10/21/16 – Jason MacLeod – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Jason MacLeod.
He is a Quaker educator, organizer, and researcher, and he's the author of a book called Merdeka and the Morning Star, Civil Resistance in West Papua, and he joins me on the line by Skype from Tasmania right now.
Is that right?
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Jason?
Very well, Scott, and hello, listeners.
Yep, I'm here in Tasmania doing well.
Good to be on the show.
Alright, well, say hi to my friend Ted down there.
I'm sure you must know everybody on Tasmania.
Well, Ted is my pal, so hey to Ted in Tasmania, too.
Alright, so now I have to admit, and I'm very sorry to say that it's true, that I have not read your book.
What I've read is a very compelling review of your book at WagingNonviolence.org, and it's by a guy named Dale Hess.
It was actually published last February here.
Waging Nonviolence.
I need to make friends with those guys, whoever they are.
Uncovering the secret 50-year history of struggle in West Papua, and I think I've seen Amy Goodman cover this back years and years ago.
I don't know whether she's covered it recently or what, but I think I remember her covering this back in the days when she covered East Timor, that she talked about this.
And about, say, oh, maybe even 10 years ago now, I read an article by John Pilger, where he talked about the Rockefeller interests in working with the Indonesians and what they had done to West Papua.
But other than that, I hardly know anything about it.
And I get the idea that the reason I know so little about it is because of how important it is and that it's a direct inverse proportion or something like that.
So I was hoping that you could fill us in and let us know.
First of all, am I right that, as in the case of East Timor, that it's a different enough nationality, it counts as a different ethnicity, and so there's sort of a racial supremacy angle in the Indonesian colonization of West Papua?
I should say to the people, too, you can more or less picture the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
It's the same kind of situation, right?
It's a big, long island from east to west that's divided in half, right?
And we're talking about the west half of it.
Anyway, is that a good place to start, the kind of racial colonization tied in with the Indonesian rule over the people of West Papua?
Yeah, look, it's as good a place as any to start.
And you're quite right.
The Indonesian archipelago is just massive.
If you kind of imagine Bangkok, it stretches all the way over to New Zealand.
It's an incredible archipelagic nation of some 17,000 islands.
But yeah, look, the West Papuans are different historically and culturally and politically from the rest of Indonesia.
The West Papuans are Melanesian, so black skin, curly hair, and the rest of the country are Asian, brown skin, straight hair.
So they've kind of had different cultural background, but they've also had a different political experience as well.
The whole nation was colonized by the Dutch.
The whole of Indonesia was colonized by the Dutch.
And the Indonesians waged a war of independence against the Dutch, which was successful, and they gained independence.
But the West Papuan experience of the Dutch was quite different, and the Dutch retained control of West Papua.
And it wasn't until 1963, a number of years later, that the Indonesians took over that part of the country.
And then so it's really just all about stealing the minerals?
Yeah, look, that's another massive factor.
West Papua is incredibly rich in natural resources.
They've got the largest individual taxpayer there, which is the Freeport-McMoRan gold and copper mine.
I think they're based in your part of the world, in Texas.
Yeah, good old evil Jim Bob Moffett.
We know him well here in Austin.
Yeah, that's him.
That's right.
And then there's all sorts of oil and gas and other resources.
There's massive land grabbing and palm oil in the south.
So, yeah, resource grabbing is a huge, another huge factor that sustains the occupation.
And then probably the third reason is that a lot of Indonesians consider West Papua part and parcel of Indonesia.
They say that it was previously all a Dutch colony and therefore when the Indonesians kicked the Dutch out, West Papua should be part of Indonesia.
West Papuans, of course, don't see it like that.
But they're the three things that kind of drive the occupation, the racial dimension, the economics, and in the way things, the political identity and the way Indonesians see that.
Yeah, well, that last part sounds really important too where, well, like you're saying, 70,000 islands.
I mean, at what point would anybody consider this a unified society or was there some big threshold?
I guess the Dutch had unified it under their rule.
And so I see, yeah, there's a central government that lays claim to it.
But then again, as far as the way it actually works, it's all very decentralized, right?
