GARY JUFFA
WORLDWIDE this week we have seen some of the most horrific acts of violence. In Sydney Australia two innocent people and a perpetrator were killed. And in Peshawar Pakistan, in a mind-numbing atrocity, 132 children and nine adults were slaughtered.
Human lives were taken in brutal fashion too inhumane to imagine. It’s as if the world was attacked by some powerful evil force. Who kills children?
And there were many other acts of horrific violence that took place and were much less widely reported.
One that should ignite the concern of Melanesians and, indeed, all humanitarians is happened next door to Papua New Guinea in West Papua.
A most horrible and most shocking scandal. I would call it the crime of the century – the systematic genocide since 1967 of the Melanesian people of West Papua.
It is scandalous because the Western media choose not to report it. The same for entities professing concern about human lives such as the UN and its agencies.
Even the efforts of a few NGOs such as Amnesty International are often meek murmurs as if they are reluctant critics. One gets the feeling they would much rather not comment but have to because of a moral sense of guilt.
I am never impressed by the Western media who are simply just corporate puppets but the events of late make them even more reprehensible.
Shallow demonstrations of pseudo concern exposed by the "business as usual" approach to selling air time to advertise products and services. Everything has a price and can be bought, even human tragedy. Such is the Western media.
Anyway, in West Papua, brutal acts of unspeakable violence, tortures, rape and murder have been perpetrated for the last four decades without the world barely raising an eyebrow. Not a single expression carrying real weight has been made.
It’s as if to say that the people being killed off are an irrelevant species of life, hardly human, and unworthy of outrage and concern let alone systematic action.
In 1965, the UN Decolonisation Committee, at the behest of the United States government, handed over the Melanesian people of West Papua to Indonesia.
In the interests of fighting Communism, Suharto, the US sponsored dictator was placed in charge of West Papua. He proceeded to slaughter more than 300,000 people in less than a decade.
The West was satisfied as long as it had access to the rich resources of that half of the island and a strategic counterpoint to any possible Communist threat in the region.
The transmigration program then began – the State-sponsored and enforced migration of Javanese people to West Papua.
Resistance in West Papua was brutally repressed by the Western-trained army and police. The UN knowingly ignored these horrible acts against humanity.
On early Tuesday morning, two hostages were killed in Sydney by a deranged gunman, who was also killed. Many were injured. There was a genuine outpouring of public grief and a vampiric and pseudo-concerned media frenzy.
Even PNG’s prime minister and other regional leaders expressed sadness, outrage and grief. Of course, this is appropriate.
But there have been no such expressions this year about the numerous killings in West Papua.
The implied message is that we don’t care about West Papua and those people dying there, we only care about our own and rugby and fashion and Christmas specials and what some entertainer was seen wearing at some event.
The wanton killings of anyone should always be cause for concern and outrage.
So why the continued apathy of Western media and so-called defenders of democracy and champions of humanity to almost daily acts of State-sponsored terrorism and violence in West Papua?
Surely this situation is just as inhumane as what was witnessed in a Sydney café where two innocent people lost their lives?
Perhaps the Western world can ask and the UN these questions: is it OK if lives are lost in a nation where resources are being exploited and developed by our companies; is it OK if we “accidently” drop a missile on a wedding because we were fighting terror; is it OK if a child about to be born is ripped from the mother’s womb by a bayonet in a remote village in Wamena and, impaled, waved around to deter further acts of dissent ?
The Western media simply can’t close its eyes and imagine that it’s not happening.
It is happening. Every day.
My sincere condolences to the families of those killed by violence in this world, the two people killed in Sydney, Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson, the families of the 132 children and nine adults killed in Peshawar, and the families of those killed in West Papua since your hopes of freedom were so brutally crushed by the UN in 1967.