West Papua Report August 2011

[Don't forget: Call Congress to sign the House letter on Papuan prisoner Filep Karma - Deadline is August 12.]


West Papua Report for August 2011 is now out. Read in full here.

Summary 

Thousands of Papuans peacefully took to the streets August 2 to support calls for a referendum on West Papua's political future. The demonstrations proceeded despite the presence of armed security forces intended to block the demonstrations and the presence of Jakarta-backed militia provocateurs. Violence erupted near Jayapura and in Puncak District on the eve of the demonstrations. Over 50 international organizations publicly called for the Indonesian government to respond positively to appeals by Papuan NGOs and churches for justice, an end to human rights violations in West Papua, and protection of human rights advocates and journalists. WPAT called on Secretary Clinton to raise with Indonesian officials the ongoing military sweep operations in Puncak Jaya, West Papua. These operations have had devastating affects on innocent Papuan civilians. Secretary Clinton called for dialogue to settle disputes over West Papua. Her repetition of US Government support for "special autonomy" made clear that the Obama administration is deaf to the voice of Papuans who have rejected "special autonomy" repeatedly. Efforts by Indonesian security forces to cover-up the human cost of their military sweep operations in Puncak Jaya have failed. Komnas Ham has proposed a dialogue about violence in Puncak Jaya. A peace conference which convened in West Papua has explored the possibility of advancing dialogue with the Indonesian government. Renowned international academics, lawyers and Papuan activists will convene in Oxford to discuss the continuing denial of the right of self-determination to Papuans. The military commander in West Papua has apologized to the Papuan Kingmi church over intimidating language he employed against the church. 

Call Congress concerning Papuan prisoner Filep Karma

Representative Joe Pitts and Jim Moran are circulating a letter to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia concerning the case of political prisoner Filep Karma, a prominent Papuan advocate of self-determination. Karma has been serving a 15-year sentence for raising the Papuan Morning Star flag at a peaceful political rally in 2004. Karma is designated a Prisoner of Conscience by Amnesty International for his nonviolent advocacy.

This bi-partisan initiative is currently circulating in the House of Representative. Please call your Representative this week and urge him or her to sign the letter.

Call the Capitol Switchboard (202) 224-3121. Ask for your congressperson's foreign policy aide. Ask that your representative sign on to Representative Joseph Pitt's and Jim Moran's letter to Indonesia's President concerning the case of prisoner of conscience Filep Karma. Urge them to support human rights and the rule of law  in Indonesia. Offer to e-mail them a copy of the letter. Tell them that if your Representative wishes to sign, she or he should contact Carson Middleton 52411 in the office of Rep Pitts. The deadline is Friday, August 12, so call soon.
If necessary leave a detailed message. If you have trouble getting through by phone send an e-mail to the office, but be sure to follow up with a call.

Thank you for your support.

To find out who your representative is go to http://house.gov/

Signers so far include: Reps. Pitts (R-PA), Moran (D-VA), Baldwin (D-WI), Dogget (D-TX), Faleomavaega (D-AS), Farr (D-CA), Filner (D-CA), Hinchey (D-NY), Honda (D-CA, McDermott (D-CA), McGovern (D-MA), Pingree (D-ME), Rohrabacher (R-CA), Rothman (D-NJ), Schakowsky (D-IL), Wolf (R-VA).

If your congressperson has already signed be sure to thank them.

The letter is an initiative of Freedom Now, who represent Karma pro-bono. Please let us know the results of your call.

Background on Filep Karma and his case can be found here from Freedom Now and here from Amnesty International. Background on Indonesia's political prisoners, Prosecuting Political Aspiration Indonesia’s Political Prisoners, can be found here.

Step by Step: Women of East Timor, Stories of Resistance and Survival

Step by Step: Women of East Timor, Stories of Resistance and Survival is available from ETAN - http://etan.org/resource/books.htm#B89 StepbyStep

Review by Jen Hughes

Step by Step: Women of East Timor, Stories of Resistance and Survival edited by Jude Conway and launched in Australia nationally in 2010, presents 13 oral histories from Timorese women, with each story accompanied by several pages of photographic snapshots from their lives.