And then like you're saying, the racial difference, I can see that it just gets twisted instead of saying, well, they're different enough that maybe we should let them be independent.
It's more like, nah, that just makes them inferior and easier excuse to rule over them instead.
Yeah, there's a huge racial dimension.
I mean, racism, it's kind of not even really discussed in Indonesia.
But, you know, it's massive.
And look, just one small example, the West Papuans have a really fabulous football team, soccer, we call it in Australia.
And whenever they go to play in Indonesia, the folks in the crowds will, you know, call them monkeys and throw banana skins.
You know, it's quite extreme.
And then you see the way the police and the military repress the West Papuans.
It's often motivated by a strong kind of racial dislike.
So, yeah, it's a massive thing, but hardly acknowledged at all inside Indonesia.
And now, as far as, you know, their argument that they deserve to be independent versus just the mindset that, no, of course not, on the part of, I think the way you were explaining it, the average Indonesian, not just the Indonesian state there, I mean, what is really to be done?
Is there any kind of progress that even can be made in the near term, do you think?
Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
You know, whilst you're saying that, you know, someone like yourself who's very well informed about what's going on around the world hasn't heard a lot about it, what's happened in the last 18 months has been more significant than what's happened in the previous 50 years.
So, you know, similar to East Timor, when the various political groups came together and formed a coalition, the West Papuans have done the same.
They've brought together three big coalitions, the West Papua National Coalition for Liberation, the National Federal Republic of West Papua and the National Parliament of West Papua.
These are three, you know, large resistance groups.
They've all come together under an umbrella group called the United Liberation Movement for West Papua.
So that unity inside the country and also outside with the representatives in the diaspora has been really significant.
Now, when that happened in late 2014, you know, supported by the government of Vanuatu and the Pacific Conference of Churches, a number of other Pacific island nations started to step up.
So you saw an example where the West Papuans got membership of the Melanesian Spearhead Group, which is a sub-regional forum in the Pacific made up of four countries, Vanuatu, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and also the pro-independence group in Kanaki or New Caledonia that's struggling against the French.
So that grouping, the MSG, accepted the West Papuans.
And what this did is basically created a permanent forum for dialogue and political negotiations with the Indonesians, who are now also members.
So that's been really significant.
And then the West Papuans took their issue to the broader Pacific island grouping, which is Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia.
And there's 16 countries, including Australia and New Zealand, that make that up.
And the Pacific island forum has started to take this up.
You know, they're saying to the Indonesian government now, look, you've really got to do something about these ongoing human rights violations.
And then only last month we saw seven nations, all Pacific island nations, like Palau, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Solomons, and others pick up this issue in the United Nations.
So, you know, as a result of this unity of different resistance groups and the diplomatic work that the leadership's doing, we're starting to see the struggle internationalized in a way that it's never happened before.
And that's a really fascinating dynamic.
And then as well as this diplomacy outside the country, you've got this amazing resistance inside the country.
I mean, this year alone we've seen over 4,000 arrests of activists.
You know, and this is just incredible.
Sometimes they're young people, as young as 10, you know, right through to their elders, going out in the streets and demanding that they should have, you know, a referendum and a free and fair say in the outcome of their country.
So there's been a lot of movement and I think a lot of calls for hope.
Yeah, wow.
4,000 arrests, I mean, that's quite a clamp down.
But I guess I see what you mean about the hope part being that they feel that's necessary at this point because that's how much pressure they're under.
And as far as the international thing, I mean, I'd hate to see people rely on being saved by the UN somehow or something like that, but it sounds like really the UN and them are just responding to all this pressure from below.
And so, yeah, that can really help to gain independence and preferably without the bloody crackdown that we saw in East Timor in the 90s.
You know, maybe there could be a peaceful transition there to independence.
Wouldn't that be something?
Look, yeah, it's certainly what the West Papuans hoped for.
But look, it's going to be a long and difficult struggle.
There's no question about it.
I mean, unlike pro-democracy struggles, you know, the Arab Spring and elsewhere, which are difficult enough to wage, these kind of anti-colonial or self-determination struggles are so much harder.
