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The frosty streets and orderly villas of Tyreso, a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden, are a long way from the bamboo huts and steamy jungles of the Papua region. But for Ruben Maury and Daniel Kafiar they have been home for nearly three decades, the base from which they have championed their seemingly Quixotic cause — independence for the western half of New Guinea Island.

Maury, a good-natured man in his 70s who seems to know everybody in Tyreso, is greeted by the local tobacconist with a friendly “hello Ruben,” and he is a fixture at the local library. The younger and more energetic Kafiar carries stacks of documents in his briefcase. Both are hard-line advocates of total independence who do not believe in a negotiated Aceh-style autonomy. “We’re different from Aceh,” Kafiar says. “Historically, our ties have been with Oceania, not Asia. Our connections have always been eastwards, not westwards.”

Maury roamed the jungles of Indonesia’s Papua for many years in the 1970s, until he and some of his comrades retreated across the border to Papua New Guinea, where he was arrested. Following a year in prison in Port Moresby, he was resettled as a refugee in Sweden in 1979. Kafiar followed a year later, and the two have since represented the Free Papua Movement, or OPM, in Europe. Outlawed in Indonesia, their breakaway cause has found few sympathizers internationally outside a few small Pacific island states such as Vanuatu and Nauru, despite their appeals to governments around the world.

While some international NGOs — among them Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — have expressed concern over human rights abuses in the provinces of Papua and West Papua, no one, it seems, wants to see the dismemberment of Indonesia.

East Timor was a special case, the argument goes. When Indonesia was proclaimed an independent state on Aug. 17, 1945, it encompassed all the territories of the former Dutch East Indies. Indonesia did not, at that time, claim what was then Portuguese East Timor. When the Dutch finally left in 1949, they held on to their western half of New Guinea. They argued that the territory was culturally different from the rest of the old colony, and that the Papuans would be exploited by the more sophisticated Javanese, if it was handed over to Indonesia.

Throughout the 1950s, the Dutch initiated moves to make their part of New Guinea an independent state. Education was improved, a naval academy was opened, Papuan troops began service, local elections were held and the territory even adopted its own flag and national anthem. But all this happened at a time when Southeast Asia was in turmoil. The communist movement was strong throughout the region, and especially in Indonesia. The United States warned the Netherlands against trying to defend New Guinea if the Indonesians attempted to capture it by force.

“We’re victims of Cold War politics,” Kafiar says. “No one ever asked us what we wanted. It all happened above our heads.”

In a secret letter to then-Dutch Prime Minister J.E. de Quay, President John F. Kennedy wrote: “This would be a war in which neither the Netherlands nor the West could win in any real sense. Whatever the outcome of particular military encounters, the entire free world position in Asia would be seriously damaged. Only the communists would benefit from such a conflict. If the Indonesian Army were committed to all-out war against the Netherlands, the moderate elements within the Army and the country would be quickly eliminated, leaving a clear field for communist intervention. If Indonesia were to succumb to communism in these circumstances, the whole non-communist position in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaya would be in grave peril, and as you know these are areas in which we in the United States have heavy commitments and burdens.”

The Netherlands gave in and on Aug. 15, 1962, Indonesia and the Netherlands signed an agreement in New York. The territory was to be handed over to the United Nations during a transitional period, then be transferred to Indonesia — but on condition that the Papuans would have the right to decide their own future. On May 1, 1963, Indonesia took full charge of the territory and renamed it first West Irian and later Irian Jaya. In mid-1969, the promised referendum was eventually held, but The Act of Free Choice, as it was called, was open to only 1,025 hand-picked delegates — and they all voted in favor of integration with Indonesia. The United Nations accepted the result and Western powers turned a deaf ear to protests over the circumstances surrounding the vote.

By then, the OPM had been formed and hit-and-run attacks began in the highlands. Ruben Maury joined the movement in 1970, abandoning his family and a job as a pharmacist in Jayapura. He had been sent to study in the Netherlands in the 1950s and, in 1962, he and five other Papuans were invited to visit Indonesia. They met President Sukarno and other state leaders but the Papuans made no promises. “We told them that we were on a study tour,” Maury says. “They sent beautiful girls to our hotel rooms, but I didn’t give in to the temptation, or to their suggestion that we should join Indonesia.”

