In West Papua Indonesian History Is Repeating Itself as Tragedy

THE flight from Bali to Jayapura, in the Indonesian half of Papua, offers a stunning view. The planes stop at Timika soon after dawn to connect with helicopters leaving for Grasberg, the largest gold mine and third-largest copper mine in the world. As the sun rises, a vast expanse of lush forest emerges. From the air it is a vision of Eden.

But on the ground, these are dark days.

Ever since 1969, and a ludicrously misnamed “Act of Free Choice”, when a decision by 1,025 selected Papuans was deemed an act of self-determination accepting Indonesian sovereignty over the former Dutch colony, simmering, low-level resistance has persisted. After the fall in 1998 of the dictator, Suharto, and the flowering of Indonesian democracy, the region was granted “special autonomy” in 2001 and renamed Papua (from Irian Jaya). In 2003 it was split into two provinces—Papua and West Papua. But Indonesia continues to rule the region in the Suharto style, through shadowy parts of the security forces. This year a spate of unexplained deaths has raised tensions. At least 17 people have been killed since May. Jayapura’s usually bustling streets are deserted after nightfall. Anonymous text-messages warn people to stay indoors, recalling memories of previous crackdowns. 

In Wamena, a sprawling town in the highlands, it is wise to take a bicycle rickshaw, not a motorcycle taxi. The cyclists, calves bulging as they labour, are native Papuans and know the way. The motorbikes belong to the Indonesian migrants—from Sulawesi, Madura and Java—who make up 40-50% of the 3.6m population of the two provinces. Migrants own the shops, restaurants and building firms, and man the police and army. Native Papuans sit in the dirt to hawk vegetables and fruit. Women traipse in from the countryside with hand-knotted nets strapped to their foreheads, stuffed with cabbages, piglets and sometimes their babies. To the migrants’ disgust, some men still come into town naked but for their penis gourds. The mainly Muslim settlers and mostly Christian Papuans do not always get along.

Three recent incidents, above all, have contributed to the climate of fear. On May 29th a German tourist was shot on the beach at Jayapura. Activists link the shooting to hearings that month at the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, where Indonesia was discussed. Among the
countries unusually critical of its record, especially in Papua, was Germany. The suspicion is that parts of Indonesia’s security forces want to show that Papua remains dangerous, blaming the Free Papua Movement, or OPM, a secessionist group that has used guerrilla tactics.

Then on June 6th a ten-year-old boy was injured by a motorcycle ridden at high speed by two Indonesian soldiers through a village near Wamena. Angry locals attacked the soldiers, killing one of them. Their comrades came back for revenge on the villagers, setting fire to some of their houses. At least one person died. For critics of the army this was a typical tale of its indiscipline, brutality and impunity. Even after a video seen around the world in 2010 showed soldiers torturing Papuan suspects, the three culprits received jail sentences of just eight to ten months, for insubordination.

In the third incident, security forces in Jayapura on June 14th shot dead Mako Tabuni, a leading advocate of a referendum on Papuan independence. The police say they had reason to suspect him of recent killings, and that he was carrying the gun used to shoot the German tourist. Eyewitnesses, however, have said he was unarmed and doing nothing more aggressive than buying betel nut when he was killed.

All of this is eerily reminiscent of the way Indonesia ruled its former province of East Timor for 24 years. There, too, abusive and mysterious security forces fuelled local resentment. There, too, Indonesia divided to rule, stressing the fissures among the local population. There, too, it would blame unrest on a tiny resistance manipulated by foreign forces. In East Timor Indonesia tried to contain unrest by closing off the territory. Papua is largely off-limits to foreign journalists. Foreign NGOs—even those dealing with an HIV epidemic spread by prostitution—are finding visas for their workers hard to come by. Some feel pressure to leave Papua altogether.

Yet there are reasons to doubt that Papua can follow East Timor into the independence it has now, as Timor-Leste, enjoyed for ten years. First, East Timor’s legal status was different. Through the occupation, Portugal remained, under the UN charter, the “administering” power. Much as the outside world might have liked to forget the problem, there were legal reminders of its existence. The Act of Free Choice, though a flagrant injustice, was nevertheless one to which the UN was party. Second, the Papuan resistance is not as coherent even as the faction-ridden Timorese.

