History.

A worked piece of tree resin from Mololo Cave on Waigeo was radiocarbon dated to approximately 55,000–50,000 years ago. The find supplies direct evidence of plant use by people living on an island near the northwestern edge of New Guinea. Its manufacture involved collecting and processing resin rather than simply carrying an unmodified natural object into the cave.¹²

Waigeo remained separated from Sahul by deep water even when sea levels were lower. Settlement therefore involved crossings between islands as well as movement over land. The researchers combine the cave evidence with reconstructed coastlines to examine possible journeys into the wider region; the find establishes activity at Mololo, not one definitive migration route.¹²

Resin preserves a form of work that stone tools alone would miss: selecting a useful tree product, gathering it and changing its form. The cave’s long sequence connects this early plant technology with later use of forest and marine resources. Waigeo was consequently more than a stepping stone on a migration map. People stayed, acquired detailed knowledge of its resources and maintained an island way of life while conditions around the coast changed.²

Excavations at Andarewa Cave near Fakfak place its earliest recorded occupation around 26,327–25,900 years ago, during the Last Glacial Maximum. The site lies between the Bird’s Head and the wider Sahul landmass. Stone tools, bone points, shells, charcoal and ochre document activities across several occupation layers. Pottery and jewellery belong to later parts of that sequence.¹

Local sedimentary stone was worked into small flakes and scrapers. Imported igneous stone raises questions about movement and exchange beyond the immediate area. Together with the inland Toé Kria record, Andarewa shows that early settlement included different environments, from coastal limestone caves to rainforest in the Bird’s Head.¹

The excavations distinguish a long sequence of occupations rather than one collection left at a single moment. Later bone points and ornaments made from animal remains show additional ways of working available materials; pottery marks a much later part of the cave’s use. Shell and charcoal deposits help connect tools to activities around the shelter. Because excavation did not reach sterile deposits below the occupation layers, the oldest recovered charcoal establishes a minimum depth to the known history, not the first arrival of people in Fakfak.¹

Research at Toé Kria records occupation of inland rainforest in the Bird’s Head from around 24,000 calibrated years before present. Its stone-tool and occupation sequence adds an inland perspective to early settlement evidence from coastal and island caves.¹

The site helps archaeologists investigate how people used rainforest environments during the late Pleistocene. Read beside Andarewa and Mololo, it documents several local histories of settlement rather than one route that explains every part of New Guinea.¹

An inland shelter asks different questions from a coastal cave. Its occupants needed routes through forest, access to materials for tools and knowledge of resources away from reefs and beaches. The occupation sequence shows that rainforest use was already part of human life during the late Pleistocene. Comparing Toé Kria with the Bomberai caves makes the geographical range of that life clearer: the early record is distributed across environments, with each excavation preserving only part of people’s movements and work.¹

Rising seas changed the geography of Sahul and the smaller islands along its western approaches. The Mololo study reconstructs a coastline much closer to Waigeo’s cave before flooding of the surrounding shelf around 9,500 years ago. Forest and marine resources were already part of the site’s early record.¹

Changing access to coasts, rivers and islands provides context for settlement and travel. It does not mean that every community moved at the same time, or that today’s island groups had their present shape throughout human occupation.¹

As low-lying land flooded, distances between shelters, landing places and fishing grounds changed. The broad continental connection between New Guinea and Australia also gave way to the waters of Torres Strait. Some former landscapes are now beneath the sea, making their settlements harder to investigate than caves above the present shoreline. This helps explain gaps in the archaeological record: an absence of excavated coastal sites need not mean an absence of people or voyaging.¹

Excavations at Mololo Cave on Waigeo recovered pottery dated to about 3,100–2,700 years ago, with a possible earlier occurrence around 3,800–3,500 years ago. Plain, red-slipped and incised vessels share features with ceramics elsewhere in Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The elaborate dentate stamping of early Lapita pottery is absent.¹

