Prologue

Since 1961, West Papuan people in the ‘Indonesian Province’ of Papua raising the Morning Star flag in public have been shot by Indonesian soldiers.^[1] Public declarations of allegiance to West Papuan nationhood broadcast beneath the flag have provoked violent retaliation. Raising the flag in public recalls the nascent state. It acts to constitute a West Papuan people and place, momentarily establishing the legitimacy of an alternative regime outside of the Indonesian state.^[2] While West Papuan people at the East Awin refugee settlement in Papua New Guinea (PNG) no longer fear being shot down for raising the flag, the affect is not dissimilar. Raising the West Papuan flag is intoxicating. In the moments between the flag’s ascension from the bottom of the pole to the top, the air can be cut with a knife. Acts of flag raising have constituted ‘signal events’ in the history of West Papua since 1961.

At East Awin, flag-raising ceremonies are held annually to commemorate several events: the inaugural raising of the Morning Star as a national flag by the West New Guinea Council (1 December 1961); the first physical battle between the OPM or Free Papua Movement and the Indonesian military at Arfai (28 July 1965); Seth Rumkorem’s Declaration of Independence (1 July 1971); and the failed uprising in Jayapura (11 February 1984). In the second month of my dissertation fieldwork at the former United Nations Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) refugee settlement in East Awin in 1998, I received a hand-written invitation to attend the flag-raising ceremony on 1 July. The ceremony took place at Waraston, East Awin, a camp comprised of people from the north coast and adjacent islands. A ceremonial ground was freshly scythed for the occasion, a flagpole erected, and a stage covered in tarpaulin. The ceremonial ground formed part of a narrow swathe cut through the surrounding jungle. To the south it bordered a clay track that wound its way past Waraston, and continued for 10 kilometres in both directions past 17 other small camps. On the northern side of the ceremonial field were the houses of Waraston. These 20 houses were perched on 2-metre poles, and constructed from milled and hand-adzed timber. Roofs were a bricolage of weathered plastic sheeting, and odd bits of bark, tin and sago thatch.

I was invited with several other people to sit in the makeshift stage lined with blue tarpaulin. Other guests shifted in their seats alongside me, fanned themselves and picked the biting insects off their legs. Next to me sat Lucia, a dignified widow whose husband had been shot by Indonesian soldiers in the forest on the border, and then burned alive in the house into which he had crawled. (Note: all names of West Papuans in this book, except those of songwriters, are pseudonyms.) Yohanes sat with his back to Lucia and me. A feisty war veteran who had fought the first West Papuan battle against the Indonesians at Arfai in 1965, he had sustained injuries to his spine after being captured and beaten with a plank. His tensed back reminded me of the embodied character of the struggle. Seated behind three low tables at the front of the stage were several lay preachers and teachers.

One side of the ceremonial field was lined with women holding babies folded into fabric slings. They used umbrellas to shade themselves against the fierce morning sun. Young girls stood near their mothers, minding infant siblings whose faces had been dusted with talcum powder. Men stood at attention some distance from the women and girls, following a military drill directed from the podium. Three young men designated as flag-bearers delicately performed the ritual of unfolding and raising the flag with white-gloved hands. The speakers wore camouflage garb, the uniform of their jungle-based resistance. Impassioned speeches were read about Dutch preparation of the West Papuan nation-state, annexation by Indonesia, and the struggle since 1962 to restore nationhood. With voices resonant with emotion, men and women and children sang the seven-verse song Hai Tanahku Papua (O, My Land Papua). Adopted as the national anthem on 1 December 1961, following a vote by the West New Guinea Council, the sensuous lyrics invoke the West Papuan nation’s homeland imagined as a geographic and territorial entity, of coastal, lowland and highland settings:

After the ceremony I joined a line of people that crossed the main jungle track to a small cemetery at the side of the Providence Lutheran church. Here we scattered yellow petals over the grave of a young architect from Biak, who had been knifed in the marketplace at East Awin by another West Papuan refugee who was said to have lost his mind.

