Hunger, Indonesia's weapon of massive destruction in Papua?

Jean Ziegler 

Jean Ziegler, a former UN special rapporteur on food rights once said that hunger including malnutrition is a weapon of mass murder in the third world. 

For Ziegler, in this day with its advances in agricultural technology, a child dying of hunger is not an accident but a murder!

Recently, newspapers reported that thousands of people in the mountains of Indonesian-occupied Papua are suffering from hunger and some of the dozens who have died are children.Although media access is severely restricted in Papua, news of the famine has spread around the world and has been reported by a number of international media outlets.

The Indonesian government's efforts to minimize this disaster by blaming bad weather and crop failure seem futile as famine in this Indonesia's easternmost province has occurred many times. Therefore, it is undeniable that the main cause is not climate change or hard-to-reach terrain.

To understand the food problem in Papua, it is worth reviewing the Pusaka Foundation report entitled "Biopolitics of food estate and metabolic damage to Papuans". It explains that the Indonesian government's efforts to change the diet of Papuans have resulted in a decline in health and malnutrition. The staple food of sago was replaced with rice. Papuan children are conditioned to prefer instant food over natural food from their own gardens dan rivers.

The development of food estates in several areas in Papua has not only failed, but also destroyed the forests and the way of life of the indigenous people there! The extraction of natural resources under the guise of development projects is usually accompanied by intensive military operations. What happened in Nduga in 2018 resulted in the displacement of between 60,000 and 100,000 civilians. 

While the government claims that most of the displaced have returned to their villages, local NGOs and churches dispute this version. Their fate is still uncertain. Hundreds reportedly died. The combination of malnutrition, poor sanitation, and lack of medical attention compromise IDPs' overall immune systems, which leads to vulnerability to tropical diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. The life expectancy of Papuans in Nduga is only 55 years, much lower than Indonesia's national life expectancy of 71 years. 

It is clear that the famine in Papua is not an accident, but deliberate. And most hypocritical of all, the Indonesian government has collected 50 tons of basic necessities for Palestinians in Gaza, while not a tenth of it was sent to Papua. Similarly, the Indonesian government has roundly condemned the oppression of Palestinians by the Israeli state, but has been reluctant to introspect on its own behavior towards Papuans.