At Manwen Bokor Cave, later pottery from about 1,300–1,000 years ago includes more varied impressed and incised decoration. Gaffney and Tanudirjo compare these assemblages with eastern Wallacea and northern New Guinea, describing changes in the reach of regional networks. Pots and manufacturing techniques provide evidence of contact without requiring the movement of whole populations.¹

The differences between the two caves matter as much as the shared use of pottery. Red surfaces, incised lines and later impressed designs document changing choices in making and finishing vessels. Comparisons with neighbouring islands help locate these choices within wider exchanges of objects and knowledge. Raja Ampat thus records repeated connections across the seas west and north of New Guinea, with local potters participating in regional networks rather than simply receiving a finished culture from elsewhere.¹

For households, a vessel could change how food was prepared or stored; for archaeology, its fragments preserve a durable record after fibres and wood have decayed. Reading that material alongside stone tools and other cave deposits helps distinguish technological change from the much broader question of who moved between islands.¹

Maritime networks connected western New Guinea with Maluku over centuries. The ANU synthesis discusses tributary relations along the coasts between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries; Overweel’s study follows the claims and negotiations described in nineteenth-century memoranda. Tidore exercised influence through coastal leaders and intermediaries rather than a uniform administration of the interior.¹

Trade, tribute and slave trading formed part of these encounters. Local rulers and communities negotiated relationships with competing outside powers. Dutch claims later drew on agreements with Tidore, but declaring sovereignty did not establish an administrative presence across Papua. The early Fort Du Bus settlement and the much later permanent stations illustrate that difference.¹

These connections gave coastal leaders access to imported goods and outside patrons, but also exposed communities to extraction and violence. The reach of a tributary relationship depended on intermediaries, travel and the ability to enforce a demand. It differed from later government with permanent stations and officials. When Dutch authorities invoked Tidore’s claims, they converted a varied maritime history into a territorial argument over people who had not collectively agreed to become Dutch subjects.¹

The Dutch established Fort Du Bus on the southwest coast in 1828 and proclaimed a territorial claim over western New Guinea. The settlement was short-lived. A declaration and a coastal fort did not establish effective control over the island’s many communities.¹

Later colonial accounts used this claim as part of a legal and diplomatic history. Reading it alongside the long gap before permanent administrative stations helps distinguish claimed territory from the actual reach of government. Papuan societies and their regional relationships continued beyond the fort’s limited presence.¹

The fort was an attempt to turn a claim on a map into an occupied place. Maintaining supplies and a garrison on the coast was different from governing inland communities or obtaining their consent. Its failure left a claim that officials could revive in later negotiations without the continuous administration normally associated with it. The interval before the stations of 1898 is consequently part of the political history: colonial ownership was asserted long before the state acquired an extensive local presence.¹

Carl Wilhelm Ottow and Johann Gottlob Geissler arrived at Mansinam near Manokwari in 1855. Their journey through the eastern Indonesian maritime network included support from the Sultan of Tidore. The mission became an important reference point in the history of Christianity in Papua.¹²

Church accounts preserve the arrival as a founding event. Later schools and teachers connected religious work with changes in education and public life. The southern mission-school record, beginning in the early twentieth century, shows how Indigenous and other non-European teachers helped shape schooling rather than acting only as recipients of European instruction.¹²

Conversion and teaching developed through relationships with Papuan communities, not simply through the arrival of two Europeans. The mission’s later importance lay in congregations, literacy and networks of teachers whose work extended beyond the island. The commemoration of Mansinam became part of a Christian public history shared across places with different church traditions. That institutional reach would later give Papuan churches a role in education, community organising and the protection of people facing violence.¹²

1898 · Permanent colonial stations

Manokwari and Fak-Fak became centres of permanent Dutch administration in 1898. These stations expanded the colonial state’s presence after earlier claims had left much of the territory beyond regular administration. Government reach remained uneven.¹

Officials relied on intermediaries, mission networks and selected local leaders. The emergence of a station did not make every surrounding community subject to the same institutions at once. Photographs and administrative memoranda preserve parts of this process, largely from the perspective of those producing the colonial record.¹

