Human Rights Violations are Occurring in Puncak

Bintang Papua, 20 January 2012

The Papua branch of Komnas HAM, the Indonesian Commission for Human Rights, has confirmed that human rights violations have been occurring in Puncak. These include a number of deaths that have occurred during this prolonged conflict.

'While not yet knowing the motive or who was responsible, the killings were clearly human rights violations. Lives were lost which is an indication that the right to life has been ignored.,' said Matius Murib, deputy chairman of the Komnas HAM Papua branch. He made the statement after attending a Forces Group Discussion on Civil and Political Rights and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ECOSOC) held by the Papuan branch of Komnas HAM.

When lives are lost, human rights are certainly violated. No need to ask about the motive as this goes beyond the power of the Almighty. The state or government have no right to destroy life, which is totally without justification .' The right to life comes only from God and no one has the right to kill people,' he said.

In this Puncak case, those involved were planning to conduct investigations in February and were planning to visit the site of the killings, in order to make recommendations to the authorities. Murib said that he could not make any comments until they had visited the site

Responding to a question about whether the government had been responsible fir triggering the conflict, he said that such a charge would need to be investigated. If this turns out to the true, then some individual or institution that had been granted powers by the state had failed o take action quickly enough to prevent the incident from occurring, and this is matter for KomnasHAM to issue a charge.

He recognised that according to investigations reported in the media, there were indeed actions by the government and related persons, and the question was, why had the conflict occurred and why were casualties still occurring. 'It is our task to investigate whether actions were taken by the state and whether they were justified.'

As has previously been reported, the conflict that relates to the election of the head of the district of Puncak and has resulted in 49 casualties among the local community since 30 July 2011. This conflict was still on-going up until 14 January 2012 in the district and the government has not made any efforts to resolve it, nor have the police done anything to resolve the conflict, which is being described as a tribal war between people living in the Central Highlands. It relates to an internal dispute within the political party called Gerindra, between a number of candidates. Gerindra has turned this internal conflict into a conflict between the commnity in general which has paralysed all development activities there.

ENDS