Third, and most important, Timor-Leste’s oil-and-gas income is relatively modest, and started to flow only after independence. Papua is already a treasure-chest. That immense forest is pockmarked in places by isolated lighter-green squares, where the trees have been felled and oil palm planted. And Freeport McMoRan, Grasberg’s owner, claims to be the largest single taxpayer to the Indonesian government. Indonesia is not going to part with such riches easily. It has invested heavily in Papua, buying itself a corps of people with a vested interest in its continued rule.

The SBY effect

Its rule in Papua is a reminder that Indonesia’s current president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, was a general under Suharto, that the army has not cleaned up its act since its atrocities in East Timor and in the conflict in Aceh in Sumatra, and that, in some other respects, too, his regime looks less like the repudiation of Suharto’s Indonesia than its continuation. But Mr Yudhoyono enjoys being feted internationally as the leader of a beacon of democratic moderation.

Papua may be the place where that image, already tarnished, is irrevocably stained.
-- The Economist

Japan’s lay judges, and why Australia should listen up

In 2009 Japan introduced two systems of lay adjudication: a quasi-jury system (saiban-in seido) and a grand jury system, the Prosecution Review Commission (kensatsu shinsakai or PRC).

Much public and scholarly attention has been paid to the quasi-jury trials, where six citizens and three professional judges decide on criminal matters. But the greatest impact of lay adjudication is seen in the power of the new grand jury, the PRC, to prosecute members of formerly untouchable groups.

The PRC was established in 1948. Eleven randomly chosen citizens were asked to review the prosecutor’s failure to prosecute the accused, often reversing its decision and recommending the accused be prosecuted. But because PRC decisions were regarded as advisory, prosecutors consistently failed to follow them. The new PRC law, however, made prosecution recommendations legally binding, leading to a series of high-profile prosecutions, including that of prominent politician Ichiro Ozawa over political funding violations in 2009. While Ozawa was recently acquitted, the prosecutor’s decision to appeal his acquittal further hampered his ability to return to the political scene.

The introduction of these two systems of citizen adjudication is the product of grassroots movements supported by progressive lawyers and concerned citizen activists, who sought to bring about transparency and accountability in Japan’s criminal justice system.

In the post-war decades, civilian efforts to transform Japan’s criminal court system were focused on re-introducing Japan’s 1923 Jury Law, which the military government had suspended in 1943 in favour of a collegial bench trial system. Without juries, the post-war colleges had a 99.9 per cent criminal conviction rate. By contrast, pre-war juries acquitted 17 per cent of criminal defendants. This imbalance prompted victims of wrongful convictions and their families, progressive lawyers and civil activists to advocate and secure all-citizen jury trials.

The campaign to reinstate jury trials gained momentum with the creation in 1982 of the Research Group on Jury Trial (Baishin Saiban o Kangaeru Kai or RGJT). This organisation was led by prominent legal writer Chihiro Isa, who participated in a 1964 jury trial in US-controlled Okinawa. Also joining the group were prominent Attorney Shojiro Goto and many progressive lawyers from the Japanese Federation of Bar Associations (JFBA). The RGJT soon became the national centre for disseminating jury information and organising public forums attended by prominent scholars and jurists. Individual RGJT members also created branch organisations in Niigata, Osaka, Kumamoto and other regions.

Another organisation that helped establish lay adjudication systems is the PRC Society (Kensatsu Shinsakai Kyokai), established in 1955 by former PRC members. Its purpose was to educate the public about the importance of citizen participation in law, as well as civilian oversight of the activities of Japanese prosecutors.

The influence of these movements came to fruition when a JFBA lawyer, who was a long-time RGJT member and worked closely with the PRC Society, successfully joined the governmental joint-task force to formulate specific provisions of the quasi-jury and PRC systems. Since the introduction of the systems in 2009, more than 600,000 citizens have served as PRC members.

Both the quasi-jury and the new PRC systems then successfully altered the ways in which military crimes are adjudicated, eradicating the privilege of extraterritoriality reserved for US military personnel stationed in Japan. In 2010, an American soldier who robbed and injured a cab driver was tried in a lay court for the first time in Japanese legal history. The quasi-jury panel found him guilty and sentenced him to 3–4 years in a Japanese prison. The PRC’s decisions in subsequent cases involving American military personnel also forced the Japanese and US governments to modify the US–Japan Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) policies on the handover of military felons.

