A Bloody Anniversary: Biak 1998-2008

West Papua Advocacy Team (USA), 1 July 2008: July 2008 marks the tenth anniversary of the massacre of hundreds of Papuan residents of Biak island in 1998. The victims, including Papuan women and children who had gathered peacefully at the base of water tower bearing their "morning star" flag were slaughtered at that site and later many more were drowned at sea, shoved off Indonesian naval vessels were their hands bound. As bodies washed ashore, Indonesian officials claimed that the corpses were those of victims of a tsunami that had struck Papua New Guinea hundreds of miles to the East. The absurdity of the claim was exposed by the victims bound hands and the fact that some wore t-shirts of Indonesian political parties.
Two members of the West Papua Advocacy Team, one then a student and the other a diplomat separately visited Biak at the time of the incident. The diplomat, denied permission to visit Biak by the Indonesian Government, disembarked at Biak during a refueling stop enroute to Jayapura and did not reboard, giving him several days in Biak. He found the Biak community deeply traumatized by the massacre - very few, even among Papuan church leaders, were willing to meet or speak with the US diplomat. But a brave few gave limited testimony of having seen bodies piled in military vehicles and of being forced to bury bodies of victims near the shoreline where they washed up, with no attempt at identification.
The site of the massacre had been hurriedly cleansed and repainted. A wall against which many of the trapped victims were murdered had been re-plastered. But a tip from a local Biak resident exposed the cover-up. He directed the diplomat to examine the water tower's foundation, its "legs." Unpainted and un-repaired, it revealed multiple bullet holes. The holes were torso high, indicating the Indonesian military had not fired over the heads or at the feet of the unarmed Papuans to disperse them as the Indonesian Government claimed. It was murder, pure and simple. Despite a decade of democratic progress in Indonesia, no member of the Indonesian military or police has been successfully prosecuted for this crime against humanity.

Excerpts of a an account by a WPAT member, Eben Kirksey, who was in Biak at the time of the massacre follow:
Every morning my friends and I had been taking food to the protesters, recounted one of these survivors, a woman from a church near the harbor. She told me about the first moments of the attack: While we were carrying the food that morning we saw several army trucks approaching. They told us to wait, but when we saw that they were military we were afraid and began running with the food and water. They began chasing us with their guns blazing. We screamed "The enemy is here!"
As the attack started, Filep Karma (leader of the rally and now an Amnesty International "Prisoner of Conscience") roused his followers, all unarmed civilians, with a hymn. They held hands, sitting in a circle, under the water tower where the flag still flew. They were mowed down as they continued to sing. Another survivor told me: the soldiers made a kind of letter U. There were Brimob police in riot gear, army troops (Kopasgad), a company of soldiers from the local Kodim barracks, as well as Navy personnel. They formed a letter U around us and then shot at us repeatedly. ... Twenty-nine people were killed in this initial assault, according to Karma and a second-hand report from a low-ranking soldier.
... I saw these ships from the hotel where I was staying. One group investigating the incident concluded that "one hundred thirty nine people were loaded on two frigates that headed in two directions to the east and to the west and these people were dropped into the sea."
A woman who narrowly escaped this ordeal told me: “I was taken by the troops to a navy ship. The number on the side of the ship was 534 AL. Several of my friends had already been taken aboard. They beat us. Some were already dead. There were women raped right next to me. One soldier, he was from Toraja, saved me. The ship was still close to shore and he told me to jump. I jumped off of the back of the ship and I swam back to the place where it had been tied up. There I found a hiding place and I waited from 8:00 in the morning till 8:20 that night.”
At least 32 decaying bodies later washed ashore on Biak. Indonesian government officials explained that these corpses were transnational travellers: they belonged to victims of a tidal wave that hit the coast over 600 km away in the neighboring country of Papua New Guinea on July 17, 1998. However, the official explanation does not match the facts. Four bodies washed up on the beaches of Biak on July 10. This was four days after the police opened fire on the demonstrators and one week before the tidal wave struck. Some cadavers were missing their heads, hands, or genitals. One male body still had a Morning Star flag painted on its chest and a corpse of a child was found still embracing its mother’s body.
The bodies of people who were shot under the water tower were heaped into a small cargo truck. Some of these people were not yet dead. Several eye-witnesses reported that this truck was filled with corpses, that it departed from the harbor, and then returned for another load. I counted fifteen people in the first load, one eyewitness told me.
The truck came a second time and I counted seventeen people inside. When they opened up the truck bed I could see lots of blood, in that small truck there was lots of blood. Human rights investigators could not determine what happened to the dead and wounded people who were transported in this truck.
Filep Karma, who is now an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, told me about how to find one mass grave. But, forensic archaeologists have not yet visited this site. Elsham Papua produced a 69 page report in Indonesian about the massacre titled "Names Without Graves, Graves Without Names." The report called for an international investigation.

Richard Samuelson
Free West Papua Campaign, Oxford, UK.