettle said, “I had the opportunity to ask our Department of Immigration … when they thought they would have a decision on the 43 asylum seekers from West Papua, and they said they were expecting to have a decision sometime in March, so we are obviously hoping that that will be sooner rather than later and that the decision will be positive.”