Jacob Rumbiak & Louise Byrne
The symbol designed by Jacob Rumbiak for the Australia West Papua Association (Melbourne) for which he is a consultant.
Jacob Rumbiak was born in Ayamaru, a small village in the ‘birdshead’ region of West Papua, then a colony of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. He was three years old in December 1961 when the President of the Indonesian Republic launched a military operation, code-named ‘Mandala’ to overthrow the government in Dutch New Guinea and to plant the red and white Indonesian flag.
Within months parachutes were floating over the western regencies of Fak Fak, Manokwari and Sorong, landing barges were snaking passage onto the southern beaches, and Indonesian soldiers were fanning out to comb the country. West Papuans, fighting side-by-side the Dutch, defended the territory, and Indonesia retreated when Yos Sudarso, Deputy Commander of the Navy, was killed during a battle in the Arafura Sea.
The International Commission of Jurists recently described Operation Mandala as “armed invasion of West Papua early in 1962”. The Indonesian Department of Foreign Affairs has always claimed it was just a few “armed clashes”, a “negative development”. At the same time however, it has always promoted Yos Sudarso as a national hero. There’s a bronze statue of the admiral in Jayapura, standing tall on a small patch of green, right arm gesturing to Papua New Guinea, staring out over Yos Sudarso Bay. This was the same bay, then called Humboldt, from which General McArthur launched 371 ships to the Philippines during World War 11. Fredrik Hendrik Island in the Arafura Sea was also given the name Yos Sudarso; and Mount Cartenz, the highest mountain in West Papua, is now known as Puncak/Mount Mandala.
Jacob, who has lived in exile in Australia since 1999, has gentle memories of his homeland. Of two villages on Numfoor Island, where babies sleep on the waves, their little bodies wrapped around logs that float, like cots, on the water; their mothers working unfettered by the weight of a child on the back. Of the huge maritime park surrounding Biak Island where Grandfather Wairow Rumbiak taught him how to row his small canoe. Of the snow on Mount Carstenz, called eternal because it’s been there since the Ice Age and reminds West Papuans that God has not forgotten the people He calls his second born. Of the vast marches on the south coast (which Australian soldiers might also remember), where sagu, hewn from the heart of thorny metroxylon palms, has nourished Papuans for centuries.
Jacob harbours memories of sadness as well. The death of his mother, giving birth to her thirteenth child. Of the Javanese beauty, Diaz Natali, armed commander of the university’s student paramilitary, whose father, Brigadier General Diaz Mulyana, was his soccer coach and wanted him to marry her. Of his wife, forced to hide while giving birth to their third son while he was labouring in the Papua New Guinea Consulate, trying to convince Ali Alatas (Indonesia’s Foreign Affairs Minister) and two generals (Benny Murdani and Try Sutrisno) of West Papua’s right to independence. Of the charges of subversion, and days in court listening to the government’s version of his life story. Jacob’s version was a ninety-page closely-argued case for independence which took him eight hours to read. He was then sentenced to seventeen years of isolation in prison.
Five years before he’d been applauded by millions of Indonesians as his deadly left foot struck the goal that won them the Asian Soccer Championship Cup. Applause too, when the scholarship student from the awkward Melanesian province graduated from Bandung Teachers Training College, the most prestigious institute of learning in the archipelago. However he found few Indonesians in the metropole, even amongst academia, who knew or were interested in West Papua or in the New York Agreement of 1962—whereby Dutch New Guinea’s self-determination, schedueled for 1970, was aborted and the Republic of Indonesia acquired a large and wealthy province. Jacob knew it was important for Indonesians to understand West Papua’s story as it is for West Papuans to keep repeating it—and he used his nine-year odyssey in Java to teach Indonesians, especially the students, the value of human rights and the principles of democracy.
In prison he had learned the breadth of resistance to Javanese rule. A lady from a Christian Church in Sulawesi visited each of his eleven prisons, silently noting his presence, and passing the information to an Indonesian human rights organization. An East Timorese Red Cross nurse worked the system to have him removed from Tangerang Prison, where he’d been isolated for two years in a sunless cell at the top of a stone tower. Another Timorese, Joao Freitas, a fellow prisoner in Cipinang, used acapuncture and traditional medicine to repair his torture-broken body. Chats with Xanana Gusmao, also in Cipinang, were more often about their future in their own republics than their pasts as leaders of indigenous resistance movements. In 1999, he escaped from prison to share the speaking-podium with Aceh’s Teuku Don Zalfari at several universities in Japan (Zalfari was later murdered by Indonesian-appointed mercenaries). An Indonesian student democracy movement helped him to escape again in 1999, this time to fly home and map more strategies for West Papua’s non-violent struggle.