At dusk, people reassembled to witness the ceremonial lowering and folding of the flag, and its solemn presentation to the master of ceremonies. Afterwards the line of onlookers dissolved, and drifted towards an old schoolhouse where women served sweet black tea with steamed buns called bapauw, and rainbow cake. Later, men played cards on the low tables on the stage lit by kerosene pressure lanterns. Young people danced Yospan to music cassettes sent by relatives from Jayapura. (Yospan was chosen as Irian Jaya’s official provincial dance at a seminar convened by the regional government in the 1980s.) Leaning against the schoolhouse wall admiring the dancers, I struck up a conversation with the woman standing next to me. She proceeded to reveal the biographical details of several women who were dancing or watching the dance. One woman’s father was serving life imprisonment in Kalisosok prison, Java. A woman nursing her baby was the daughter-in-law of the freedom movement leader who made the independence declaration in 1971. The dance was accompanied by misteri hidup or the mystery of life, a song composed in prison by musician Arnold Ap in the days before his execution. The woman told me that the movements of this dance mimicked the paddling of a canoe, but young people at East Awin had never seen a sea canoe. Nor had they seen the ocean. She told me that northerners perceived the East Awin settlement as a sort of living hell: an inland lowland swamp distant from the sweeping white beaches pounded by waves and fringed by palms. Their previous coastal diet of bountiful seafood, coconut, sago and garden produce had been replaced by the cassava plant at East Awin. They processed its flesh to resemble sago and boiled its leaves to eat as greens.

Although hand-written invitations to commemorative ceremonies were issued to each camp at East Awin, the audience was usually comprised of northerners from Waraston camp only. A Waraston woman explained to me:

At Waraston, the flagpole, stage and audience faced the road, the main thoroughfare at East Awin. During the flag-raising ceremony that day, and on subsequent occasions, I observed people from neighbouring camps returning from the market along this road. They halted, and waited without lowering their laden billum until a group had collected, then walked slowly past in single file—without so much as turning their faces towards the ceremony. According to the organisers, other people at East Awin considered flag-raising commemorative ceremonies to be a political activity that contested the conditions of their refugee and ‘permissive residency’ status, risking their deportation.

In the performance of national rituals containing flag raising, anthem singing and historical speeches, these refugees constitute their identity as West Papuans. At East Awin, even mentioning the Morning Star flag elicits historical monologues about West Papuan experiences of the atrocities of Indonesian colonisation. It is not just the flag and anthem that bring out narratives about Indonesian colonisation though. In this book I examine other events, campaigns and policies that invoke a similar reaction, for example, transmigration, the 1969 Penentuan Pendapat Rakyat (PEPERA) or Act of Free Choice, the koteka campaign and Arnold Ap. Individually, and sometimes in confluence, these events, campaigns and policies caused some West Papuans to seek political asylum across the border in PNG.

The performance of national rituals at East Awin needs foregrounding in a brief chronology of events in the Indonesian province of Papua since 1961. These events provide a backdrop to the cross-border movement of West Papuans into PNG. Each event led to government and military policies deemed oppressive, provoking resistance referred to as the struggle to attain merdeka or West Papuan independence.^[3] On 1 December 1961, the Dutch administration of Netherlands New Guinea oversaw the election of a New Guinea Council, and installation of the ordinances of nation-statehood like a territorial flag and national anthem. On 19 December, Indonesian President Sukarno declared a campaign of total mobilisation to wrest Netherlands New Guinea from the Dutch. Dutch control of Netherlands New Guinea was subsequently ceded to Indonesia through the New York Agreement on 15 August 1962, which provided for a United Nations (UN) transitional authority present until 1 May 1963. Between 14 July and 2 August 1969, West Papuans voted in eight assemblies (1022 delegates appointed by the Indonesian administration) in the Act of Free Choice, and West Irian was declared Indonesia’s seventeenth province.^[4] The Indonesian government’s military actions and policies, implemented since 1962 to secure West Papua as part of the republic, have led to land annexation, internal displacement, deaths in custody and the killing of unarmed villagers and independence supporters.