Permanent stations changed the terms of encounter. An official could now record a population, appoint an intermediary and respond to disputes from an established base. Coastal communities faced a government seeking to make its categories and demands routine. Papuan authority did not simply vanish, but its relationship with outside power became more sustained. Administration expanded through selected ports before reaching further inland, leaving substantial differences in how and when communities encountered the colonial state.¹

1902 · Merauke and the southern administration

A Dutch administrative station was established at Merauke in 1902. Expansion in the south involved policing, mission activity and intervention in local settlements and movement. The colonial record describes these measures through the government’s own objectives.¹²

Research on missions and schools shows that administration did not advance through European officials alone. Non-European teachers and local relationships were central to the process. The effects on children, communities and authority need to be read as part of Papuan history, as well as the history of the colonial state.¹²

The southern station linked river and coastal movement with a new administrative centre. Policing and mission schooling brought decisions about where people lived, how children learned and which authorities intervened in disputes into closer contact with colonial power. For Marind communities, these changes entered an existing social landscape of kinship, ritual and exchange. The history of Merauke therefore includes the reorganisation of local life, alongside the establishment of a town and a government office.¹²

After the 1926–1927 uprisings in the Netherlands East Indies, Dutch authorities exiled political prisoners to the Boven Digoel detention settlement at Tanahmerah. The camp was remote from the colonial centres on Java, but situated within an inhabited southern Papuan landscape, along the Digul River.¹

The settlement extended colonial administration and coercive institutions into the interior. Accounts of the exiles describe confinement, work, illness and political networks; the location also connected the camp with Papuan communities, river transport and the administration based in Merauke. The camp photograph in this account records its built environment, rather than the whole experience of people living around it.¹

Digoel also worked as a threat to organisers far from Papua. Accounts of isolation and disease circulated through newspapers, making exile there an instrument of intimidation throughout the colony. Authorities presented the settlement as a place of supervision and re-education, while prisoners experienced removal from their communities and political networks. Papua was used to confine opponents of colonial rule even as Papuan communities faced the extension of that same rule along their rivers.²

Koreri traditions in the Biak-Numfor region connect ideas of renewal with religious and political imagination. The large movements of 1938–1943 brought those ideas into encounters with colonial administration, missions and wartime occupation. Participants did not all give Koreri the same meaning.¹

Missionary-scholar Kamma documented the movement through participant accounts and his own interpretation. Koreri demonstrates that Papuan political imagination had a history before the institutions and symbols of Dutch decolonisation in 1961.¹

Kamma traces the major movement from Supiori into Biak, Numfor and Yapen, with leaders including Stephanus Simopyaref. Expectations of Manseren Manggundi’s return joined hopes for renewed life with resistance to outside domination. Missionary teaching, colonial demands and then Japanese occupation entered that field of expectations. Organising and armed resistance during the occupation met violent repression. The sequence places Indigenous ideas of renewal and collective action within the political history before the later referendum and diplomatic movements.¹

Japanese occupation and Allied campaigns transformed parts of New Guinea into military landscapes. Biak and Hollandia were major sites in the 1944 campaigns. Airfields, wrecks and other material remains continue to mark places where Papuan communities lived through occupation, labour demands and fighting.¹

Military archives often focus on operations and equipment. Archaeological work on Biak adds another route into the record, while local memory can describe experiences left out of official accounts. A wartime photograph documents a particular scene; it does not by itself explain the civilian experience around it.¹

The remains surveyed on Biak include defensive positions, aircraft, vehicles and wrecks on land and underwater. They show how infrastructure for war occupied the same island landscape used for settlements and subsistence. After the fighting, these objects became part of local places and memory rather than disappearing with the armies. The war also interrupted the colonial order: the Dutch return after Japan’s defeat occurred amid Indonesian independence and a new struggle over the future of West New Guinea.¹²

