Citizen Media and Civil Resistance in West Papua
ENDANGERED JOURNALISTS
or a referendum. Nor did it precipitate discussion about Special Autonomy.
Faced with intransigence on the part of the Indonesian government, Papuan
leaders escalated tactics, calling for another mass public meeting, the Third
Papuan People's Congress, to debate the struggle. On 19 October 2011, the last
day of the Congress—a three-day gathering of unarmed resistance groups-
Papuan leaders formed the NFRWP (National Federal Republic of West Papua)
and declared independence, again. The response from the security forces was
swift and brutal. About an hour after the congress concluded, the Indonesian
security forces opened fire. Three Papuans were shot dead. Two were fatally
stabbed. Three hundred people were arrested and beaten. Six of the leaders
were jailed, charged with treason. The police-who shot, stabbed, beat and
tortured people received warning letters.
The killing of protesters at the congress-relayed by mobile phone, Face-
book, YouTube and mailing lists-outraged Papuans and their supporters outside
the country. The arrest, beating and killing of protesters even divided political
elites inside Indonesia. It attracted more third-party support for the West Papuan
cause and revealed the extent to which the Indonesian state would go to deny
Papuan aspirations for freedom.
The occupation of the provincial parliament in June 2010 and the Indone-
sian security forces's fatal attack on unarmed Papuans at the Third Congress in
October 2011 was also evidence that the social media revolution had well and
truly arrived in West Papua. In July 1998, when the Indonesian military opened
fire on activists under the water tower in Biak, it took weeks and months for
the news to get out. Even now we still do not have a comprehensive forensic
account of what happened. By October 2011 the news was instantaneous, even
though no international journalists were present. (I do not think I will ever for-
get the frightened voices of Papuan friends who called me from the grounds of
the Catholic Seminary where the Third Congress was held. In the background I
could hear the sound of gunshots.)
By 2013 social media was influencing the opinion of heads of state. At the
MSG (Melanesian Spearhead Group), an important sub-regional forum with links
to both the Pacific Island Forum and the United Nations, Gordon Lilo, former
Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands, said that social media was highlighting
human rights violations in West Papua, calling the situation a 'cyber war' with
Indonesia and likened social media posts to 'cyber bullets' (Dorney 2013). In
February 2015, Peter O'Neill, Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, was even
more forthright (Garrett, 2015). In an extraordinary speech he embraced West
Papuans as 'our people':
I think as a country the time has come for us to speak about the oppres-
sion of our people. Pictures of the brutality of our people appear daily on
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