Journal of Genocide Research

ISSN: 1462-3528 (Print) 1469-9494 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjgr20

“A thousand miles of cannibal lands”: imagining away genocide in the re-colonization of West

Papua

Tracey Banivanua-Mar

To cite this article: Tracey Banivanua-Mar (2008) “A thousand miles of cannibal lands”: imagining away genocide in the re-colonization of West Papua, Journal of Genocide Research, 10:4, 583-602, DOI: 10.1080/14623520802447743

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623520802447743

Published online: 06 Nov 2008.

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Journal of Genocide Research (2008), 10(4), December, 583– 602

“A thousand miles of cannibal lands”: imagining away genocide in the

re-colonization of West Papua

TRACEY BANIVANUA-MAR

Following recent calls to monitor intensifications of settler-colonial structures (Journal of Genocide Research, Vol 9, No 4, 2007, p 403), this article focuses on an as yet poorly recognized site of settler-colonial violence against indigenous peoples. Rather than engaging in what the author argues is ultimately a fruitless and potentially diversionary debate over whether the killings, massacres, disappearances and structural elimination of West Papuans amount, conceptually, to genocide, this article focuses on the kinds of discursive and epistemic violence that provide the enabling backbone and camouflage for genocidal practices. The larger questions with which the paper engages is why it is that we remain so reluctant to detect the crime of genocide, and what it is that popularly diverts our attention? In the modern era, when a body of international human rights law maintains some, if largely ineffectual, global scrutiny, it is not only the acquiescent consent of settlers on the scene that needs manufacturing for structural genocide and genocidal events to occur. In the context of globalized markets for, and consumption of, discursive representations, modern genocides are being sold to, and allowed to happen by, all of us. With a particular focus on the spectacle of cannibalism, this article explores what the author argues is a text-book example of the kind of discursive footwork that has historically accompanied colonialism’s genocidal structures, and has allowed genocide to masquerade as criminally neutral (unintentional fatal impact or simply progress), or morally compelling (civilizing missions, assimilation, or development). Finally, in exploring the reflected presence of claims of cannibalism and savagery in the face-to-face violence of Indonesian Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 2016 occupation in West Papua, this article also argues for bringing debates about genocide back from the brink of over-analysis. As has been well advanced to date, dimensions of genocide studies threaten to tip the balance of debates so that genocide becomes a concept rather than crime, and a concept that is severed from the blunt physicality of determined and sustained attempts at mass extermination. An over-determined ‘genocide,’ the paper argues, is a temporized genocide, and one which therefore opens crucial space in debates for re-engaging precisely the kinds of colonial discourses that enable, excuse and even naturalize genocide in the first place.

West Papua has long occupied colonial imaginations as “a few thousand miles of cannibal land.” 1 These words were uttered by John F. Kennedy’s CIA advisor, Robert Komer, in 1962 as the United States (US) prepared to step in to the struggle between a newly independent Indonesia and the withdrawing Dutch colonial rulers over the region then known as West Irian. At the time, the description

ISSN 1462-3528 print; ISSN 1469-9494 online/08/040583-20 # 2008 Research Network in Genocide Studies DOI: 10.1080/14623520802447743

TRACEY BANIVANUA-MAR

reflected West Papua’s fame as something of a final frontier in the aftermath of the sensational disappearance of Michael Rockefeller in 1961. 2 This fame has lingered. In a variety of popular media West Papua is often represented as an Edenic “hotbed of discovery” in evolutionary isolation, and has become home to commodified dreams of first (and fatal) contact with undiscovered peoples whose imagined primitiveness is epitomized by their presumed cannibalism. From discoveries of “tree-dwelling tribe[s] of cannibals,” to advertised cannibal holidays, and adventure tours to see the world’s “last” cannibals, West Papua has come to be imagined as a living, breathing natural history display. Since 1963 and the Indonesian invasion that eventuated, however, West Papua has also been home to the kind of determined policies of transmigration, assimilation, and sustained physical and administrative violence against indigenous Papuans that are common to settler-colonialism. Many argue that West Papua is a site of unfolding genocide. 3 This sits in stark contrast to the popularly consumed image of a racialized edenic paradise, but as this article explores, the contrast is not coincidental. The takeover of West Papua occurred amidst the post-war winds of change, when the United Nations (UN) led an international commitment to the decolonization of non-self-governing territories. In the case of West Papua, however, Komer’s description echoed an international dismissal of Papuan aspirations for self-rule. In the New York Agreement of 1962, which was brokered by the US between the Netherlands and Indonesia, possession of West Papua was handed to post-colonial Indonesia, which in turn promised a future act of self-determination in which West Papuans would be able to vote for their future. This act, the Act of Free Choice, occurred in 1969, when 1,000 people representing a population of a million voted unanimously and under demonstrable coercion to retain Indonesian sovereignty. Otherwise known as the Act of No Choice, it is now increasingly argued that the UN and global community knowingly stood aside while Suharto’s military engineered the outcome of the ballot. 4 In an exemplary memo sent in 1968 to the US State Department and copied to Canberra, the Hague and other centres of interested governments, the US ambassador in Jakarta described the Act of Free Choice as an appropriate “formula” for ensuring an “affirmation of Indonesian sovereignty.” The world’s governments cited the Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 2016 primitiveness of Papuans as justification for accepting the vote. As Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State put it, free elections “would be almost meaningless among the stone-age cultures of New Guinea.” 5 In the subsequent vote of the UN General Assembly, 84 members voted to cement Indonesia’s sovereignty in West Papua, while 30 members abstained. Those abstaining, mostly from former African colonies, cited the unacceptability of deeming a people to be too “primitive” to be free. 6 Their voices carried little weight against the Cold War interests of free world governments, however, and the violence that erupted and endured after 1969 has since enjoyed a powerful international sanction. West Papua, renamed Irian Jaya between 1973 and 2004, is treated within Indonesian national discourse as a province internal to the post-colonial nation. 7

This claim however, is based on West Papua’s former colonial status under Dutch rule, and Indonesia’s occupation and multi-dimensional marginalization

“A THOUSAND MILES OF CANNIBAL LANDS”

of indigenous Papuans lends the region the structural status of a colony of settlement. As is detailed below, West Papuans are close to being outnumbered by transmigration settlers; they have little administrative or political power; are subject to pacification and assimilation campaigns; the significant mineral and timber-based wealth extracted from the region rarely ends up in the hands of indigenous land owners, and their land in turn is constitutionally framed as being owned by no one. 8 As is also detailed, expressions of Papuan identity through dress, language, or music have become resilient and enduring forms of resistance, and in turn, have been treated as seditious and treasonous, routinely attracting military campaigns of arbitrary arrest and violence. While due care must be taken to acknowledge the particularities of Indonesia’s occupation of West Papua as a defiant act of decolonization, the dispossession and displacement of indigenous Papuans is nevertheless typically settler-colonial. Moreover, underpinning the structural similarities between West Papua and the classic settler-colonies of European empires, and perhaps the ultimate circum- stance that distinguishes West Papua’s status from simply being militarily occupied, is the international sanction that Indonesian governments have enjoyed. Like colonialism of old, the occupation of West Papua in the international realm is legally sanctioned as a civilizing mission, or in twentieth and twenty-first century terms, as an act of development. It is the discursive context of this international acquiescence or blindness that this article explores. I argue that the prevalence of popular images of West Papuans as savages distracts, masks and, in the end, naturalizes the political state of West Papuans. Moreover the spectre of cannibalism represents something of a distillation of, and reference to, perpetuated colonial tropes of the past. One of the striking benefits of interrogating settler-colonial, and indeed colonial, formations of genocide is that, as Patrick Wolfe put it, settler-colonialism is an indicator of the kinds of social, political, economic and ideological conditions that enable and perpetuate genocidal processes. 9 He is of course not alone in arguing that colonialism shares an intimate, genealogical, structural, and social, affinity with genocide, but his analysis of the logic of elimination is an important reminder that genocide is produced by a far-reaching structural Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 2016 context. It is these contextual mechanisms that this article attempts to unpick. 10

