Tiny Timbulsloko fights back in face of Indonesia’s ‘ecological disaster’

Drone views of the village of Timbulsloko showing the scale of coastal erosion and sinking flatlands in an area that once used to be rice fields on the edge of the Central Java city of Semarang. Mangroves are being rapidly re-established. Drone footage source: CoREM (UNDIP). Video compilation: Scott Creighton (AUT), David Robie’s Café Pacific

ANALYSIS: By David Robie in Semarang, Indonesia

A vast coastal area of the Indonesian city of Semarang, billed nine months ago by a national newspaper as “on the brink of ecological disaster”, is fighting back with a valiant survival strategy.

Thanks to a Dutch mangrove restoration programme and flexible bamboo-and-timber “eco” seawalls, some 70,000 people at risk in the city of nearly two million have some slim hope for the future.

An area that was mostly rice fields and villages on the edge of the old city barely two decades ago has now become “aquatic” zones as flooding high tides encroach on homes.

Onetime farmers have been forced to become fishermen.

Villagers living in Bedono, Sriwulan, Surodadi and Timbulsloko in Demak regency and urban communities in low-lying parts of the city are most at risk.

Indonesian academic exchange an opportunity for unique collaboration

Universitas Gadjah Mada's Centre for Southeast Asian Social Studies (CESASS)
meets AUT's Pacific Media Centre with a Sky Tower backdrop. Photo: PMC

From AUT University

Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie will next week join academics from around the world in a global professorial exchange with Indonesia's Universitas Gadjah Mada. In return, six academics from the progressive Yogyakarta university have visited Auckland University of Technology for the first communication and publication research collaboration of its kind in New Zealand.

The academics from Yogyakarta, led by Gadjah Mada University's Centre for Southeast Asian Social Studies (CESASS) director Dr Hermin Indah Wahyuni, arrived in Auckland earlier this month for a two-week visit featuring workshops, seminars and joint research projects related to climate change.

They will also be collaborating with their newly published research journal IKAT, the PMC's 23-year-old Pacific Journalism Review and AUT Library's Tuwhera research platform on a major project involving ecological communication and Asia-Pacific maritime disasters.

Dr Robie is one of six academics invited by CESASS as part of the Indonesian government's World Class Professor (WCP) programme to strengthen international publication and research studies.

An Indonesian oasis of progressive creativity emerges in culture city

Dr Max Lane, pictured here with Faiza Mardzoeki, talks about his project to establish a community and activist library for the student city of Yogyakarta in Indonesia. Video: Café Pacific

By David Robie in Yogyakarta

A VISION for a progressive activists, writers and researchers retreat in the lush outskirts of Indonesia’s most cultural city, Yogyakarta, is close to becoming reality.

Unfinished Nation ... one of Dr Max Lane's
many books.

The Indonesian Community and Activists Library (ICAL) is already an impressive “shell” in the front garden of Australian author and socio-political analyst, intellectual and consultant Max Lane, arguably the most knowledgeable English-language writer on Indonesian affairs.

Dr Lane, who has been writing and commenting about cultural and political developments in Indonesia, Philippines, Timor-Leste and his homeland since the 1970s, is delighted that completing the centre is so close.

“We have almost completed this building, the library, which will have a reading room, an office, and also some accommodation for those who would like to stay for a few days, or even longer to use the library,” he says, gesturing towards the empty rooms at the complex in the rice-producing and tourist village of Ngepas.

“The library will have about 4000 to 5000 books in the field of social sciences, humanities, history, feminism and so on.”

Activists, media freedom advocates plan ‘global action’ for West Papua

"Gagged" West Papua. Instagram montage by tuckwolf_

By Pacific Media Watch

MEDIA freedom advocates and human rights activists are planning a “global action” for West Papua with demonstrations marking UNESCO world press freedom day events in Jakarta next week.

The advocates want to focus global attention on the “media blackout” long imposed by Indonesian authorities, in spite of promises to open up access to the two Melanesian provinces of Papua and West Papua adjoining independent Papua New Guinea.

The global action will begin on May 1 and run for three days climaxing with World Press Freedom Day on May 3.

