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	Why nearly 2 million people are demanding an independence vote for West Papua province by Tasha Wibawa Asia Pacific News   Jan. 2019   Earlier this week, a petition signed by more than 1.8 million people calling for an independence referendum in Indonesia's West Papua province was delivered to United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet.   Benny Wenda, chairman of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), said he hoped the UN would send a fact-finding mission to the province to substantiate allegations of human rights violations.   "Today is a historic day for me and for my people," Mr Wenda said after the meeting in Geneva. "I handed over what I call the bones of the people of West Papua, because so many people have been killed."   Local media reported Indonesia's Minister for Defence, Ryamizard Ryacudu, told Parliament: "They're not allowed independence. Full stop."   The embattled Indonesian province has had a decades-long independence struggle, with its identity torn between several conflicting stakeholders.   West Papua and Papua, often referred to collectively as West Papua, are the easternmost provinces of Indonesia and their acquisition has been the cause of controversy for more than 60 years.   West Papua shares its borders and cultural ethnicity with Papua New Guinea, but while PNG was colonised by the British, prior to German and Australian administration, West Papua was colonised by the Dutch, setting it on a different course.   According to the Indonesian Centre of Statistics and the World Bank, West Papua's regional GDP per capita is significantly higher than the national average, mainly due to mining.   However, it is also the most impoverished region in the country with the highest mortality rates in children and expectant mothers, as well as the poorest literacy rates.   Control of West Papua was agreed to be transferred to Indonesia from the Dutch with the assistance of the United States government as a part of a US Cold War strategy to distance Indonesia from Soviet influence in 1962.   Prior to this, Australia had also supported the West Papuan bid for Independence, but backtracked due to a Cold War security logic to minimise 'the arc of instability'.   The Netherlands and Indonesia signed the New York Agreement, which would place Indonesia under UN Temporary Executive Authority until a referendum that would allow all adult West Papuans to decide on the fate of their independence, called the Act of Free Choice.   But in 1967, the Indonesian government signed a 30-year lease with US gold and copper mining company Freeport-McMoran to start mining in the resource-rich region, prior to the referendum.   Two years later, according to historians, a number of men were handpicked to vote under the monitor of the Indonesian military and voted unanimously to remain under Indonesian rule. It has since been dubbed the "Act of No Choice" by activists.   Indonesia and its representatives at the UN have since repeatedly rejected claims of human rights abuses in the region and demands for another referendum, saying the allegations have been spread by "Papuan separatist movements".   "The provinces of Papua and West Papua will always be a part of a unified Indonesia," Indonesian diplomat Ainan Nuran told the UN security council in 2017.   Clashes have occasionally broken out. In December, Indonesian police claimed independence supporters killed 19 people working at an Indonesian-owned construction company.   On Monday, the Indonesian military said separatists opened fire on an aircraft carrying military personal and local goverment officials, killing one soldier.   But verifying any information is difficult because of restrictions on press freedom and the remoteness of the location.   In 2015, Indonesian President Joko Widodo announced he would open the region to foreign journalists following decades of media blockades and bureaucratic red tape, but a series of statements by foreign journalists suggests otherwise.   A 2004 report from Yale Law School said the Indonesian government had "acted with necessary intent to perpetrate genocide against the people of West Papua", a claim the Indonesian government has strongly denied.   Activists have been imprisoned for displaying the West Papuan pro-independence Morning Star flag, and say they face discrimination and are subject to violent attacks for expressions of political views.   There have also been a number of military crackdowns that have been referred to by Human Rights Watch as "high priority" human rights abuse cases.   The number of insurgencies in the region has declined as the Papuan indigenous population halved due to government policies of transmigration.   The late West Papuan academic and activist John Otto Ondawame described the situation as "cultural genocide".   Transmigration refers to the government resettling Indonesians from high-population regions to low-population areas, which was formally ended by Mr Widodo in 2015.   The program was deemed controversial by analysts as it involved permanently moving people from densely populated areas of Java to sparsely population regions such as Papua.   It has been criticised as causing fears of the "Javanisation", or "Islamisation" of Papua, resulting in strengthened separatist movements and violence in the region. It's hard to say.   In 2017, Mr Wenda said he had presented a similar petition with the signatures of 1.8 million people demanding a vote on independence to the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation, although it became unclear whether the decolonisation committee actually received the documents.   This time, Mr Wenda was accompanying a Vanuatu delegation in Geneva and reportedly presented the document to the UN's human rights wing rather than the decolonisation committee.   Mr Wenda told the ABC he was hopeful the new petition delivered to a different branch of the UN would have an impact.   "We hope that she will deliver the petition to the secretary-general to review [the referendum] of 1969, and give the people of West Papua [the opportunity] to choose its own destiny," he said.   But the head of the Presidential Palace in Indonesia told local journalists this week, "The UN will respect Indonesia's sovereignty".   In the past, the ULMWP, along with other international activists, have called on the UN to review the 1969 referendum and investigate human rights abuses in the region. These requests have been repeatedly rejected by the UN and Indonesia has continued its administrative powers over the region.