In 2002, Alexander Hinton argued that the discourses of alterity that accompanied empire and nation building have historically provided genocidal priming for perpetrator societies. When these primed conditions were heated and agitated, genocide tended to explode into cases of what we could term hot genocide, such as in Germany, Cambodia, or Rwanda. 11 While I do not disagree with this formula, this article emphasizes the ways in which, in the case of colonial genocides, we deal with cold killing—that is, with either a cultivated state blindness towards the massacres and atrocities of private individuals and corporations, or the structural, policy-driven, day-by-day genocide of settler-state replacements of indigenous populations. In the same collection as Hinton, Nancy Scheper-Hughes argued that in order to better understand the how of genocide, rather than the whether or what, we must

look to the invisible, and quiet genocides, or the genocidal continuums of the present. 12 In an extension of this call, I explore the silencing processes by which the violence endured by indigenous peoples is so often hyphenated, suffixed or prefixed. A focus on the spectacle of cannibalism observes the discursive footwork that has historically ushered genocide into the realm of the criminally neutral (unintentional fatal impact or simply progress), or morally compelling (civilizing missions, assimilation, or development). In observing the reflected presence in West Papua of claims of cannibalism in the face-to-face violence of occupation, the larger question with which the paper engages is why we, who observe or ignore what happens to indigenous peoples, remain so reluctant to detect colonial genocide? What is it that diverts our attention? In the nominally postcolonial era, when a body of international law and rhetoric of human rights maintains some, if largely ineffectual, global scrutiny, it is not only the consent of settlers on the scene that needs manufacturing for genocide to occur. The globalized consumption of the spectacles and discourses of savagery which accompany colonialism’s racial violence means that modern genocides are sold to, and allowed to happen by, all of us. This article does not centre on the potentially diversionary debate over whether the killings, massacres, disappearances and structural marginalization of West Papuans amounts to genocide in the legal sense. My reluctance to engage in definitional debate stems directly from a central point explored in this article. That is, and this has been well advanced to date, that as definitions of genocide multiply, genocide also increasingly resembles an amorphous and malleable concept, occasionally removed from the blunt physicality of attempts to eliminate the physical, political or cultural existence of a group. Recent exchanges over Christian Gerlach’s “extremely violent societies” thesis pointed out and exemplified the way in which debates that are excessively focussed on limiting and expanding our conceptual definitions of genocide and its hyphenated typologies are risky. 13 They run the risk of setting up taxonomies of genocide, or opening crucial space in debates for re-engaging precisely the kinds of discourses that enable and naturalize it in the first place. This argument is certainly not new, but it is directed at the nagging absence in debates over definition of the violence, Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 2016 terror, silence, and trauma that brings genocide into the homes of those peoples who are still defined in order to be destroyed. While studies of genocide must adopt a little cold abstraction for the sake of analysis, I argue here for the value of definitions that remain focussed on the experiences of victims, in addition to those of perpetrators. While this may well lead to politicized discussions fuelled by victim groups’ desires for survival, acknowledgement or justice, perhaps if prevention is our aim, this is as it should be. In the face of colonialism’s character- istically dragging and daily genocides against indigenous peoples we must be, as Ward Churchill put it, “unequivocally political” in our detection of it. 14 Genocide, after all, is a crime defined for the purposes of prevention as well as punishment or justice, and when it comes to prevention it is surely preferable to err, if at all, on the side of over-diagnosis. Moreover, a characteristic of colonialism, and settler-colonialism in particular, is that genocide is often a means rather than an

end. As I argue, colonial genocides are frequently passive in their aggression, and state actions of neglect, omission, silence and inaction accumulate to knowingly inflict destruction on indigenous peoples. Analyses of genocide that centre on the impact on victims not only enable the detection of inferred or passive intent—necessary in a legal context. In addition such a focus may work against those discursive currents and camouflages explored in this article, which so successfully naturalize ongoing acts of colonial violence.

West Papua: scene 1

In 2006, a segment titled “Last cannibals” aired on 60 Minutes on the Australian commercial television network Nine. The story followed journalist Ben Fordham and Paul Raffaele, a writer for Smithsonian magazine, as they searched the jungles of West Papua for “primitive warriors who have never seen a white man ... and still eat human flesh.” Stumbling through jungle and waterways, they survived an altercation with locals, which Raffaele later described in an online chat hosted by 60 Minutes, as a confrontation with “frenzied naked cannibals” asking for money. As they journeyed further into this “living, breathing time capsule” they met people who, Raffaele reported, eat everything on a (presumably human) body but the teeth. On reaching their heart of darkness, Fordham and Raffaele visited one of the famed Korowai tree-houses to meet people they promised had never before seen white people. With shining eyes, and declaring himself a “sook,” Raffaele reported achieving his life-long dream of making “first contact” with stone-age cannibals, and Fordham’s narration judged “from these astonished faces [that] it’s clear they’ve never seen anything like us.” Scenes of Raffaele dropping his trousers and lifting his shirt to wave his belly and wiggle his naked rear end in the faces of the gathered group makes that easy to believe. 15

“Last cannibals” could readily be dismissed as tabloid entertainment of no great significance, but to do so might miss the point that cannibalism has deep purchase in colonial worlds, a purchase reflected in the ease with which the report was able to brand the Korowai as cannibals. No evidence of cannibalism was offered, no history of Korowai, nor introduction to any West Papuans with more than a first Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 2016 name, and no “experts” were consulted. This in itself is not noteworthy. As William Arens controversially claimed nearly 40 years ago, cannibalism has deep roots in colonial imaginations and has accompanied the discovery of “natives” since Columbus. Indeed the quest for savagery and conquest, of which cannibalism is so symbolic, is an industry as central to colonization as violence and economic exploitation. 16 Etymologically derived from Columbus’ discoveries via hearsay of the Carib man-eaters, and conceptually drawing on a European archive of monsters on the borders and peripheries of the unknown, cannibalism has been and may always be the epitome of savagery, primitiveness, alterity and spectacle. 17 Wherever cannibals have been discovered, Arens argued, they existed prior to and independent of any evidence. Such was the case in “Last Cannibals.” Filled with images of semi-clothed black Papuans climb- ing trees and eating in jungle settings of seething rivers and dimmed lighting, the