1949–1960 · West New Guinea after 1949

The 1949 transfer of Dutch sovereignty to Indonesia left West New Guinea under Dutch administration. Indonesia claimed it as part of the former Netherlands East Indies; Dutch policy increasingly pursued a separate political future. The unresolved territory became a diplomatic dispute, but political organising within Papua also took several directions.¹

In Serui, Silas Papare’s organising connected Papua with the Indonesian republic. Johan Ariks and other leaders advocated a distinct Papuan future. Chauvel’s regional study follows these different positions through Serui, Biak, Hollandia and Fakfak, where local networks, education and relations with officials shaped political choices.¹

Petitions, parties and delegations became ways to address the Netherlands, Indonesia and the United Nations. These records reveal named participants and changing demands before the Council of 1961. They also show why later accounts of decolonisation need to include Papuan political disagreement and participation, alongside negotiations between states.²

The dispute left Papuans living under a colonial government while two states argued over their future. Regional organisers used the openings available to them to press different programmes. Education and employment connected people across communities, making a territory-wide public life more possible. By the end of the 1950s, this organising could no longer be described only as a dispute inherited from the Netherlands East Indies: Papuan participants were asserting political demands of their own.¹

1950s–1961 · Papuanisation and political organisation

In the final period of Dutch rule, expanded schooling and Papuan participation in administration helped form a new institutional political field. Papuanisation was also part of a Dutch programme for the territory’s future, pursued amid the dispute with Indonesia.³

Papuan organisers were not one unified bloc. They debated independence, relations with Indonesia and the pace and form of political change. Council proceedings and later historical studies should be read alongside those differing aspirations, rather than treating Papuan politics as only the product of Dutch policy.³

Schools, administrative work and political meetings put representatives from different regions in contact. They supplied skills for writing petitions, debating policy and organising delegations. These institutions remained colonial, but Papuan participants used them to articulate claims that were not reducible to Dutch interests. The Council of 1961 grew out of this expanding public field. Its formation raised a practical question that would continue through later movements: who could speak for the territory, and how would its many communities take part?¹

Mining, plantations and migration changed livelihoods and control over land. An economic project could be described by government or business as development while the people living there experienced loss of forests, food sources or decision-making power. Research by AJAR and the Papuan Women’s Working Group begins with these lived relationships. Its case studies ask what land means to women and how they respond when forests become concessions.¹²

Women’s accounts show how a change in land control redistributes work. Families may travel further for food, rely more on cash or lose places where children learned from older relatives. The consequences continue after a clearing operation or compensation meeting has ended. AJAR’s participatory research follows women who maintain knowledge, organise with others and insist on being heard in land decisions. Their experience puts the ongoing costs of extraction alongside the revenue and infrastructure used to justify it.¹

Opposition to Indonesian rule spread in parts of the highlands before the 1977 election. Residents refused to participate, while OPM forces attacked posts and damaged airstrips. Indonesia's military deployed ground and aerial operations. Attacks reached villages around Wamena, the Baliem Valley, Karubaga and Bokondini, with civilians subjected to violence.¹

Survivors described aerial bombing and strafing, burned homes, arrests, torture, sexual violence and killings. Some residents who did not recognise warplanes went into the open, believing the aircraft carried assistance. Research by the Asian Human Rights Commission and International Coalition for Papua also connects the aerial attacks to OV-10 Bronco aircraft and helicopter deployments through military accounts and contemporary reporting.¹

Families left their homes and gardens to seek shelter. Hunger and disease caused further deaths among people who survived the direct attacks. Interviewed decades later, survivors still remembered parents, children, partners and neighbours they had lost. The investigation published in 2013 compiled 4,146 names of people reported killed from interviews in 15 districts; its record did not cover every victim.¹

Displacement broke up village life and access to food. Returning families faced the loss of relatives and damage to their livelihoods, while survivors continued to demand disclosure and accountability for the military operations.¹

Mambesak was founded on 5 August 1978 in Jayapura. Led by anthropologist, musician and museum curator Arnold Ap, the group gathered songs from different Papuan regions and brought them into performances, cassette recordings and radio. Students from several communities participated. Weekly performances at the university museum made it a meeting place where people could hear their own languages and learn those of others.¹

