West Papuans have yet to recover from the trauma of human rights violations, whilst continuing migration inwards is threatening to marginalise them in their resource-rich province, an ecumenical team from the World Council of Churches (WCC) has told top-level Indonesian government officials.
Papuans appear to be traumatised because of migration to their island, Rev Prof James Haire told Indonesian social welfare minister Aburizal Bakrie 24 July.
A theology professor from the Uniting Church in Australia, Haire was one of a six-member ecumenical team of "Living Letters" who visited West Papua and other parts of Indonesia last week.
Living Letters teams representing the member churches of the WCC travel to locations around the world in advance of the International Ecumenical Peace Convocation in 2011. They listen, learn, share approaches and challenges in overcoming violence and in peace-making, and pray together for peace in the community and in the world.
"As Indonesia democratises and undergoes reform, and thus experiences the free movement of population from other provinces into Papua, an irony is that these factors unintentionally tend to marginalise the indigenous Papuans," said Haire, speaking on behalf of the Living Letters team.
At the root of the problem is a transmigration programme sponsored by the 1965-1998 Suharto government. It had encouraged other Indonesians to migrate to West Papua in order to make the Papuans, who had long been fighting for independence, a minority in their own territory.
The post-Suharto government stopped the transmigration programme, but it could not stop waves of other Indonesians seeking to do business in West Papua, again tilting the economic scale to the disadvantage of less educated, largely illiterate Papuans.
With the continuing spontaneous migration into West Papua of mostly Muslim traders, the population now is about 2.4 million, with about 1.4 to 1.5 million West Papuans, most of whom belong to churches such as the Christian Church of West Papua or the Indonesian Christian Church (GKI), a WCC member.
Autonomy has recently been granted to Papuans. However, trained bureaucrats and public servants still often come from outside the island, again unintentionally tending to disadvantage the position of the Papuans, noted Haire.
"All these emerging marginalisation trends plus the serious concerns for education, healthcare, and economic livelihoods need to be addressed," he added.
Give and take