reliance of “Last cannibals” on revived colonial tropes and imagery was not subtle. But as dated as the story might seem to postcolonial sensibilities, it continues to resonate in a perpetuated colonial industry of spectacle. In the nineteenth century, as Europe found ways to exploit the islands of the Pacific by representing them, British, French, German, Dutch and American accounts peopled the black islands of the western Pacific from Fiji to West Papua (branded “Melanesia” in the 1860s) with ferocious cannibals. Throughout colonial discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cannibalism was a synecdoche that stood for a wider colonial experience of discovery or conquest. In Melanesia, known as the Cannibal Isles, the region remained popular with gen- erations of armchair ethnologists, cultural tourists, and P&O cruisers whose demands for cannibalism were met by hundreds of studio photos, travel tales and seafaring yarns, artefact collections, and travelling human exhibits such as the Fiji Cannibal Exhibition of 1873. 18 The supply and demand for the spectacle of cannibalism continued seamlessly into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and from Fiji to Papua New Guinea (PNG) re-creations of cannibalism with replica cannibal pots and cannibal forks continue to offer tourists an authentic experience. Such tourism gained some infamy in 1987 with the launch of Dennis O’Rourke’s documentary Cannibal Tours which unflatteringly turned the lens back on rich western tourists journeying up the Sepik river into the interior of PNG. 19 From the Italian experts on “vegetating” natives, to the German tourist in a safari suit, or the New Yorker in search of primitive art and those that had eaten Michael Rockefeller, the documentary effectively testified to the transnational and enduring appeal of cannibal tourism. More recently, the location of the enduring hope that cannibals might still be accessed has moved west across the 141st meridian that divides West Papua from Papua New Guinea and produced best-selling books like Sabine Keugler’s Jungle Child (2005), about a child of civilization brought up amidst West Papuan cannibals; the 1994 documentary Lords of the Garden featuring dramatic first-contact moments with Korowai cannibals; and Discovery Channel sagas of white men Going Tribal amongst the Kombai cannibals. Finally, while an emerging tourist industry makes cultural adventures available to those who can afford Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 2016 it, others may be lucky enough to win such competitions as that hosted by the UK men’s magazine Zoo in 2004 which offered “cannibal sex holidays” in West Papua as its prize. 20

Rather than travelling as journalists, Raffaele and Fordham travelled as tourists to film “Last cannibals” within a lucrative industry in which connoisseurs can purchase dreams of discovery for a few thousand dollars. Catering to the demand, one company offers tours to see the Kombai or Asmat people, and conducts regular “First Contact” expeditions to “discover” Korowai. They promise to consumers “truly ‘stone age’ tribes” and the experiences of coming “face to face with humans of a ‘completely’ different nature and time” (their emphases). On its website the company offers a tantalizing account of an expedition where an ambush similar to that described by Raffaele and Fordham provided a rite of passage into the unknown. A similar ambush confronted writer Michael Behar

in 2005, who paid AUD$10,000 to the same company for the journey that he suspected was not wholly authentic. Another company, Hidden Cultures Adventures, journeys to the stone age, as they put it, where customers can observe the daily life of a people “who have never been exposed to westerners.” Customers are reminded that they are “observers” and must not influence the “natural balance” by teaching “our language, games, songs etc.” Dissuaded from giving gifts tourists are encouraged to “leave no trace of our presence” and to leave behind only “smiles on the faces of our hosts.” 22

However well intended the cultural advice of Hidden Cultures Adventures may be, it is hard not to compare it to requests to leave only footprints and not feed the animals in wilderness reserves and zoos where people are not part of the featured fragile fauna. This is a fantasy central to this brand of tourism. Underpinning the superficial element of titillation is the sense that tourists are engaging in the kind of “salvage” ethnography of a dying peoples that characterized the methods of such late nineteenth century anthropologists as Margaret Mead and Alfred Kroe- bler. 23 Indeed a looming extinction in the face of modernity is the unsubtle subtext of the world’s “last” cannibals. The closing scenes of “Last cannibals,” for example, focused on a six-year-old boy, Wawa, who was condemned to death by his community as a suspected cannibal witch or xaxua. A few months after it aired, Nine network’s Australian rival, Seven, sent the host of their daily current affairs entertainment programme to West Papua on a failed mission to save Wawa. This resulted in a distasteful network brawl that drummed up a media frenzy illustrated with a predictable iconography of cannibal pots, grass- skirted cannibals, and headlines referencing tribalism, spears, and Conrad’s heart of darkness. 24 Apart from the sensational child-saving, however, Wawa represented a more universal question. If civilization intruded in time to save Wawa, would it “destroy these last survivors of the Stone Age” in the process? Raffaele authoritatively concluded: “let them be as they are because, within 20 or 30 years, it’ll all be over anyway.” 25 We were not told why, but the inference is clearly that it is, mysteriously, inevitable—“discovery” is a fatal impact. This scene of West Papua as a haven of undiscovered cannibal savages and a remote and isolated Eden of untouched stone-age wilderness is a deeply racialized Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 2016 construction that places West Papuans outside time. Conceptually, cannibalism functions to designate an exotic, inferior and colonizable status to those so defined. In addition, it functions as a destination, and situates designated cannibals directly and fatally in the path of the future. In the past, the idea of cannibalism and the violence from which it distracted attention, were also mutually productive. Not only did the promise of its existence compel explorers, travellers and missionaries ever onwards and inwards beyond the frontiers of conquered and civilized territory. In addition, the cry of cannibalism also provided the moral authority for this expansion and whatever violence accompanied it. During the nineteenth century, the violence of punitive raids from Queensland to the islands of the Torres Strait and Papuan coast; the atrocities of some of Queensland’s most violent labour raids into the islands of the western Pacific; and the suppression of uprisings such as those in the interior of Fiji and New Caledonia in the

1870s, were carried out with a ferocity matched only by the excessive levels of ritualistic depravity to which the targets of violence were rumoured to sink. Wherever claims of native cannibalism, depravity, savagery or primitiveness intensified, in other words, the commission of land grabs, labour raids and atrocities in the name of colonial civilization could be found. 26 Claims of cannibalism therefore functioned throughout Melanesia like halls of mirrors, matching the accusa- tion of being less than human with the reality of dehumanizing treatment. As in the past, cannibalism in West Papua continues to operate in these ways. It powerfully consolidates colonial narratives of savagery, inferiority and primitiveness, in the shadow of which colonial violence diminishes as it is naturalized. In this context, genocide readily becomes a passive and mysterious extinction, edited of the conditions producing it.

West Papua: scene 2

Through the looking glass of the scene above is a parallel image. Four months before “Last cannibals” went on air in Australia, 43 West Papuan refugees made it to the Australian mainland, where all but one were granted refugee status by an Australian government notorious for its hostility towards asylum seekers. In receiving asylum, these refugees joined tens of thousands of West Papuans who have fled since 1969. In fleeing, they have invisibly traversed the playgrounds of cannibalism’s tour industry, crossing the Arafura Sea where Michael Rockefeller disappeared, or the Sepik River of Cannibal Tours which criss-crosses the border with PNG. They all carry similar but individual tales of experiencing or fearing displacement, disappearance, torture, murder and indefi- nite imprisonment for their own, their relatives, or their associates’ links to such seditious activities as contact with the Free Papua Movement, the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM); attending powerfully symbolic ceremonies for raising the West Papuan independence symbol, the Morning Star flag; 27 or wearing tra- ditional clothing, fighting for land, undertaking banned cultural practices, or being in the way of transmigration settlements. The banner flown by these 43 refugees as they landed incited those who saw them to save the souls of West Papuan Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 2016 people from genocide. 28

Cycles of defiance and suppression, fear and terror, pepper the reports that have seeped from West Papua since the invasion of 1963. Amidst varied politics of resi- dence where landowners refuse to clear land, to well attended flag-raising ceremonies, retaliatory kidnapping of foreigners by the OPM, or the sabotage of international industries, the conviction amongst West Papuan nationalists that they are autonomous and should not be a part of Indonesia has proven impossible to suppress. In the 1970s, the open defiance of Papuans against the Indonesian takeover peaked in the face of the most intense period of militarization. 29

But as large-scale troop deployments were replaced in the mid-1970s with campaigns dominated by secrecy and intelligence, small-scale massacres, intimi- dation, torture and disappearances, West Papuan resistance has become ever more dynamic. As Chris Ballard reports, the varied protests and campaigns of

