West Papua: Rainforest Warriors

This week’s Unreported World travels to one of the remotest places on earth, where journalists are forbidden to work and usually arrested when they arrive, and where a bloody conflict between government forces and locals is rarely glimpsed by the outside world. Reporter Evan Williams and Director Siobhan Sinnerton spend three weeks undercover in West Papua, an outlying province of Indonesia in the Western Pacific, which is home to the world’s biggest copper and gold mine. Getting in to West Papua is extremely difficult. Obtaining official journalist accreditation is virtually impossible so the team have to film clandestinely” They begin their journey in Wamena in the remote western highlands. Waiting inside a safe house, hiding from the Indonesian authorities, they meet a group of tribal warriors who have travelled for days to be there. They tell Unreported World that at least 12 of their friends have been killed by the security forces, and claim that thousands more have been killed in a campaign which could wipe out their ethnic group. West Papua’s tribes lived in stone-age isolation until they were discovered by Europeans in the 1930s. Indonesia annexed the area in the 1969, after a group of selected West Papuans voted for annexation, but the rest of the population were not allowed a chance to vote. Since then hundreds of thousands of Indonesians have been subsidised to settle in West Papua, and they now control most of the commerce – leading to seething resentment and conflict between the two groups. In the company of guides from the West Papuan underground, the team trek deep into ancient forests to tribal villages affected by the conflict. At one village they find the inhabitants crying and wearing mud as a sign of mourning for their children who have been allegedly killed or “disappeared” by the security forces. Some mothers are so heartbroken that they have mutilated themselves by cutting off their fingers. But while some grieve,