The United States will step up its military cooperation with Indonesia, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said in Singapore on Friday after meeting his Indonesian counterpart Purnomo Yusgiantoro.
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Operations at a US-owned mine in Indonesia have been suspended after the government ordered a halt to production following a tunnel collapse which killed 28 workers. The All Indonesian Workers Union says workers will not return until Freeport suspends officials believed to be responsible for a tunnel collapse last month, in which 28 workers were killed. Production could be suspended for up to three months.
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The bid by the Indonesian Government to grant amnesty for some political prisoners in Papua was rejected by political prisoners at Abepura penitentiary.
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The present wave of protests seem to suggest a fundamental shift in Malaysian society today – there is a collective change of mood, away from passive and subservient acceptance of an authoritarian political order towards an active and deliberate questioning of its legitimacy.
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The German government has approved the sale to Indonesia of about 100 used Leopard 2 tanks and 50 armored personnel carriers but has put off a decision on a tank sale to Saudi Arabia, a defense source said on Friday.
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“There has been massive persecution against KNBP activists. This is extremely excessive, some others are still detained at Papua Police Regional Command, and Giban has suffered a broken arm and must be treated at Abepura Regional District Hospital (RSUD).
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Indonesian police in Jayapura have violently dispersed a pro-independence rally being held by the West Papua National Committee (KNPB). KNPB leader Victor Yeimo was arrested along with media worker Marthen Manggaprouw and two KNPB activists.
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Public Servants BEARING WITNESS serves as a supplement to mainstream news’ output. P.S. BEARING WITNESS was created to help maintain an informed public by covering the major international stories mainstream media has missed or oversimplified.
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Violence has again broken out in Indonesia’s troubled province of West Papua, with the Australian-supported counter-terrorism police squad Densus 88 leading the attack.
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Worried that ethnic cleansing may take place without international attention, Anonymous is preparing an operation in support of Myanmar’s minority Muslim Rohingya ethnic group, possibly targeting government officials.
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A new report by UK-based NGO, TAPOL, forcefully challenges the Indonesian government’s repeated assertion that the country has ‘no political prisoners.’ There were at least 210 political arrests in West Papua during 2012, a significant number of whom were women. The true number is likely to be higher as a number of arrests go unreported. Paul Barber, Coordinator of TAPOL, said, “Papua’s political prisoners are not mythical characters – they are real men and women whose existence must be recognised. If the government wants peace in West Papua, it should be talking to political leaders, not locking them up.”
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The Papuans Behind Bars website, which is supported by a range of human rights NGOs internationally as well as in Jakarta, displays the images and profiles of several of the at least 40 political detainees being held in Papuan jails today. The website is intended to support advocacy for the rights of the political prisoners. According to several human rights organisations, these prisoners have been subject to torture, denied access to lawyers, been forced to confess as well as other human rights violations. Pacific Media Watch's media-freedom project editor Daniel Drageset interviewed Paul Mambrasar, one of the websites founders...
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The military presence in West Papua is almost always accompanied by human rights violations such as killings, arbitrary arrests, rape and torture. Papuan leaders have voiced their concern at plans for more than a thousand Indonesian soldiers to build 1,500 km of new roads in the next two years to accelerate ‘development’ in West Papua.
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Put in a broader context of the politics of torture in Papua, the cases of Gobay and Klembiap are not uncommon or isolated. Rather, they reveal a glimpse of the ways the Indonesian state has governed Papua for the last fifty years. In this context, torture is widespread and has become “a standard procedure” of the Indonesian state security apparatus in targeting pro-Papuan independence activists. As we notice here, the police use torture to extract confessions from suspects, to collect intelligence information and/or simply to exact shock and awe effects. If torture fails, suspects are charged with anachronistic laws such as Regulation 12/1951. This law was the product of the Dutch colonial power in its attempt to justify any arrest of pro-Indonesian activists back in early days of independence struggle. The maximum penalty of carrying a weapon is 10-year imprisonment.
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Buddhist Nationalism provides the perfect cover for the military elite of Myanmar to continue their decades-long campaign of ethnic cleansing of Muslims, Christians and other indigenous minority groups throughout the territories of Myanmar. The current Western narrative of the new, open Burma of Thein Sein fails to properly recognize this ongoing human rights disaster, and policies based on that fantasy will also fail.
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US-based Chevron, the leading crude oil producer in Indonesia, is set to spread its wings to the eastern part of the country after wrapping up a seismic survey of two exploration blocks in West Papua. The firm’s production alone accounted for 40 percent of Indonesia’s oil output last year of around 870,000 barrels-per-day.
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Several sources are reporting that over 500 people have fallen ill and close to a hundred people have already died from malnutrition and “disease outbreaks” since November of last year in five remote villages in West Papua’s Kwoor District, Tambrauw Regency.
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The Papua New Guinea Health minister Michael Malabag, speaking as a private citizen, has said it is time PNG made a bold stand for the independence struggle of the mostly Melanesian indigenous people of the Indonesian province of West Papua.
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Public Servants BEARING WITNESS serves as a supplement to mainstream news’ output. P.S. BEARING WITNESS was created to help maintain an informed public by covering the major international stories mainstream media has missed or oversimplified.
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Ordinary people in this part of the Pacific are painfully aware that the West Papuan people continue to live under the gun. It is the politicians in Melanesia who have been slow to take up the cause. But that may be changing.
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