Amungme landowners against the operation of Freeport’s Grasburg mine on their land, has involved a range of legal and political campaigns, guerrilla style operations, and careful management of the international media through the taking of hostages. 31 But as his article also details, Amungme resistance has also necessi- tated the careful management of military retaliation and attacks which since the late 1970s have increasingly relied on the production of terror. The response of the Indonesian military, police and paramilitary to support for independence or defiant expressions of West Papuan identity since 1969 has been notoriously swift and bloody. This has been documented by various historians, journalists, and Indonesian and international non-government organizations. For example, the military operation of 1977, codenamed Operasi Tumpas (Operation Annihilation) mobilized against continued Amungme resistance to Freeport mine with full military paraphernalia. Strafing raids against numerous villages, such as the bombing of the village of Ilaga and the region of Akimuga with “Daisy Cluster” bombs dropped from OV-10 Broncos, followed by slash-and-burn raids on the gardens of surviving villagers, were openly aimed at clearing the mountains of resistant habitation.32The OPM later reported that soldiers burned the houses and churches and shot the livestock in all villages they passed, as well as frequently shooting men, women and children. At a later human rights tribunal hearing, Eliezer Bonay, a former governor of West Papua, estimated a death toll of 3000, while the Jakarta daily, Kompas reported that local rivers were so full of corpses the fish could not be eaten.33Throughout this and many other campaigns such as that on the island of Biak in 1970, reports detailed the kind of killing that accompanied these deaths. Reports abounded of disembowellings where the abdominal cavities of bodies were left on display filled with sticks, cab- bages and leaves; extreme sexual violence and mutilations of women, particularly pregnant women and their foetuses; and industrialized mass killings and mass graves. 34 This kind of violence is of course dense with symbolism. When a soldier killed Nalogolan Kibak, a leader of Kampong Dila, his body was strung up and his blood drained into a bucket from which tribal leaders, teachers and pastors of the area were forced at gunpoint to drink. 35 While contributing to a mimetic culture of terror in this land of cannibals, such violence targeting Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 2016 women, unborn babies, community leaders and the physical means of survival is all too familiar in the annals of genocide. While a “culture of terror” haunts the frontiers and remote border areas where Jakarta’s control over special forces and militia is seen to be limited, this violence is backed by, and backs, a centralized campaign of resettlement, relocation, and deculturation. 36 For example, following another military campaign codenamed Operasi Sapu Bersih (Operation Clean Sweep) in 1981, during which numerous massacres were reported in the Jayapura district and villages in the Paniai Basin of the central highlands were attacked with napalm and chemical weapons, the cleared land was later converted to transmigration land. 37 Since the mid-1980s, West Papua has been targeted by Indonesia’s transmigration programmes, which resettle the dispossessed and alienated poor, primarily from Java and Bali, on government sponsored land. John Otto Ondawame has noted that the

numbers of transmigration settlers within West Papua are 88.4% higher than any other province in Indonesia. 38 Those on whose land new settlers are placed, are themselves rendered “translocals” and resettled amongst transmigrant communities at specified ratios of one Papuan family to every nine Javanese families. 39

Changing regimes, a new status of Special Autonomy since 2002, and the gradual build-up of anti-Papuan militia since 2000 have all ensured a more dynamic occupation of West Papua than can be properly represented here. The key point, however, is that the colonial imagery that compelled and shaped Dutch, British, German and Australian colonialism on the island of New Guinea, has been successfully grafted onto this occupation. Reports of the violence of military operations have been replete with references to Papuans as pigs, dogs and monkeys; early programmes like Suharto’s Operasia Bursana (Operation Wear Clothes) and his donation of 80,000 items of clothing played enduringly on the language of civilizing Papuan inferiority; and Indonesia’s programmes of civilizing and Indonesianization have been famously defended by various ministers of particularly the Suharto regime, as getting Papuans “down from the trees” to abolish their traditions. 40 The campaign to pacify West Papuan resistance to Indonesianization, in other words, is clearly permeated by discourses of Papuan backwardness and primitiveness, and has consistently been framed as a civilizing mission. The reports emerging from West Papua and Indonesia via a variety of human rights watch bodies, survivors and refugee testimonies name as genocide the litany of physical and sexual abuse, extrajudicial killing, and the concerted efforts to deprive Papuans of a means of survival. 41 Rather than mincing definitions of genocide, many of these claims limit themselves to the 1948 Convention. Amongst the most recent, for example, is a research report conducted by the Lowenstein Human Rights Clinic at Yale University’s Law School, which found that, simply put, the collective acts and omissions of the Indonesian state, for which reliable evidence is available, amounts to genocide in accordance with current understandings of the convention and international jurisprudence. 42

Not surprisingly, the accusations of genocide are rejected by the Indonesian government and military who continue to maintain that their operations are in defence Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 2016 of Indonesia’s national integrity. This is a powerful argument for it inherently draws on the rights of sovereignty confirmed by the UN acceptance of the 1969 act of self-determination. As internal national affairs, military operations with such names as Clean Sweep and Annihilation are framed as the self-defensive suppression of political insurgency, and as political rather than race-based cleansing. While it does not take much to argue the case that in the settler-colonial context, and amidst the entwinement of deculturation programmes with the suppression of West Papuan aspirations for national independence, the political is racial, perhaps a more pertinent question emerges from this observation. 43 How is it, and under what circumstances can the resistance of handfuls of indigenous peoples armed with the symbols of a bow and arrow and the Morning Star flag, be framed as being so threatening they warrant defensive action involving machine guns, napalm, cluster bombs, elite Kopasus soldiers and helicopters? Under what

conditions in other words does genocide disappear? The answer, I believe, lies in the entanglement of the two contrasting and mutually productive scenes we have encountered and, I suggest, it reveals a key feature of colonial genocides.

Colonial genocide and the silencing chatter of cannibals

The two scenes of West Papua presented above are mirrored contrasts. The land of an undiscovered Eden is home to thousands of reports of people who have disappeared and communities who have fled military harassment to hidden camps in the Papuan jungle. West Papua’s pristine wilderness is actually an aggressively exploited source of rare timber and valuable minerals in ways that are epitomized by Freeport’s military-protected Grasburg mine—the biggest in the world. It is estimated that by the time this transnational mine completes its operations, it will have generated more than twice as much waste as the earth excavated from the Panama canal. Most of it will be drained into waterways which Freeport’s own studies have found are consequently too toxic for aquatic life. 44 The contrasts do not stop there. The place of “cannibal sex holidays” is ravaged by HIV/AIDS whose spread is being facilitated by a two-tiered prostitution industry that expli- citly offers less protection to Papuan women. 45 The “truly stone-age” Asmat people have for years been working under varied conditions of coerced and free labour in a thriving and ruthless logging industry, while the undiscovered Korowai are well accustomed to extrajudicial punishment and torture at the hands of police following any claims of cannibalism or witchcraft. 46 Tales of West Papuan savagery that are sold to interested audiences, in other words, are not just empirically impossible in their imagined pristineness. In addition, the depth of savagery represented in circulating discourses of the ultimate savagery of cannibalism is reflected in the violence of military crackdowns. Claims by tourist-journalists Fordham and Raffaelle that West Papuans are cannibals who eat everything but teeth are reflected in reports of Indonesian military-led mutilations of women; and testimonies of prisoners being made to lick blood from the floor of gaol cells, or to cut and eat their own hair during recent crackdowns on flag-raising ceremonies. 47 Likewise, the stock images of West Papuans in “Last Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 2016 cannibals,” or which adorn the websites of tour companies are reflected in the graphic images illustrating recent reports on genocide showing mutilated corpses, and smiling soldiers displaying like a hunting trophy the body of Yustinus Murib, an independence leader who was killed after speaking to an Australian film crew in 2003.48 Two taboos of human crimes—genocide and cannibalism—circle each other in the information that comes out of West Papua in a silencing tangle where a con- stant chatter about ritual violence, lost tribes, lost worlds, and lost people over- writes the actual disappearances and violence that make such an imagined world available for a small fee. So too, we see this in the mimetic exchanges of terror and counter-terror taking place on the frontiers of Indonesian settlement where the sheer brutality of pacifying violence inscribes discursive patterns onto the very bodies of West Papuans. The co-existence of these two scenes