You know, whether we're talking about West Papua or Western Sahara or Palestine, Tibet, you know, what have you, you've got to wage the struggle in three different areas.
You know, you've got to wage it inside the occupied territory.
Now, in this case, it's West Papua.
But you've also got to wage it inside the territory of the occupier.
So, you know, in this case, it's Indonesia.
And then you've got to target all the different countries that prop up the occupation, you know, whether it's, you know, Bob Moffat in the U.S. or whether it's, you know, police training, you know, from the Brits in the U.S. and the Australians or, you know, whatever other interests, you've got to target those as well.
So, yeah, it's incredibly difficult.
Yeah.
Well, now, so elaborate more, would you, about the Americans here.
In this review of your book, they mention the New York Agreement and the Kennedy administration and their complicity in, you know, the sham process basically for handing over West Papuan sovereignty to Indonesia in the first place.
So this isn't just Freeport.
This is Uncle Sam.
And we all know that Jim Bob Moffat would probably be living under a bridge if it wasn't for the government handing him tax money all day or holding, you know, natives at bayonet point while he steals their minerals or whatever it is.
So tell us as much as you can about the American role in the people of West Papua's problem here, if you could.
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Yeah.
Yeah.
Great.
The U.S. has played a really important role in propping up the occupation and backing Indonesia.
So, you know, you mentioned the 1962 New York agreement.
So the U.S. and you said the Kennedy administration, they helped broker this.
So they brought together the Dutch and the Indonesians and they hammered out this agreement.
Now, there are a number of problems with the agreement.
And the first was that West Papuans weren't even involved at all.
They weren't even sitting around the table.
So, you know, it was undemocratic right from the beginning.
But there was one one positive factor, and that was that the New York agreement stipulated that there should be an act of universal suffrage, a referendum.
Now, that was due to that ended up taking place in 1969.
But by, you know, when the New York agreement was hammered out, Sukarno was in power by 69.
Saharto was in power.
And, you know, as you know, he came to power as a result of support of the CIA and a massive slaughter of anywhere between half a million and two million activists in Indonesia.
So once Saharto was in power, he decided there's not going to be be one person, one vote.
That's just not going to happen.
What he did is he rounded up 1022 ordinary West Papuans.
And in a process that took over a couple of months in different parts of the country, you basically had the military, you know, hold a gun to the head and said, vote for Indonesia.
You know, we're going to cut your tongues out.
And this, I mean, you literally said that and said, you know, go ask the US, you know, maybe they'll give you a place on the moon.
But, you know, you're not going to be free.
Now, what happened was under this kind of duress, 100 percent of people said, right, you know, we're going to we'll be with Indonesia.
They just felt like they had no choice.
And there was no vote.
There was no vote.
Basically, they had a general make a speech.
And, you know, raise your hands if you agree with that.
And this is happening in the context when anyone who disagreed was basically disappeared.
And we had whole villages that were, you know, raised to the ground.
The US was supplying aircraft, Bronco aircraft and other military equipment that was used to repress the West Papuans at that time.
And then since, so that was, you know, kind of a big diplomatic push, repressive push that was carried out with lots of practical and tacit support from the US.
And then, as you said, the kind of the economics have kicked in with companies like Freeport.
But then you also the US is also involved in military, militarily backing Indonesia.
So they train, they help train the police.
They help train the military and, you know, basically endorse what's turned out to be state funded death squads in West Papua.
You know, there's groups like Detachment 88, which gets a counterinsurgency police group.
They get a lot of backing from the US and the Australians and the Brits.
And they're in West Papua kidnapping activists, disappearing them, shooting them, presiding over the arrest and torture of unarmed dissidents.
So, yeah, the US is involved pretty deep in helping maintain the occupation.
And we don't hear anything about it because the Indonesian government doesn't let journalists in there.
Yeah.
I wish I had reread that Pilger piece.
I meant to try to find a moment to reread it about the Rockefeller's role in brokering some of this stuff back in the 1970s and how things were going to be there.
Do you know about that?
Oh, yeah.
Look, a little bit.
