Ending genocides once and for all!

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, born on December 10, 1948, is still an ideal to be achieved.

Today's situation is unfortunately marked by numerous violations of its established principles. On a global scale, armed conflicts are multiplying the number of victims, particularly civilians, with horrific war crimes or even crimes against humanity.

What we are witnessing through the media regarding the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza is arguably the most documented genocide in modern history. Yet ironically, this genocide is also the most denied and ignored. After a year of war, 96% of Gaza's population (2.15 million people) is facing a serious humanitarian crisis. On October 2, 2024, a group of American doctors alerted President Biden that 62,413 Gazans had died of starvation.

The international community has failed to protect thousands of Palestinian lives from barbarity. This is truly dramatic! But what is worse is that the genocide in Gaza is not the only one happening right now. In other parts of the world, in different scales and forms, genocide is also happening.

As in West Papua, in the Pacific, only 250 km north of Australia. In this territory, held captive by Indonesia since 1963: plunder, massacre and exploitation of nature take place, with impunity, and in almost total media silence. Six decades of political conflict between the central government in Jakarta and West Papuan independence factions have created an unparalleled humanitarian crisis. 

The economic and social situation of West Papuans is getting more complicated, especially in Intan Jaya, Maybrat, Pegunungan Bintang, Nduga, Yahukimo, Puncak Papua and Paniai. The number of Papuans killed since 1963 is in the hundreds of thousands depending on the source: from 100,000 to 1,500,000. As of today, around 83,000 West Papuans are internally displaced, with thousands more have fled abroad, mainly to neighboring Papua New Guinea. What has been happening in West Papua under Indonesian rule is a slow and programmed extermination of the Melanesian people who have lived in the region for 50,000 years.

We can go on and on about genocides. The question now is, how can we end them once and for all? Could the solution lie not in state institutions, but in a global, collective, and coordinated civil society movement? Since justification for state violence provides a favorable context for genocide, developing a culture of nonviolence is an urgent need, and this must start from ourselves.