of West Papua, however, are more than mutually productive. We might also view them as opposing poles marking the contours of a more universal enabling process. Cannibal tourism signals the kind of cognitive universe where taxonomies of violence impose differing modes of perception and render sustained and structural violence, or genocide, invisible, inevitable and natural. Cannibal tourism and discourses therefore matter not simply because of the racism they perpetuate. More than this, that perpetuated racism—that system of knowledge— drives the staggeringly bold indifference of the international community that does not just ignore what is happening in West Papua, but profits from it. Tom Beneal, the Chairman of the Papuan Customary Council, argued in 2005 that “we cannot just blame the Indonesians for colonizing us. The British and Americans are colonizing us too.” 50 Indeed, given the historical abandonment of West Papua in 1969, and the Australian, British, American, and other international commercial interests that have since profited, West Papua is a transnational colony. As we have seen, in the 1960s West Papuans were considered insignificant primitives on the one hand, and crucial to global Cold War affairs on the other. In 1969, the US embassy in Jakarta reported to the US State Department and Canberra that “there is little question that a great majority of the non-Stone Age Irianese,” or “possibly 85– 90 percent” of West Papuans wanted independence. Despite this acknowledgement of diversity, at no point in the nego- tiations between the US, Indonesia, the UK, Australia, the Netherlands and the UN over West Papua’s future were Papuans consulted. Instead, John F. Kennedy characterized West Papuan independence as an outcome that was to the detriment of “the entire free world position in Asia,” benefiting “only the communists.” British intelligence therefore appears to have been correct when it advised its Foreign Office in the lead up to the Act of Free Choice, that “US, Japanese, Dutch, or Australian governments would not “risk their economic and political relations with Indonesia [over] a relatively small number of very primitive people.” 51

While global economics and politics mitigated against international support for the West Papuans’ quest for independence, the rhetoric of civilizing these thousand miles of cannibal land also operated as a powerful distraction. Today, although only the most crass journalism and overtly commercialized ethnography Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 2016 is as explicit, it is arguably the case that widespread acquiescence in West Papua’s colonization is underpinned by a similar reluctance to risk national interests for the sake of “a small number of very primitive people.” Transnational companies extract West Papua’s considerable wealth with ambiguous levels of protection from the Indonesian military. In addition, the physical acts of displacement of West Papuan landowners continue to receive support and encouragement from the World Bank, particularly enthusiastic about Indonesian transmigration policies; while the tacit approval via military training and foreign aid for the Indonesian military offered by Australia, Britain and South Africa over time has offered practical assistance and explicit approval for military campaigns. 52

The levels of international support for Indonesia’s position in West Papua point to the inadequacy of mystifying genocide as solely the actions of rogue states or individuals. But they also bring us to the enduring feature of colonial genocides

(settler or otherwise): the invisibility and banality of all but the most sensational violence against indigenous peoples. This is the insidiousness of settler-colonial and colonial genocides. The mesmerizing discourses that define the inadequacies and failures of colonized peoples and compel colonization for their physical and cultural correction have an enduring ability to mask violence as an inevitable if unpalatable Fatal Impact. This is intensified in the case of cannibal discourses, for cannibals are unnaturally savage, and unbearably so, in ways that naturalize extinction and fatal impacts. This has a long genealogy of entwinement with colonial activity and the legal doctrines that have enabled it. Indeed, since the earliest debates of the sixteenth century over Amerindian rights, the laws of Nature, and natural justice, cannibalism was positioned as the ultimate unnatural act. In the sixteenth century, it condemned entire social systems to a morally defensible, or providentially inevitable extinction, and while the brashness of such reasoning is a product of its time, I would argue that, although slightly more sophisticated in the present, such logic has not been extinguished. 53

Within the confines of colonial logic, genocidal activities, policies and relations are masterfully reframed as reasonable responses to a racial or historical providence. In other words, a key and defining feature of colonial genocides is the for- mative role of neglect, inaction, passivity, and inability in the carefully framed face of civilization’s inevitable future. In West Papua’s neighbouring regions of Australia and the western Pacific during the nineteenth century, for example, the rural and remote frontiers were home to semi-legal or illegal settlers, rifle corps, vigilante groups and mutual protection societies which rapidly spearheaded colonial invasions. But their spectacular violence, and their talked about but secreted massacres were frequently and carefully represented as being spatially and circumstantially beyond the sobering, civilizing and regulating reach of colonial law. This in essence was the point of Kurtz figures “going native.” 54 The clear impact of this has been the essential legitimization of colonial violence in the con- demnation and punishment of illegitimate violence. Outlawing the frontiers, in other words, made colonial invasion both legal in international (read European) law, and morally imperative—if only to limit Wolfe’s “frontier rabble.” 55

That colonial forces—particularly in settler-colonies—failed repeatedly to Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 2016 prevent frontier atrocities, or to hold back the tide of history, has always been central to the legitimization of ever more invasive penetrations into indigenous societies. So it was that throughout the nineteenth century the alarming decline of indigenous populations by upwards of 90% in parts of Australia and the Pacific was repeatedly framed and acted upon by colonial governments as the inevitably fatal impact of modernity about which they could do little or nothing beyond smoothing the dying pillow. 56 This was despite inquiries and campaigns throughout the centuries by indigenous peoples, missionaries and others demon- strating that population collapses were due to historical actions rather than racial providence. As would be infamously the case in Australia, state policies that had the effect of removing Aboriginal landowners, and critically endangering entire nations and language groups throughout the country were formulated within a rhetoric of “protection” that actively ignored the destructive impact of Protection

legislation. This has all been well canvassed in recent years, but repeating it under- lines a defining feature of colonial genocides. 57 That is, colonialism’s genocides are frequently framed and defended as happenings rather than actions, and states need only do nothing, or be thoroughly, repeatedly and consciously inept for nature to take its course, or for the tide of history to wash away colonized peoples. The result of course is that colonial genocide may still be framed as the product of misguided benevolence in a language of denial that itself is central to the deeper genocidal structure of settler-states. 58

