Tag: Politics of Indonesia

Unions call on Indonesia to release arrested nurses

ACTU MEDIA RELEASE :  

Tuesday, 29 March 2011


Unions call on Indonesia to release arrested nurses


Australian unions have called on the Indonesian Government to respect international labour Conventions and human and trade union rights following the arrest of five nurses in West Papua.

ACTU President Ged Kearney said it was outrageous that the nurses had been detained for nine days and were reportedly subjected to long periods of police interrogation, simply because they had supported an industrial campaign to ensure they received their contracted entitlements.

“It is disturbing that at the same time as workers in North Africa are beginning to benefit from newfound democratic freedoms, repression of basic human rights including the freedom of association is taking place in our region,” Ms Kearney said.

“These West Papuan nurses were pursuing their legitimate rights and it is obscene to think they are languishing in jail.

“I am advised that more than 1500 nurses took spontaneous and unprecedented industrial action in response to an announcement that the Government of the province of West Papua had withdrawn industrial payments.

“We are told that in an attempt to intimidate the nurses and to force them back to work, five nurses were arrested.

“The intimidation has failed and the nurses and their community are more resolute than ever in their determination to secure the release of the five nurses and to win the industrial campaign.

“However it is simply outrageous that this type of intimidation and violation of human and workers’ rights is occurring.”

Ms Kearney said the arrests of the nurses, including two officials of the National Union of Indonesian Nurses, was a heavy-handed and excessive response to nurses pursing a legitimate industrial campaign in support of their contracted entitlements.

“This action is a clear breach of ILO Convention 87 (Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise), which was ratified by Indonesia in June 1998.

“It violates the fundamental human and trade union rights enshrined in C87 and reflects poorly on the Indonesian authorities.

“The Indonesian Government should take immediate steps to release the nurses, to remove all charges and to enter a constructive dialogue with the National Union of Indonesian Nurses to resolve these issues.”

Media contact: Rebecca Tucker ph (03) 9664 7359 or 0408 031 269; rtucker@actu.org.au

 



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Australian Nurses Demand Release of Jailed Nurses in West Papua

Media release

ANF demands release of jailed nurses

29 March 2011

The Australian Nursing Federation is calling for the immediate release of five nurses in West Papua who have been jailed by the Indonesian government for taking industrial action.

ANF acting federal secretary Yvonne Chaperon said eight nurses and midwives were originally detained by the criminal investigation unit of the Papuan police in Jayapura for their involvement in industrial action. Five nurses remain in jail.

“The nurses and midwives at the DokII Hospital in Jayapura were promised an incentive payment over a year ago and were suddenly informed on 30 December 2010 that the local authority had rescinded the decision to pay them. This led to a decision by the nurses and midwives to take industrial action and the subsequent detention and interrogation of five nurses.”

Ms Chaperon said the Australian Nursing Federation, representing over 200,000 nurses and midwives nationally, condemned the excessive response by the Indonesian Government.

“These nurses and midwives were exercising a democratic right to take industrial action in response to a decision that was made without reason or warning to withhold an incentive payment they had been promised more than a year ago,” Ms Chaperon said.

“We stand united with our colleagues in West Papua and call for their immediate release. They must be allowed to return to their homes and families without the threat of further intimidation or harassment.”

Media enquiries: Cathy Beadnell 0400 035 797

The ANF, with over 200,000 members, is the professional and industrial voice for nurses, midwives and assistants in nursing in Australia.  For more information, go to www.becausewecare.org.au.

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SMH: A Worm Inside the New Indonesia

FYI – Media Information

[With reflections on West Papuan situation.]

The Sydney Morning Herald
February 26, 2011

A Worm Inside the New Indonesia

by HAMISH McDONALD

WITH popular uprisings turfing out rulers in Tunisia, Egypt and perhaps elsewhere in the Arab world, a lot of analysts have focused on fears of ”contagion” in other regions, notably on China’s censorship of news reports about the protest wave in the Middle East.

Yet the Middle East event that might have the most far-reaching effect is not the awakening of the Arab ”street” against authoritarian rulers, but the vote in a United Nations supervised referendum a month earlier.

The largely African people in the south of Sudan voted overwhelming to secede from their Arab-dominated country and form a new nation – a result accepted by the Khartoum government and its main foreign backers, including China.

This has followed the declaration of independence from Serbia by Kosovo in 2008 that was accepted by most of the world and approved by the International Court of Justice, and Russia’s unilateral recognition of Georgia’s South Ossetia and Abkhazia as sovereign states soon afterwards in retaliation. It has left respect for the ”territorial integrity” of states and post-colonial boundaries somewhat tattered.

