A group of 18 professors from the country’s top universities have urged the government to end the use of military force in dealing with problems in Papua, the nation’s easternmost region where violence and conflicts still persist.
The Academic Forum for a Peaceful Papua said separatism was not an isolated problem in Papua, hence deploying military troops would not end the conflicts ravaging the sregion.
“Using guns will never solve the problem because the issues are not only about separatism. The complexity of the problems in Papua involve many other factors, including history, politics, economics, sociocultural issues and, of course, welfare. Papua’s issues cannot be simplified to only separatism,” the group said in a statement released on Thursday.
To address such an array of problems, the academics said, peaceful dialogue must be used. “Only by using dialogue can we determine the problems in Papua and find the best ways to solve them,” they said.
The group includes Padang State University’s Mestika Zed, Hasanuddin University’s Arfin Hamid, Gadjah Mada University’s Purwo Santoso, and the University of Indonesia’s Muridan S. Widjojo.
The latest violence occurred Thursday, when a family car was shot at by unknown assailants in Ja-yapura. Local police said the car had been shot at least 18 times, detik.com reported. Last week, a string of fatal incidents took place across Papua, while thousands of Papuans rallied to demand a referendum.
Clashes between supporters of two rival candidates for regent in the newly created Puncak regency claimed at least 19 lives. This was followed by the killing of four people in a village near the provincial capital Jayapura. The Indonesian Military (TNI) has blamed some of the violence on the Free Papua Movement (OPM).
Thaha Al-Hamid, secretary-general of the Papua Presidium Council (PDP), said conflicts in Papua would always be linked with the TNI, regardless of their number.
“It is more to do with the behaviour and paradigm of the TNI. They tend to look at us differently, as if Papua was Jakarta’s enemy,” Thaha told a discussion during the launch of a 2011 study on Papua by human rights group Imparsial on Tuesday. The study concluded that the expansion of the TNI’s command centers in Papua, and the deployment of more troops to the region, contributes to an “unhealthy” relationship between locals and military personnel, resulting in continuing violent incidents.
“One soldier and a platoon can be considered as equal in terms of the psychological effect on locals, as long as paradigm reform does not take place,” Thaha said.
Imparsial program director Al Araf said the central government’s decision to increase the number of military posts in Papua and send more troops to the region may be taken as proof that Jakarta has never been serious about ending the violence in Papua, a province that provides large state revenues thanks to its lucrative extractive and forestry industries.
“According to the data that we collected for this study, there are about 16,000 soldiers in Papua. And yet the government has planned to increase the number to more than 32,000 by 2024. This kind of security approach will never end violence.”
Bambang Darmono, a former military general who now heads the government’s agency for the acceleration of development in Papua and West Papua (UP4B), said the government was actually not trying to use a security approach to address Papua’s problems. “We are implementing socioeconomic and cultural-political approaches toward Papua. The fact that security forces are being deployed is to cope with the security issues that appear to be ‘side effects’,” he said.