The collection of stories reveal the role women played in East Timor's independence struggle on the guerilla front, the diplomatic front and in the student movement inside and outside the country and afterwards.

The opening story told by Ceu Lopes Federer provides a lens through which to read the subsequent twelve stories. The work Ceu and her compatriots did to meet the financial needs of the resistance inside and outside Timor, to keep it alive and strong, and to provide them with accurate information about what was going on outside in relation to East Timor gives the reader an insight into how important women were in the solidarity movement that was the backbone to the diplomatic front.  Mica Barreto Soares' story tells how Timorese studied in Indonesia and the work they did for East Timor inside Indonesia. The two show the importance of the women's solidarity work to the survival of the guerilla movement inside Timor and segue into the stories about the work Timorese women did all over the world. They also provide background for the sometimes small but extremely risky activities of other storytellers when they speak of secreting letters and notes, medicines or food, inside clothing and bluffing their way through Indonesian positions inside East Timor and Indonesia.

La'o Hamutuk staff talk about current issues in Timor - Tues, Aug 2, NYC

The East Timor and Indonesia Action Network invites you to
join La'o Hamutuk researchers for a discussion in a wide-ranging discussion of current issues in Timor-Leste.

Tuesday, August  2, 2011, 6:30 - 8:30 pm
Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Ave (btn 34 and 35 St), Room 5307, Manhattan

with Juvinal Diaz and Charlie Scheiner

Next year Timor-Leste, the most petroleum-export-dependent country in the world, will elect its President and Parliament. What will the elections mean for Timor-Leste's future? What are the key issues?

Juvinal and Charlie research and advocate on issues of economic development, petroleum and sustainability, justice and accountability, Timor-Leste's budget, imminent borrowing from foreign agencies, and more. 

La'o Hamutuk (Walking Together): Timor-Leste Institute for Development Monitoring and Analysis is a research and advocacy organization in Dili, Timor-Leste. Juvinal studied agriculture at the University of Timor-Leste, worked as a community organizer, and has been part of La'o Hamutuk's Natural Resources and Economics Team since 2009. He is passing through New York  Charlie is a member of ETAN's Executive Committee and has lived in Timor-Leste and been with La'o Hamutuk for the last decade.  www.laohamutuk.org 

more info 917-690-4391

Say it ain't so, Mo! - Nike in Indonesia

Guest blog by Jeff Ballinger

Jeff Ballinger, global worker rights researcher/activist
Twitter: @press4change


My apologies for references to baseball, the U.S.A.'s "national pastime", but the exasperation expressed by the quote, "Can't anyone here play this game?" perfectly captures my reaction to the news last week that a Bangladesh factory run by Grameen (Nobel-laureate, Muhammad Yunus) was closed after attacks by rioting garment workers. [Given the toxic political atmosphere in Bangladesh and current bad relations between the  government & Grameen, there could be some behind-the-scenes (political or freelance-extortion) provocateurism.]

The foregoing is noted with more sadness than surprise, as it comes on the heels of a searing Associated Press report ten days ago, about how Converse/Nike shoes are made in Sukabumi, West Java. ("Nike says nearly two-thirds of the factories that make Converse products fail to meet standards for contract manufacturers...")

Converse shoes are displayed at a store in Jakarta, Indonesia. Irwin Fedriansyah | The Associated Press

I have been warning (whining?) -- and here -- about Nike's deployment of "codes of conduct", Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and business self-regulation schemes for more than a decade; here's the evidence that this noxious media manipulation has, for the most part, succeeded:  Almost all the comments about this AP story were either expressing surprise ("We thought that Nike had fixed that.") or, that this type of "gotcha" story was inevitable when a big brand sources from nearly a thousand factories. In other words, the Sukabumi story is a one-off (and what a great challenge it is to police the supply chain).  In fact, this story could have been written 15 -- or five -- years ago, and it could have described almost any Nike-producing factory in China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, etc.  The default position of virtually all garment production is something akin to what Frederick Douglass wrote in the 1850s: "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them."


