Women in West Papua: Broken promises and survivance sovereignty

WRITTEN BY CAMELLIA WEBB-GANNON AND ELVIRA RUMKABU

4 September 2023

Indonesia has militarily occupied West Papua, the western half of the island of New Guinea, since 1962. The territory’s previous colonisers, the Dutch, had since the 1950s commenced the process of working with West Papuans toward independence. Indonesia, also a former Dutch colony, contended that the Indonesian state borders should encompass all Dutch colonial territory in the region. In 1969 the United Nations were responsible for overseeing a referendum in which West Papuans were instructed to cast a vote for independence or permanent Indonesian annexation. Claiming that West Papuans were too primitive to cast individual votes regarding their political future, the Indonesian military hand-picked 1025 West Papuans for a ‘staged’ vote, threatening them with violence if they chose independence. The United Nations turned a blind eye to this sham plebiscite. From this time on, the international community has largely considered West Papua to be part of the Indonesian state. In the years that have followed, West Papuans have carried out a six-decades-long campaign for decolonisation from Indonesia, but have been subject to many crimes against humanity and what they call a ‘slow-motion genocide’ at the hands of Indonesian security forces.

It is especially West Papuan indigenous women who had to fight for their survival and that of their families, communities, and nation. Many promises or glimpses of a promising future have been extended to these women through Dutch, Indonesian, West Papuan, and transnational corporations’ visions for West Papua’s future. These broken and/or unfulfilled promises have largely rendered West Papuan women dispossessed of their land and voice. Still, these betrayals have neither defined nor defeated West Papuan women. Instead, they have and continue to practice sovereignty ‘between the promises’, enacting what we call ‘survivance sovereignty’ as a means of carrying on in between severed and asseverated promises for a decolonised future.

Broken promises

Indonesia promised all Papuans liberation from colonisation when it contested Dutch sovereignty in the territory. Yet, in the past six decades, Papuan people — and Papuan women in particular — have experienced scant liberation under Indonesian control. In 2017, for example, research by the Papuan Women’s Working Group and the Asia Justice Rights (AJAR) organisation found that four out of ten West Papuan women “had been subject to violence committed by Indonesian state authorities”. The use of rape and torture of women as instruments of intimidation by security forces is widespread. Indigenous women are discriminated against and treated as second-class citizens when they attempt to access health and reproductive services. Even ‘Indonesianised’ beauty ideals are imposed on Papuan women through advertisements, television shows and in beauty salons that do not represent the latter’s dark skin and curly hair. Papuan women are relegated to substandard stalls in market areas throughout the territory while the more highly sought-after stalls for selling produce and other goods are occupied by Indonesian sellers.

It is imperative that women’s survivance work and decolonisation goals in West Papua be acknowledged in any future liberation-oriented promises made to West Papuans, and that West Papuan women are recognised as central actors in determining their own futures.

In the early 20th century, Dutch missionary institutions promised a better life for West Papuan women and children through the introduction of schools specifically for female students, intended to “break the shackles of tradition and culture that impede progress, including that of Papuan girls”. Many of the pioneers of the Papuan women’s movement were graduates of the girls’ schools. For example, Beatrix Koibur, one of the two women on the 2000 Papua Presidium Council — an influential Indigenous political platform — completed three years (1950-1953) at a Dutch Protestant girls’ school. With the transfer of West Papua from the Dutch to the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority, however, these girls’ schools were closed. Dutch attempts to ‘uplift’ Papuan women through education were truncated alongside Dutch withdrawal from West Papua.

The West Papuan independence movement promises decolonisation for all Papuans. Yet, some West Papuan women have reflected in conversations with us that the decolonisation movement’s focus on achieving nation-statehood first and at all costs is masculinist, leaving little room for women’s leadership or women’s ideas about what decolonisation should prioritise. In a culture shaped by successive colonial regimes that have infantilised and emasculated Papuan men, the resulting independence movement is one led by male warriors resisting disempowerment. However, West Papuan female academic Elvira Rumkabu, one of this article’s authors, believes that seeking independence for West Papua needs to prioritise survival issues for which women are often responsible such as food sovereignty, sustainable livelihoods for Indigenous Papuans, high maternal and child mortality rates in isolated areas, and the exploitation and alienation of lands. Reframing the narrative of and strategies for independence will make space for women to be included in the independence movement.