The interesting thing is, so after the Suharto came to power in 65, the Rockefeller's and, you know, people like Henry Kissinger as well are on the board of Freeport.
Who was Nelson Rockefeller's protege?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
So, look, they did a deal with the Indonesian government and they were actually in West Papua preparing to open up this massive mine, you know, the world's largest gold and copper mine in 1967.
So that's two years before there was meant to be, you know, some kind of act of universal suffrage, which, as we know, never took place.
So, yeah, they were right in there way before the whole question of sovereignty had ever been resolved.
And that kind of massive economic wealth has helped maintain the occupation.
And, you know, like I've been there, I've been to that mine, I've been to the hotels where the U.S. expats stay and, you know, you're still just full of a lot of U.S. advisors, government advisors, military advisors, private contractors.
They're everywhere.
Sure.
Well, and definitely back at that time, the State Department really was the Rockefeller empire.
In fact, it was built on Standard Oil's global corporate network that had preceded the American empire.
So when they finally needed a global State Department, the Rockefellers were like, hey, we have offices in all of these countries where you need to be.
So the overlap was incredible the way they worked together and certainly, especially back then, too.
And, you know, I think they didn't even know that there was ever anything immoral about hiring the U.S. government to use violent force to get their way on any issue in the whole world that they could think of.
There's a bunch of curly headed N-words in between them and some gold.
Well, so have the CIA send in some guys with bayonets to solve the problem.
Simple as that.
What's the discrepancy here?
You know, that's the way they look at it.
Certainly.
And so tell us more about this police state, too, because we kind of glossed over that at the beginning was sort of the real point.
Four thousand people rounded up.
That doesn't sound like they're getting speedy trials and and skilled public defenders here.
You talked about the secret police and I guess there's the public police.
But are we talking about straight up, you know, West Bank style military occupation by Indonesian troops at all times?
Or is there any form of, you know, kind of sock puppet self-government representation, maybe more like the Gaza Strip, where they're really just trustees of the occupying power, but at least they're locals, that kind of thing?
Or what's it look like?
Definitely.
Look, it's that combination of hard and soft power without a doubt.
So, yeah, you do have the police and the military as an occupying force severely kind of clamping down on any sort of public dissent.
But at the same time, as you say, you've also got West Papuans who are running day to day affairs of the country.
But, you know, that that's kind of a really interesting dynamic as well, because the government.
So there's two provinces in West Papua, which is one half of the island of New Guinea, I should say.
So, you know, the eastern part is Papua New Guinea that's been independent since 75.
And then the western half is West Papua controlled by the Indonesians.
So there is these two provinces.
You've got Papuans.
There's a Papuan governor in power there.
But, you know, what's interesting is he's increasingly speaking out and criticizing Jakarta, you know, who's 3,000 kilometers away.
So, yeah, you do have that dynamic.
But he's shadowed by a whole lot of military and police.
It's kind of difficult to move.
And, you know, then you've a lot of West Papuans put their faith in Jokowi.
Joko Widodo is the current Indonesian president.
They saw him as being a democratic reformer.
Unfortunately, you know, he's turned out to be no better than a lot of the previous Indonesian presidents.
Human rights violations have increased in West Papua.
You know, Jokowi said he would allow journalists to come in.
That hasn't eventuated.
He said he'd release political prisoners.
That hasn't eventuated either.
There's still, you know, scores of political prisoners in West Papua.
So I think we're starting to see a dynamic where a lot of people are recognizing that the conventional political processes put in place by the Indonesian government, things like special autonomy, you know, just aren't working.
And the demand for a referendum is becoming more and more strident every day.
So I'm interested in Moffat's mines over there.
Are the people working them just slaves or how many degrees above outright slavery are they living over there?
Yeah, that's interesting.
So it was pretty bad right up until 2008.
In 2008, because there was no independent union that was allowed, not just at the mine, but anywhere else in West Papua.
But the Papuans got themselves together.
They unified the highland workers and the island workers, and they formed an independent labor organization called Tongoi Papua.
And they went on.
It was incredible because the workforce was really divided.
