Ministry in Australia

When I saw a television crew filming the whole procedure, I was naive enough to ask, whether this was for the news on Television. I was given a definite "no". These people filming were from the military security, I was told.

Kenneth Davidson in an article in the Age (31/5/84) wrote:

"In the past five years, about 8,000 families have been shifted from Java to Irian Jaya, on to three, four or five hectare plots in order to subsist together with cash crops such as coffee or rubber. In the next five years, the Indonesians plan to move another 80,000 families, so that by 1990 there should be about half a million of Javanese origin in Irian Jaya on top of an estimated one million Melanesians. I don't think much imagination is needed to see what the effect of this will be on the indigenous population, or how the indigenous population will react."

A brother of one of OPM's leaders spoke to me secretly. He pointed to his black skin and curly hair and said: "We are losing our identity in the present struggle. Go and tell your churches in Australia, that we will never agree to an integration with Indonesia. Our brothers and sisters are across the Papua New Guinea border, they have the same colour of skin and the same curly hair. One day we will be one nation."

This left a deep impression on me. Several other lay people and some ministers told me that they were afraid to talk to me. They knew that there were spies among the delegates, who would report them to the police.

One person said that they had been forbidden to talk to me, but he just ignored it. He talked to me openly after a meal and told me about a lecturer at the Theological School at Abepura, near the capital Jayapura. After a student demonstration one day, he suddenly fled across the border to Papua New Guinea.

He also knew Arnold Ap personally. Ap had been imprisoned without trial for several months. Everyone in church and community held him in highest regard. He helped people to become more aware of their own culture and history, which went against Indonesian policy. The evening before he was killed he had been visited by a member of the church. Nothing suspicious was apparent then, which went against the official Indonesian report that he had been sick. Apparently the Indonesian government had given orders to release him, but the prison authorities didn't agree with this. In the early morning of the following day he was found shot outside the prison gate. The official version was that he had been shot after an attempt to escape, but no one of those who knew him believed it. His body was given to his family in a sealed coffin and his family was ordered not to open it. They did open it, however, and saw that he had been tortured. They knew then that the official version was a cover-up of his murder. A very sad story, indeed.

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