Prominent UK-based West Papuan lawyer and civil rights campaigner Benny Wenda will then pay a visit to New Zealand the following week to raise awareness.

Grief, repression, life and death in West Papua’s Highlands

Bonnie Etherington reading from her new book The Earth Cries Out at the Women's Bookshop in Ponsonby,
Auckland, this week. Photo: Del Abcede

THE Auckland launch of Bonnie Etherington’s thrilling debut novel, The Earth Cries Out, on grief, repression and life in another world -- the Highlands of West Papua -- this week was intriguing.

Along with the usual literati at events like this, were the human rights activists with “Free West Papua” emblazoned on their chests and the media freedom advocates intent on exposing the constant gags imposed on the West Papuans by the Indonesian military killing machine in defiance of an empty “open door” policy proclaimed by President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo in 2015.

The “Free West Papua” movement, fuelled by inspired and continuous social media exposes and debate, has been growing exponentially in recent years.

But you wouldn’t know that if you merely relied on the parochial New Zealand media, which doesn’t seem to have woken up to the human rights catastrophe happening on its Pacific doorstep. (Instead, global news services such as Al Jazeera English, or local services such as Asia Pacific Report and Radio NZ International are having to do the job for them).

Speaking at the Women’s Bookshop in deepest Ponsonby – a world away from the mountain jungle near Wamena in West Papua, Nelson-born Etherington gave three readings from her book, which she says is aimed at a more nuanced understanding of West Papua, one of them a chilling rendition of the fate of a woman accused and slain as an alleged “witch”.

West Papua: The crackdown aftermath - finding a dignified solution

The arrests of more than 1600 protesters in West Papua earlier this week are part of a broader systematic oppression of Papuans by the Indonesian government. Pictured are many detained protesters in the Mobile Brigade compound at Kotaraja, Jayapura.  Photo: Tabloid Jubi

OPINION: By Rev Benny Giay
 
LAST MONDAY, Indonesian police arrested more than 1600 people in Jayapura, Papua. They were rallying in support of a coalition of groups representing West Papuans’ aspirations for independence.

The police stopped the protesters, who were heading to the local parliament, forced them to board military trucks, and took them to the Mobile Brigade compound.

The protesters were demonstrating their support for the United Liberation Movement of West Papua's (ULMWP) bid to gain full membership in the grouping of Melanesian countries, the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG).

The ULMWP holds observer status in the group, which consists of Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Solomon Islands. Last year, Indonesia was granted associate membership.

To prevent further violent mistreatment of protesters, together with several Papuan councillors and church leaders, that day I [May 2] went to the Mobile Brigade’s compound to negotiate with the security forces to release the detainees peacefully.

Time to end West Papua atrocities, isolation – and back its Pacific claims

The "Free West Papua" item on TVNZ's independent programme Tagata Pasifika. West Papuan membership of the Melanesian Spearhead Group is now critical.

By DAVID ROBIE

THE TIME is long overdue for ending more than a half century of isolation for West Papua, after decades of systematic oppression from Indonesian “security” forces following Dutch colonial rule.

But instead of honouring the promise of The Hague for West Papuan self-determination, expansionist Jakarta send in paratroopers to Irian Jaya in a disastrous campaign in 1962, and “stole” Papuan independence aspirations with a sham Act of Free Choice under the United Nations banner seven years later. 

A shameful betrayal by the West and the United Nations. Four decades of genocide has followed with impunity while the world has largely ignored the plight of West Papuans.

However, things are gradually changing. Social media and the increasing courage of eyewitnesses to speak out are producing a compelling dossier of damning evidence against systematic human rights violations by Indonesian forces.

Whereas in recent years, West Papua has been something of a "black hole" or "blind spot" for media coverage from countries such as Australia and New Zealand - and even much of the Pacific - the tide seems to be turning.

Bloody aftermath of Paniai massacre in West Papua captured on video

The four-minute video, shot by citizen journalists and released publicly for the first time today, includes first-hand testimony from survivors of the Paniai massacre in West Papua and graphic footage taken in the immediate aftermath. Video: Minority Rights Group International

NEW VIDEO footage showing the bloody aftermath of the Paniai massacre in West Papua highlights the urgent need for Indonesia to hold an independent and transparent investigation into the tragedy, says Minority Rights Group International (MRG).