Already the example is being applied to an intractable issue right on Australia’s border and forming the touchiest part of what many see as our most important foreign relationship – the question of West Papua, the western half of New Guinea now part of Indonesia.

As Akihisa Matsuno, a professor at Osaka University, pointed out this week in a conference at Sydney University’s Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, South Sudan and Kosovo take West Papua out of the usual context of debate about the rights and wrongs of its decolonisation from Dutch rule in 1962 and ”act of free choice” under Indonesian control in 1969.

Kosovo’s independence was a case of ”remedial secession”: no states claimed the Kosovars had a right to self-determination, there was just no prospect of its peaceful reintegration back into Serbia or the rump Yugoslavia. Protection of people in Kosovo had more weight than Serbia’s territorial integrity.

Sudan became independent in 1956 from British rule, but has been in civil war most of the time since, with a 2005 peace agreement finally conceding a referendum. This suggests lack of integration between territories ruled by the same colonial power can justify a separate state, Matsuno said. ”This means that colonial boundaries are not as absolute as usually assumed.”

Indonesia itself went down this path in 1999 by insisting, for its domestic political reasons, that East Timor’s vote in 1999 was not a delayed act of self-determination that should have been taken just after the Portuguese left in 1975, but a ”popular consultation” with the result put into effect by Indonesia’s legislature. This amounted to conceding a right of secession to its provinces, Matsuno said.

West Papua’s act of free choice was seen as a farce from the beginning. As the historians Pieter Drooglever in Holland and John Saltford in Britain have documented, monitors were kicked out of the territory by the Indonesians in the seven-year interval between the Dutch departure and the ”act” – which was a unanimous public vote by an assembly of 1022 handpicked, bribed and intimidated Papuans in favour of integration with Indonesia.

Revolt has simmered and broken out sporadically ever since. Canberra’s relations with Jakarta went into crisis in 2006 when 43 Papuan independence activists and family members crossed the Torres Strait by motor canoe and requested political asylum.

Richard Chauvel, an Indonesia scholar at Melbourne’s Victoria University, told the conference Jakarta feels Papuan independence is not seen as the threat it was a decade ago when a ”Papuan spring” of breakaway sentiment and protest followed East Timor’s departure. The territory has been broken into two provinces so far, and numerous district governments, Papuan separatists fragmented, and no state bar Vanuatu is questioning Indonesian sovereignty (though the US Congress last September held its first committee hearing on West Papua).

Yet Chauvel says West Papua has become an ”Achilles’ heel” for a democratising Indonesia over the last 10 years. ”Papua is Indonesia’s last and most intractable regional conflict,” he said. ”Papua has become a battleground between a ‘new’ and an ‘old’ Indonesia. The ‘old’ Indonesia considers that its soldiers torturing fellow Indonesians in a most barbaric manner is an ‘incident’. The ‘new’ Indonesia aspires to the ideals of its founders in working towards becoming a progressive,
outward-looking, cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic and multi-faith society.”

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono called the recently reported
torture cases ”incidents” by low-level soldiers, not the result of high-up instructions. Chauvel says he is probably correct: ”A more likely explanation is that instructions were not necessary. These acts reflected a deeply ingrained institutional culture of violence in the way members of the security forces interact with Papuans.”

Matsuno argues that South Sudan makes Indonesia’s post-colonial claim to West Papua more shaky, since it too had racial, religious and other differences to the rest of the country and had been administered separately within the former Netherlands East Indies. A ”more moral question” behind self-determination is coming to the fore, he said, the factor of ”failure” in governing.

The Japanese scholar sees echoes of East Timor in the late 1980s, when even foreign policy ”realists” started recognising the failure of Indonesian rule on the ground: serious human rights abuses, foreign media shut out, migrants flooding in, local leaders turning away from government, a younger generation educated in the Indonesian system refusing to identify themselves as Indonesians.

”These young people were increasingly vocal and continued to expose the ‘unsustainability’ of the system,” Matsuno said. ”Indeed the unsustainability of the situation in West Papua seems to be a truth. Only it takes some more time for the world to realise the truth.”

No one expects any outside power to intervene. But as we are seeing in the Arab despotisms, the new media make it harder and harder to draw a veil over suppression. In the Indonesia that is opening up, the exception of West Papua will become more glaring.

