The West Papuan Warriors Are A Rugby League Team Trying To Stop A Genocide

For Tala Kami there was no prouder moment in his rugby league career than pulling on the West Papuan Warriors jersey for the first time. Emblazoned with West Papua's distinctive 'Morning Star' flag, the jersey is a symbol of the region's 55-year struggle for Independence from Indonesia, one in which an estimated 500 000 people have been killed. At least one academic has labelled it a "slow motion genocide."

"There's nothing like it," says Tala. "Every time we play all the boys play out of their skin," he says.

Tala is from Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, which shares a border with West Papua. To Papuans, however, the border is "just something drawn up by the Dutch."

"The lands are the same, the people are the same, the language is the same, the cultures are the same. We don't feel like we're fighting for another country, we feel like we're fighting for our people," says Tala.

The Warriors were founded in 2015 to raise awareness about the slaughter and oppression of his people. The team is a mish-mash of West Papuan refugees, Papuans from New Guinea, and a handful of players based around Australia for the rare opportunities they go on tour there.

They have never played in their West Papua, where the simple act of wearing their jersey or hoisting the West Papuan flag is punishable by between 15 years and life in prison.

"It breaks your heart but there's not much you can do," says Tala. "There's not much say with the government level so what we're trying to do is build up a grass roots movement and build it up from there. We're having a little bit of success and hopefully it will keep on building," he says.

Since Dutch colonial forces withdrew from the region in 1962, Indonesia has ruled West Papua with an iron first. Fearing an armed conflict with Indonesia under the communist Sukarno regime, the UN and USA were quick to sign the region over to the Indonesians on the proviso a referendum on West Papua's independence was held in the country. It took place seven years later by which time the Sukarno regime had been ousted in a British, Australian and American-backed coup led by Indonesian military General Suharto.

Despite the UN overseeing it, the referendum under Suharto was a sham with 1000 tribal elders handpicked to vote by Indonesia from West Papua's total population of a million. They were allegedly threatened, beaten, held in seclusion, and told how to vote, with the referendum predictably ending in a favourable result for Indonesia. Several international observers expressed their skepticism about the vote but the results remained.

"The process of consultation did not allow a genuinely free choice to be made," found the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office briefing that year with the US Ambassador to Indonesia agreeing, "95 per cent of indigenous Papuans wanted to have freedom."

West Papua is home to vast resource wealth in the form of oil, copper and gold. It is also home to the world's biggest gold mine, Grasberg, owned by the Freeport-Mcmoran group, whose past board members include the well-connected, American financier, Godfrey Rockefeller and former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Mining operations continue to extract vast amounts of wealth annually from West Papua while employing up to 15 000 mostly American, Indonesian and Filipino workers. Local Papuan miners, meanwhile, are paid $1.50 an hour and the region as a whole remains the poorest in Indonesia, a country already significantly mired in poverty. Those who dare to protest risk indefinite imprisonment and/or beatings, torture, murder and rape.

"I've spoken to people who've escaped, who've had their mothers killed and raped in front of them…It's definitely happening," says Tala, who has met with dozens of refugees who've fled across the rugged, mountainous border into Papua New Guinea.

The Papua New Guinea government, however, does not acknowledge the existence of West Papuan refugees and neither they nor Australia will raise the issue of the West Papuan independence for fear of jeopardising their relationship with Indonesia. Just this January Indonesia suspended military relations with Australia after one of their officials took offence to a laminated poster at SAS Headquarters in Perth relating to West Papuan independence.

The Indonesian government flatly refuses to talk about West Papuan independence and has shown no signs of yielding to demands from various global parliamentarians for a second UN-sponsored independence referendum.

"That's why it's important for us to show that just because our government isn't saying anything doesn't mean that we don't feel something or we don't want to fight for them," says Tala.

Only a handful of small Melanesian nations, known as the Melanesian Spearhead Group, have demonstrated any desire to help West Papua achieve independence - among them Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Fiji). It's had little effect and Tala says many West Papuans are beginning to lose hope.

"So many people have tried. They've got international lawyers, they've had documentaries, they've had this and they've had that, and nothing has worked. A lot of them are almost giving up hope that it will never change," he says.

The Warriors will continue the fight on their behalf but with minimal awareness of their plight internationally, funds are low and players are forced to pay their own airfares an accomodation, "which isn't easy coming from PNG but they really put in the effort to do that," says Tala.

"The cause is bigger than us."

In PNG, where rugby league is followed with religious fervour, the Warriors have managed to attract several players from the the national rugby league team, the Kumuls, to play for them, which has significantly boosted the profile of West Papua's fight for independence.

Tala hopes next to get the attention of the dozens of high-profile Melanesian and Polynesian players representing in the National Rugby League (NRL) and Super 18 rugby union competitions in Australia and New Zealand.

"We wanna build up more West Papuan identity and get pride in the flag again and get pride in who they are," he says.