You may be thinking, "Oh, it is the 'race to the bottom,' then?"  Not so fast. Folks who remember the years-long strike wave in Indonesia during the early- to mid-90s will recall that the minimum wage rocketed from 86 cents to $2.46 per day.  Instead of running off to Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, Nike-supplier factories increased investment and the Nike contract-workforce went from 22,000 to 110,000.  It was still a very good deal in Indonesia at triple the price for labor!  [The 'Underground Economist' of the Financial Times cites a brilliant study by Berkeley economist on these latter two points...]

In this AP photo taken May 26, 2011, workers leave a factory that make Converse shoes, in Gunung Putri, West Java, Indonesia. Workers making Converse sneakers in Indonesia said supervisors throw shoes at them, slap them in the face and call them dogs and pigs.

The Douglass principle still held up, however; these brutal contractors would not pay a penny over what was required and - as Nike continued to assemble a team of phony "responsibility" operatives - the Korean and Taiwanese bosses devised new ways to cheat workers.  Tens of thousands were denied severance pay ($32 million in Indonesia alone, I calculate) in the early- to mid-2000s and work became more "precarious" with short-term contracts and outsourcing. Nike's feckless "responsibility" team (now numbering over 210!) could do little more than lament the fact (see transcript beginning @10:54) that Nike HQ is powerless.  By the way, the video clip that I have is devastating: Nike's CSR vice-president giving a condescending lecture on poverty-level wage to young CNBC reporter. [Any help I can get in uploading this to Youtube would be most appreciated!] Reminds me of the lesson I received on Wage Elasticity from a World Bank staffer in the parking lot of the American Club in Jakarta (1990). I could not tell him what I thought of this slavery/servitude justification because he was the only poker player in our group more inept than myself...


But, hold on a minute - don't tell the U.S. anti-sweatshop students' movement or some determined group of Vietnamese expats that you cannot force Nike to directly deal with contractors' depredations! The Vietnamese forced Nike to broker a million-dollar settlement... students' story - pls see below. 


[Fragment from what I wrote for the War Resisters League's WIN magazine some months ago]: 

How did university students achieve a string of victories for Latin American workers? United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) has assisted more than 4,000 college-logo garment workers in Honduras and the Dominican Republic by deploying grassroots pressure tactics and carefully crafted appeals to university administrators. Even in the midst of a global economic downturn, diligent research combined with determined activism on the part of the wronged workers forced Russell Athletic to reopen a factory that was closed to thwart unionization. It produced an agreement between Nike and the CGT union of Honduras to pay restitution to 2,100 workers illegally denied severance benefits when two suppliers for the shoe giant closed abruptly last year. In addition, the students' persistence in seeking ethical alternatives has led the largest brand selling to bookstores, Knights Apparel, to pay more than triple the Dominican Republic's minimum wage to hundreds of workers. Merchandise from the Alta Gracia factory is already on 140 campuses. 

The research to monitor compliance with "codes of conduct" for factories was carried out by the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC; launched by the USAS in 1999) and funded by 123 universities, based on a percentage of university-licensed apparel sales. While the codes include language about "freedom of association" and collective bargaining -- specific trade union protections -- the Russell case was the first in nearly a decade of activism that delivered meaningful redress when the Jerzees de Honduras plant was shuttered as collective bargaining talks were under way. For 14 months starting in early 2008, USAS teams in North America and Great Britain convinced administrators at 110 schools to stop purchasing from Russell Athletic. College bookstores are the company's largest revenue source. In late 2009, the Jerzees de Honduras factory was reopened and Russell has pledged not to oppose unionization at seven other factories it owns and operates nearby.

In essence, these two inspiring stories are like the early days of the East Timor Action Network, when no one would believe that an activist group with almost no budget could win against the Pentagon, lobbyists of arms-makers, and diffident politicians. Our current struggle for justice in West Papua is facing the usual challenges, complicated by "conventional wisdom."  What do I mean by this?  See what PBS/Newshour reporter, Ray Suarez said about Indonesia just last week: "Indonesia hasn’t managed to do is root out the legendary levels of corruption that discourages foreign investment." Now, how could he say this immediately after saying, "...solid years of back to back to back high levels of economic growth"?  How can you say, on the one hand, that corruption inhibits growth, while the evidence of double-digit growth has been the reality for Asia's most corrupt countries for two decades?  Any ideas on how to fight this pervasive misperception?