Returning, Maury spent eight years in the jungle with the OPM before he and some of his ill-equipped comrades crossed into independent Papua New Guinea in 1978. There, they received little sympathy — Papua New Guinea did not want to antagonize its powerful neighbor — and were detained for illegal entry. A year later, Sweden accepted Maury and four other OPM leaders as political refugees, and they arrived there in March 1979. Among them was also Jacob Prai, one of the founders of OPM, and John Otto Ondawame, who now represents the movement in Port Vila, Vanuatu.

They were not alone in Sweden. Over in another part of Stockholm, Hasan di Tiro was helping to lead the fight for Aceh independence. In the southern university city of Lund, the Pattani United Liberation Organization, or PULO, was sending out letters demanding independence for Thailand’s southern Muslim provinces. And in the 1980s, the communist New People’s Army of the Philippines was active here.

And it is not just Asians. Representatives of Peru’s Shining Path Maoist guerrilla movement maintain a presence in Sweden through a “friendship association.” Before the collapse of South Africa’s apartheid regime, the African National Congress used Stockholm as its base in the West.
Why is peaceful Sweden, which hasn’t known war for two centuries and is better known for Nobel prizes, Ericsson mobile phones and the pop group ABBA, a magnet for the disgruntled? It all began in 1968 when then-Education Minister and future Prime Minister Olof Palme demonstrated against the Vietnam War in Stockholm, marching side-by-side with North Vietnam’s ambassador to Moscow. A year later, Sweden recognized North Vietnam, and the “Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam” opened an office in Stockholm.

Since then, independence movements and revolutionary organizations have flocked to Sweden, drawn by its liberal refugee policy. Indeed, there are now so many that it’s hard for them all to make their voices heard — and hard for the government to check the backgrounds of some of the less attractive ones. That has helped fuel a backlash against political refugees in this liberal bastion, which has led to electoral gains by anti-immigrant groups.

But as Sweden’s welcome cools, the Papuans may fare better than others. Although they look as un-Swedish as possible, there is a lot of interest in New Guinea in this country. That is largely thanks to one man, Sten Bergman. In the 1950s, this Swedish aristocrat ventured into some of the remotest parts of then-Dutch New Guinea, and went on to write a best-selling book about his experiences — “My Father is a Cannibal.”

A whole generation of Swedes — myself among them — grew up reading it. We were fascinated by this daring Swede dressed in a white safari suit and by his adopted stepfather, a Papuan village chief who had eaten human flesh and whose wardrobe consisted of a penis sheath and a boar tusk through his nose.

That romantic image of New Guinea may belong to history but the need to find a solution to the Papuan conflict is still a reality. It become even more pressing after the Free Aceh Movement, or GAM, signed its peace deal with Jakarta on Aug. 15, 2005. GAM gave up its demand for independence in favor of autonomy and agreed to lay down its arms while Jakarta promised to withdraw all nonlocal military and police forces. The peace process was supervised by an Aceh Monitoring Mission set up jointly by the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean. A presidential decree granted amnesty to GAM members. The Aceh agreement has been hailed as one of the most important successes in solving a civil conflict in modern times, and the man who brokered it, former Finnish President Martii Ahtisaari, was awarded the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to restore peace in Aceh and elsewhere. Hasan di Tiro and other exiles were able to return to Aceh, and GAM leaders are now mainstream politicians.

But both Maury and Kafiar reject an Aceh-style solution. They also oppose the split of the former province of Irian Jaya into Papua and West Papua, which was made in February 2003. And the limited autonomy the territory was granted in January 2002 does not satisfy their aspirations either.

“Autonomy is not a lasting solution,” Maury says. “The people want independence, not autonomy. We’ve already made up our minds.”

While the OPM unilaterally declared independence on July 1, 1971, it has not been recognized by any foreign country. The mission in Vanuatu was set up in 1987 by Kafiar, who traveled there from Sweden and met Walter Lini, the country’s first prime minister. At the time, Vanuatu provided support to the Kanak indigenous liberation movement in French New Caledonia, and was the only country in the region to support the right of East Timor to self-determination. Kafiar remained in Vanuatu for two years before returning to Sweden. Following Lini’s resignation in 1991, support for all those movements dwindled, but the OPM was allowed to keep its office open. Now Maury and Kafiar are highly critical of the current two representatives in Vanuatu, Ondawame and Andy Ayamiseba, who they consider “Indonesian stooges.”

