Preface for As if We’re Half Animals, by Filep Karma.
Deiyai Publishers, Jayapura, 2014.
Preface
Jim Elmslie
Filep Karma’s life embodies the story of West Papua since the Indonesian takeover in 1962-3. Born in
1959 he has lived his entire adult life under the shadow of the Indonesian military. In one of the darkest
chapters of West Papua’s dark history since 1962– the Biak Massacre of 6 July 1998 – Karma was the key
player in peacefully confronting the Indonesian state and demanding independence. His philosophy and
practice of non-violence protest were met with extreme violence by the Indonesian military. The veil of
civility that shrouds West Papua was ripped aside and the true nature of the forces confronting the
Papuans was exposed. Karma survived the violence of that day and his first long prison term, and is
viewed by many in Papua and beyond as a kind of saint – a man prepared to give up everything to
peacefully express an ideal – that his country should be free. For that he has been beaten, shot, serially
incarcerated and threatened with death.
The title of this book, As if We’re Half Animals, is a powerful statement; five words that seek to explain
52 years of mistreatment under Indonesia. The fact is that West Papuans have been treated like ‘halfanimals’ and that treatment continues until today, from Jayapura all the way up to Wamena in the
central highlands, and throughout the country. Papuan men and women are caught up in ‘sweeping’
operations, or police road blocks or at simple protests over basic rights and are imprisoned, tortured
and killed, seemingly at random. Not only are perpetrators of the even the worst violence not held
accountable (they are promoted), but soldiers gleefully record their atrocious acts on their cell phones
as ‘trophies’. Like the big game hunters in Africa posing with dead lions, they are seen to squat proudly
over the corpses of slain Papuans, grinning. In the taunts the soldiers make in one notorious video of a
disemboweled and dying man in his village, they speak as if to a ‘half-animal’, as if the Papuans do not
deserve the right to be treated as humans.
This entrenched inhumanity was most wrenchingly revealed to me at the Biak Massacre Citizens
Tribunal, held at Sydney University on July 6, 2013. One survivor of the massacre, Tineke Rumakabu,
described her treatment at the hands of a group of soldiers within an army facility. Twelve women and
girls are stripped, beaten and raped by the soldiers. In chilling words Tineke told the Tribunal:
I saw a man showing us a little knife, the one you use to shave, and then 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.
Why? How can one answer that? How can one look inside another man’s head and figure out what
chain of thoughts (or orders) must flow to come to the conclusion that this is a reasonable thing to do?
Of the twelve women, eight are killed; four, including Tineke, manage to escape when Christian soldiers
intercede on their behalf. Her testimony under oath and before eminent Australian lawyers is
corroborated by reports of dozens of mutilated bodies being washed up on the shores of Biak, including
that of a naked, headless woman, in the days and weeks after July 6th.
The treatment of Tineke Rumakabu was not an isolated event. A theme of Indonesia’s 52 year
occupation of West Papua is extreme sexual and other violence carried out against both men and
women, with impunity and apparent relish. Again, why? Rape and torture are a feature of every war,
and the strange and horrible war that has unfolded in West Papua since the Indonesian takeover is no
exception. Yet the accounts of cruelty meted out to the Papuans, such as to Tineke, go beyond rape,
beyond ‘torture for information’. They are gratuitous acts, as Dr Budi Hernawan has shown. Acts
performed for the pleasure or amusement of the perpetrators and as a demonstration of arbitrary
power. Would soldiers and police do this to their own mothers, or wives, or sisters? No. Are they acts
done in hidden locations by deranged maniacs? No. By soldiers, on duty, in their base. Presumably with
the knowledge of their superiors. Something is seriously wrong here.
