The mangled and burnt remains of Deris Kogoya, killed by an Indonesian helicopter attack.

On May 6, Deris Kogoya was riding his motorbike when he was executed by an Indonesian rocket, bazooka, or mortar attack from a helicopter near Kelanungin village, Puncak Jaya regency, West Papua. The mangled human remains in the photo had been an eighteen-year-old youth just a few hours earlier. He was with his friend Jemi Walker who was seriously injured, but is being treated by traditional methods in secret because he is afraid of being killed if he goes to a hospital.

What kind of place is this where the lives of young people can be taken from them, leaving a mangled mess of tissue and bone behind, and where a hospital becomes a crime scene? It’s not something that a person in Barcelona, London, Oslo, Canberra, Washington … can even contemplate. What would happen if we were talking about a quiet Parisian Street, or a hospital in Stockholm? That’s a silly question because it’s impossible. These are places of white people. Therefore it can’t happen. I’m talking about something that’s routine in West Papua which, after a fraudulent UN-supervised “Act of Free Choice” in 1969, was formally frogmarched to become part of Indonesia. So, Indonesia is killing its own people? Not exactly. The so-called referendum is an officially blessed screen behind which the Indonesian regime claims its national right to do as it wishes with its “own” people, who aren’t really its own people because they’re Melanesians condemned by underhand United Nations politics to be stripped of their land so it could be annexed by an Asian country that would be friendly to the most destructive forms of resource extraction by its western allies. Well, that’s a cut-to-the-chase way of putting it.

How come almost nobody knows about this? It’s not just because journalists can’t report on what’s happening, or because visitors to West Papua are strictly monitored, or because a UN human rights mission has never happened, even after a petition demanding a real independence referendum signed by 1.8 million West Papuans was delivered to the UN Human Rights chief, Michele Bachelet in 2019. Now that petition, organised in conditions of genocide, was a referendum! The UN, needless to say, expresses “concern”. But a fat lot........

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