A still from the MRG video.

In December 2014 four unarmed Papuan teenagers were killed and 17 more Papuans were injured when the Indonesian army and police opened fire on a group of peaceful protesters in Paniai.

They had gathered to protest an earlier incident of violence by the Indonesian security forces.

The four-minute video, shot by citizen journalists and released publicly for the first time today, includes first-hand testimony from survivors of the massacre as well as graphic footage taken in the immediate aftermath.

"This film gives a disturbing insight into the Indonesian military’s casual disregard for the lives of Indigenous Papuans,’ said TAPOL's Esther Cann.

A struggle for ‘truth’ and the NZ media myopic over Fiji, West Papua

The vigil for 58 victims of the 2009 Ampatuan massacre - including 32 news people - at AUT University last week.
Photo: © 2014 John Miller

INTERESTING that the Indonesian news agency Antara should send one of its most senior journalists all the way from Jakarta to cover last week’s Pacific Journalism Review conference in Auckland, yet the local New Zealand media barely noticed the largest-ever local gathering of activists, media educators, journalists, documentary makers and newsmakers in one symposium.

Apart from a half-hour interview on Radio NZ’s Sunday with Max Stahl, the Timor-Leste film maker and investigative journalist world-famous for his live footage of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre – images that ultimately led to the world’s first independence-by-video triumph some eight years later – and a couple of bulletins on RNZI, you would have hardly known the event was on.

But the conference was packed with compelling and newsworthy presentations by journalists and media educators. Topics ranged from asylum seekers to the emerging “secret state” in Australia; from climate change to the logging of “cloud forest’ on the island of Kolombangara; from post-elections Fiji to the political ecology of mining in New Caledonia.

All tremendously hard-hitting stuff and a refreshing reminder how parochial and insignificant the New Zealand media is when it comes to regional Asia-Pacific affairs.

Dangerous trend in copycat cybercrime laws in the Pacific [video]

             Video by Pacific Media Watch editor Anna Majavu.

COPYCAT cybercrime laws designed to curb freedom of expression on social media and independent blog news sites are becoming a major threat to the Asia-Pacific region.

Café Pacific today publishes a video from the book launch of David Robie's new book Don't Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific, which raises these issues.

Speakers at the event included the AUT Dean of Creative Technologies, Professor Desna Jury; Wiremu Tipuna, Takawaenga Māori at AUT (Ngati Kahungunu); Dr Steven Ratuva, president of the Pacific Islands Political Studies Association (PIPSA); publisher Tony Murrow of Little Island Press; and Pacific Islands Media Association (PIMA) chair Sandra Kailahi.

TV New Zealand's Pacific correspondent, Barbara Dreaver, sent a "launch" message which was read out by Kailahi.

Border ‘butchers’, absentee poll reps and West Papua’s growing strife

A West Papuan in handcuffs at a recent “Free West Papuans” rally in Auckland. Photo: Del Abcede/PMC

THE INDONESIAN parliamentary elections this week were disappointing on a number of fronts, especially for presidential frontrunner Jakarta Governor Joko “Jokowi” Widodo. His Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) which gained just 19 percent of the vote, was far less than the expected 25 percent. But the presidential vote is not until July.

What about West Papua? What was the fate of representation for the two Melanesian provinces bordering Papua New Guinea this week? Who among the Jakarta hopefuls really have the future of the Papuan region at heart?

Bobby Anderson, one of the rare journalists filing from West Papua, wrote in New Mandala:

In Papua, where state sovereignty and legitimacy is deeply contested, representation matters. So in this national election, who purports to represent Papua?

Candidate residence is one way of sizing up the candidates and the results are telling. Sixty three out of 114 candidates running for the DPR (National House of Representatives) seats in Papua province live within the greater Jakarta area.

Parliament soft-pedals over East Timor’s harsh draft media law

East Timorese media ... fears draft media law could lead to censorship.
Photo: Diariu Timor Pos

JOSÉ BELO, Timor-Leste’s celebrated champion of investigative journalism and advocate for a free media, recently vowed he was prepared to go to jail rather than allow his fledgling independent nation muzzle the press.

