By Paul Gregoire: Sydney Criminal Lawyers Blog

Indonesian president-elect Prabowo Subianto was in Canberra last month to meet with soon-to-be counterpart prime minister Anthony Albanese and to further negotiate a new defence deal, in his current capacity as Indonesian defence minister with our own defence minister Richard Marles.

Albanese told the press on 20 August that he was pleased to announce our nations’ bilateral treaty-level Defence Cooperation Agreement had been completed that day, which marks the strongest ever defence ties between the two nations, which will ultimately strengthen interoperability.

Of course, if the name Prabowo Subianto, who’s to take over as Indonesian president from Joko Widodo in October, rings a bell, it’s likely in relation to the command role he used to play in the Indonesian military’s Kopassus, the nation’s special forces, in regions like East Timor and West Papua.

Prabowo has the reputation of being Indonesia’s greatest human rights violator of current times. But that didn’t prevent former Australian defence minister Peter Dutton from gifting his then Indonesian counterpart 15 Bushmaster military vehicles in 2021, some of which have turned up in West Papua.

Indeed, after Prabowo took out this year’s February election, United Liberation Movement for West Papua president Benny Wenda warned that “the butcher of East Timor” taking top office signalled a ramping up of the militarised occupation of West Papua, which has been on the rise since 2018.

Extract from Benny Wenda’s Statement:

As President of the ULMWP, I am calling for new Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto to be arrested if he ever leaves Indonesia. Interpol must be put on alert: Prabowo is a dangerous war criminal who is complicit in genocide in both East Timor and West Papua. He has never faced justice. Ordinary people who support West Papua should also be willing to perform a citizen’s arrest if he comes to your country.

Prabowo’s crimes in East Timor are well known. As a General and leader of the notorious Kopassus unit, he helped lead massacre after massacre, from the 1983 Kraras slaughter, in which more than 300 Timorese were executed, to the killing of hundreds by his hooded ‘ninja’ killers in the 1990s.

While he is mostly known as an enthusiastic torturer and murderer of the Timorese people, Prabowo’s name also inspires terror in the hearts of West Papuans. In 1996, as commander of the feared Kopassus unit, he prevented the Red Cross from completing a planned hostage transfer following the kidnapping of eleven scientific researchers by the OPM. Instead, he tricked Kelly Kwalik, the OPM group leader, into cancelling the hostage transfer; with the complicity of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Indonesia then painted their attack helicopters as Red Cross helicopters, leading the OPM fighters into a trap – into a massacre. This led to a series of further revenge attacks on highland villages, in which many innocent Papuans were murdered.

AU-kosy

At last month’s Canberra negotiations over the defence treaty, both Albanese and Prabowo gave short statements, but questions were not allowed, while Marles went on to sign off on the Indonesia-Australia DCA at the Indonesian Military Academy in Magelang, Central Java on Thursday, 29 August.

Prabowo stated that it was the most significant agreement between the neighbouring nations since the Lombok Treaty of 2006, especially as this DCA is the first such legally-binding agreement, which is due to the enhancing nature of military cooperation between nations.

So, in terms of negotiations, it’s unlikely that Australia pressing Indonesia on its presence in West Papua was on the agenda, especially as Australia’s overt support for Israel over the past 11 months would undermine any such efforts.

Marles explained that the agreement, which remains unpublished, was not a military alliance but rather “an important piece of international architecture” that includes the two nations partaking in joint military exercises beginning this November.

The defence minister further flagged that in this time of build up towards war with China this “non-alliance” agreement would cover “areas such as maritime security, counterterrorism, humanitarian and disaster relief, logistics support, education and training, as well as across defence industry”.

On his way back to Jakarta last week, Prabowo paid a visit to Port Moresby to speak with Papua New Guinea PM James Marape, and a controversy stirred after a West Papua journalist was barred from a presser, which featured Prabowo suggesting PNG might advise him on Melanesian customs.

And while relations along the border between PNG and Indonesian-run West Papua continue to be a source of friction, deals cut last year between Port Moresby, Canberra and Washington in regard to the Lombrum Naval Base place the Melanesian nation firmly within the AUKUS sphere of influence.

West Papuan president-in-exile Benny Wenda condemned the PNG meeting with Prabowo, warning that “Melanesian leaders cannot trust this dangerous war criminal”, as while the former general “may speak softly… he is complicit in genocide”.

“Tens of thousands of West Papuans and East Timorese were killed under his jurisdiction while he was a Kopassus commander,” Wenda added on 23 August, ahead of this week’s Pacific Island Forum. “He is directly complicit in numerous massacres and has never repented or faced justice.”

Around 100,000 West Papuans have been internally displaced since Jakarta began its current crackdown in the region in 2018. This began in Nduga regency, after 19 Indonesian construction workers who were building the controversial Trans-Papua Road project were killed by local militia.

Armed liberation forces have been operating in West Papua ever since the United Nations handed Jakarta control of the Melanesian region in 1963, as the Netherlands was vacating its colonial rule of Indonesia. But this was on the proviso that a West Papua independence referendum was held.

In 1969, the UN brokered Act of Free Choice took place, which involved the Indonesian Army selecting 1,026 West Papua people to vote in what should have been a whole-of-community decision, and all of those who voted at gun point chose to stay with Jakarta.

This week, the ULMWP was calling on the Pacific Island Forum to reaffirm its 2019 call for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit West Papua, with the ultimate goal being that a new internationally supervised national vote on self-determination takes place.

Indeed, in January 2019, ULMWP president Wenda presented the West Papuan People’s Petition to the UN, which is a document calling for a new referendum. And this has been signed by 1.8 million West Papuans, which accounts for around 70 percent of the Indigenous population.

The ULMWP has long been pushing for full membership for West Papua in the Melanesian Spearhead Group, and in the early 2020s, it succeeded in bringing together disparate groups to form a West Papua provisional government, which operates inside of West Papua, as well as abroad.

“A sick joke”

Wenda warned that as the incoming president has been cosying up to neighbouring countries, like Australia and PNG, over recent weeks, extrajudicial killings have continued to take place in occupied West Papua.

And he added that Prabowo travelling to Papua New Guinea to suggest that the PM there might assist Jakarta in “defending our culture and protecting our rights, is a sick joke”. And as for West Papuans the new leader of the occupying force will always be a Kopassus strongman general.

“Prabowo is a killer of Papuans and, through his family’s mining and palm oil interests, a destroyer of Papuan land. He should not be welcomed by Papuans,” Wenda made clear in his 23 August statement.

“Prabowo’s propaganda tour is simply a distraction,” the locally recognised president of West Papua continued.

“There is only one long-term solution to the West Papuan issue: an internationally-supervised independence referendum.”

Here’s what even the BBC is saying about Indonesia’s President elect

The 72-year-old has a shocking human rights record according to both local and international rights observers.

He is most notorious for allegations he commanded a unit which abducted and tortured several democracy activists during the dying days of the Suharto regime in the late 1990s. Of the 23, some survived, one died and 13 remain missing.

He was fired from the army following this and went into self-exile in Jordan in the 2000s.

But he returned to Indonesia a few years later, building up his wealth in palm oil and mining before making the jump to politics.

Paul Gregoire is a Sydney-based journalist and writer. He’s the winner of the 2021 NSW Council for Civil Liberties Award For Excellence In Civil Liberties Journalism. Prior to Sydney Criminal Lawyers®, Paul wrote for VICE and was the news editor at Sydney’s City Hub.