Similar civilian oversight functions are needed in Australia. In November 2011, President Obama announced that the US would deploy 2500 marines to Australia and made an agreement that allowed the US Air Force to have increased access to airfields near Darwin. Like in Japan, the increased presence of US soldiers in Australia risks the victimisation of local residents, as the case of the US Navy sailor who killed an Australian cyclist in Willowbank, Queensland, in 2011 shows. But as the US–Australia SOFA gives the US military the right to exercise primary jurisdiction over crimes committed while on duty in Australia, it was an American military court, rather than an Australian court, that adjudicated the crime.

It is time for civil activists and grassroots organisations in Australia to reclaim the right to exercise primary jurisdiction over crimes committed by foreign soldiers. Similarly, a civilian oversight panel might be established to monitor the decisions of Australian prosecutors. Japan’s recent history offers some clues to the benefits of citizen adjudication and the need to create civilian oversight of both the Australian and US governments’ activities.

Hiroshi Fukurai is Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Trouble in Paradise

Does that mosque in Male look deceptively friendly?

Democracy suffers in Maldives in the face of rising fundamentalism

The Indian Ocean paradise Maldives, until recently a moderate Muslim state, is the latest Asian country to witness a troubling rise in ultraconservative Wahhabi Islam imported from the Middle East. Male, the country’s capital.

On June 2, Ismail Rasheed, popularly known as ‘Hilath,’ was attacked outside his home when his throat was slit through his trachea, missing a vital artery by millimetres. Rasheed, an outspoken blogger advocating freedom of religion and a fierce critic of the growing religious extremism in the archipelago country, is expected to survive the near-fatal attempt on his life, the second. The gruesome assault on Rasheed cannot be treated as an isolated episode. It is an upshot of the rising religious radicalization in Maldives, whose constitution does not allow any national to practice a religion other than Islam.

Rising religious intolerance

Religious intolerance has been rising steadily in the country, which lies about 700 km south of the Indian coast. According to a 2010 US State Department report, “NGO sources …stated that in general the media practice self-censorship on issues related to Islam due to fears of being labelled ‘anti-Islamic’ and subsequently being harassed.” The Ministry of Islamic Affairs blocks antic-Islamic websites as well as sites featuring information on Christianity. Statements contrary to government policy or to the government's interpretation of Islam are blocked by law.

Under the reign of the former President Mamoun Abdul Qayoom, the island country strived to remain moderate. However, the inroads made by Islamic fundamentalists among Maldivians travelling and living in other Islamic countries has paved the way toward the foundation of a thriving Wahhabi movement. As conservatism has spread among the 395,000 population, the majority of them Sunni Muslims, so has a hard refusal to allow any religious deviationism.

In 2010, Mohamed Nazim, a Maldivian, faced the rage of a violent mob consisting of about 11,000 people who demanded an apostasy punishment of death for publicly declaring himself as a non-Muslim. After three days of counseling by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Nazim apologized before journalists for his action. In the same year, Ismail Didi, a young self-proclaimed atheist, committed suicide after he had failed to secure political asylum abroad.

Ismail Rasheed has received repeated threats to his life for voicing his concerns about religious extremism. He used his blog extensively to critique the radical conservatives through perceptive and satirical writings. He asserted his firm orientation toward Sufi Islam in a country where Sufis and Shias are considered apostates. He has claimed he is being persecuted by hard-line Sunnis because of his demand for a liberal interpretation of Islam in a country whose constitution favors the practice of Sunni Islam.

Rasheed’s blogs were blocked by the Communications Authority of Maldives (CAM) in 2011 on the order of Ministry of Islamic Affairs, which claimed the blog possessed ‘anti-Islamic’ material. The first assault on his life took place in December 2011 at the Artificial Beach, a popular place for sports, games and events such as live music shows in Male, where he joined a group of 30 Maldivians who had gathered at a peaceful protest on International Human Rights Day to call for religious freedom. The group was attacked by stone-throwing members of religious advocacy groups. While it remains uncertain whether the assailants actually intended to murder Rasheed, his skull was fractured in deliberate violence unleashed on him.

