WP
More than ninety West Papuan tribes, political organisations, religious and political groups have called for a boycott of products implicated in the Indonesian occupation, in the first major West Papuan boycott campaign ever announced.
The boycott campaign has identified a number of target brands that are provably complicit in ecocide in West Papua. The first set of campaign targets, associated with West Papuan palm oil, are Hershey’s, KitKat, Smarties, Aero, Oreo, Ritz, Pantene, and Herbal Essences. All contain palm oil and are made by parent companies who source palm oil directly from West Papua. More than 90 West Papuan tribes, political organisations and religious groups have endorsed the call for a boycott, which they say should continue until the people of West Papua are given the right to self-determination.
Raki Ap, a spokesperson for the United Liberation Movement for West Papua, which is overseeing the call, said: “These products are linked to human rights violations, in the first place, because West Papuans are being forced, with violence, to get off the land where they’ve lived for thousands of years, which has now resulted in ecocide.
“This is a signal to the countries who are dealing with Indonesia, especially those in the Pacific region, to take notice of who they’re dealing with and how they are basically allowing Indonesia to continue the colonial project in West Papua, the human rights violations, and also ecocide.”
West Papua is the western half of the island of New Guinea, home to the world’s third-largest rainforest. It is rich in natural resources, including the world’s largest gold and copper mine as well as extensive reserves of natural gas, minerals and timber.
The call to boycott Indonesia was initially made in December 2022 by the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC), who urged a targeted boycott until Indonesia allows the long-awaited UN High Commissioner for Human Rights visit to West Papua. Building on this demand, West Papuans have endorsed a boycott until West Papuans are allowed to exercise their right to self-determination.
West Papuans say more than 500,000 of their people have been killed by the occupation in the past six decades, while millions of acres of their ancestral lands have been destroyed for corporate profit. Indonesia, already the world’s largest palm oil exporter, is now breaking ground in West Papua on the world’s biggest single palm oil plantation, as well as a sugar cane and biofuel plantation that will be the largest deforestation project ever launched.
Read more at the Guardian and here and here