Insignificance and Uncertainties in West Papua: A Letter of Insecurities of A Spoiled Middle-Class

If you’re born during the 1990’s or experienced the 1998 revolution by looking at the marching buses full with angry civilians waving their flags crying for a change — through a window of the building that you had Kumon elementary school math course inside.. then probably you, more or less are seeing the same thing through the same lens with me right now.

Perhaps what we see isn’t as important as what we don’t see. 

After the fall of Soeharto and the New Order regime, Indonesia turned slowly from a feudalistic authoritarian country to a somewhat “democratic” one. The change that people have been waiting for finally came, or so we believe.

Us, the proud bastards of the 90s, were always told not to remember the sins of our fathers through the “un-exposedness” of the mass media. Our history textbooks only tell what the winner of history wanted to tell: the communist purge, East Timor, or any other sites of state-sponsored violence and genocides. Not to mention how they told us the reason for justifying the gore act that they did to our Chinese-descendant brothers and neighbors; or how beautiful Bali is, until the ocean waves slowly washes away the sand that hides hundreds of graveyard of innocent men and unborn child.

West Papua is another picture-perfect example. We always knew how primitive the Papuan people are; that we’re nobles in fine clothes and them the koteka-wearing savages. We always knew that god gave birth to one of the prettiest paradise on earth there, which we call Raja Ampat; that their land has rich-load of gold and natural resources. We always knew that, not only wears koteka, but they’re also a life-threatening separatist savages; that we always know the number of soldiers killed by OPM (Free Papua Movement).

But what we’ve never been told is that Papuans are also human. We never knew how they struggle for their lives; how they fight for their land and trees, so some multinational corporation won’t rape it; how they honor the nature and their ancestors. We never knew their history; how they’ve fought for their independence from the Dutch in 1961; how their fathers were pointed with guns and will get shot in the head if they don't vote for supporting Indonesia’s occupation in the 1969 “Act of Free Choice” at New York. We never knew the number of Papuan men that had bullets shot into their head, or their women being ripped off and raped by our noble state military men in front of their own village families in an open field, or how their children carries inerasable scars of war trauma.

So who’s to blame for this confusion? Who do we have to believe? Which “truth” do we have to seek? Perhaps it is a truth that we only see what we want to see. That we’re born ignorant and will die in ignorance. Thus, repeating what history sang about RMS Titanic, our great “nation” would sail bravely to the “great perhaps” — and sink in cinematic and obsolete nature, caused by our own iceberg of ignorance.