Filep Karma’s explanation is that Indonesian treatment of the Papuans is based on profound racism and
religious prejudice. That to the Muslim and Asian Indonesian soldiers the (predominantly) Christian
Melanesian Papuans are grossly inferior. So inferior that it is morally justifiable to mutilate them for
pleasure; to kill them for sport. Many years ago John Rumbiak, the great Papuan human rights
campaigner who suffered a debilitating stroke in 2005, also told me that at the heart of the problems in
West Papuan was racism. Not just Indonesian racism, but the racism of the Western countries and the
United Nations that allowed the 1969 Act of Free Choice to proceed with only 1025 Papuan
representatives voting out of some 800,000 people. Why? Because it was widely agreed in Western and
UN circles that the Papuans were too unsophisticated (read primitive, inferior, backward) to be able to
comprehend the voting process, even when that process was meant to be deciding their future. So
Western racism underscored and reinforced Indonesian racism; so the occupation of West Papua
became a racially based occupation with Indonesian settlers encouraged to stream in at will.
Of course no historical process involving several million people over many decades can be reduced to
one word. Indeed the family history of Filep Karma shows that he came from the elite of West New
Guinea/West Irian/Irian Jaya. His father was a senior public servant under the Dutch and went on to
serve as a regent of Wamena after the Indonesian takeover. Filep is highly educated, articulate and has
travelled internationally. On the surface the Karma family seems to have been a beneficiary of both
colonial systems, rewarded with high office and the perks that go with it. Yet when Filep joins the
protests against then President Suharto in early 1998, and starts to call like many others for West
Papuan independence, in fact leading the movement on Biak, he awakens the new, supposedly
reforming, Leviathan of post-Suharto Indonesia. This book provides an inside view into the events on
Biak in 1998 which allow the reader to comprehend the true nature of Indonesian rule over West Papua.
It is a journey into a moral abyss. The Leviathan is unleashed in the form of Indonesian soldiers turned
loose to indulge their gruesome whims. To inflict premeditated terror on the population. For control.
The Biak Massacre showed that the Leviathan still ruled in Indonesian West Papua, even after the
downfall of Suharto. This is something that most West Papuans instinctively know. Filep Karma
rationalizes it by his title: As If We Are Half Animals. For how could a government supposedly engaged in
promoting the welfare of its citizens condone this behavior? By relegating the Papuans to a sub-human
category. This is similar to the situation in apartheid-era South Africa and the pre-war American South.
Dehumanising the victim to rationalize control, to justify atrocity. The Papuans are not accused of being
communists, but of being separatists, which means traitors, enemies of the nation, a threat that must be
dealt with by the Leviathan.
Filep Karma is a “separatist”. He wants West Papua to be an independent nation. He believes that
independence is a right to which the West Papuan people are entitled. (Although, of course, it can be
argued that, as Theys Eluay used to say before he was assassinated by army special force in 2001,
Papuans are not separatists because they never – voluntarily -- joined Indonesia in the first place.) Most
West Papuans agree with Filep, but the Indonesian government, and probably most Indonesian people
do not. For them West Papua is not only an integral part of Indonesia, it is also the site of final victory
over the Dutch East Indies Empire, who had ruled for 350 years with the whip and the club and the
avowed racism that underpinned all white colonialism. The whites were eventually tossed out, not just
in Indonesia but from almost all their erstwhile colonies: by both pressure from independence
movements and by the fact the European powers lost the stomach or capacity to wield the whip and
club with sufficient force to keep the colonial peoples cowed.
In the resulting asymmetrical struggle the Indonesian state holds almost all the cards over the Papuans.
Certainly overwhelming military power and a vast apparatus of semi-military social control. A population
“imbalance” of two hundred or so to one in Indonesia as a whole and now a settler majority in Papua
itself. Monolithic international support with the exception of Vanuatu. The active encouragement and
support of global big business, eager for access to West Papua’s resources. It would appear a hopeless
cause but the West Papuans continue to struggle on. Among the Papuan people the desire for freedom
still burns, but action is stymied at almost every turn by the state through violent repression and by the
knowledge, on all sides, that the Leviathan is always in the background.
There is a dilemma for Indonesia - the Leviathan does not just inhabit West Papua but haunts the
nation. From the mass killings in Java in 1965, to the massacres in East Timor, Poso, Aceh, and
elsewhere, Indonesians know that brutality lurks not far below the surface of their nation. This is
certainly something not confined to Indonesia: brutality is a universal trait of humanity; civilization the
process of containing it. How can it be contained in West Papua? Only with truth and openness and
uninhibited dialogue.
