I'm unsure if that's an accurate description. I would say it is more accurate to say that West Papua is being genocided. Indigenous West Papuans are being genocided by settlers from Java. More than 500,000 West Papuans have been killed according to estimates by indigenous groups. It is hard to verify since Javanese settlers (Prabowo is Javanese) control the army and no media or journalists, and not even Indonesians are allowed to enter West Papua. This year, thousands of excavators were shipped on barges into West Papua. Western corporations like Freeport McMoran are complicit. It is horrific to see videos that have come out. There is one which I saw, I still get nightmares. It is an indigenous Papuan man being skinned alive in a drum of water. The name that was spread was Defianus Kogoya. It is so sad... West Papua was one of the most beautiful places on this planet with inland seawater lakes that had non-venomous jellyfish in Misool. Cave systems with handprints said to pre-date the Toba erruption. All of this being destroyed.
I can just add it has been going on for a while in recent history and noone talks about it.
Gives you opportunity to think how deeply flawed our media is.
I am shocked it’s not reported about in Western media.
Hell, then love self flagellating about how they themselves (the west) are the worst people on earth, which is also a political agenda and is only convincing if you ignore pretty much all of human history and large parts of the current day reality elsewhere in the world.
Average american already has their hands full (slash "their brain full") with local matters - family, friends, community. It's hard enough to get attention to spare to turn to national matters, much less stuff that happens on the other side of the world in non-allied poor countries.
Uh, no? There's an active tourism industry particularly around the Baliem Valley and the Raja Ampat islands. You can fly into any of the larger cities without a permit, and while travel in the interior does require permits (surat jalan), these are usually readily granted.
This is not to dismiss the scale of state violence against the OPM and any civilians caught in the net, but Papua is hardly a hermetically sealed off North Korea.
We're talking about West Papua. Not Papua New Guinea. The Western half of the island is occupied by the Prabowo regime. The Prabowo regime enforces strict limitations on international journalists, human rights monitors, and foreign researchers trying to enter the region. Indonesian authorities have consistently restricted or delayed official access to West Papua for high-level United Nations representatives, including requests from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. All of this is done with full knowledge by collaborating companies like Blackrock (owner of Freeport McMoran) that massive human rights abuses, we're talking about at a level greater than that in the middle east is actively being committed there.
In regards to Suharto, it seems the 1965 coup attempt that got him into power was a surprise even to the US embassy in Jakarta, but of course they welcomed it, considering the previous president (Sukarno) was anti-imperialist and was flirting with the 3rd largest communist party in the world (after USSR's and China's).
Somewhat relatedly, a documentary moviemaker realized what was behind the curtain of Indonesian society and said "it's as if I had wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust only to find the Nazis still in power.". He made a documentary following a man who was sanctioned by the Suharto regime to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ).
A review:
> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.
From: https://docthisway.com/2024/09/23/the-act-of-killing-review/
> This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated.
Someone's quick on the draw this morning
This one works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKoP2PnU60s (but according to https://tools.watannetwork.com/blocked in Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and United States)
Sorry, I copy/pasted half my reply from an old comment.
Sorry YouTube regional-based DRM (presumably) is fucking you. Director's name and documentary title is available, you're going to need to search it for yourself.
Suharto was responsible for his own rise. He took money and intel from wherever he liked and was basically an independent & ruthless strongman. Neither he nor other Indonesians need to be infantilized by lazy neocolonial narratives.
The US' strategy to use a proxy to commit heinous crimes against humanity is named after this event. It's called the Jakarta Method.
You wrote "the US put him in power" and I say that's babying.