Rather than arresting his assailants, police arrested Rasheed on the insistence of religious conservatives led by the Adhaalath Party and the NGO Jamiyyathu Salaf, which demanded legal action against the participants of the gathering. Rasheed was called a prisoner of conscience by human rights groups and networks across the globe who had criticized his arrest.

The skepticism about the Maldivian government’s commitment to democratic principles of freedom of speech and expression has grown in the backdrop of the government’s reaction to the brutal attack the activist earlier this month. While condemning the attack and the use of violence, the Human Resource and Youth Minister reiterated that Maldives is not a secular country and warned of that disagreements by extremists are plausible. As of today, the police have made little progress in finding his assailant. Some suspect possible sabotaging of the case to please the fundamentalists.

Fledgling illiberal democracy

Maldives, like many other countries in the world, fits a description of democracy in which popular attention to real democracy remains constrained, with the government paying only lip service to its forms but not its core values. According to the scholar Amitai Etzioni, the world today conflates its understanding of democracy with liberalism. The casting of votes by the people of a territory toward electing a government is indispensable for a flourishing democracy irrespective of the commitment of the elected government toward liberal principles such as individual’s freedom of speech and expression, indispensable civil liberties and rights of individuals.

In Maldives, the parliament’s decision to create a multiparty system in 2005 was upheld as significant progress in welcoming democracy to the country. In this regard, the emergence of the conservative Adhaalath party is criticized to have contributed toward the precarious swelling of religious intolerance, which threatens the realization of substantive democracy in Maldives. Although many scholars believe in the compatibility between Islam and liberal democracy, the Wahhabi movement in Maldives has been able to radicalize the religion by encouraging the use of violence to suppress voices of dissent.

Yet Maldives continues to be called a democracy. The forthcoming days are critical to see if they affirm the fundamentalist belief that democracy is a scourge to the freedom and individual rights of Maldivians.

(Annapoorna Karthika is a Research Officer at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi.)

Japan's Nuclear Ambitions Awaken

A seemingly minuscule change in its law may have big implications

It would be wrong to say Japan’s experience as the first victim of nuclear weapons in 1945, the year when the United States became the world’s first nuclear power, is a permanent deterrent to its own ambitions for nuclear weapons. It would be also a mistake to assume that the country’s nuclear trauma in the 67-year wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially since the 2011 Fukushima era, has snuffed the government’s interest in weaponization.

It is thus disappointing but not surprising that Japan recently altered its basic law on atomic energy to include “national security” among its goals for nuclear power. An Upper House session was quick to revise the main principles of the basic law on nuclear power for the first time in 34 years so as to avoid the neighbors’ watchful gaze. That adds fuel to the fire that the new wording could be a stepping stone to legally permitting the development of atomic weapons in the not-to-distant future. It is hardly the first time that Japan has fumbled the nuclear issue with its neighbors, although Japanese officials in the past have always immediately moved to squash such allegations.

Environment Minister Goshi Hosono told the Diet on June 13 that “security means nonproliferation.” Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura reiterated the government's stance on the following day, apparently in consideration of the growing concerns from the neighboring countries, assuring that “our principles over the peaceful use of nuclear power will be firmly observed.” These allegations are the equivalent of arguing that fishhooks do cause the catching of fish, since this can also involve rods, reels and anglers.

In any case, the Japanese nuclear program is not so much driven by ideology as by a mixture of fear and ambition. In effect, that is what Japanese leaders on the right wing are already doing, and will continue doing so long as the following troubles are not fundamentally resolved.

First, China’s rise poses serious threats to the national security and sovereignty of Japan. Historically, the Japanese people have a negative impression of China and vice versa. For example, the territorial spat over the Senkaku Islands, known to the Chinese as the Diaoyus, which are controlled by Japan but claimed by China, has darkened both sides of the East China Sea. There are still-fresh scars left by wartime atrocities, such as the 1937 Nanjing Massacre and the Manchurian Incident of 1931, in which Japanese troops fabricated a bomb attack and used it as a pretext to invade and establish a puppet government. Japan has long been a target for Chinese expansionism in Asia in areas where American military and economic influence are beginning to wane.