Belo, 42, publisher of the small yet probing Tempo Semanal online and print weekly, says he won’t give up in the current struggle over the fate of the media.

He has been campaigning against a draconian draft media law over the past few months.

“It’s about the future of our country,” he told Fairfax Media’s Lindsay Murdoch.

But the news about a draft law that is feared could lead to censorship is not getting any better. Since Café Pacific broke this story in early February, the Timorese non-government organisation La’o Hamutuk has been monitoring developments closely – and making quality submissions.

Fighting for East Timor's right to free expression and information for everybody, not just journalists

La'o Hamutuk ... submissions for free speech and the right to information
for everybody in Timor-Leste. Photo: David Robie

EARLIER this month Café Pacific published two commentaries on the draconian proposed media law for Timor-Leste and why journalists are up in arms about it. They were republished on Pacific Scoop.

But it isn't only journalists who are concerned, non-government organisations that often carry out independent investigations on issues that local media don't have the resources to tackle are also upset.

It is the narrow definition of "journalists" and freedom of information for the public at stake. One of the provisions essentially gags freelance and independent journalists, and also foreign correspondents are blocked as the draft currently stands.

The International Federation of Journalists has issued a statement criticising the draft law and Reporters Sans Frontières is believed to be sending a letter to the Timorese legislators reviewing the draft law.

On February 19, Committee A of Timor-Leste's Parliament invited La'o Hamutuk and the HAK Association to present and discuss our views.

'Pak' Prabowo seeks to 'clear' his name over Timor atrocities allegations in media jousting

Beatriz looks for her husband among the bodies after the 1983 Kraras massacre, as portrayed in
Beatriz's War, East Timor's first feature film.

By DAVID ROBIE

INDONESIAN presidential hopeful ‘Pak” Prabowo, the retired Kopassus general notorious for his alleged human rights violations in Timor-Leste, has finally broken his silence and made a statement to the Jakarta Post denouncing a recent article about his past as “scurrilous allegations”.

Yet his odious record speaks for itself.

He claims in an open letter that allegations about his actions three decades ago, notably the massacre in August 1983 in Kraras - now known as the “village of widows",  were "based on unproven allegations, innuendos and third-hand reports".

What was he forced to reply to? Journalist Aboeprijadi Santoso, a contributor  to The Jakarta Post writing from the safety of Amsterdam, had written an article entitled: “Whatever happened in Kraras, Timor-Leste, ‘Pak’ Prabowo?”

Timor-Leste soldiers and young citizens paying homage
to the Kraras  massacre victims in 2013.
Photo: David Robie

He was referring to the massacre that has been immortalised in Beatriz's War, the harrowing new film about the Timorese struggle for independence from Indonesia, especially telling the story from a woman's perspective.

Heroine Beatriz (a composite character created from real life people) was a survivor from the Kraras massacre. Prabowo is depicted as being responsible for many human rights atrocities in the film.

Santoso recently described Prabowo as one of the “most interesting – and most controversial” presidential hopefuls in the Indonesian elections due in July because he has reinvented himself as an anti-corruption campaigner. 

Dodging censorship to see The Act Of Killing

DRAFTHOUSE FILMS have announced their award-winning controversial, shocking and surreal film The Act Of Killing about the Indonesian anti-communist massacres in the 1965-66 purge - screened at the New Zealand International Film Festival last year - is now available on video on demand.

Winner of more than 50 awards internationally, appearing on more than 40 official critics' top ten lists, and shortlisted for best documentary at this year's upcoming Academy Awards, Joshua Oppenheimer's groundbreaking documentary The Act Of Killing is finally available to watch everywhere.

At the time of checking, 352,000 people had seen the trailer.

In this chilling and inventive documentary, executive produced by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, the unrepentant former members of Indonesian death squads are challenged to re-enact some of their many murders in the style of the American movies they love.

Remembering East Timor's Kraras massacre 30 years on

Police, military perimeter guards and the public watch
the 38th independence anniversary parade at the
"widows village" of Kraras. Mobile photo: David Robie/PMC

By DAVID ROBIE in Dili

ON 28 November 1975, Timor-Leste made its fateful unilateral declaration of independence. A week later, a paranoid Indonesian military, fearful of an upstart "leftwing" neighbouring government, staged its brutal invasion and 24 years of repression and massacres followed.

