Citizen Media and Civil Resistance in West Papua
ENDANGERED JOURNALISTS
flying for more than 24 hours. Now we managed to do that. We kept the
flag flying for four days.
In 1998 in Biak City, Karma and his compatriots were under the opinion that
if they raised the Morning Star flag and kept it flying for at least 24 continuous
hours then the United Nations would intervene and West Papua would become
an independent state. West Papuans may not have had the most nuanced un-
derstanding of the vagaries of international politics but the Indonesian military
were fully cognisant of the millenarian momentum behind Karma's movement
(Kirksey, 2012). Indonesian politicians understood the power and value of sym-
bols and rituals. Openly allowing expressions of Papuan sovereignty was not
a view they were prepared to tolerate. In the days leading up to 6 July 1998
Indonesian troops had been gathering in Biak City. Three warships—at least
one of which was sold to Indonesia by the then East Germany government-
and C-130 Hercules planes, the kind of aircraft the Australian government
eagerly donated to Indonesia, brought in heavily armed troops-Hassanuddin
Company from Sulawesi and Pattimura from Ambon, two neighbouring pro-
vinces. Local villagers from the surrounding hamlets were press ganged into
militias and told to arm themselves with sharp implements. Captain Andrew
Plunkett, a former intelligence officer who worked at the Australian Embassy
in Jakarta, was quoted saying it 'was a dress rehearsal' for the militia-backed,
military-led bloodletting and destruction that occurred post-referendum in East
Timor in 1999 (Biak Tribunal, 2013).
Agus (2013), a West Papuan primary school student at the time, remembers
what happened:
On the first day of the demonstration we heard people on the street. They
were yelling 'Papua Merdeka'. At that time I did not understand what they
were shouting about. We just followed the people to the tower. People
were praying and singing. I saw a different flag flying from the top of the
tower and I was really surprised. There were so many people and lots of
police. The police saw us in our school uniforms. They told us to go back
to school then they took us back to school. When the principal saw us he
was angry. He said if anyone goes to the tower they will get a penalty.
On July 5 the headmaster closed the school but we had to stay because
we were living at the school. The only other person at the school was a
school security guard. No one went outside. No one went to the market.
The headmaster and the teachers just told us to stay at school for our own
safety. People everywhere were preparing to leave but we did not know
what was happening....
The massacre was on a Monday. The night before Sunday and the
following morning-we heard everything. Our school is surrounded by a
big fence. We couldn't see anything but we could hear what was happening.
PACIFIC JOURNALISM REVIEW 22 (1) 2016 39View entire presentation