In West Papua, thus, patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism combine to disproportionately harm women. Promises from aggressive agribusinesses to provide jobs, schools, and money in exchange for Indigenous land are rarely followed through, often not agreed to by women, and leave women more impoverished than men. Hatib Kadir contends that “the rich forest biodiversity is entangled with women who… mix herbal medicines, make clothes, accessories, and cosmetics from roots and bark, and cultivate seed nurseries from forest to garden”. When women lose forests and gardens to palm oil plantation companies, for example, they lose a major source of food, medicine, spiritual connection, relationship development, creative knowledge, social and economic capital, and a site of cultural transmission.

Survivance sovereignty

In a world anchored in tragedy, West Papuan women have developed devices to stay afloat, to hold buoyancy, to claim life. Women practice perjuangan, “a hard work that strives through struggle to care for family and community”. The concept of perjuangan is similar to that of survivance, defined by Gerald Vizenor as the “act of persevering”. By practising survivance, West Papuan women are claiming sovereignty in parts of their lives that the tentacles of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalist exploitation cannot penetrate — humour, faith, story, creativity, and communion.

In many instances, Papuan women actively use the tragedy they experience to create a stronger collective. West Papuan activist Rode Wanimbo likens Papuan women to the tiru, the ironwood pillars that support the honai, the traditional West Papuan highlands roundhouse. Without the tiru, the honai cannot stand. The tiru surround the furnace in the middle of the honai. They become stronger the longer they are exposed to heat and smoke. Wanimbo has described how when she returns to her ancestral village for rest, a celebration, or a funeral, her aunts greet her with a keening lament known as leendawi. It is “the way they express what they have been going through”, she explains, “a giving of voice to stories of trauma from villages, gardens and homes being burned down by security forces to being displaced from the places they belong”. Part of Wanimbo’s work with traumatised women now involves creating spaces for women to meet safely and tell stories, to heal through sharing leendawi, to refuse to suffer violence in silence or isolation.

Another survival strategy the researcher Julian Smythe encountered among women in West Papua is to meet tragedy with humour. When faced with the ineffable task of feeding her own and her husband’s extended families while pregnant and with her husband a political prisoner, one Papuan woman reported that all she could do was laugh and get on with the work. Laughter helped another woman interviewed by Smythe who, upon attempting to wash the corpse of her good friend one last time before burial, was struck by the irony of her pleading with the lifeless body of her friend as it refused to cooperate in the beautification process, repeatedly falling over. Prayer is yet another survivance strategy. Mama Valentina Wanopka from Subur village in Boven Digoel “never passes a day without praying”, believing it to be her ultimate weapon in the fight she is leading on behalf of her children, and future generations, to defend her deceased husband’s land from the investment plans of timber company PT Merauke Rayon Jaya.

Papuan identity

Many West Papuan women engage in survivance sovereignty through ‘guerrilla gardening’. After being forced to flee Nduga regency following a brutal Indonesian army offensive operation in 2018, a young Papuan woman named Yohana found refuge in an internally displaced persons centre in the highland town of Wamena. Her sole means of survival has been to borrow land from the local community to garden. Instead of asking for a wage rise in her position as a plantation labourer, another West Papuan woman requested a patch of garden to “maintain her role and identity as an indigenous Papuan woman [to] not merely rely on cash from the oil palm company”. When yet another woman’s employment at a plantation was ended, she created a small garden outside of her house to repay her family’s debt. Gardening, she expressed, “is like returning to [her and her husband’s] original identity as Papuans”.

Other Papuan women are gathering as feminist collectives, creating a place and space for diverse women in West Papua to connect, strategise, and advocate for better lives for women. The West Papuan Feminist Forum, a branch of the Pacific Feminist Forum, voiced in its 2022 inaugural meeting communique that “we want to re-create [a] movement that [is] based on our Papua[n] knowledge and experiences in advocating [for] ecological justice, sexual and reproductive health and rights, inclusive leadership and participation, rights for freedom [of] expression, and decolonisation”.

West Papuan women are making promises to and for themselves. This is survivance sovereignty. History has shown how critical women’s activism has been to turning around violent conflict. In Bougainville, for example, it was indigenous women who led the peace process, ending the ten-year civil war with Papua New Guinea in 1998. It is imperative that women’s survivance work and decolonisation goals in West Papua be acknowledged in any future liberation-oriented promises made to West Papuans, and that West Papuan women are recognised as central actors in determining their own futures.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Authors biography

Camellia Webb-Gannon is a lecturer of social policy at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and coordinator of the West Papua Project.

Elvira Rumkabu is a lecturer of international relations at Cenderawasih University based in Jayapura, Papua. Image credit: Unsplash/Asso Myron (cropped).