Once again, the Indonesian government is escalating violence against West Papua by sending 5 infantry battalions to 5 regions in West Papua to silently support national agricultural projects there. This means more land grabbing and worsening ethnic cleansing will take place in West Papua.

State violence against the West Papuans began with Indonesia’s forced annexation of West Papua in the 1960s. Ethnic cleansing against the indigenous Papuan community and the migration of people from other islands to exploit West Papua occurred after that annexation.

Similar to the violence of Israel against Palestine, the process of Indonesia’s violence against West Papua is more commonly known as settler colonialism, which is regulated by bureaucracy and military support under the name of national interest that declared independence from Dutch colonialism in the 1940s.

However, ironically, the violence that started under the dictatorship of Suharto continues through the newly installed Prabowo-Gibran government, which has taken over as the latest president of this nation-state, akin to the Dutch colonialism in Java since the mid-18th century. What is different this time is that the violence occurs within the borders of a nation-state that gained independence in the 1940s.

The concepts of nation-state and industrial capitalism originated in Western Europe. Such concepts were introduced by Western colonizers to their “backward or primitive” colonies. The nation-state concept then became a weapon in the struggle for independence from the hands of Western colonizers.

Once again, ironically, the most marginalized communities or ethnic groups often become the victims in the modernization of newly independent nation-states. They are frequently perceived as “primitive” by the dominant ethnic groups within those new nation-states. In fact, the Suharto dictatorship once used the racist argument that Papuans were too “primitive” to justify the domination over them.

New nation-states often employ capitalist economic development methods used by Western colonizers, particularly capital accumulation in the name of national interest, which usually involves the extraction of natural resources and the exploitation of cheap human resources.

Moreover, the elite from developing countries often collude with elites from developed countries for mutual interests in the global economic and political system that favors developed countries, especially the United States. The annexation of West Papua by Indonesia itself was a maneuver that favored U.S. imperialism in competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Once again, the Socialist Party of Malaysia (PSM) wishes to express solidarity with the indigenous peoples of West Papua in their struggles for self-determination. Therefore, we call on the Indonesian government to withdraw security forces from West Papua, halt transmigration, and cease national agricultural projects in the region immediately to mitigate harm to the West Papuans.