It was a chance reading of these events, as chronicled by George Monbiot in his travelogue Poisoned arrows, that first aroused my interest in West Papua as a possible dissertation subject in 1995. Further reading on the demise of Arnold Ap, variously described as an anthropologist, museum curator, musician and composer, increased my resolve. In 1996, getting permission from the government of Indonesia to do anthropological fieldwork in West Papua could mean years of waiting without a positive result. In mid-1997, while studying Indonesian in Jogjakarta, Java, I visited the families of fellow West Papuan students at Gajah Mada University. I lived in neighbourhoods in Jayapura, Biak and Wamena; sites where some of the ‘signal events’ in the history of West Papua had occurred. With only a slim possibility of getting permission to do fieldwork in West Papua, I decided to apply for a research visa from the government of PNG to do twelve months’ fieldwork at East Awin, a former UNHCR refugee settlement for West Papuans that had been established in 1989.

Between 1984–86, as many as 11,000 West Papuans crossed into PNG seeking asylum (between 1962 and 1969, the Australian Administration of PNG recorded around 4,000 crossings by West Papuans).^[5] Pushed by particular forces in their local area—often battles between Indonesian soldiers and West Papuan freedom fighters—they crossed at different times, as individuals and in groups, in a multitude of places along the international border. Movement can be broadly categorised on the basis of shared place of origin and crossing point, in terms of four relatively discreet phases. I refer to the people who crossed the border to seek asylum during the period 1984–86 in terms of four groups: ‘northerners’, Dani, Muyu and Sota peoples.

The first major movement comprised about 1000 northerners who crossed the border near Vanimo between February and June 1984. This northerner group included formally educated and politically active people from north-coast towns (Jayapura, Sorong and Manokwari) and islands (Biak-Numfoor and Serui), as well as villagers from the northern border region. At Vanimo these northerners were housed in a resettlement camp called Blackwater. A second movement occurred in 1985 when about 350 Dani from the Baliem Valley crossed near Bewani, south of Vanimo. This group was also relocated to Blackwater. Both of these movements occurred in PNG’s northern Sandaun Province. A third movement occurred during an 18-month period between April 1984 and September 1985 when 9500 Muyu crossed the border into Western Province at numerous crossing points. A fourth movement took place in 1992 when about 100 families from the border town of Sota sought refuge across the border in the Morehead District, PNG. (In December 2000, after the period of fieldwork, a fifth major movement occurred when about 400 people from the Baliem Valley, who were living in and around the capital Jayapura, crossed the border near Vanimo and sought asylum.)

After the government of PNG acceded to the UN Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1986, it determined that West Papuans would be relocated from 17 informal camps on the international border to a single inland location as recommended by UNHCR.^[6] The government identified a 6000-hectare site at East Awin, a division of the Kiunga District in Western Province, approximately 120 kilometres east of the Indonesian–PNG border. At the time of research for this book in 1998–89, East Awin settlement consisted of 17 ‘camps’ stretched along the Kiunga–Nomad road between 40 to 70 kilometres. The population was approximately 3500 or 20 people per square kilometre, compared to less than 10 people per square kilometre in neighbouring areas.^[7]

During the period of fieldwork at East Awin (March to September 1998 and February to September 1999), most West Papuan refugees were either applying for permissive residency in PNG, or planning to repatriate to West Papua. The offer and processing of permissive residency permits, and preparation for repatriation by a large faction at East Awin, occurred somewhat fortuituously during the period of my fieldwork. Activities associated with permissive residency and repatriation allowed me to hone my understanding of refugee-ness; specifically, what it meant to be a West Papuan refugee in relation to being a repatriate, or permissive resident. As this book elaborates, remaining a refugee or becoming a repatriate or permissive resident was determined in part by people’s subjective engagement with ‘national’ history, and their pragmatism at a household and/or village level.