Unlike the spectacularly intense blood-lettings of Germany, Armenia, or Rwanda, colonial genocides rarely speak their name. Time and again, colonialism’s violence has been legal and conducted within the parameters of normative political, economic and moral structures. This is the critical point. In the context of colonialism, genocide is more likely to be normative than aberrant, and dominant ways of knowing indigenous peoples as natives are the generating force for this normalization. It is only in such a context that policy actions aimed at doing nothing about the engineered dying out of a people, or designed to enforce their merging, absorption, or assimilation, can possibly be framed as being in the best interest of those peoples. I have argued that in West Papua a wider assumption that West Papuans, as cannibal natives, must be developed and civilized masks the inherent reality that this must necessarily “destructure” their society. 59 From beneath the blanketing overlay of the matrixes of colonialism’s enabling knowledge therefore, genocide disappears. The presence of horrendous violence conducted by a rogue military or a rogue nation fits readily with popular perceptions of genocide for many reasons, not least of which is the ease with which genocide can be imagined as neatly contained in time and space. Harder to conceive of, and perhaps to prevent, is the kind of systemic and epistemic forces of genocide that structure the very way we think. Indeed, our attempts to define the extremity of, or to hyphenate genocide against indigenous peoples might therefore be read as symptomatic of colonialism’s definitive brand of normalized genocide. This brings me, finally, to the necessity of not dismissing as political self-interest, or ethnically charged, the definitions of genocide put forward by indigenous peoples, victims and survivors such Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 2016 as those put forward by West Papuans. As the example of West Papua indicates, dominant ways of talking about indigenous peoples tend to render them native savages. If left uninterrogated, conversations about the particular status of the “metaphoric” violence endured by indigenous peoples is likely to be inflected with the same taxonomies that compelled the violence in the first place. 60 Ultimately, there is a crude simplicity to genocide that is encapsulated by the brevity of its legal definition. When Indigenous peoples can demonstrate that they have repeatedly experienced the impact of these definitions—such as the death of members of the group; serious bodily or mental injury as a group; the prevention of births or removal of children of the group; or the infliction of measures designed to destroy the group, because of their group status—this should be our starting point for understanding the myriad and all too common occurrences of genocide. From that point, in the interest of prevention and restitution rather

than simply definition, we might more effectively work backwards to a deeper and more practical understanding of how genocide happens. The gap in perception alone, as is epitomized by the contrasting scenes of West Papua, should alert us to the atmospheric presence, the “conceptual blockages” of an enduringly dominant colonial logic that plays such a functional role in the commission of genocide. 61

Conclusion

It is not difficult to chart the patterns of genocidal relations and the overarching and transnational setter-colonial logic that positions West Papuans as standing still in the way of only one possible future. Their land is coveted, taboos of physical and sexual violence have long been breached so that extreme human rights abuses are a matter of course in their “pacification,” and the province is crawling with militia and military engaging in violence that manifests what Stasch has called a “density of memetic gestures.” 62 While much is being written about this by NGOs and human rights watch groups, mainstream media outlets remain distracted by the spectre of cannibalism. As a discourse of savagery par excellence claims of cannibalism reduce West Papuans to caricatures and their sustained and sophisticated struggle to an inherent cultural belligerence. Cannibalism is not only mesmerizing, it is also a key indicator of the kind of ideological matrix that has long been a silencing tool for colonial regimes. As we have seen, this silencing is nothing as simple as the hiding of underground killings, although this happens. Rather I refer to the disappearance of genocide into a range of explana- tory frameworks of thinking and knowledge that continue to neutralize and nor- malize all but the most bloody violence that is committed daily against many indigenous and post-colonized peoples. It is for this reason that the contrasting images of West Papua as both an eden and an invaded territory should be viewed as mutually referential, where the savagery of state-sanctioned violence can be seen in parallel existence with the desire for cannibals. In West Papua, we can see through cannibalism the way in which discourses of savagery and of race are definitive in the processes that render the lives of indigen-Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 2016 ous peoples less meaningful. In addition, however, colonalism’s frontier conflict, with its spectacular shows of violence, serves well to highlight the reciprocal role that violence itself plays in the process of minimizing the perceived right of a people to exist. Genocide is a profoundly corporeal crime, focused on bodies, blood and blood quota, and the symbolically loaded violence committed against the living and deceased bodies of victims does not only serve to generate cultures of terror on the ground. This violence also serves to dehumanize and desensitize, and to prepare ordinary sensibilities (perpetrator, bystander, and victim alike) for the dull methodical everyday genocides of colonial displacements of indigenous peoples perpetually elsewhere. In this sense, the notion that genocide is aberrant and historically atypical, or even unique, is its most effective survival mechanism. We should acknowledge that genocide occupies a normative space in colonial worlds alongside and in tandem with that occupied by race. So, too, should we

acknowledge that colonial epistemologies still occupy a normative position in what Vinay Lal and others have argued are the everyday categories of knowledge guiding the constructed “international community.” 63 This adds another way of thinking through what others have called structures of genocide, genocidal continuums, or genocidal relations, but to think in terms of normality captures the ease with which ordinary people are primed to become perpetrators, bystanders, collab- orators, or even victims. It captures the sense of enduring routine and ordinariness of colonial genocides and speaks to the processes by which, despite their scale, they continue to be belittled and explained away.

Notes and References 1 Cited in George Monbiot, “In bed with the killers,” The Guardian, May 2, 2005. 2 West Papua was also of interest at the time due to alluvial gold that had been found flowing into the Arafura Sea in 1959. In 1960, the Rockefeller interest Freeport Sulphur had signed an agreement with the East Borneo Company to establish a mine in West Papua. John Otto Ondawame, “West Papua: the discourse of cultural genocide in conflict resolution,” in: Barry Sautman, ed., Cultural Genocide and Asian State Peripheries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp 105– 106, 111. 3 Claims of genocide in West Papua are controversial and unsurprisingly denied by the Indonesian government. Reports of genocide, as opposed to widespread human rights abuses, have intensified in recent years. Of note are the reports of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic in 2003, the report for the West Papua Project at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney in 2005, and Rev. Socratez Sofyan Yoman’s submission to the International Court of Justice Australia in his capacity as President of the Federation of Baptists Churches. This report not only details the systemic impact of transmigration, but also lists the individual names and ages of victims of violence clashes with the Indonesian military. Elizabeth Brundige et al., Indonesian Human Rights Abuses in West Papua: Application of the Law of Genocide to the History of Indonesian Control (New Haven, CT: Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Center, Yale Law School, Yale University, 2004); Ondawame, op cit, p 111; John Wing and Peter King, Genocide in West Papua? The Role of the Indonesian State Apparatus and a Current Needs Assessment of the Papuan People (Sydney: Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Sydney and ELSHAM Jayapura, Papua, 2005); Socratez Sofyan Yoman, “Systematic genocide of the indigenous peoples of West Papua under special autonomy,” submitted to ICJ Australia, 2005. 4 John Saltford, The United Nations and the Indonesian Takeover of West Papua, 1962–1969: The Anatomy of Betrayal (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). See also John Saltford, “United Nations involvement with the act of self-determination in West Irian (Indonesian West New Guinea) 1968 to 1969,” Indonesia, Vol 69, 2000, pp 71– 92. 5 Airgram A-803 from Jakarta to State Department, October 4, 1968; Memorandum for the President from Henry Kissinger on Suharto Meeting, July 18, 1969. National Security Archive, George Washington University, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB128/index.htm Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 20166 Speeches by the representatives of Zambia, Togo, Sierra Leone and Ghana were particularly forthright. For brief excerpts of these speeches, see Robin Osborne, Indonesia’s Secret War: The Guerrilla Struggle in Irian Jaya (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp 48–49. 7 For an interesting and succinct analysis of eras of nationalism in Indonesia, particularly in relation to the treatment of Acehnese and West Papuans, see Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, “Indonesian nationalism today and in the future,” Indonesia, 67, 1999, pp 1– 11. 8 Article 33 of the 1945 Indonesian Constitution. Ondawame, op cit, p 117. 9 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol 8, No 4, 2006, p 403. 10 For a good historiographical essay covering the key contributions and the contours of these debates, as charted by such scholars such as Tony Barta, Alison Palmer, and Ju¨rgen Zimmerer, see A. Dirk Moses, “Conceptual blockages and definitional dilemmas in the ‘racial century’: genocides of indigenous peoples and the Holocaust,” in: A. Dirk Moses and Dane Stone, eds, Colonialism and Genocide (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp 148–180. See also Alison Palmer, Colonial Genocide (London: Duke University Press, 2003), and the two edited collections: A. Dirk Moses, Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Aboriginal Children in Australian Society (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003); A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone, eds, Colonialism and Genocide (New York: Routledge, 2007).

