West Papua Videos
In 1880 the first book about Papua was published, the first paragraph
attempted to dispell the mythos of Papuans being cannables and primitives.
Today 120 years later the mine companies continue to paint Papuans with
this eighteenth century mythos and themselves as bringing technology to a
'stone age' people; they make no mention of the local & national elections
held in 1959 and 1961 and the peoples objections to the mines.
Since Indonesia has forbidden western media,
few journalist have been brave enough to report or document
the many human rights abuses including the racial discrimination
of a people as 'stone age' 'primitives'.
At a time when the world is quickly depleating its resources,
and is consumed by ethnic conflicts,
it is unfortunate that we have overlook the world's most mature cultures
because early explorers had mistaken technology for culture.
Instead of seeing these cultures for what they are, today one Indonesian
tourist operator even sells a travel package in which he promises the
customer will see cannables. Some tourist have even believed the performances
provided.
Since the late 1980s the OPM has been making a concerted effort to get
western reporters in and out out West Papua, their first real success was
in 1991 with the release of:
- Rebels of the Forgotten World a 52 minute documentary as a
film maker flys into West Papua and must then dodge TNI patrols searching
for the group while completing their work and getting out on foot.
Other Films include:
- Cry of the Forgotten Land is 26 minutes from 1995 filmed on
a tourist visa to document some of the cultures of West Papua
- Land of the Morning Star produced in 2003 by the late Mark Worth
for Film Australia
using archive footage and footage from the brief period when Wahid
(first Indonesian President not part of the corrupt Indonesian militia system)
was in office.
Some media files on this CD-ROM
- Theys Eluay before his murder in 2001.
- Benny Wenda at Geneva
United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations 23rd Session, Geneva, 18-22 July 2005
- West Papua report about Laskar Jihad and ethnic replacement
March 2005, very low resolution copy. DVD of original is available for free broadcast.
- 2004 Report about OPM National Congress,
2002 Timika ambush killing two American teachers #Warning this is DVD file Mpeg, 200Mb in size
- West Papua - Backgrounder 2004-07-14
- Economic vs. Human Rights a Noam Chomsky view of
Indonesian relationship. A view which I do not share, as I have found
considerable evidence that Standard Oil using Dutch subsidaries and
others like Freeport Sulphur had been misrepresenting geologist teams to
explore both the Dutch East Indies & West Papua for mineral wealth,
but had kept these discoveries secret from both the Dutch and US governments
until after business contracts with Indonesia were secured.
A example of this was the Ertsbery discovery, where the 1936 geologist Jean Dozy
confirmed in a 1980 interview in Brisbane that he had been very excited about
size and pureity of the gold as well as the copper deposits.
This is at odds with the Freeport version until recently available online
which claim the gold was unknown & that it was Wilson in Aug. 1951 who
read the old report and immediatly set forth to Western New Guinea.
But, a more likely explanation is discovered in the pages of the
New York Times which in
March 1959
revealed that the Dutch government had now started to search for
the source of the alluvial gold.
I have found no evidence that the US government
(outside of the CIA which had substanical Ford Foundation and Indonesian relations at the time)
knew of this until the mid 1960s, indeed the 1962 use of communism to get
Presidental assistance suggests to me that the companies had to use covert
deception to achieve the transfer of adminstration to allow their mine operations.
- Two videos produced in Melbourne
in 2003, the second also announcing the death of Yustinus Murib.
- London group, Eye on West Papua
today Benny Wenda is out of Indonesia and helping to present his peoples
calls in Europe. London protesters 2002.
- Point of Ignition history and the mass murder of highlanders in Wamena 2003. (44 Minutes)
- Attacks in 2003
- Papuan Reconciliation Forum
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