Map 1. Location of East Awin

Map: Cartographic Services, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.

This book begins by unpacking the narratives of colonisation told by West Papuans at Awin which provide an historical and political backdrop to resistance, and to their own cross-border flight and subsequent claims for asylum. In the narratives of colonisation contained in the first chapter, the ‘canonisation’ of ‘Indonesians’ is discernible.^[8] By canonisation, I borrow from Malkki to refer to the way that atrocity against a category can lead to the creation of boundaries and classification of the agents or perpetrators as essentially inhuman.^[9] The agents of civilian policies and military campaigns mentioned above were soldiers and civil servants—Indonesian citizens. Spontaneous migrants and government-assisted transmigrants total almost 50 per cent of the Irian Jaya population. Theological scholars propose that atrocities against West Papuans as a category have generated collective ‘memories of suffering’ or memoria passionis.^[10] These collective memories effect antagonistic opposition, but their latent energy can potentially ‘turn the existing status quo upside down.’^[11] Malkki and Anderson call this ‘inversion’, and suggest that canonising behaviour risks the inversion of primordial nationalism.^[12] Hypothetically, in an independent state of West Papua, Indonesians could experience surveillance, control and possibly even expulsion. But it is not inevitable that ethnic conflict will be generated by primordial sentiment, and researchers have shown ethnic violence to be generated by the state to appear like primordialism, and to be linked to developments in provincial and national politics.^[13]

State atrocity against a category of people can lead to the creation of boundaries. In the context of West Papua, cultural performance as a boundary-making activity is most explicit in the work of museum curator and musician Arnold Ap, and the subject of the second chapter. During the 1969 Act of Free Choice voting period, Ap led a demonstration of fellow Cenderawasih University students and was imprisoned at the Gunung Ifar prison near Jayapura. Following his release, it is said that Ap made a conscious decision to mobilise West Papuan people in the preservation of their cultural identity through performance. Taking cultural difference as his ‘conscious object’,^[14] Ap’s work was directed towards cultural salvage, regeneration, and expression, rather than a racist project to dominate or eliminate non-Papuan groups. That is not to say that Ap’s work did not ‘musically feed the imagination’^[15] of West Papuan nationhood. In his work as curator, composer and musician, Ap used performance to articulate cultural difference towards a contrastive or ‘alternative identity’.^[16] Memory of the suffering of Arnold Ap—who died at the hands of Indonesian soldiers—remains central to a memoria passionis of West Papuans, outside and inside the homeland. Ap’s work has particular resonance at East Awin, where some of his fellow musicians and peers lived after crossing the border into PNG in 1984.

Paths of flight by West Papuans crossed various boundaries, and illuminate different experiences of displacement. Some such paths are elaborated in chapter three. The journey for northerners and Muyu people was shorter than for Dani highlanders. Dani people fled the Baliem Valley to seek refuge over the mountains to the north, in the lowland swamps of the Mamberamo basin. Although they were only ‘internally displaced’ among Mamberamo, their sense of displacement is signified by a landscape that is grotesque in its foreignness. It is terrifying, and produces famine for them. Lack of cultural knowledge means they cannot process foods like sago and coconut, and do not recognise forest food. In contrast, for Muyu people whose land lies contiguous to the international border, the familiarity of the landscape at East Awin, proximate to their own region and ancestral land known as dusun, amplifies their experience of displacement. For coastal and island northerners, it is the inland location of East Awin that is profoundly disorienting and unsettling. Deprivations experienced during the intense drought and bushfires in 1997 consolidated refugee perception and experience of East Awin as a dystopian place.

