Citizen Media and Civil Resistance in West Papua
ENDANGERED JOURNALISTS
You need to know that a military police post and army complex is next
to our school. So when the army moves we can hear everything. On the
Sunday night we could hear heavy boots running beside the fence. Lots of
boots. Running. We could not see but we could hear. We were so scared.
We just sat there terrified, crying, listening to the sound of heavy boots
running close to where we were. At that time we thought something would
happen and we were really afraid. We just sat there hugging each other.
Around 4 am or 4.30 am on Monday, July 6, we heard gunshots. It
was before dawn. We sat there in that room in the school hugging each
other and crying. The shooting kept going. I was one of the youngest.
The oldest was around 15. We did not know what to do except shed tears.
All we could do was say, 'Oh God, what is happening?" The guns kept
shooting until around 7 am.
When the shooting stopped my older brother came round to pick me up
... About two blocks from the Tower a woman ran up to the car begging
for help. She was covered with blood. My brother quickly helped her get
into the back of the car. When I turned around he told me not to look at her.
About a week later when I was back in East Biak I heard my parents
tell of fishermen who were pulling up bodies in their nets....
After a month we went back to school. The headmaster forbids us to
talk about what happened on that day. He said, 'Do not talk about the past.'
He said that school could not be responsible for our safety. Two of our
friends had disappeared. Their names are Johanes Orboy and Hermanus
Fakdawer. They were both twelve years at the time. They were my friends
but we never knew what happened to them and I did not dare ask. We just
had to keep these things inside and leave them there.
A week later Edmund McWilliams, Political Counsellor at the US Embassy
in Jakarta, arrived in Biak but it was many months before muted news of the
massacre hit the foreign press (see Murdoch, 1998). McWilliams saw the bullet
holes, chest high; pock marks over the water tower (McWilliams, 2013). It is
not known how many died that day and in the days that followed. Some esti-
mate over one hundred. Many Biak islanders who witnessed it say in excess of
150 people were killed that day and in the days that followed. No independent
investigation has ever taken place. None of the mass graves dotted around Biak
have been exhumed so the missing have not been accounted for and the dead
have not been given a proper burial. Like other human rights atrocities such as
the bloodletting after the 1965 coup, the Indonesian government refuses to even
acknowledge what happened. The truth just like the truth of what happened
in so many other places in West Papua, such as Paniai in the mid-1960s, the
Baliem Valley in 1977, Abepura in 2000, Wamena in 2000 and 2008, Waisor in
2001, Enarotali in 2014 has been buried.
If protesters thought the killings would end with the shooting at the water
40 PACIFIC JOURNALISM REVIEW 22 (1) 2016View entire presentation