So they had very few opportunities to actually get together and organize.
But what happened is they would come together every day for about 10 minutes.
It's tram terminal as they're waiting to be taken to different parts of the mine, the underground mine and the open cut mine.
And they managed to get agreement to strike.
They went on strike for about four days.
And as a result of that, they won a 100 percent wage increase and got agreements to hire a lot more Papuan workers.
And then they went on strike again in 2011.
That went on for about three months and just lost the company, lost tens of millions of dollars every day.
And now some contractors are on strike again.
So there's been a lot of agitation amongst the workers.
And interestingly, the Papuan mine workers and the Indonesian workers are starting to collaborate a lot more.
But yeah, look, the conditions are pretty bad.
Lower paid workers can barely get by.
I can't remember the exact figure per month, but it's not a lot.
And large parts of the population in Timica, which is the main town that services the mine, live in absolute poverty.
And tragedy there is the Amungme and the Kumoro, they're the two tribes who own the land around the mine, still see very little benefit.
I mean for the Amungme, that's their ancestral grandmother.
And she's had her head cut off and they're digging out the contents of her stomach and they're dumping it into these rivers at the rate of 200,000 tons per day.
And it's just smothering vast tracts of rainforest.
So it's a pretty bad situation environmentally as well as from a labor and human rights point of view.
And you've still got the Indonesian military and police who provide protection to the mine.
And that's with the Freeport Moffat still very involved with that.
I saw figures the other day that the police get $10 million for lunch money, you know, in inverted commas.
And you've got kind of military generals that get direct cash payments to provide security.
Directly from Freeport McMahon you're saying?
Or from the U.S.?
Yeah.
So it's really difficult to get an exact picture of what's going on.
But certainly our colleagues working in the mine say direct cash payments are still being paid to the police and the military there.
Man.
So yeah, I mean, you could see how that's it's going to be tough work no matter what.
Poor people working in mines.
That's the story of humanity.
Do the best you can since, you know, the Bronze Age or whatever it is.
On the other hand, if they had independence and if they had anything like local control, they might have a local horrible warlord who just takes over.
But it seems like they would have a lot better shot at having something like a fair and equitable system or a chance on correcting whatever system tries to come up in place of Indonesian rule here.
And then it's a question of, you know, yeah, it's tough work, but how do we compensate for that in terms of, you know, working hard to make sure that people are kept safe first and foremost while they're doing it and this kind of thing.
And as long as you got, you know, the people who own the place are based out of Austin, Texas, and the only accountability are the local cops who are the representatives of occupying foreign power.
There's basically there's no opportunity for accountability whatsoever for what happens to these people.
That's why I assume the worst without knowing.
I just figure what hope do they have if they can't talk back or else, right?
Yeah.
And that's why international solidarity is so valuable.
And that's why, you know, the conversation that we're having right now is so important.
You know, the Papuans are really looking out to folks in the U.S. and elsewhere to stand with them to, you know, to tackle, you know, Freeport's involvement, to look at the way the U.S. is training and arming the Indonesian police and military.
You know, not for the U.S. and people in the U.S. to save them, not at all.
You know, the Papuans are the ones driving their struggle and they're the ones that are going to ultimately liberate their country.
But solidarity in places like the U.S., targeting the way the U.S. props up the occupation is absolutely vital.
And I, you know, I look to the next couple of years to with hope that we'll start to see, you know, that kind of international solidarity emerge.
All right.
Now, Merdeka, that means independence.
Freedom.
That means freedom.
Yeah.
Yeah, it means freedom.
But, you know, it's one of these really interesting words and there's lots of nuanced understandings about it.
But look, the Papuans want to be independent, but they also want to make sure that they've, you know, they can maintain control of their natural resources, that they can speak their own language, that they can, you know, practice their own cultural identity and all of that kind of stuff.
So, yeah, it means freedom, but in a very rich and deep sense.
All right.
Good deal.
Well, that's the book, Merdeka and the Morning Star, Civil Resistance in West Papua.
And that's Jason MacLeod.
Thanks very much for coming on the show.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
And thanks listeners, too.
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