Their hard-line stance can be somewhat curious, given the low-level of visibility their movement has attained. Kafiar says that separation from Indonesia is a first step. The next would be to unite the entire island — a union of the Western half with Papua New Guinea. “That border was drawn up in Europe in the late 19th century, with a pen and a ruler. It’s a straight line. People have relatives on both sides of the border,” he says.

But there are also hundreds of different tribes speaking as many different languages in New Guinea, with little to unite disparate villages. The Aceh movement was fairly unified, while the OPM has been torn by factionalism, often along clan and tribal lines. Papua New Guinea itself has had enormous problems establishing a sense of nationhood, and many observers consider it a near-failed state with some of the highest crime and murder rates in the world, environmental degradation and an economy almost entirely dependent on the export of raw materials.

An independent West Papua — if it ever materialized, which seems unlikely — would also have to deal with fundamental demographic changes. Between 1975 and 1995, a government-sponsored transmigration program resettled tens of thousands of people, mainly from Java, in Irian Jaya. In addition, many people from other parts of Indonesia went there on their own, attracted by business opportunities and the search for new land. This is reflected in the breakdown of religions in the area. In 1964, of 808,336 people, 49.5 percent were Protestants, 26 percent Catholics, 18 percent “others,” i.e. animists; and only 6.5 percent were Muslims. Data from 2004 — the last available before the province was divided into two — show a total population of 2,516,284 of whom 23.2 percent are Muslims. Although there are Papuan Muslims, most come from other islands.

And there could be even more migrants in the area than what official statistics indicate. In a July 2007 document titled “West Papuan Churches’ Deepest Concern and Appeal to the International Community,” local Papuan church leaders stated: “The current composition of the West Papuan population is 30 percent native and 70 percent migrants. The native West Papuans have been marginalized in all aspects of life.”

Even if exaggerated, it reflects new contradictions — and potential conflicts — in Papuan society. Jihadi groups have also visited the area, leading to fears that the kind of factional fighting that tore apart the Maluku islands from 2000 to 2002 could erupt in the two Papua provinces.

Maury and Kafiar argue that there is a deliberate attempt to make the area not only “more Indonesian” but also Muslim. Muslims, on their part, claim that Islam is an older religion in the area then Christianity. Muslim traders visited the island’s shores before the arrival of the first Christian missionaries in the mid-19th century. However, according to most accounts, the native population was entirely animist before two German Protestant missionaries, Johann Geissler and C.W. Ottow, set foot at Manokwari in 1855 — even before the Dutch established a permanent presence on the island.

The delicate demographic and religious balance in Indonesia’s two easternmost provinces is perhaps the reason why outside powers prefer a continuation of the status quo rather than separation from Indonesia. The Papuans may be victims of old Cold War politics, as Maury and Kafiar argue, but two generations later it seems unlikely that anyone would be prepared to reconsider that fact at this late date.

The Free Papua Movement

The Free Papua Movement, or OPM, was founded in 1965 in reaction to Indonesia’s incorporation of the former Dutch New Guinea through a UN-supervised process during 1962-63. On July 1, 1971, OPM announced the formation of the “independent republic” of West Papua.

At the same time, an armed wing, the National Liberation Army, or OPM-TPN, was established with strongholds along the border with Papua New Guinea. Its current armed strength is unknown but assumed to be in the hundreds rather than the thousands. However, it is believed to have many activists and supporters throughout the western half of New Guinea Island.

In July 2006, the group decided that its objectives should be sought exclusively through nonviolent means, although it has clashed with Indonesia’s security forces on a number of occasions even after that pledge was made. It has seven, some say, four, commands which seem to operate independently of each other. In addition, the OPM has two international offices, one in Port Vila, Vanuatu, and the other in Tyreso, a Stockholm suburb.

Since the beginning, the OPM has been plagued by internal schisms and defections, and there seems to be little or no coordinated leadership either at home or in exile. The main unit operates around Timika and Wamena in the Central Highlands and is led by Kelly Kwalik. Another commander, Mathias Wenda, is reported to be based near Bewani in Papua New Guinea. The overall commander is said to be Richard Yoweni, who is in his 60s.

The movement is outlawed in Indonesia and it is a crime to display the Papuan independence flag in public.

 

Photo: Members of the Free Papua Movement attend a Morning Star independence flag-raising ceremony. (Muhammad Yamin, Reuters)