Independence, Anti-Capitalism and the Struggle for Our Future: Seeking an End to State-Corporate Violence in West Papua

Abstract

Since the 1980s, Indonesia has embraced a neoliberal economic agenda that has encouraged aggressive industrial development. This intensification of industrial development has been met with resistance from local communities and this has led to a recent upsurge of state violence and dispossession. As this paper will show, other methods, such as arbitrary detention and torture of Papuan dissenters, have been employed by military actors to defend corporate land-grabbing and highly contentious industrial projects. This extractivist logic may well produce jobs for some, but at the same time it creates huge amounts of toxic waste, poisons food and water sources, devastating some of the world’s richest coral reefs, destroys biodiversity and further displaces and oppresses the West Papuan people. It is precisely because the Indonesian presence is based on an extractivist logic that the popular resistance to transnational capital and popular support for political independence are indistinguishable. By linking the process of environmentally devastating extractivism to the intensification of state violence, this paper further argues that the world needs to wake up to the plight of West Papua. Given the fundamental importance of the Papuan forest (the island of New Guinea is home to the third largest rainforest area on the planet), it argues that the challenges to state repression, deforestation, extractivism and displacement are indivisible. Thus, the state violence used against the people of West Papua must be a priority for both international climate and human rights campaigns. The article concludes that a Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) may offer a strategic approach to making the case of West Papua more visible. In addition, a PPT hosted in Britain could be one contributing step towards bringing the willful blindness of the British government and of British corporations into public view, thus contributing to a process of seeking accountability for British corporations.

Keywords: West Papua, climate change, deforestation, extractivism, colonialism, state-corporate violence, capitalism