15/10/2026
WEST PAPUA: A CONFLICT THE WORLD TOO OFTEN OVERLOOKS
West Papua’s decades-long struggle for independence and the human suffering associated with it receive remarkably little attention in Australian media. Yet reports of military operations, civilian deaths and families fleeing into remote jungle areas deserve far greater scrutiny.
In this article, Thomas Petersson examines how the conflict has reached the isolated Korowai people and why independent reporting, accountability and international attention are so important.
The National Herald
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War in West Papua reaches one of the world’s most isolated peoples
Thomas Petersson 14 October 2026
On 2 July 2026, Nicholas F. Gosselin, an American pilot working for the Indonesian aviation company Associated Mission Aviation, landed a small aircraft carrying seven Indigenous Papuan passengers at an airstrip in West Papua. Fighters from the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) shot him dead and set fire to the plane. The passengers survived.
The TPNPB is the armed wing of the Free Papua Movement, or OPM, which fights for West Papuan independence from Indonesia. It said the aircraft had entered an area where it had warned civilian planes not to fly, alleging that such flights were used to transport Indonesian troops and supplies. The Indonesian military denied that Gosselin’s plane was carrying troops. Its passengers, it said, were civilians.
Indonesian soldiers recovered Gosselin’s body the following day. Later in July, Indonesian military and police operations reached the territory of the Korowai people. Local sources told Human Rights Monitor that ground forces moved through the forest with the support of helicopters and drones. They alleged that security forces fired into civilian settlements. These accounts have not been independently verified.
Hundreds of people from the area including children, pregnant women and the elderly reportedly fled into the jungle. Human Rights Monitor has identified two civilians it says were killed during the operations, though the circumstances of their deaths remain unclear.
When I visited the area twice in the early 2000s, contact with the Korowai was still relatively limited. I particularly remember three women who approached our camp after a week. They had observed us from a distance and were cautiously curious. They told us it was the first time they had ever encountered white people. They left us as swiftly and silently as they had appeared. They offered a reserved smile. Then, they were swallowed up by the jungle once more.
I cannot know where those women are now. But the reports of families fleeing into the jungle have brought that encounter back to me. To understand why soldiers and independence fighters have come to this remote part of West Papua, we have to look beyond the events of July.
West Papua’s future was sealed when Indonesia took over control of the western half of New Guinea from the Netherlands in the 1960s. Under the 1962 New York Agreement between Indonesia and the Netherlands, the Papuans were supposed to determine their own future through a vote: an ‘Act of Free Choice’. The choice was independence or integration with Indonesia. Amid violence and under military duress, all 1,025 handpicked Papuans voted in 1969 to join Indonesia, then ruled by the Suharto dictatorship. The vote was monitored and accepted by the UN.
"No society, no human being, lives outside the current of history. However much outsiders imagined their home as an untouched frontier, the Korowai were never outside West Papua’s struggle over land, power and independence."
For many Papuans, the vote did not settle the question of independence. It denied them a genuine choice. The OPM’s armed struggle, and Indonesia’s continuing military response to it, cannot be understood apart from that history. Great power interests dictated the outcome, and Papuans still live with its consequences.
The voices of smaller nations have rarely carried much weight in West Papua’s modern political history. Instead, the region’s fate has been shaped by notions of ‘primitive savages’ and the doctrine of might makes right in international relations. During the Cold War in the early 1960s, for instance, an official White House memorandum described West Papua as ‘a few thousand square miles of cannibal land’.
The Indonesian dictatorship under President Suharto (1967–1998) held West Papua in an iron grip, backed by the United States. Since the early 1970s, the American mining company Freeport-McMoRan has extracted gold and copper in West Papua, protected by the Indonesian military. Freeport signed its first mining contract with the Suharto regime as early as 1967. The mine is illustrative of how the struggle over West Papua has always been a contest of control of its land and resources, which matter to Indonesia and to foreign companies.
Over the years, thousands of Papuans have lost their lives in the conflict and under Indonesian rule. The democratic progress that gained momentum after the fall of Suharto in 1998 has not resolved the conflict in West Papua. In the 2024 Indonesian presidential election, victory went to Prabowo Subianto, the former general who under the Suharto dictatorship was deeply entangled in the brutal repression in West Papua. As commander of the army’s elite Kopassus forces, he led several harsh military operations in both East Timor and West Papua.
Since Prabowo assumed the presidency, the Indonesian military (TNI) has intensified its operations in West Papua through several large-scale campaigns. The Indonesian government justifies these operations as counter-terrorism measures against what it calls ‘separatist terrorist groups’, and as necessary steps to protect vital infrastructure and agricultural mega-projects. Throughout 2025 and 2026, the military has launched raids against numerous isolated villages and areas where OPM members are suspected to be hiding.
During a military operation in the village of Soanggama in October 2025, 14 people were killed. The military claimed that all of them were OPM combatants, but local human rights defenders later said that the majority were civilians. In mid-2026, violence intensified sharply in the Sugapa and Agisiga districts. Several church workers, pastors and a pregnant woman were reportedly killed as gunfire struck civilian homes. Similar incidents have been reported in various other locations.
According to Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM), 97 incidents occurred in West Papua in 2025, leaving 119 people dead and 43 injured in connection with violence and armed conflict. The corresponding figures for the first half of 2026 stand at 42 incidents, with 59 people killed and 50 injured. According to a report by Human Rights Monitor, there were around 127,000 internally displaced people in West Papua at the end of August 2026.
It is difficult to establish what has happened in many of the places where people have fled. Critical journalists are, and have long been, effectively banned from the region. The question of allowing the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights access to West Papua has been debated for years. In early September, the member states of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) sharpened their rhetoric, demanding that the High Commissioner be granted entry before 31 December 2026—a date that coincides with the expiration of Indonesia’s current term on the UN Human Rights Council.
Whether this heightened rhetoric will bear any fruit remains to be seen. The difficulty of obtaining independent access matters especially in the Korowai area, where reports of the July operations remain contested and displaced families are hard to reach. In Australia, this area is perhaps best known for the 2006 media battle between Channel Seven and Channel Nine over attempts to ‘rescue’ a six-year-old boy named Wawa, who had been portrayed by Nine’s 60 Minutes as being at risk of being killed and eaten.
The Korowai lived for a long time with very limited contact with the outside world. The first mission post in the area was established around 1980. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the region became a mecca for wealthy Western tourists. The untouched drew them in. The pure and unspoiled. Exoticism. Treehouses, p***s gourds and stone axes captivated the Western gaze.
A gaze that has compartmentalised and directed its focus elsewhere. A gaze that would rather look at a man in a p***s gourd than listen to a politically conscious Papuan speaking of their reality. A gaze that has sought both to embrace and to dominate.
Over the past few decades, transformation in the region has been profound. Today, many Korowai have moved from the deep jungle to permanent villages established by Christian missionaries and the Indonesian state. The presence of Indonesian authorities has grown increasingly palpable. The tourists’ fascination has waned, but the rest of the world has drawn ever closer.
No society, no human being, lives outside the current of history. However much outsiders imagined their home as an untouched frontier, the Korowai were never outside West Papua’s struggle over land, power and independence. Now that violence has reached their territory, the question is whether those same outsiders will pay attention to what its people say has happened.
I remember the warmth in those three women’s eyes, their wonder. Today, I remember them with sorrow. I do not know whether they are among those who fled. But the people who did flee deserve more than our speculation: they deserve safety, help and an independent account of what happened to them.
