West Papua

Last year, I stopped travelling to Indonesia. I simply did… I just could not bear being there anymore. It was making me unwell. I felt psychologically and physically sick.
Indonesia has matured into perhaps the most corrupt country on Earth, and possibly into the most indoctrinated and compassionless place anywhere under the sun. Here, even the victims were not aware of their own conditions anymore. The victims felt shame, while the mass murderers were proudly bragging about all those horrendous killings and rapes they had committed. Genocidal cadres are all over the government.

Southeast Asian elites “forgot” about those tens of millions of Asian people murdered by the Western imperialism at the end of, and after, the WWII. They “forgot” about what took place in the North – about the Tokyo and Osaka firebombing, about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, about the barbaric liquidation of Korean civilians by the US forces.

John Pilger describes the wholesale corporate takeover of the natural resources of West Papua, known as the "forgotten bird of paradise" by its impoverished indigenous people. A mountain of copper and gold, forests and fisheries, oil and gas: the "acquisition" of untold riches, sanctioned by the Suharto tyranny, was unique and remains a metaphor for "globalisation".