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INDONESIA: Widespread impunity in Papua aggravating tensions

 

Date: 22 February 2011 03:15:24 CET

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 22, 2011
ALRC-CWS-16-06-2011

Language(s): English only

HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL
Sixteenth session, Agenda Item 4, General Debate

A written statement submitted by the Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC), a non-governmental organisation with general consultative status

INDONESIA: Widespread impunity in Papua aggravating tensions

The Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC) is seriously concerned by ongoing, widespread human rights violations and violent acts being committed by the Indonesian security forces in the Papuan highlands in Indonesia. Impunity typically accompanies even the most serious abuses, as shown by the lack of effective remedies in a case of severe torture that the ALRC has documented recently. Despite institutional reforms in Indonesia, effective accountability for human rights violations in Papua is lacking, resulting in impunity that then engenders further atrocities.

Impunity and the sense of injustice that it engenders in society are having a strong impact on social stability and cohesion in Papua. Repression, discrimination and human rights violations by the Indonesian security forces are adding to tensions. Papuans reportedly feel like second-class citizens in Indonesia, even within Papua itself, and face discrimination, poverty and injustice as a result. The military arbitrarily suspect Papuans of being linked with rebel groups and stigmatise them, subjecting them to abuse.

Autonomy law rejected

The State has failed to provide justice and remedies and to bring prosperity and equality to Papua through the Special Autonomy Law, despite it being Indonesia’s most resource-rich region. Demonstrations in Jayapura, the capital of the Papuan province, have repeatedly rejected the Special Autonomy Law of 2001, with many civil society speakers having labelled it as being a failure. The autonomy parliament in July 2010 issued a decree formally rejecting the law and demanding a referendum on the political status of the autonomy region. The law was rejected mainly due to it having failed to deliver on any of the key demands of indigenous Papuans since its enactment. These include economic aspects but security and the need for protection against discrimination and human rights violations also figure highly.

The repeated calls by Papuan politicians, church and other civil society leaders for a dialogue between Papua and Jakarta have not been responded to by the government. Given the ongoing grave human rights violations by Indonesian security forces and the deteriorating relations between Papua and Jakarta, the ALRC is concerned that the situation of human rights risks declining seriously in the coming period, unless Indonesia takes meaningful action to address its role in the worsening situation. To be credible in doing this, the Indonesian government and military must ensure that human rights violations are halted and impunity is shown to be being dismantled, with justice being served and reparation being provided to victims.

Torture and impunity — a symbol of abuse and injustice

In the high-profile torture case mentioned above, which remains emblematic of the situation of human rights in Papua at present, Mr. Tuanliwor Kiwo, an indigenous Papuan man, was arbitrarily detained and tortured in May/June2010 by the Indonesian military. Mr. Kiwo was arrested at the Kwanggok Nalime TNI post near Yogorini village on his way from Tingginambut towards Mulia, Papua, Indonesia. During two days of detention, Mr. Kiwo was subjected to several serious forms of torture including burning, beatings and other forms of violence, resulting in serious injuries and Mr. Kiwo falling unconscious. He was able to escape in the morning of the third day. Mr. Kiwo is currently in hiding for security reasons but has given a detailed testimony of his torture in a video recording.1

While cases of torture are often reported from Papua, this case received significant international attention after video footage of the torture2 was published by the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) in October 2010. As a result of the significant public pressure concerning this case, three members of the military were tried in a military tribunal for disobeying their superior’s order to release the victim and were sentenced to between nine and twelve months imprisonment. The ALRC is concerned that the charge and punishment in this case are not commensurate with the gravity of the violation that severe torture represents. Furthermore, the victim has not been provided with any form of remedy. Despite its high profile nature, this case speaks to the Indonesian system’s inability to address torture as a serious crime and human rights violation, and its failure to provide adequate reparation to victims. In less visible cases, even less can be expected, and impunity typically prevails.

In another case of violence by members of the military in the March 2010, that was also published in October 2010, the perpetrators have received sentences of an equally disproportionately low nature. Three solders from the Indonesian military’s Pam Rahwan Yonif 753/Arga Vira Tama squad, based in Nabire, Papua, were given a five-month imprisonment sentence by the military court III/19, Cenderawasih military command in Jayapura in November 2010, for having kicked and beaten arrested indigenous Papuans whom they suspected of involvement in separatist activities. The names of the convicted officers are Chief Pvt Sahminan Husain Lubis, Second Pvt Joko Sulistiono and Second Pvt Dwi Purwanto. Military judge Lt. Col. Adil Karokaro explained in the verdict that the defendants had breached the Indonesian military’s code of conduct by torturing the residents.

The government of Indonesia continues to deny the widespread use of violence by the Indonesian military in Papua, and alleges that these violations are rare and isolated, individual cases. However, the ALRC continues to receive further cases of violence against indigenous Papuans, including killings by the police and military, arbitrary arrests, the burning of houses and killing of livestock, which point to a widespread pattern of the use of violence, as well as a policy of intimidation by the Indonesian military.