	Migrants and refugees crossing Libya subjected to ''unimaginable horrors'' by UNHCR, OHCHR, MSF   Dec. 2018   Migrants and refugees are being subjected to "unimaginable horrors" from the moment they enter Libya, throughout their stay in the country and if they make it that far -- during their subsequent attempts to cross the Mediterranean sea, according to a UN report released this week.   The 61-page report, published jointly by the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) and the UN Human Rights Office, covers a 20-month period up to August 2018, and details a terrible litany of violations and abuses committed by a range of State officials, armed groups, smugglers and traffickers against migrants and refugees. These include unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention, gang rape, slavery, forced labour and extortion.   Based on 1,300 first-hand accounts gathered by UN human rights staff in Libya itself, as well from migrants who have returned to Nigeria or reached Italy, the report traces the entire journey of migrants and refugees from Libya's southern border, across the desert to the northern coast - a journey "marred by considerable risk of serious human rights violations and abuses every step of the way."   The climate of lawlessness in Libya provides fertile ground for thriving illicit activities, such as trafficking in human beings and criminal smuggling, and leaves migrants and refugees "at the mercy of countless predators who view them as commodities to be exploited and extorted," the report says.   "The overwhelming majority of women and older teenage girls interviewed by UNSMIL reported being gang raped by smugglers or traffickers," the report says. UN staff visiting 11 detention centres, where thousands of migrants and refugees are being held, documented torture, ill-treatment, forced labour, and rape by the guards, and reported that women are often held in facilities without female guards, exacerbating the risk of sexual abuse and exploitation. Female detainees are often subjected to strip searches carried out, or watched, by male guards.   Those who manage in the end to attempt the perilous Mediterranean sea crossing, are increasingly being intercepted or rescued by the Libyan Coast Guard which then transfers them back to Libya, where many are delivered straight back into the pattern of violations and abuse they have just escaped.   The approximately 29,000 migrants returned to Libya by the Coast Guard since early 2017 were transferred to immigration detention centres run by the Department of Combating Illegal Migration, where thousands remain detained indefinitely and arbitrarily, without due process or access to lawyers or consular services.   The report states Libya cannot be considered a place of safety following rescue or interception at sea, given the considerable risk of being subject to serious human rights abuses, and notes that these "pushbacks" have been considered by the UN Special rapporteur on torture as violations of the principle of non refoulement, which is prohibited under international law.   The report calls on the European Union and its Member States to reconsider the human costs of their policies and efforts to stem migration to Europe and ensure that their cooperation and assistance to the Libyan authorities are human rights-based, in line with their own obligations under international human rights and refugee law, and do not, directly or indirectly, result in men, women and children being trapped in abusive situations with little hope of protection and remedy.   Migrants held in the centres are systematically subjected to starvation and severe beatings, burned with hot metal objects, electrocuted and subjected to other forms of of ill-treatment with the aim of extorting money from their families through a complex system of money transfers.   The detention centres are characterized by severe overcrowding, lack of ventilation and lighting, and insufficient washing facilities and latrines. In addition to the abuses and violence committed against the people held there, many of them suffer from malnutrition, skin infections, acute diarrhoea, respiratory tract-infections and other ailments, as well as inadequate medical treatment. Children are held with adults in same squalid conditions.   The report points to the apparent "complicity of some State actors, including local officials, members of armed groups formally integrated into State institutions, and representatives of the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defence, in the smuggling or trafficking of migrants and refugees."   "There is a local and international failure to handle this hidden human calamity that continues to take place in Libya," said Special Representative of the Secretary-General and head of UNSMIL, Ghassan Salam.   Many people are held in unofficial and illegal centres run directly by armed groups or criminal gangs. They are frequently sold from one criminal group to another and required to pay multiple ransoms. "Countless migrants and refugees lost their lives during captivity by smugglers after being shot, tortured to death, or simply left to die from starvation or medical neglect," the report says.   "Across Libya, unidentified bodies of migrants and refugees bearing gunshot wounds, torture marks and burns are frequently uncovered in rubbish bins, dry river beds, farms and the desert."   "The situation is utterly dreadful," said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet. "Tackling the rampant impunity would not only end the suffering of tens of thousands of migrant and refugee women, men and children seeking a better life, but also undercut the parallel illicit economy built on the abuse of these people and help establish the rule of law and national institutions."   http://www.msf.org/migrants-and-refugees-returned-overcrowded-libyan-detention-centres-libya http://www.unhcr.org/desperatejourneys/ Visit the related web page
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