Another shooting occurred on Monday as a Freeport-owned car was attacked by unknown assailants in Mimika. Police officer First Brig. Marselinus was reportedly shot in the head and sent to a Freeport hospital in Mimika, Papua.
It was the fifth shooting in Papua in the past four weeks.
Unidentified gunmen attacked another Freeport car on Oct. 14, killing three workers and severely injuring three others, and an attack on a Freeport mining site on Oct. 21 left a contract worker and two local Timika residents dead.
Mulia Police chief Comr. Dominggus Oktavianus Awes was killed by unidentified assailants on Oct. 24.
Attacks that did not result in death took place on Oct. 26, when a Freeport patrol car was shot at mile 35 on the Tembagapura-Mimika road, and on Oct. 30, when Indonesian Military (TNI) personnel guarding an outpost came under heavy gunfire.
The police have been left chasing shadows as they have failed to glean any clues from the shootings to trace back to the unidentified assailants.
Police spokesperson Insp. Gen. Saud Usman said the police could not track the gunmen due to the difficult terrain and cold weather, and admitted that the pursuit was “almost impossible”.
“The field there is tremendously difficult,” Saud told reporters on Monday. “The gunmen are controlling the field very well, and our security personnel are having trouble navigating the terrain,”
Al Araf, a researcher from human rights watchdog Imparsial, slammed the police’s defensive tone, saying that the police had taken over the security responsibilities of the Freeport-controlled site from the TNI in 2004 and “had more than enough time” to master the terrain in Papua.
Al Araf described the police’s inability to identify the gunmen as unjustifiable, arguing that the police and the TNI could actually be held responsible for nurturing the region’s never-ending conflict.
“The suspicion here is that the bloody conflicts in Papua could be controlled by certain interests, and the police and the TNI themselves could be the ones who have been nurturing the conflicts in Papua since the [security operation of] Freeport is big business for them,” Al Araf told The Jakarta Post on Monday.
In contrast to the police’s failure to maintain security in Papua, the they have deployed huge amounts of security forces to the restive region.
According to Imparsial, there are 10,000 police officers and another 14,800 TNI reinforcements deployed in Papua, a region populated by 3 million people — 1 percent of Indonesia’s total population.
Critics said that the “excessive” amount of personnel deployed in Papua would only prevent peaceful dialogue from occurring, as the police and military have allegedly been involved in human rights violations in the region.
The National Commission of Human Rights (Komnas HAM) revealed on Friday that serious human rights violations occurred in Papua following the third Papuan People’s Congress at Abepura, Papua, in which three Papuans were killed by severe mutilation, with dozens of others reportedly also being tortured during police interrogation. (sat)