The movement of West Papuan people across the border into PNG, onto the other half of the island, affects a geographical and cultural space that appears small. The displacement of Muyu from their own land, occurring in the smallest of geographic and cultural spaces, is the subject of chapter four. By capturing the texture of Muyu displacement, I join other refugee researchers in challenging the assumption that movement inside a region requires less cultural adjustment because refugees are living with their own people or neighbours, in the same ecological landscape, on the other side of a colonial-imposed boundary.^[17] Arjun Appadurai’s concept of ‘locality’ as the production of new social spaces that generate other social spaces provides a useful framework to consider a process of social formation at East Awin, both in individual camps and across the settlement as a whole.^[18] Chapter five examines social formation through various practices including fictive kinship, death and burial of close relatives and friends, and evolution of camps as bases of alliance.

Chapter six demonstrates the way that over time, the ‘empty rainforest’ at East Awin has become ‘inscribed’^[19] with refugees’ own histories through such house- and garden-making activities as clearing, planting, harvesting, building and renovating. Casey’s theorising of ‘dwelling’ as a conscious activity that can affect familiarity, and his notion of ‘inhabiting’ a space through certain body habits, offer insights into a process of resettlement.^[20] Even at East Awin where people did not want to imagine settling in the medium term, many people prepared their environment to mitigate against feeling unsettled. Chapter seven describes how, among Muyu, sago consumption was the most concrete marker of their displacement at East Awin. They resisted becoming settled in the long term by refusing to plant sago. Yet they also tried to simulate sago flour by processing cassava, and tried to replicate sago thatch by curing (smoking) other thatch materials. Using Baudrillard’s notion of simulation and ‘dissimulation’,^[21] I explore the Muyu judgement that a sago appetite cannot be sated by cassava.

In spite of the dwelling, inhabiting and simulating activities of refugees at East Awin, the memory of their geographical place of origin, which is the place of their extended family and birthplace, is maintained intact as the real homeland. Return to the homeland is conceived in terms of a ‘teleology of return’^[22]—as something destined. Yet repatriation to the homeland may carry more risks than remaining in a dystopic place of resettlement. The first event of major repatriation occurred in 1993 when 94 families returned to Irian Jaya. Conrad’s account of this repatriation event in chapter eight stands as a cautionary tale to prospective repatriates: repatriation risks becoming translokal. Conrad reveals how people’s dusun was transformed into a transmigration settlement in their absence: partitioned rice paddies populated by Javanese farmers and retired military personnel. Repatriates were then integrated into this transmigration settlement as local transmigrants known as translokal. Becoming translokal in the event of repatriation realises West Papuan refugees’ worst fear: that their ancestral land will be appropriated and they will become objects of the state. I consider the policy of translokal as a tactic of the state by drawing on Appadurai’s exploration of neighbourhoods as subversive formations.^[23]

Most West Papuans at East Awin chose not to repatriate, and applied for ‘permissive residency’. Chapters nine and ten explain how this residency status removes their classification as refugees and, significantly, allows relocation elsewhere in PNG, and visiting rights to the homeland. In theory, at least, permissive residents have the opportunity to select a viable location of resettlement in PNG. They can relocate themselves to a place that is familiar both culturally and ecologically, and ‘connected’ to the geographic region of origin by telephone and/or transport. Relocation to a viable place that allows connection with kin and neighbours in the village or town of origin may radically affect people’s experience of living outside the homeland.

Among West Papuan refugees at East Awin, a vision of teleological return to the geographical homeland continued at least until the end of my fieldwork research in 1999—which coincided with a short-lived period of political reformation across Indonesia. The largest repatriation event took place in 2000, involving 632 refugees, including 86 Dani. All repatriates were members of the West Papuan Indigenous People’s Association. Chapter eleven explores the evolution of a discourse of indigeneity among these refugees, and tracks the fateful event of the return of the Dani group to the Baliem homeland. Then I shift from return to arrival, specifically, the arrival of 400 West Papuan asylum seekers at Vanimo in 2000. The relocation of this group from Vanimo to East Awin in October 2004 will augur a new era. The arrival of new refugees in the wake of others’ departure, and their occupation of the vacant camp of repatriates, may cause those West Papuan refugees at East Awin who imagined their return to the geographical homeland to be imminent, to confront a different future.