The Merdeka West Papua Support Network condemns the Prabowo Administration’s plans to revive Indonesia’s transmigration program in West Papua. The program, packaged as distribution of what the government deems as ‘abandoned’ land, further marginalizes Indigenous Peoples and aggravates the decades-long conflict in West Papua.
Transmigration in Indonesia started under Dutch colonization as a way to distribute skilled workers within the colonies, but wasn’t implemented as an official government policy until the 1970s under the former president and dictator, Suharto.
The transmigration program intended to “foster development and redistribute farmers from land-scarce Java to less densely populated outer islands” – the latter including restive regions such as Aceh and West Papua. Although the program ended along with Suharto’s fall from power, its impact manifests until present day.
Studies by academics and West Papua advocates suggest that the transmigration program played a key role in Indonesia’s counterinsurgency agenda as it relates to securing control over Papua’s resource-rich areas which are also hotspots for resistance, both civil and armed.
Transmigration entails the displacement of IP communities coupled with continuous military deployment and setting-up military bases in what is already Indonesia’s most militarized region.
One of the program’s infamies is the distrust it had rooted between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. It had, and continues to, pit citizens against each other to compete for land, employment, and social services. Indigenous Papuans are discriminated in their own land and on the other hand, the gradual erasure of Indigenous culture, including some languages and practices, are blamed on the Javanese migrants. Meanwhile, the state remains unaccountable for setting up the system that essentially institutionalized discrimination in West Papua, even referring to Papuan activists as “separatists”, contradicting its own national slogan on unity.
Transmigration will also worsen cases of land dispute in West Papua. The removal of Indigenous Papuans from their lands paves the way for corporations to exploit the resources in the area. The case of the food estate project in Merauke, in Southern Papua brought with it threats of ecological destruction, food scarcity for the locals, corruption, and human rights abuses with the deployment of even more troops from the TNI (Indonesian National Army).
As world leaders once again gather for the annual UN Climate Conference (COP29), we call for urgent attention to such government policies that endanger the lives of IP environmental defenders and enables the large-scale destruction of their mountains, forests, and waters.
The transmigration program reeks of settler-colonialism and commercialism of ancestral lands. It does little to address the roots of the land problem in both West Papua and Indonesia. We call on to the international community to speak out against colonization in all its new forms: reject the transmigration program, stop the genocide in West Papua, and uphold the people’s right to self-determination!
Reject the Transmigration Program!
West Papua is not an empty land!
End West Papuan Genocide!
Free West Papua! Free all colonized peoples!
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