West Papuans had changed during the decade he’d been in prison. The United Nations referendum was still an Act of ‘No’ Choice, but by talking the military into their mythology, the Papuans were managing the violence of the occupation more astutely. A line in a song, the movement of a river, even a shredded flag evoked but did not essay the litany of horrors they’d endured since 1963. The national agenda was becoming more important than family identity; people talked ‘West Papua’ first, then ‘Dani’ or ‘Mebrat’ or ‘Biak’. He found small communities in the highlands communicating rather than competing at their boundaries, the dialogue woven by women—third, fourth, or even fifth wife of traditional leaders, who were used to translating negotiations between their husbands and their fathers, but were now talking about resistance to Indonesian rule and the independence of a Melanesian nation. Their conversations were being echoed around the country by the Christian network of parishes. Even the weary fighters in the mountains, who everyone calls ‘the OPM’, were beginning to streamline their strategies.
The Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM) is the oldest non-traditional organization in West Papua. It began as a small study group in 1964, formed by a primary school teacher to examine methods of resistance. Indonesian aggression soon forced members to abandon their mission in the village and take up armed resistance in the forest. Hundreds of frightened families followed, including Pastor Daniel Rumbiak’s. The fighters taught the pastor’s young son to hunt and to harvest the forest; and by 1969, the year of the referendum, an eleven-year-old Jacob was commanding a platoon of thirty-seven men. A treacherous amnesty before the referendum had deprived the OPM of many of its founding members, and leadership had become a matter of who was left. Last week in Melbourne, Jacob watched a documentary about two ten-year-old cigar-smoking brothers, tiny twin commandoes of the Karen in Burma. He too had smoked bush cigars; his ‘career’ also had not been a matter of choice.
In 1999, Jacob was an official observer of the ballot in East Timor. Like most who had worked with the Timorese, he knew they’d vote for independence. Unlike most, he knew the Indonesian army, anticipated its thirst for pay back, and looked for opportunities to minimise what military analysts call ‘scorched earth policy’ (or destroy everything as you leave). In Viqueque, where he was based, he met five Indonesian military from West Papua (including a cousin from Biak) and decided a traditional Melanesian feast before the ballot might inspire a measure of goodwill. The West Papuans invited the local militia and their Indonesian commanders; and Jacob invited elders of the local communities and student campaigners from Dili. The chief of Beloi village killed a pig, and the guests gathered in the light warm air of a tropical night. Guitars strummed a repertoire that everyone seemed to know, and the tuaca (bush wine) flowed. Then the moon waned, and the mood shifted. The Javanese remembered the terrible massacres of 1966. The West Papuan soldiers began talking about helping, not hindering, a referendum in West Papua. Militia members wept. The district military commander, one of the most violent in East Timor, slumped and said he felt terrible. A few days later, East Timor lay scorched and dying in the bloody wake of the freedom vote, but the liurai (chief) of Viqueque told his daughter in Melbourne how surprised he was by the comparatively low level of violence and destruction in his territory.
Indonesia’s third president, Abdurrahman Wahid, started his term by releasing West Papuan political prisoners. Then he provided funds for a National Congress, the first democratic space West Papuans had experienced since 1961. Representatives from the territory’s thirteen regencies were flown to Jayapura, the provincial capital. Many of those not invited sold their pigs and vegetables and walked. Everyone wanted their aspirations for independence recognised. Later in this memorable year of political tolerance, the Protestant Church declared it was independence of its mother church in Jakarta. Some believed that West Papua’s valiant non-violent struggle was, at last, approaching its goal. Jacob was watching closely and cautiously from his new home in Australia.
POSTSCRIPT. In December 1999, Indonesia’s Vice-President, Megawati Sukarnoputri appointed Major-General Simbolen as Commander of the Indonesian Army in West Papua. He had earned points in the Jakarta bureaucracy by capturing East Timor’s resistance leader, Xanana Gusmao, in 1991, but was classified by Australian intelligence as ‘hardline’, and named by the United Nations as one of six key conspirators of the violence in East Timor.
Simbolen stamped notice of his arrival in West Papua by incarcerating most of the religious, student, military and political leadership. The list included Rev. Herman Awom, Vice-Moderator of the Protestant Church, and Mathius Wenda, leader of the West Papuan National Army (TPN) who had operated out of bush headquarters in PNG for years. Drs. Albert Sefnat Kaliele, Chairman of the West Melanesian Council, was also jailed for allegedly misusing the equivalent of $aus7.00. (The Australian Chapter of the International Commission of Jurists was refused permission by the Indonesian government to observe his trial).
In July 2001 Sukarnoputri was appointed president, and a few months later, a prominent West Papua leader, Theys Eluay, was murdered in West Papua. In December she was filmed addressing the military in Jakarta, telling them to “do your duty as solders and don’t be concerned with human rights.” On 22 December she cancelled her visit to Jayapura—for which three thousand highlanders had walked across the mountains to register their objections to Special Autonomy.
Melbourne 2001
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