I spent some years on the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea, running a safari lodge in a river-bank village
called Tambanum. Life is still very traditional there; subsistence farming and fishing, with a little cash
income from selling artefacts. There are no ‘chiefs’ as such. Decisions are made collectively. The men
meet in their Haus Tambaram to rest and to discuss issues that affect the whole village. I was there once
when a major debate was underway on whether or not to attack a village downstream that had been
established on the Tambanum’s traditional land when white missionaries moved an inaccessible tribe to
the river’s bank. Another tribe had then taken the land that the first one had vacated and so they were
unable to return. Some men thought that if the interlopers were not attacked they would become
further entrenched, that traditional land would be lost and that the problem would grow worse for their
children and descendants. Other men thought that if they did attack the police would eventually
respond by attacking Tambanum, randomly beating and arresting people and burning down houses.
There was no consensus.
Discussions went on for many days. In the Men’s House there was a large carved wooden Orator’s Chair,
in the shape of a human-sized figure with a seat at waist height, placed in the middle of the earthfloored and grass-thatched building. On the stool’s seat lay a bundle of bound leaves from a hibiscus
bush called a tangat. Each man would take his turn in the debate by clasping the tangat and striking the
Orator’s Chair with it as he made each point. After a few minutes he would finish and lay the tangat
back on the stool’s seat, signifying that the floor was open and the next man would move forward and
say his piece. Meanwhile most of the men of the village reclined on the black palm benches all around
or squatted next to the smoky little fires. They talked quietly and puffed on their home grown cigars as
they listened.
After everyone who had wanted to speak had spoken no vote was taken; rather those who wanted to
attack the village down river got together and headed off armed with their axes and spears. Those who
did not want to attack stayed behind. The conflict with the interlopers was never really resolved – there
are people still there today but they have not stolen much land. The police did come and arrest and beat
a few men, but did not burn down any houses. The problem was not resolved, but mitigated, and the act
of protracted dialogue built an understanding of what other people thought and why. Dialogue allows
you to understand why you disagree with someone; it is an essential component of human interaction.
With the election of President Joko Widodo in 2014 a new era begins for Indonesia. Jokowi visited West
Papua twice in his election campaign and has made it clear that he wants to tackle this profound
conundrum. He can move quickly on critical issues that the Papuans are facing: human rights violations;
health and education services, land rights and environmental and resource issues. While the long term
effective survival of the Papuan people hangs on these issues, they also need and deserve more than
economic development. They need to be able to tell their stories, to be heard and acknowledged.
President Widodo also has the opportunity to put a line under the repressive policies of the past – to
start a new era. His election has already created a ripple of optimism amongst the Papuans who have
been so badly let down in the past. Jokowi can emphasis that a new regime is in power with definite
actions such as freeing political prisoners, by lifting media restrictions and by investigating past abuses,
including the Biak Massacre. He can transform the atmosphere from one of fear and cynicism to one of
hope for a better future.
Jokowi also wants to tame the Leviathan. He wants to strengthen democracy in Indonesia and reinforce
human rights in West Papua. This is a direct threat to the dark forces within the nation and an existential
threat for his Presidency. The most favoured lair of the Leviathan in Indonesia is West Papua: it lives
there hidden in the obscuring mists of military, corporate and conglomerate domination. How do you
fight such a beast? By hearing stories of the victims. By allowing the light in. By giving people a tangat to
make their points. To use words not bullets. To use words as bullets of enlightenment.
Filep Karma’s is the story of West Papua and Indonesia. Through him we learn that however much a
person is made to suffer there are some ideals that are worth more than life itself. By his courage we
come to understand the nature of the Leviathan and how it can be overcome. It’s a story as old as
humanity: good people standing up to injustice with truth their main weapon.
Jim Elmslie is a Master of International Studies and Doctor of Philosophy (Economics) at Sydney
University. His Ph.D. thesis entitled Irian Jaya Under the Gun: Indonesian Economic Development versus
West Papuan Nationalism was published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2002.