In the face of state repression and international indifference West Papuan activists have been locked in a life or death struggle for independence. People and Power finds out what is behind one of the most forgotten conflicts in the world. When the Dutch decolonized their East Indies empire after the Second World War they handed it all to the emergent country of Indonesia – all except the territory of West Papua, which forms one half of New Guinea, the second largest island on Earth. This remarkable landmass – split neatly by colonial powers into West Papua and Papua New Guinea – is like few other places in the world. Its mountainous terrain and dense rainforests have spawned extraordinary linguistic diversity among its indigenous population, some of whom are still in uncontacted tribes. Five decades ago few, if any of these tribes, showed any desire for their land to become an extension of Indonesia, a new nation state with which they shared neither history, culture, religion nor ethnicity, but which wanted resource-rich West Papua within its borders.