Second, Japan fears that America’s ability to control global and regional issues is inevitably declining. The weakening US power therefore raises a fundamental question to Japan: how to live ‘harmoniously’ with China in the region, given that America’s ‘pivot to Asia’ remains uncertain. It is an article of faith among Japanese conservatives that the possession of nuclear weapons would function as the great equalizer that would guarantee its security. In fact, Japan may be skeptical of whether the US can still provide the credibility of its extended deterrence commitments in the event of a Chinese conventional, chemical or biological attack.

Third, North Korea’s die-hard nuclear ambitions, as evidenced in 2009 and 2009 nuclear tests, have served up a good excuse to revise the basic Japanese atomic energy laws. In particular, Japanese conservatives have played up the outlaw regime’s threats and played down the US’s nuclear umbrella. Talk of the nuclear umbrella may be music to the Japanese right but it’s not to the public as a whole.

This isn’t to say the Japanese are fond of American nuclear deterrence in the region. In spite of Washington’s efforts to make the North’s nuclear weapons program obsolete, Pyongyang has officially declared itself a nuclear-armed state in a constitutional revision in the last April. Japan may find the crippled six-party talks unnecessary to resolve the denuclearization of North Korea. Most of Japanese pundits have long since stopped believing the North would abandon its nuclear weapons program.

Finally, most Japanese now feel more insecure than at any time during the lost decades. They are often seen as losers in many respects. Japanese political elites thus feel the urgency of creating new momentum so as to rebound quickly from the tsunami and Fukushima disaster, while watching nervously the military and economic rise of China. Japan’s relatively stagnant has filled this social vacuum and eventually revived concerns that the Japanese could be drawn into a Sino-Japanese conflict in the immediate future, as the successful Chinese atomic bomb test in October 1964 prompted some right-wing Japanese leaders, including Yasuhiro Nakasone (to become prime minister long later), to call for a reconsideration of Japan’s policy of nuclear abstention.

Needless to say, Japan has a nuclear future. But foreign Japan watchers need to understand the differences of the Japanese expressions between rhetoric and reality, called honne (underlying intention) and tatemae (surface meaning). An equivocal Japan has a long history of its political leaders both expressing and hiding nuclear nationalism. Prime Minister Eisaku Sato shocked the then Johnson administration at a private meeting in January 1965 by claiming that “if Chinese communists had nuclear weapons, the Japanese also should have them,” but also announced to the National Diet in December 1967 the adoption of ‘Three Non-Nuclear Principles.’ These stated that Japan would not manufacture, possess, or permit the introduction of nuclear weapons onto Japanese soil.

In the spring of 1968 nevertheless, Sato allegedly commissioned clandestine, nongovernmental research on Japan’s nuclearization in the disguised name of ‘The Study Group on Democracy.’ Needless to say, Sato held dyed-in-the-wool views that the possession of nuclear weapons would secure Japan’s future.

While the recent revision of the Atomic Energy Basic Law has been somewhat disconnected from reality on the ground, the Japanese public with their severe nuclear allergy, can be ‘educated.’ It’s an open secret that Japan now possesses enough weapons-grade plutonium on its soil to make more than 700 nukes. Critics warn that Japan’s latent capability to acquire nuclear weapons constitutes an unacceptable threat in the volatile region.

Japan as a responsible country is thus again on the brink of a nuclear dilemma emanating from a combination of fear and ambition. Diplomatically cautious though it may be for South Korea, China and North Korea to take issue with Japan, Tokyo’s nuclear reticence will likely continue to evolve, politically and militarily. If the pattern of benign neglect strategically continues, Japan’s neighbors will grow less interested in cooperating with Tokyo and any possibility of North Korea’s denuclearization, slim at best, will disappear. In a sense, Japan has jilted the Obama administration’s nuclear free-world mantra.

One would think that Japan and its ‘close and distant neighbors’ could find common ground on security and stability in Northeast Asia. Yet there have been little more than historically deep-rooted public spats among them. Inevitably, ordinary Japanese dance to a tune played by political and military elites, with no regard to a yawning gulf between the elites and the people. The truth of nuclear ambitions is not always easy to hear, but this may turn out to be Japan’s greatest diplomatic challenge.

(Lee Byong-Chul is a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Cooperation in Seoul.)