That work connected cultural documentation with public confidence in being Papuan. Songs and stories could circulate beyond the communities where they originated without losing their local roots. The museum became a place of teaching rather than only a store of collected objects. Mambesak’s reach also made it a target for authorities who regarded Papuan cultural organising as a political threat.¹

Ap was murdered in 1984 and the group disbanded. Its recordings and the memories of surviving members continued to carry the work beyond that rupture. The documentary Muman Minggil follows filmmakers Yonri Revolt and Mahardhika Yhuda as they recover this history through interviews, radio programmes and cassette tapes. It reconnects today’s listeners with an experiment in cultural education that violence ended but did not erase.¹

In 1984, unrest and military operations were followed by a large movement of Papuans into Papua New Guinea. Rosemary Preston’s study examines refugees’ experience from 1984 to 1986, including the difficult relationship between humanitarian assistance, border policy and political aspirations.¹

People who crossed included families, political activists and people from communities with kinship ties across the border. Camps and settlements became sites of both everyday survival and organising. Later ethnographic work by Diana Glazebrook follows how refugees negotiated exile, education, subsistence and movement between settlement and border communities.²

Another political initiative emerged in Jayapura in December 1988, when Thomas Wanggai proclaimed West Melanesia. Chauvel describes this initiative within the wider development of Papuan nationalism. Its symbols and organisational lineage differed from those of the Morning Star movement, adding to the political currents later brought into umbrella organisations.³

Crossing the border could provide escape from military operations while creating new restrictions on residence and movement. Refugees had to secure food and schooling within policies that did not necessarily recognise their political aims. Kinship across the boundary offered relationships distinct from formal camp administration. Exile became both a prolonged condition of family life and a base for advocacy. Its history connects the independence struggle inside Papua with organising across the Pacific and abroad.¹²

Mama Yosepha Alomang organised Amungme resistance to the environmental and social effects of Freeport’s mining operations. Her work joined land claims with women’s livelihoods, collective action and the treatment of Indigenous people around the mine. The Goldman Environmental Prize recognised her work in 2001.¹

The prize’s account documents her detention and torture in 1994 after she was accused of assisting rebels. It also describes practical organising: demanding that the company purchase local produce, creating a cooperative, and supporting traditional culture. These activities made questions of livelihood and safety part of the struggle over land.¹

Abigail Abrash’s research describes Amungme and Kamoro concerns about land, environmental change, security and the terms of company engagement. The two communities have different territories and relationships with the operation. Their organising provides a local history of mining that is more detailed than the contract dates or production figures alone.²

Alomang’s organising also challenged who was allowed to negotiate the consequences of mining. Women supplying food and sustaining households had a direct stake in land decisions and company practices. A cooperative and demands for local purchasing turned that stake into collective economic action. Recognition in 2001 made her work internationally visible, but its foundation lay in continuing community relationships. Her history joins resistance to violence with practical efforts to retain a livelihood and a voice on Amungme land.¹

Military operations around Timika in 1994–1995 subjected Amungme communities to killings, detention, torture and disappearances. Reports by the Catholic Church brought testimony from the mining region into public view. The National Human Rights Commission subsequently confirmed serious abuses; Amnesty’s September 1995 account records its findings of 16 extrajudicial executions and four disappearances.¹

One incident concerned a prayer gathering at Hoea on 31 May 1995. The church report described soldiers shooting civilians, including children and church worker Martinus Kibak. The events formed part of a wider pattern in which suspected links with independence fighters became grounds for violence against villagers. People living around a major mine faced security forces whose operations could reach homes, gatherings and everyday community life.¹

The commission’s acknowledgement challenged official denials but did not itself provide criminal accountability or restore missing relatives. Amnesty pressed for independent investigation and prosecution. The case connects the region’s land struggle with demands for physical safety and truth: church documentation and community organising made abuses visible where military power and economic development were closely intertwined.¹