11 Alexander Laban Hinton, “The dark side of modernity: toward an anthropologoy of genocide,” in: Alexander Laban Hinton, ed., Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), p 29. 12 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Coming to our senses: anthropology and genocide,” in: Hinton, Annihilating Difference, pp 369–373. 12 Christian Gerlach, “Extremely violent societies: an alternative to the concept of genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol 8, No 4, 2006, pp 455 –471. 13 Ibid. For responses to Gerlach that make similar points, see Alex Hinton, Patrick Wolfe and Henry

R. Huttenbach, “Documents and discussion,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol 9, No 1, 2007, pp 11– 23.
14 Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1997), pp 11– 12. As he puts it, in the context of the denial surrounding colonial genocides, such a political stance goes towards “not just opposing genocide but ... ending it.” On this point, see also on this Moses, “Conceptual block,” p 151. 15 “Last cannibals,” Reporter: Ben Fordham, Producer: Stephen Rice. Broadcast on 60 Minutes, National Nine Network, May 21, 2006. Transcripts at sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/sixtyminutes/stories/20060521/ story1653.asp; and the online chat of May 21, 2006: sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/sixtyminutes/stories/ 20060521/story1655.asp. See also Paul Raffaele, “Sleeping with cannibals,” Smithsonian: The Magazine, Vol 37, No 6, 2006, pp 48– 57. 16 William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). See also his re-stated position in William Arens, “Rethinking anthropophagy,” in: Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen, eds, Cannibalism and the Colonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp 39–62; William Arens and Gananath Obeyesekere, “Cannibalism recon- sidered: responses to Marshall Sahlins,” Anthropology Today, Vol 19, No 5, 2003, pp 18–19. 17 Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), pp 15–16.
18 “The Fiji Cannibal Exhibition” of the US featured “[t]wo celebrated Fijian Chiefs...Regular Man Eaters...
also the hand of the Late Lovoni Rebel King.” Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonisation in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p 166. For more on cannibal claims in the Pacific see the collection of essays in Gananath Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). I have also developed this further in relation to Fiji in Tracey Banivanua-Mar, “Cannibalism in Fiji: a study in colonialism’s discursive atavism,” in: P. Grimshaw and R. McGregor, eds, Collisions of Cultures and Identities: Settlers and Indigenous Peoples (Melbourne: RMIT Publishing, 2006), pp 155– 175. 19 For in interesting discussion of O’Rourke’s film and the wider industry of developing world tourism see Edward Bruner, “Of cannibals, tourists, and ethnographers,” Cultural Anthropology, Vol 4, No 4, 1989, pp 438–445. 20 On Lords of the Garden, see Rosalind Morris, “Anthropology in the body shop: lords of the garden, cannibalism and the consuming desires of televisual anthropology,” American Anthropologist, Vol 98, No 1, 1996, pp 137–146. “Living with cannibals” is the third of Bruce Parry’s series Going Tribal, co-produced by BBC Wales and the Discovery Channel; on Zoo’s cannibal sex holiday see the excellent article by Paul Kingsnorth in which he discusses the obfuscating effect of cannibal tourism: Paul Kingsnorth, “Spot the real savage,” New Statesman, Vol 15, March 2004, p 13. 21 These are offered by Papua Adventures. See www.papua-adventures.com/first-contact.html. See also Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 2016 Michael Behar, “Rumbled in the jungle,” The Age, August 2, 2005. 22 Journeys to the Stone Age are offered by Hidden Cultures Adventures. See www.hiddencultures.com/trips/ korowai.html and www.hiddencultures.com/whattoexpect.html 23 Scheper-Hughes, op cit, p 353. 24 See The Age, The Herald Sun, The Australian, and The Weekend Australian, September 15– 17, 2006. See also cartoons for this period such as Nicholson’s “Naomi Robson eaten by cannibals” which ran in The Weekend Australian, September 16–17, 2006. This can be viewed at http:// www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au/cartoon_

5025.html
25 “Last cannibals.” 26 I explore this at much greater length in Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), pp 20–42, 121–149. There is an extensive literature on cannibalism, colonialism, and power. See for recent overview of the literature Obeyesekere, op cit, pp 1–23; Richard King, “The (mis)uses of cannibalism in contemporary cultural critique,” Diacritics, Vol 30, No 1. 2000, pp 106–123. 27 The raising of the Morning Star flag is a symbolic display of independence, and ceremonies are usually conducted on the anniversaries of West Papua’s independence from the Netherlands (October 1, 1962)

when the territory was placed under the administration of the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority before being handed to Indonesia. 28 The banner they carried read: “Save West Papua People Soul From Genocide... From Military Government Of Indonesia [We] Need Freedom Peace Love And Justice In Our Home Land.” Image held by the Australian West Papua Association (http:// www.zulunet.com/AWPA/). On the past status of refugees, particularly along the PNG border, see Carmel Budiardjo and Liem Soei Liong, West Papua: The Obliteration of a People, 3rd edn (Surrey: TAPOL Indonesia Human Rights Campaign, 1988; reprint, 1988), pp 93– 112; Klaus Neumann, Refuge Australia: Australia’s Humanitarian Record (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2004), pp 65–91. On the 2006 responses see David Palmer, “Between a rock and a hard place: the case of Papuan asylum-seekers,” Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol 52, No 4, 2006, pp 576–603. 29 The troop build-up since 2000 now rivals the period of the early 1970s. Ondawame notes that there are 50,000 troops in West Papua, including the elite Kopasus and Kostrad troops. These have been re-deployed from East Timor and Aceh, and join an intensifying presence of militia such as Laskar Jihad. See Ondawame, op cit, p 111; John Wing and Peter King, Genocide in West Papua? The Role of the Indonesian State Apparatus and a Current Needs Assessment of the Papuan People (Sydney: Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Sydney and ELSHAM Jayapura, Papua, 2005), pp 7 –8, 38–39. 30 On changing patterns of resistance in West Papua, particularly post-Suharto, see Peter King, West Papua and Indonesia since Suharto: Independence, Autonomy or Chaos? (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004), pp 27– 51; Eleri Harris, “Kidnapping, West Papuan resistance and the Australian media,” BA(hons) thesis, Department of History, University of Melbourne, 2005. 31 Chris Ballard, “The signature of terror: violence, memory, and landscape at Freeport,” in: Meredith Wilson and Bruno David, eds, Inscribed Landscapes: Marking and Making Places (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), pp 13– 26. Freeport is estimated to have displaced as many as 40,000 people, including Amungme. Ondawame, op cit, p 116. 32 Budiardjo and Liong, op cit, pp 35–37. See also Elizabeth Brundige et al., op cit, p 23. 33 Gathered from various field reports of the OPM and refugee testimony cited in Osborne, op cit, pp 71–72. Kompas, November 28, 1977 cited in Budiardjo and Liong, op cit, p 68. 34 The disembowelling incident referred to occurred in the village of Kuyuwagi in front of a number of wit- nesses, and was reported along with a number of other atrocities by OPM Captain Rudy based at Sorong. Osborne, op cit, p 71. The massacres on Biak were reported in the Dutch press based on survivors’ accounts. Cited in Budiardjo and Liong, op cit, pp 79– 80. 35 This was reported in the OPM’s “Full report on the Irian Jaya situation” detailing survivor and witness testimonies. Cited in Osborne, op cit, p 71. An anonymous reviewer of this article queried whether or not we can take these claims at face value. Many are based on reports and testimonies gathered by Church and OPM offi- cials; NGO representatives based in Jakarta, Jayapura and visiting refugee camps in PNG; and a range of UN reporting bodies (see note 41). Although these bodies along with scholars based at Sydney and Yale Univer- sities have done the cross-checking and careful sifting of information that I would suggest makes these claims reliable, I would also note that, like Chris Ballard, I am also speaking here of a frontier situation where tales, rumours, eyewitness accounts, memories and experiences of this violence circulate and interact to create a culture of terror. 36 Michael Taussig, “Culture of terror—space of death: Roger Casement’s Putumayo report and the explanation of torture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol 26, 1984, pp 467– 497. 37 Budiardjo and Liong, op cit, pp 80–82; Osborne, op cit, pp 86–88. Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 2016 38 Ondawame, op cit, pp 116– 117. 39 Budiardjo and Liong, op cit, p 53; Osborne, op cit, pp 128 –133. 40 Citing Foreign Minister Subandrio and education minister Daoed Yusuf in Osborne, op cit, pp 136–137; King, West Papua and Indonesia, p 33; Ballard, op cit, p 16. 41 The key reporting agencies in West Papua are extensive and decentralized. They include the National Human Rights Commission of Indonesia; the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights (which reports annually); the West Papuan Catholic Church and a number of Catholic organizations both within and beyond West Papua; Amnesty International; the International Court of Justice; Human Rights Watch; and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. The West Papua Information Kit (at http:// wpik.org) is a good starting point for accessing these agencies and their reports. 42 For a good discussion of the importance of jurisprudence, in this case in relation to definitions of “groups” in hearings of the Rwandan genocide, see Paul J. Magnarella, “Recent developments in the international law on genocide: an anthropological perspective on the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda,” in: Hinton, Annihilating Difference, pp 310–322. 43 For an account of the very political context of the dropping of “political” groups from the Convention see Hinton, op cit, p 3.