On 17 September 1983, the infamous massacre of at least 300 civilians (probably a far higher number) took place at the village of Kraras and Wetuka River near Viqueque.

This heralded the end of the so-called ceasefire between Indonesian and Falintil forces and led to the long guerrilla struggle against Jakarta's harsh rule.

This week, the people of Kraras - the "village of widows" - proudly hosted the 38th anniversary of Timor-Leste independence; the real date, not the "rewritten" post-UN date. They also honoured the 30th anniversary of the Kraras massacre.

The massacre has been graphically portrayed in Timor-Leste's first feature film, Beatriz's War, and it was fitting that this movie should be screened to thousands of Timorese in an open-air arena at the independence festival this week.

Honouring the Matebian massacre victims in East Timor

Student candles for the victims of the Matebian massacre in Timor-Leste.
Photo: Belo Dutay

By Celestino Gusmão for Café Pacific 

University students from Timor-Leste's eastern Baucau district gathered this week to commemorate the 1979 Matebian cave massacre in a month of events focused on protest against the impunity over atrocities during the illegal Indonesian occupation.

At the place at Foho Matebian on the slopes of the mountain of that name where the students lit candles, Indonesian forces used bombs to seal off the inhabitants of an entire village inside a cave with a rockfall.

Even if people had survived the rocks, they would have died of starvation trapped in the cave.
Until now, their remains are buried behind the rocks.

It is in this area during 1978/9 when the majority of the Timor-Leste population abandoned the struggle against Indonesian forces and instead took up a guerrilla struggle.

The Fretilin leadership was disorganised but took up armed struggle in the hills until Indonesia reluctantly agreed to a referendum on independence in 1999.

West Papua supporters hail 'sacred mission' as success

WEST PAPUA Freedom Flotilla supporters have uploaded a video of their secret ceremonial "sacred mission" in Papuan coastal waters earlier today on YouTube. A SBS report cited activists hailing the mission as a success. Here it is.

• Earlier story on the mission
• Guardian warns of 'torture fears'
• Freedom flotilla updates

Indigenous leaders from Australia, West Papua meet in secret at sea

Photo: West Papua Freedom Flotilla

From the West Papua Freedom Flotilla

EVADING the Indonesian navy, two tiny boats met near the Australia-Indonesia border to ceremonially reconnect the indigenous peoples of Australia and West Papua.

The ceremony was the pinnacle of a 5000km journey beginning in Lake Eyre, in which sacred water and ashes were carried and presented to West Papuan leaders.

While the Freedom Flotilla’s flagship, The Pog, sailed towards West Papua, the world watched its progress via a live satellite tracker onboard the vessel, providing a much needed distraction for the clandestine ceremony to take place in an undisclosed location off the south coast of Papua.

The cultural exchange of Indigenous elders was held in secret, due to threats made by Indonesian government ministers and military officials who had stated that the navy and air-force would “take measures” against the peaceful protest, and had not ruled out the use of lethal force.

Soon to be Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop had also stated that Indonesia may do “whatever it wishes” to stop the peaceful protest.

Is Australia's new Asia-Pacific asylum policy the harshest in its history?

Australian protesters rail against the new Rudd asylum-seekers policy outside the
Sydney Town Hall today. Photo: Peter Boyle/Socialist Action

FOLLOWING Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's announcement, asylum seekers who arrive in Australian waters by boat will no longer have the chance to be settled in Australia.

Instead, asylum seekers arriving by boat will be held in an expanded facility at Papua New Guinea's Manus Island and those who are found to be genuine refugees will be settled in PNG under a surprise agreement with the Peter O'Neill government in Port Moresby.

Announcing the changes yesterday, Rudd admitted it was "a very hardline decision".

 Protests in Sydney greeted the new policy.

The Conversation spoke to three policy analysts for their response to Rudd's announcement:

ALISON GERARD, senior lecturer in justice studies at Charles Sturt University, Bathurst: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's "Pacific Solution #3" is irreconcilable with our international refugee obligations. Like other proposals put forward by this government, it is likely to be robustly contested in court as a breach of basic human rights.