By Martin Flanagan

Human rights advocate John Rumbiak fled Papua a year ago. Local police had warned him that his investigation into the assassination of Papuan independence leader Theys Eluay in November 2001 had put his life in danger.

After he was alerted to this, a group of armed men Rumbiak believes belonged to Kopassus, the Indonesian paramilitary group, took up residence in a house near his own and began monitoring his movements.

Since he left the troubled Indonesian province, Rumbiak says one of the directors of Els-ham, the human rights organisation for which he works, had been attacked and shot along with a member of her family.

Rumbiak, who comes from the island of Biak off the north-west coast of Papua and is now a visiting scholar at the University of Columbia in New York, is in Melbourne for tomorrow night's Morning Star Concert at the Victorian Arts Centre. Rumbiak says the concert, organised by musician David Bridie, is an opportunity for Australians "to be really educated about what's going on in West Papua. They're going to learn about Papuans as people, that they have a culture, and the problems they're facing."

Rumbiak says the Papuan people will cease to exist as an independent identity within 10 to 20 years if the present rate of assimilation in the province continues. "Their culture will be extinct," he says. As such, he believes Indonesian Government policies in the area come within the definition of genocide.

Els-ham estimates that there have been 100,000 extrajudicial killings in Papua since the province was taken over by Indonesia in the 1960s. "That number doesn't include rapes and people who have disappeared. These are only confirmed deaths."

Rumbiak says Papuan culture is also threatened by transmigration, which has brought a million people to the province from other parts of Indonesia, the degradation of indigenous culture, and the accelerating rate of HIV-AIDS. A recent addition to the Papuan scene has been an Islamic militia called Laskar Jihad which, Rumbiak says, has connections with the Indonesian military. "The Muslim community is being manipulated to create conflict."

Rumbiak says his inspiration is Tuarek Narkime, chief of the Amungme people who were the original owners of the land now occupied by the giant Freeport gold and copper mine.

The impact of the mine and the local activities of the military led an outraged Narkime to paint his body with mud, don his penis gourd and walk from his village to Freeport's company town, Tembagapura, and make a statement of protest.

Rumbiak quotes him as having said: "Gentleman, I am angry with God! Why has He created such beautiful mountains, valleys and rivers, rich with minerals and placed us - the indigenous peoples - here in this place that attracts so many people from around the world to come, exploit our resources and kill us? You had better kill me now, kill all of my people, all our livestock, dig a big grave and bury us all, and then you can do whatever you want on our grave!"

Rumbiak says Chief Narkime once told him that, as great as the provocation to the Papuan people has been, "our minds and hearts have to be as clean and white as Nemankawiarat (the glacier-capped Carstenz mountain peak) when you fight for truth and justice for your people and your land".

Rumbiak says for this reason the Papuan struggle has been built around integrity, non-violent direct action and compassion.

Greens senator Bob Brown refers to the Papuans as "our invisible neighbours". Rumbiak agrees. He says the world simply doesn't know about Papua.

"To begin with, Papua is isolated. The only way to get there is a six-hour flight from Jakarta. Diplomats say it is too hard to visit. If you're a journalist, you can't get there without a permit from the Information Department in Jakarta and when you arrive you have to go to the police for a pass permit."

Rumbiak says the international perception of the Papuans is of a primitive Stone Age people. Laskar Jihad calls Papua "the Land of No Religion".

At the same time, multinational corporations have been given access to the region's forestry and mineral riches. Rumbiak says these industries have brought with them prostitution, which has inflamed the region's AIDS epidemic.

Rumbiak says Australians have a moral responsibility for what is happening in Papua. "Australia is one of the countries that has benefited politically and economically from what is going on in West Papua," he says.

Rumbiak believes this is not the struggle of Papuans alone. "This is the struggle of anyone, no matter where they are in the world, who believes in respect for other human beings and their cultures, and for the beautiful natural planet upon which we all depend for life."

Rumbiak is absolutley right when he says "Australian's know nothing about what is going on in West Papua" when I speak to people around you in the work place ect. no-one knows what I'm talking about, people don't even know where West Papua is.

