Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to share with the Senate this afternoon the fantastic experience that I had last week when I met a group of 43 West Papuans who are currently based in Christmas Island. They are students and members of the independence movement in West Papua. Many of them brought their young families with them. What they have been experiencing first-hand in their country is something that I spoke about in the chamber yesterday. What they have been experiencing has been described by a number of studies done by Sydney university, by Yale University and, indeed, in the last fortnight, by the UN Secretary-General on the Prevention of Genocide, who said that these people are at risk of extinction.

During World War II, many of the indigenous people of West Papua supported the 8,000 troops and other allied forces that were based in Merauke—which is the place where these 43 West Papuans left from before they arrived in Australia two weeks ago. General MacArthur had his headquarters in Jayapura, which is now the capital of West Papua.

I had the great thrill of spending a couple of days with these people, who invited me into the accommodation that is being provided for them on Christmas Island. They talked to me about the frightening experience that they had had in making their way in a traditional long boat. Herman is the spokesperson for that group. His father chopped down a large tree in Jayapura and spent a month hollowing out that tree to make a traditional Melanesian long boat. These 43 people, many with young children, travelled all along the north coast of West Papua and around Merauke in the far south of West Papua.

It was a six-week journey. They were on the ocean for six weeks. They gathered fuel along the way. They had to be very careful when buying fuel. So that the Indonesian authorities did not notice the large amount of fuel that they were buying, they bought fuel along the edges. Some people joined them along the way and then they travelled to the far north coast of Queensland—a journey that they told me would normally, in good weather conditions, have taken between 10 and 11 hours, but their experience was five days at sea. There were rough seas. At one stage they say that they were being pushed in the direction of Indonesia but they had to keep going—and they did keep going in these rough seas.

I spent quite a bit of time with one young man who explained to me how he cupped his hands and caught rainwater because they had run out of water and food. I met two beautiful young girls—Herman’s daughters, twins—who were born the second time Herman was imprisoned by the Indonesian military for being involved in peaceful protest. This young boy that I met caught rainwater in his hands and put it into a container so that he could feed Herman’s three-year-old twin girls and give them some water for that treacherous sea journey. Unsurprisingly, at Christmas Island last week they were not very interested in going for a swim or a surf with me, because their experience in the water, coming across in the boat, had been really frightening.

The young man also explained to me about when he was placed in the Hercules as one of the 43 West Papuans and they were taken from where they landed on the far north coast of Queensland over to Christmas Island. He said they were extremely frightened because they did not know where they were going and they were concerned that they were being taken back to Indonesia. In talking with them about where they were, perhaps unsurprisingly, they did not have a clear idea of where Christmas Island is. When I was with them last week, some of them thought they were in Australia or on an island just off the coast of Australia. So some of the locals on Christmas Island sat down, welcomed the West Papuans into their homes, and pulled out an atlas to show them where Christmas Island is. When they opened the atlas to show them, the faces of the young man and his younger brother, who he was looking after, fell when they realised how close they were to Jakarta. Of course, from Christmas Island it is just a one-hour flight to Jakarta, but it is a five-hour flight to Perth. They had no understanding of the fact that they had been taken to somewhere so close to Jakarta, to Indonesia, which they had been fleeing. They kept asking me when we were down on the coast, ‘Which way is Indonesia?’ They wanted to know which way Java was from where they were.

Just last week, when I was preparing to speak at a public meeting in Perth, one of my colleagues spoke with the father of the young man I spent time with. The young man, with his two younger brothers, was put on the boat by his parents. They are the only three children of this pastor from the highlands of West Papua. The pastor has subsequently been visited by the Indonesian security forces and asked whether the three boys on the boat were his. He had no choice but to say yes. When he was speaking with the community in Perth, we asked him: tell us why you put all of your children on that boat. He is not a man who has very much English, but he said: ‘Because I wanted them to live. The next generation of West Papuans are at the forefront of the genocide that we are experiencing from the Indonesian military, and I want my children to live.’ It is that simple. He put his kids on the boat, his three young boys, because he wanted them to live. It is incredible to think of a parent making that decision. The best opportunity for his children to live was to put them on this traditional long boat and for them to travel across the sea to seek asylum and protection in Australia, rather than to stay in West Papua. The pastor has experienced what happens to young students who are involved in the independence movement in West Papua.

I spoke before about Herman, and, as I said, he has twice been imprisoned for being involved in peaceful protest in West Papua. And when I met the young men in the detention centre on Christmas Island, I was introduced to one young man whose father had been imprisoned by the Indonesian military for 20 years for raising the West Papuan flag. He had been imprisoned with Xanana Gusmao and died from poisoning whilst in prison. I was introduced to another young man, whose relative was shot two weeks ago in Waghete in the northern Highlands Paniai region of West Papua. A fourteen-year-old boy, Moses, was walking to school through a marketplace. As the Indonesian military have admitted, they shot into this marketplace at unarmed civilians, and Moses was killed on his way to school that day. He was shot along with others, who have subsequently escaped from the custody they were being held in. These are the experiences that these people have of what is going on in West Papua.

The father of the young man who I met last week told another story. He was asked: ‘When is D-day for the West Papuans? When is it too late?’ He said: ‘Let me tell you a story to describe that situation. Let me tell you about an area of the highlands my friends have visited. They say you often go to the schools there and there is no teacher. The kids are playing outside and it is four weeks into the school term. They ask the kids, “Where is the teacher?” And they say, “The teacher didn’t come back after the holidays.”’

There is a West Papuan man, an incredibly charismatic man, who has been involved in training with the Indonesian security forces. He is now travelling through the highland regions offering parents the opportunity to take their children to Java, where schooling will be provided free of charge. It is not just any schooling; it is schooling in fundamentalist Islamic schools where jihadists are trained. So young boys, 10- to 13-year-olds, in West Papua are being offered the opportunity to either stay where they are and not get adequate schooling or go, free of charge, to militia training schools in Indonesia. That is an awful choice and circumstance for people to be offered. It is frightening.

A West Papuan colleague of mine who is currently living in Perth speaks of the same thing happening 30 years ago when boys in his class, the strong boys, were taken out of their schools in the highlands by the Indonesian military, not to jihad schools, but to be trained up as soldiers. I do not want to see a generation of young West Papuans trained up to come back to their families with guns and a fundamentalist mentality. We are already seeing genocide occurring at the hands of the Indonesian military. I do not want to see more West Papuans being trained in this way. I use the word ‘genocide’ because that is the word the United Nations uses. It is the word used by the studies that have looked into these activities. I spoke about this yesterday and described those activities. When they looked at the definition of genocide in international law they found that it fits with the activities being perpetrated upon the West Papuan people at the hands of the Indonesian military. So I use that word with full understanding of its significance and consequences.

Australians must not sit on their hands and let this occur. We must take every step that we can to ensure that our neighbours across the sea do not die. The similarities between West Papua and Indonesia are astounding. In recent reports by the United Nations, many members of the Indonesian military forces currently operating in Indonesia have been implicated in human rights abuses such as in the massacre in Liquica. One such person is now, for example, the head of the police in West Papua. The commander of the TNI in East Timor has also been transferred to West Papua. The Indonesian military intends to bring another 5,000 troops into West Papua. Many of them are coming straight from Aceh. Eurico Guterres, a notorious militia commander from East Timor now operates in West Papua. (Time expired)