In January 1996, an OPM unit led by Kelly Kwalik took members of a scientific expedition hostage in Mapenduma. Church workers and the International Committee of the Red Cross participated in negotiations. A Kopassus operation under Prabowo Subianto followed in May. Nine remaining hostages were recovered on 15 May; two Indonesian hostages died during the final phase. The hostage crisis brought international attention to the highlands, while the experience of villagers received much less notice.¹³

A separate attack at Geselema on 9 May became the subject of later investigation. Mark Davis recorded villagers’ accounts of gunmen arriving in a white helicopter associated with the relief visits people expected. Le Temps reported that an inquiry commissioned by the ICRC confirmed deception involving the familiar helicopter and the deaths of eight civilians. The inquiry cleared ICRC personnel of involvement. The attack must be distinguished from the subsequent hostage rescue.¹²

Using the appearance of humanitarian assistance turned the expectation of a safe encounter into exposure to violence. Villagers’ testimony complicated the official account of a successful rescue, raising questions about civilian deaths and the protection of relief work. Prabowo’s command of the operation is documented; the identity and individual orders of every gunman are not established by that fact alone. The surviving record includes both the hostages’ ordeal and the civilians whose deaths were obscured by the rescue narrative.¹²³

The Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate programme, MIFEE, was launched in 2010 to develop food and energy production through plantations and large-scale enterprises. The proposed area included Malind customary lands, with sago forests, hunting grounds and rivers sustaining village life. Company negotiations over land rights brought decisions about food, income and relationships between clans into concession arrangements.¹

Field research by FPP, Pusaka and Sawit Watch in 2013 collected residents' experiences in Baad, Wayau, Koa and Zanegi. Residents described incomplete information, promises of assistance and employment, imposed compensation terms and unclear agreements. Negotiations through selected leaders also fragmented collective customary decisions. Families depending on the land could bear the consequences without understanding the full terms of an agreement.¹

In Zanegi, land had been ceded to PT Selaras Inti Semesta, a Medco subsidiary, in 2009, before MIFEE's launch. Residents subsequently reported reduced hunting grounds and fish. Researchers recorded child malnutrition and illness, while paid employment had not replaced food previously obtained from forests and rivers. A doctor reportedly visiting for only one day each month illustrated the limited care available as health needs grew.¹

Losing forest access changed families' ability to obtain food and sustain life on their land. Promises of development confronted residents' experience of greater dependence on cash income, purchased food and company decisions. These village accounts explain the demands for protection of land rights and community consent in subsequent projects in Merauke.¹

UNESCO inscribed noken-making on the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding in 2012. Noken are knotted or woven bags made from local fibres and used to carry food, goods and children. Making them connects plant knowledge, skilled work and everyday exchange.¹

The inscription identifies threats to transmission and calls for safeguarding the practice. Regional studies also show how makers negotiate changing markets and household needs. Their work continues through identifiable people and communities; contemporary works and maker photographs can be explored in Exhibition.¹

The urgent-safeguarding category recognises a practice whose continuation requires support, not a finished achievement that can be left to museums. UNESCO identifies declining transmission, changing materials and competition from manufactured bags among the pressures. Responses need to keep experienced makers able to teach and younger people able to learn. The inscription’s value lies in making those needs visible while leaving the practice in the hands of the communities who continue it.¹

Veronika Triariyani Kanem examines the lives of Muyu women making and distributing string bags, known as men, in Merauke. Recognition of noken by UNESCO in 2012 brought greater visibility and tourism demand. Making bags can generate household income, but increased sales do not automatically ensure that the knowledge passes to a new generation.¹

The study records older women’s concerns about younger women having limited time or facing structural barriers to learning. Imported mass-produced bags from Java and Makassar also change what young people carry. Women’s accounts connect cultural knowledge to work, access to markets and the practical conditions of everyday life.¹

