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‘The kids had all been tortured’: Indonesian military accused of targeting children in West Papua
(www.theguardian.com)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Last year UN human rights experts called for urgent and unrestricted humanitarian access to the region over serious concerns about “shocking abuses against Indigenous Papuans, including child killings, disappearances, torture and mass displacement of people”.
The day before the boys’ detention, in the same region of Nduga, soldiers opened fire on a group of women and children returning with string bags filled with food from shopping in a neighbouring village, locals say.
Nopinanus Kogoya, an uncle of one of the tortured boys, says the attacks are proof that ordinary West Papuans are being deliberately targeted by the Indonesian military – not just caught in crossfire as soldiers wage war against the militants.
Locals say the brutality escalated in February this year, when Phillip Mehrtens, a New Zealand pilot working for Indonesian airline Susi Air, was taken hostage and his plane burned by the rebel army at Nduga airport.
The year after Prabowo trained as a young cadet in Australia, Father Dorman Wandikbo, the president of the evangelical church of Indonesia and a veteran of the West Papuan independence struggle, fled military violence in his home town of Wamena.
Eneko Bahabol, who does advocacy work with refugees in the highlands, says in his visits to similar camps he’s seen children, women and the elderly dying, as well as more than a dozen untreated serious diseases – pneumonia, rheumatic fever and amoebic dysentery among them.
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