Gunmen Kill New Zealand Pilot in Papua Amid Escalating Violence
A New Zealand pilot was killed by gunmen on Monday in the restive Indonesian territory of Papua, where violence between the authorities and separatists has escalated in recent years but where foreign victims are rare.
The Indonesian authorities attributed the killing to the West Papua Liberation Army, an armed pro-independence group in the isolated and impoverished region, the country’s easternmost.
Separatists have occasionally used the kidnapping of foreign citizens to draw attention to their decades-long cause and for leverage in negotiations, but the intentional killing of foreigners is extremely rare. The rebel group accused by the authorities of killing Glen Conning, the pilot, on Monday said it was not clear that its fighters were involved.
Mr. Conning, 50, was working for an Indonesian company and ferrying civilians on a helicopter to the remote village of Alama, according to a local police officer. The gunmen captured Mr. Conning after he landed and proceeded to kill him and set his helicopter on fire, said the official, Faizal Ramadhani, a police general.
But they released the passengers — four adults, a child and a baby — because they were local residents, the general said.
Last year, a faction of the West Papua Liberation Army captured another New Zealand pilot and has been holding him hostage since.
The rebels initially threatened to kill that pilot, Phillip Mehrtens, unless Indonesia recognized West Papua’s independence, said Damien Kingsbury, an emeritus professor at Deakin University in Australia who acted as an intermediary for part of the negotiations for Mr. Mehrtens’s release.
But that was untenable, Mr. Kingsbury said, and the group later switched its focus to negotiating with New Zealand.
He added that foreign pilots who are employed by Indonesian companies are seen as working for the enemy, as they could be involved in transporting Indonesian workers or military personnel into or around West Papua.
Sebby Sambom, the spokesman for the West Papua Liberation Army, said that he had not received any reports from fighters on the ground about Mr. Conning’s killing. The rebels have previously warned foreigners not to physically enter into what they describe as a war between Indonesia and the West Papuan separatists.
A former Dutch colony, the two provinces of Papua and West Papua make up the western, Indonesian-controlled half of the island of New Guinea, the world’s second-largest island after Greenland. The island’s eastern half is the nation of Papua New Guinea.
Indigenous Papuans are ethnically and culturally distinct from Indonesians. But Indonesia, another former Dutch colony, argued that it should take full control of all the territory once controlled by the Dutch in the East Indies and, in 1963, annexed Papua and West Papua. It took full control over the territory after a vote in 1969, which is regarded by many Papuans as rigged since Indonesia rounded up hundreds of tribal leaders and detained them until they agreed to join Indonesia.
Since then, activists have campaigned for the territory’s independence, both through a nonviolent movement and armed struggle. The movement is supported by the majority of the Papuans, said Cammi Webb-Gannon, a senior lecturer and the coordinator of the West Papua Project at the University of Wollongong in Australia. The activists complain of the heavy-handed control Indonesian authorities exert over the territory, and the exploitation of the territory’s rich natural resources by Indonesians and foreign companies.
Human rights groups have long raised concerns about the heavy Indonesian military presence in the region and the human rights violations against Indigenous Papuans. Groups like Amnesty International have documented dozens of suspected unlawful killings by security forces and the use of excessive force to handle peaceful protests.
The long-running conflict, which has flared up periodically over the decades, has escalated in the past five or six years, experts said.
In 2018, the West Papuan Liberation Army claimed responsibility for killing as many as 24 Indonesian construction workers, who it claimed were spies for the Indonesian military. The killings prompted the government to send a flood of troops into the region, intensifying the fighting and displacing swaths of locals, Dr. Webb-Gannon said.
In 2019, a wave of protests erupted in Papua in response to reports that students from the region were harassed by the police and insulted with racist slurs in the East Java city of Surabaya. Some of the protests turned deadly after demonstrators clashed with security forces, and at least 33 people died, according to Human Rights Watch.
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