For a maker, the market involves finding buyers, obtaining materials and fitting production around other responsibilities. A finished men carries the time and skill invested before it reaches a customer. Kanem’s account shows a tension between greater demand for a recognised cultural product and the uneven conditions for learning to make it. Supporting sales and supporting transmission are related tasks, but neither happens automatically through a heritage label.¹

West Papuan delegates meeting in Vanuatu agreed on the Saralana Declaration in December 2014 and formed the United Liberation Movement for West Papua, ULMWP. Its founding umbrella brought together the National Federal Republic of West Papua, the West Papua National Coalition for Liberation and the National Parliament of West Papua.¹²

The agreement sought a common diplomatic vehicle for movements that had often competed over leadership and representation. IPAC’s 2015 assessment describes the organisational backgrounds and limits of that unity. A shared diplomatic body did not mean that all domestic organisers or armed commanders followed one leadership.²

ULMWP’s institutional history later records a provisional government initiative in 2020. That is the movement’s own description of its political project. Its diplomatic activity belongs alongside the histories of OPM and TPNPB commands, KNPB mobilisation and older diaspora associations, rather than replacing them.¹

The coalition gave its members a way to present a common self-determination demand to Pacific governments and international audiences. It joined organisations with different domestic and diaspora histories around a diplomatic platform. Relations with armed commands remained a separate issue: a statement by an umbrella body did not necessarily determine a local TPNPB operation. Understanding that structure helps identify who issued a proposal, whose support it claimed and which people would need to take part in any political settlement.¹²

On 7 December 2014, soldiers beat young people in Enarotali after a dispute concerning a vehicle’s lights. Residents gathered at Karel Gobay field the following day to protest the treatment. Security forces opened fire. Four young people were killed and others injured. The demand for an explanation of a beating became a mass shooting, leaving families to seek accountability for both the initial violence and the deaths.¹²

Komnas HAM concluded in 2020 that the events constituted a gross human-rights violation, identifying elements of crimes against humanity. The finding connected the shootings with command responsibility rather than treating them only as the acts of unidentified individuals. Years had passed between the deaths and this formal recognition, while families continued to demand a credible investigation and prosecution.¹

Prosecutors brought only retired officer Isak Sattu to the Human Rights Court in Makassar. On 8 December 2022, the court acquitted him; two judges dissented over his command role. Victims’ representatives and civil-society organisations criticised a prosecution that had narrowed responsibility to one defendant. The result left the documented deaths without a conviction and renewed demands to investigate the wider chain of responsibility.²³

Racist abuse against Papuan students in Surabaya helped trigger protests across Papua in August 2019. Demonstrators connected discrimination with demands over rights and political treatment. Responses included arrests and restrictions on information, while events differed between locations.¹

Human Rights Watch’s investigation follows those experiences through interviews and case research. It documents discrimination affecting students and other Papuans beyond the demonstrations, placing the protests within a longer pattern of unequal treatment.¹

The protests made the relationship between everyday racism and political exclusion explicit. Papuans studying or living outside Papua described harassment and suspicion attached to their identity, while demonstrators linked dignity with self-determination. The state’s response included prosecutions of peaceful political expression as well as the information blackout. HRW’s later interviews show that the issue extended into education and ordinary public life. The protests challenged both individual insults and the institutions that allowed unequal treatment to continue.¹

On 3 June 2020, the Jakarta State Administrative Court ruled that the government’s internet throttling and shutdown in Papua and West Papua during the 2019 protests were unlawful. AJI and SAFEnet brought the case against the communications minister and president.¹

The interruption had affected journalism, organising and access to information. The ruling established a legal finding about those government actions, giving later debates over internet restrictions a concrete precedent.¹

The government had justified the restrictions as a response to unrest and the circulation of false information. AJI and SAFEnet challenged the measures because cutting access also prevented residents and journalists from communicating and documenting events. The court’s finding gave that harm a legal consequence: a security justification did not make the actions lawful. The case placed the ability to report from Papua within the struggle over rights, alongside the demonstrations that the blackout had obscured.¹