44 Grasburg mines gold and nickel. See Jane Perlez and Raymond Bonner, “Below a mountain of wealth, a river of waste,” New York TImes, December 27, 2005. For more on Freeport see Ballard, “The signature of terror,” pp 13–26; Denise Leith, “Freeport and the Suharto Regime, 1965– 1998,” The Contemporary Pacific, Vol 14, No 1, 2002, pp 69–100; Ondawame, op cit, pp 104– 111. 45 Leslie Butt, “Kb kills: political violence, birth control, and the Baliem Valley Dani,” Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, Vol 2, No 1, 2001, pp 63– 86. See also Brundige et al., op cit, pp 34–36; Wing and King, op cit, pp 8– 10, 45. 46 Budiardjo and Liong, op cit, pp 38– 40. On the Korowai, see Rupert Stasch, “Giving up homocide: Korowai experience of witches and police (West Papua)’,” Oceania, Vol 72, 2004, pp 33–52. 47 Brundige et al., op cit, pp 44– 46, citing the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women reporting on the military campaign on Biak on July 16, 1998 and reports by Human Rights Watch on the military response to the Wamena flag-raising ceremony on October 6, 2000. Two months after the initial crackdown, students from the Ninmin Dormitory in Abepura, and residents from neighbourhoods settled by Wamena residents, were arrested, beaten and tortured; prisoners also reported being made to lick blood from the floor and cut and eat their hair. 48 Ibid; Wing and King, op cit, pp 20–34; Ballard, op cit, pp 13–26. 49 See Taussig, op cit, pp 467– 497; Michael Taussig, Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia (New York and London: The New Press, 2003); Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), pp 46– 84. On West Papuan narratives of terror Ballard, op cit, pp13– 26; Stuart Kirsch, “Rumour and other narratives of political violence in West Papua,” Critique of Anthropology, Vol 22, No 1, 2002, pp 53–79; Stasch, op cit, pp 33–52. 50 Tom Beneal in Wing and King, op cit, pp 46– 48. 51 In order of citation: Airgram A-278 from Jakarta to State Department, July 9, 1969. National Security Archive, George Washington University, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB128/index.htm; John F. Kennedy to Dr J.E. de Quay, April 12, 1962 cited in Monbiot, op cit; I.J.M. Sutherland to

D. Murray, Foreign Office Southeast Asian Department, April 30, 1968 cited in Saltford, “United Nations involvement” p 75.
52 Osborne, op cit, pp 146– 147. 53 L.C. Green and Olive P. Dickason, The Law of Nations and the New World (Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 1989), pp 176– 214; Phillip P. Boucher, Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs: 1492– 1763 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992). 54 I explore this in greater detail in Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, pp 20–42, 139–149. 55 This is well elaborated in Wolfe, op cit, p 392. These themes are also developed in Jordanna Bailkin, “The boot and the spleen: when was murder possible in British India?,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol 48, No 2, 2006, pp 462– 293 and by myself in Tracey Banivanua-Mar, “Consolidating violence and colonial rule: discipline and protection in colonial Queensland,” Postcolonial Studies, Vol 8, No 3, 2005, pp 303–320. 56 On population declines, see David Maybury-Lewis, “Genocide against indigenous peoples,” in: Hinton, Annihilating Difference, pp 43– 53. This is also a theme developed by Tony Barta in his “Mr Darwin’s shooters: on natural selection and the naturalizing of genocide,” Patterns of Prejudice, Vol 39, No 2, 2005, pp 116– 137. 57 An extensive historiography regarding Australia’s assimilation and protection regimes has emerged since

1998. For an exception see Tony Barta, “Relations of genocide: land and lives in the colonization of Austra-
      Downloaded by [Radcliffe Infirmary] at 09:51 09 August 2016 lia,” in: I. Wallimann and M.N. Dobkowski, eds, Genocide and the Mordern Age (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987). For a good overview see Neil Levi, “‘No sensible comparison’? The place of the Holocaust in Australia’s history wars,” History and Memory, Vol 19, No 1, 2007, pp 124–156; and for one of the better discussions see Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (New York: Verso, 2003). 58 Tony Birch, “‘History is never bloodless’: getting it wrong after one hundred years of federation,” Australian Historical Studies, Vol 118, 2002, pp 42–53; Churchill, op cit, pp 19–80. 59 This from the Fanon-esque argument that all colonialism is settler-colonialism in Jean-Paul Sartre, “Genocide,” New Left Review, 48, 1968, p 16. 60 Barry Sautman, “Cultural genocide in international context,” in: Barry Sautman, ed., Cultural Genocide and Asian State Peripheries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp 1, 20. 61 Moses, “Conceptual blockages,” pp 148–180. 62 Stasch, op cit, p 49. 63 Vinay Lal, “Genocide, barbaric others, and the violence of categories: a response to Omer Bartov,” The American Historical Review, Vol 103, No 4, 1998, pp 1187– 1190; Vinay Lal, “The concentration camp and development: the pasts and future of genocide,” in: Moses and Stone, Colonialism and Genocide, pp 124–147.

Notes on Contributor

Tracey Banivanua-Mar teaches colonial and postcolonial history at La Trobe University in the School of Historical and European Studies. She is the author of a number of refereed articles, a monograph titled Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Labor Trade (University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), and the co-editor with Julie Evans of Writing Colonial Histories: Comparative Perspectives (RMIT Publishing, 2000).

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