Info Night: West Papua

Films and talk about the current situation in West Papua.

West Papua, the western half of the island of New Guinea, has been the scene of ongoing conflict for over 50 years as the Indonesian military tries to assert its dominance over the Papuan people. Most of the news about West Papua which reaches us in Europe is connected to this conflict – the military opens fire on a demonstration, an activist is imprisoned for treason. But behind the headlines there are a million different struggles as individual Papuans and their communities try to live their everyday lives in this violent society that is so determined to marginalise its indigenous inhabitants. In the cities Papuans struggle to survive when they have been squeezed out of the economy by migrants from elsewhere in Indonesia. In rural villages, people have to contend with oil palm and sugar cane plantations, logging and mining companies, who are owned by Indonesia’s elite or foreign multinationals, invariably backed up by police and military. And since the New Guinea rainforests are the third largest tropical forest on the planet, their struggle for cultural survival will have impacts around the globe.

This is the story of some of those local struggles, told using photographs and video made by local Papuan activists. There will also be a distro of pamphlets highlighting different struggles not just in West Papua, but also in Indonesia and the rest of South East Asia.