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strong>June 12, p1

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono downplayed the tensions in Papua on Tuesday by calling the recent deadly shootings “small-scale incidents compared to those in the Middle East”.

“The recent incidents in Papua can be considered small, with a limited number of victims. They are hardly as severe as the violence in the Middle East, where we have witnessed deadly attacks with many fatalities almost everyday,” he said.

Your comments:

It is hard to say how many Papuans have really been killed by the police and military.

In Syria, UN observers and journalists can report the violence, but in Papua, international NGOs and journalists are banned and the flow of information out of remote regions is limited.

A lot of incidents are only reported from one point of view, i.e. official statements by the security forces scapegoating “unidentified people linked to the OPM (Free Papua Movement)” or something similar, to give the impression that Papuans struggling for their basic human rights are terrorists, while the police and military just do their job to protect Indonesia.

Markus Hagenauer

The President failed to see the big picture — that the “agent provocateurs” are hard at work and testing the waters to see if Papua is ripe for the picking.

He didn’t even remember that Timor Leste gained its independence with the help of a diplomatic offensive by four activists from a Brooklyn-based organization called ETAN.

This time around, they will be provoking religious violence that eastern Indonesian Christians are being oppressed by western Indonesian Muslims.

Atmo