Citizen Media and Civil Resistance in West Papua
ENDANGERED JOURNALISTS
tower they were mistaken. Much worse-unimaginable horror-was yet to
come. Tieneke Rumkabu, who was caught up in the army attack when she took
coffee to the protesters under the tower, testified to a quasi-legal citizens tribunal
at Sydney University in 2013 about how she was imprisoned and tortured by
police (Biak Tribunal, 2013).
They threw me onto a truck.... They took us to a place but we didn't know
where. We were tortured with weapons-they make a cut on my hands
and burn me with cigarettes. They cut with a sharp bayonet, then they
pour acid. When I scream they burn me with cigarettes on both hands....
They brought candles and they burn the candles. They put it inside, into
my vagina. I saw one of my friends, Martha, who was also tortured with
the candles.... They put a bayonet in her neck and then in the vagina and
also cut off her breasts and beheaded her.... Then a man showed us a little
knife, the one you use to shave, and he said 'we are going to use this to
cut off your vaginas, from above and below, and from the left and from
the right.' I saw a little girl, they raped her and then she died. All over the
place it was blood everywhere because women's vaginas and clitorises
had been cut out and they had been raped many, many times. They also
hit another woman with a bayonet and then cut off the neck and also the
breasts of the woman. Eight women were killed and they let four of us stay
alive.... We didn't go home. I hide in the forest, the jungle, for two months.
When Tineke Rumkabu came out of the jungle she was arrested again and
thrown in jail. The massacre may have occurred many years ago but the sur-
vivors are still being harassed. When I travelled to Biak in January 2015 I met
with some of the survivors of that massacre. They had formed a support group,
United for Truth (Bersatu untuk Kebenaran), and had begun advocating not just
for themselves but for survivors of other human rights violations in West Papua
as well. We had just fifteen minutes together before immigration and police
intelligence raided the meeting. They did not want us to talk to the survivors.
According to ELSHAM (Institute for Human Rights Study and Advocacy
in West Papua) and witnesses like Tineke Rumkabu, the dead and dying were
dumped in trucks and taken to the wharf where they were loaded onto three wait-
ing warships, KRI Kapap, KRI Telek Berau and one other. We know this from the
pictures Dr Eben Kirksey, a US anthropologist, took from his hotel window at
the time. Many of those still alive were then killed. The bodies were mutilated
then thrown overboard. In the days following July 6, corpses and many body
parts washed up on the beaches of Biak. Irene Dimara, now a refugee living in
Cairns, Australia, told me a fisherman found her brother, Dance Korwa: 'His
penis had been cut off, he had no eyes, his teeth had been pulled out and he had
more than five stab wounds in his belly' (Dimara, 2013).
PACIFIC JOURNALISM REVIEW 22 (1) 2016 41View entire presentation