I hope this concert will educate people in Australia about what is happening in West Papua and it would be wonderful in the concert went to each of the capital cities.

ps keep up the great work by providing regular newspaper articles.

Ground-breaking septet Not Drowning Waving will reunite for a night to get people talking about West Papua, writes Michael Dwyer.


David Bridie has never gotten Papua New Guinea out of his blood. Well, the malaria is under control now, 17 years since his first holiday in Rabaul. But over a dozen subsequent visits, the Melanesian people from there and neighbouring West Papua have haunted his music and his conscience.

With tomorrow night's celebrity-studded Morning Star Concert for West Papua, the Melbourne singer-songwriter will wrap up a full year of hard work, all geared towards the modest goal of "getting people to talk about West Papua".

In the process, he'll revisit what many fans - including musicians such as Peter Gabriel and David Byrne - consider his finest hour with his old band, Not Drowning Waving.

Defunct for 10 years, the ambient world-music septet will reunite to perform songs largely drawn from their ARIA-award-winning album Tabaran, recorded in Rabaul in 1988 with a collective of local musicians, some of whom have made the trek to Melbourne for the event.

"(Gabriel's record label) Real World were going to release Tabaran overseas but then the band broke up so they didn't," Bridie recalls with a dry laugh.

"We'd run out of steam and money. We'd got signed to Warners in America, then dropped two weeks before the album launch and that was a real kick in the guts.

"It was quite an expensive band to run and like any shared household, we started getting on each other's nerves a little bit. But we were always swimming against the tide."

That understatement alludes equally to NDW's pioneering embrace of sampling technology and their passion for music drawn from cultures forgotten or ignored by the mainstream.

It was meeting and working with Melanesian musicians - some of them living free in Papua New Guinea, some of them refugees from Indonesian-controlled West Papua - that changed the course of Bridie's music and, increasingly, his life.

"The first thing that hit us was that everyone's a musician there, it's not a specialist thing, there's no self consciousness about singing, no weird ideas about being a star," he recalls. "There's something quite effortless and beautiful about it in that way.

"The second thing was that Papua New Guineans were free and West Papuans weren't. It was as simple as that. And yet they were the same Melanesian people.

"Getting to know those people personally, you start to feel for them more when there's any deprivation of liberty, human rights abuses. You start hearing their stories and it really hits home - the reality of it, rather than just being words on a piece of paper."

Bridie's first solo record, 2000's Act of Free Choice, was in pointed memory of the controversial 1969 referendum which cemented Indonesia's claim over the people and natural wealth of West Papua.

But it was the commercial success of his other band, My Friend The Chocolate Cake, that turned music into activism. The Cake licensed their tune The Romp to a TV advertisement last year, consoled by the purest of motives: it financed the Morning Star campaign.

It's a triple-pronged push. A book and CD have also been produced to raise awareness and money for New York-based human rights lobbying group, the Papuan Resource Centre.

Follow the Morning Star is a lavish photographic tome by Ben Bohane and Liz Thompson, with text by historian Jim Elmslie. Sound of the Morning Star is an exotic collection of soundscapes by members of NDW and other Pacific region artists, some of whom will appear at tomorrow night's concert.

Apart from NDW's reunion with PNG superstar George Telek and other Melanesian musos, the show features ARIA king of pop Alex Lloyd, comedians John Clarke, Dave O'Neill and Andrew Denton, electronic artists P'nau and Paul Mac, indigenous theatre and dance pieces and a 20-piece Melanesian choir. West Papuan string band Black Paradise and their countrymen in exile, the Black Brothers, promise to be highlights. Bridie is keen to see former Dead Can Dance singer and film soundtrack composer Lisa Gerrard perform.

"But I think mainly I'm just looking forward to being on stage with Not Drowning Waving, looking across at these people who I've played so many gigs with. I'm gonna be savouring the moment."

The Morning Star Concert for West Papua is at the Melbourne Concert Hall tomorrow, 8pm.

oh how I wish I could go to this concert...anyone going let me know how it all went...