Human rights violations and other crimes committed against civilians by members of the military are still only tried by military courts, which lack independence, transparency, a comprehensive penal code incorporating human rights norms, and a system of punishments that are proportional to the severity of the crimes committed. A military tribunal is not able to hold perpetrators of torture accountable in line with international law standards. Such tribunals cannot invoke any military regulations that prohibit the use of torture. Therefore, perpetrators cannot be tried for committing torture and no remedies can therefore be provided to victims.

Furthermore, the country’s penal code does not include torture as a crime. This means that members of the police that commit torture remain immune from criminal prosecution. Indonesia is therefore failing to comply with its obligations under the Convention Against Torture. Indonesia ratified the Convention against Torture in 1998, but the use of torture is still widespread and systematic, as cases received and documented by the ALRC attest. The promised review of the penal code has been delayed for years despite recommendations made to the government of Indonesia, which it accepted, during the Universal Periodic Review in this regard.

From a human rights perspective, it is vital for Indonesia to immediately begin to take credible action to tackle impunity and be seen to be tackling it in an effective way. Jakarta must ensure that the security forces halt the use of excessive force and violence-based strategies in dealing with security-related issues in Papua. Allegations of human rights violations must be investigated and any lacuna in legislation and due process must be addressed. For example, torture must be criminalized in line with Indonesia’s international obligations under the Convention Against Torture. Military personnel who are alleged to be responsible for human rights violations against civilians must be tried in civilian courts.

The ALRC invites the Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers to recommend institutional reforms to the government of Indonesia to ensure that members of the military are held accountable by independent courts that uphold human rights and constitutional values and ensure that these are made available to legislators in Indonesia.

The ALRC also requests that the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment follow up with the Indonesian government to ensure the full implementation of the recommendations made to Indonesia during the UPR review regarding the review of the penal code and the full criminalisation of torture.

Furthermore, the ALRC urges the Indonesian government to heed the call for dialogue made by the Papuan indigenous community and avoid a further deterioration of the conflict in Papua. Finally, the ALRC calls on the Indonesian government to release all Papuan political prisoners, in order to show its commitment to a new path towards peace, security and human rights in Papua.

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Footnotes:

1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX5CuZhFFCI
2 http://humanrightsasia.blip.tv/file/4446942/

# # #

About the ALRC: The Asian Legal Resource Centre is an independent regional non-governmental organisation holding general consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. It is the sister organisation of the Asian Human Rights Commission. The Hong Kong-based group seeks to strengthen and encourage positive action on legal and human rights issues at the local and national levels throughout Asia.

International Human Rights Day 2010 – Download our pre-print PDF version of the annual reports here.

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Asian Human Rights Commission
#701A Westley Square,
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Hongkong S.A.R.
Tel: +(852) – 2698-6339
Fax: +(852) – 2698-6367

URL: humanrights.asia
twitter/youtube/facebook: humanrightsasia

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JUBI: New unit (UP4B) to be set up in Papua

JUBI, 9 February 2011

New unit (UP4B) to be set up in Papua

A new unit, UP4B -Unit Percepatan Pembangunan Papua dan Papua Barat – a Unit to Accelerate Development in Papua and West Papua – is to be set up in March this year for the purpose of handling a number of political and human rights problems as well as development which is still virtually stagnant.

‘As members of the Papuan Peace Network – JDP – we have decided to help the government in setting set up this body,’ said Muridan Widjojo of LIPI., the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.

Muridan said that LIPI had decided to get involved in this and help the
government, in the hope that this new body will not confine itself to
dealing only with social and economic issues such as development projects but will also prioritise the issue of human rights violations
and the political situation throughout West Papua so that these issues can be properly addressed.

‘We hope that the establishment of this body will be supported by all
those involved, so as to ensure that it does not confine itself only to
social issues but will also deal with the issue of human rights which
also needs to be prioritised.’

Muridan also said that the JDP hopes that the UP4B will be able to
advance the process of dialogue between the indigenous Papuan people (OAP) and the Indonesian government, mediated by a neutral international party, in order to get to the root of the problem. These problems should not be allowed to go on festering without end which can only mean that stability and the welfare of the Papuan people will continue to be disturbed.

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[Another JUBI article reports that Muridan has called on the Indonesian president to deal seriously with the issue of dialogue between Indonesian and Papua, and will set up a special team for this purpose. We hope to post the item in full soon. TAPOL]

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