The Front Lines of the Global Free-Trade War

ONE GAUGE OF global policies is how they affect people we may have never heard of. West Papuans, for example.

In March, I met Matheus Adadikam while he was visiting Washington, D.C. He’s the general secretary of the Evangelical Christian Church in Tanah Papua, representing 600,000 people. Located between Australia and Indonesia, West Papua shares a South Pacific island with New Guinea. It’s basically on the other side of the world from D.C.

Pastor Matheus told me about his country. Well, not exactly his country, he says. Indigenous Papuans have lived there for 40,000 years, but in the colonial era—and more recently, as a province of Indonesia—they’ve had no right of self-determination. “As a Papuan, we have no right to speak about our rights as Papuans,” he says. “Forty years ago we ‘became Indonesian,’ so we can no longer speak of ‘Papuan human rights.’”

The story is starkly familiar. Since the establishment of colonial economic forces, the land of Indigenous Papuans has been held in chattel slavery by those more powerful—English (1793), Dutch (1828), Japanese (1944), United Nations (1962), and now Indonesians (1963). “Killings, torture, and rape of Indigenous people are routine,” according to the Center for World Indigenous Studies.

A conservative estimate is that 100,000 people have been killed since 1963. “Even to raise our Morning Star flag is to die or be in jail,” says Matheus. (One man is serving seven years in jail for flag-raising.)

In 1960, a rich vein of gold and copper was discovered in the Jayawijaya mountain range in West Papua. After some back-room deals, the U.N. “gave” West Papua to Indonesia. Indonesia promptly welcomed the Phoenix-based Freeport-McMoRan mining company to open what became the largest gold and third-largest copper mines in the world.

“Justice, peace, and care of all of the Lord’s creation is the main mission of our church,” says Matheus, “but our experience has been that change happens fast, and external influences are changing who we are as a people.” His main mission now is traveling the world asking for help.

“The police and army have a personal economic interest in the mining companies,” Matheus says. “As a pastor, I can say that the government tries to blame local people for the violence, but it is not true.” The brutality of the Indonesian military in response to protest or self-determination can be seen in Joshua Oppenheimer’s award-winning companion documentaries The Look of Silence and The Act of Killing and in a film about East Timor, A Guerra da Beatriz.

“In 2006, Indonesia declared us a ‘separatist’ church because we support the right of self-determination,” Matheus says. “If we are not independent politically, then slowly but surely we will lose our Papuan life. ... Indonesia makes agreements with corporations to take our trees, our water, our resources, and they don’t care at all about the people. They say, ‘We don’t need the Papuans, we just want their land.’

“As a pastor I have seen too many people killed,” Matheus continues. “When I was invited to speak at the World Council of Churches, while I was gone my family was terrorized ... my wife and my kids ... this is our experience.”

MATHEUS BROUGHT A flash drive with him, and I slip it into my computer port. First to pop up are Christian praise songs and family photos—so that if the drive fell into the hands of Indonesian security, they would be quickly bored. These are followed by videos of the Indonesian military confronting crowds of protesting miners in Timika, photos of the dead along the road, interviews with police at the morgue, close-ups of bullet wounds, and the insistent keening of angry women.

Now West Papua is trapped on the frontlines of the global free-trade war between China and the U.S. The Papuans are squeezed between the ASEAN free-trade zone and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Obama’s “pivot to Asia” has slapped West Papua in the face—and no reporters are allowed in to see it.

In 1941, exiled Greek poet George Sefaris wrote, “[P]erhaps he was speaking of heroes—the night he dragged his foot through the darkened city—when he howled, groping over our pain: We advance in the dark, we move forward in the dark.”

Matheus continues, “We don’t need your money. The money you deliver to the Indonesian government, they use to buy more weapons to kill us.” 

Perhaps followers of Christ, dragging ourselves wounded through the world, can only advance like Seferis’ heroes, “forward in the dark.”