Andreas Harsono’s three-decade odyssey reveals a land of systemic racism, silenced histories, and a struggle for identity.
By Akhlis Purnomo
LEBAK, INDONESIA – The story of West Papua is, for most Indonesians, a story they have never truly been told. Journalist and human rights activist Andreas Harsono unravelled his story and journey of reporting West Papua as he sat down with Cracks on the first Sunday morning (11/2) of November 2025 at the comfort of Compok Cellep, his uniquely designed suburban home in Lebak Regency, Banten Province, Indonesia.
“I was growing up in an era where we rarely knew what happened in Papua,” Harsono recalled. Born in 1965, the year Indonesia’s military regime solidified its power and the controversial New York Agreement laid the groundwork for West Papua’s future, his childhood was steeped in a single, unchallenged narrative: that West Papua had willingly chosen to integrate with Indonesia. “We were just being told that Irian Barat (now West Papua) had agreed to 100% integrate with Indonesia. There was a massacre in 1977, but there was no news report at all. The military controlled the media tightly.”
The facade first cracked in 1996, when Harsono worked as a reporter for Associated Press Television and was dispatched to Wamena to cover the kidnapping of 16 international biologists by the Free Papua Movement (Organisasi Papua Merdeka or OPM). As an Indonesian citizen, he could travel where foreign correspondents were barred. For three weeks, he witnessed the tense negotiations led by Colonel Prabowo Subianto’s Kopassus forces. Subianto himself is now the president of the Republic of Indonesia.
“I got malaria, too,” he said with a wry smile. “It was the first time I realised that there was something wrong in West Papua.” He saw a reality starkly different from the placid portrayal in Jakarta’s newspapers: widespread human rights abuses and pervasive racism against dark-skinned, curly-haired Papuans. “That was when I started to question my own understanding.”
That initial questioning ignited a lifelong commitment. From 2008 to 2018, Harsono returned to West Papua every year; his journeys culminating in seminal reports for Human Rights Watch on political prisoners, media blackouts, and, most recently, the deep-seated racism that underpins the conflict. His work, Something to Hide (2015), is not just a chronicle of oppression, but a personal reckoning with his Javanese-Indonesian identity.
The Four Pillars of a Forgotten Conflict
Ask Harsono to diagnose the crisis, and he turns not to polemics, but to the sober analysis of Indonesia’s state-owned National Research and Innovation Agency (Badan Riset dan Inovasi Nasional, BRIN). He outlined the four root causes they identified.
First, and most fundamentally, is the manipulated history of integration. Harsono points to founding father Mohammad Hatta’s early reluctance to include West Papua, citing cultural differences, and the deeply flawed 1969 “Act of Free Choice” where just over 1,000 hand-picked West Papuans, under intense military pressure, voted unanimously for integration. “The history of how West Papua became a part of Indonesia was manipulated,” Harsono stated.
Second are the systemic human rights abuses. The names of the victims punctuate his sentences like grim milestones: Theys Eluay, a prominent West Papua independence leader, assassinated by the Indonesian Army Special Forces (Kopassus); his driver, Aristoteles Masoka, disappeared; Filep Karma, another pro-independence leader who became a close friend, was imprisoned for raising the banned Morning Star flag. “I get reports and videos every day about human rights abuses from the ground,” Harsono said.
Third is environmental degradation, where the lush Papuan rainforests are being devoured by palm oil and mining conglomerates. “Freeport was the beginning in 1969,” he noted, referring to the massive American-owned gold and copper mine. “The environment and wildlife are destroyed, and millions of hectares of land are being stolen from the indigenous West Papuans.”
The fourth is deliberate marginalization. He cites Filep Karma’s book, Seakan Kitorang Setengah Binatang (“As If We Were Animals”), which describes how, in the 1960s, West Papuans owned over 90% of businesses on the capital Jayapura’s main street. Today, many have been pushed to the economic fringe, selling betel nuts on plastic mats. “OPM are systematically implemented,” Harsono explained. “Middle-class, intellectual business owners were accused of sympathizing with the Free Papuan Movement; they were arrested, tortured, and their stores were handed to military-linked businesses.”
The Complicit and the Courageous: Journalism in the Crossfire
Navigating this complex and dangerous terrain requires a careful understanding of the media ecosystem itself. Harsono drew a stark distinction between the Suharto-era’s outright propaganda and the more nuanced, yet still troubled, contemporary landscape.
While independent media outlets like Project Multatuli, Tirto, and Mongabay have produced commendable work about West Papua, a more disturbing phenomenon persists: the infiltration of newsrooms by state intelligence. A leaked military document once revealed over 200 journalists doubling as informants, he said. He wrote in length about the leaked document on Indonesia: Military Documents Reveal Unlawful Spying in Papua (2011).
“They were divided into two positions,” Harsono explained. “The agents were the full-time intelligence officers pretending to be journalists.” He recounted the case of Victor Mambor, the editor of West Papuan media Jubi.id, who discovered that one of his staff members was a police officer secretly sending daily editorial minutes to his superiors via Facebook Messenger. In another case, an army soldier was found working undercover in a Manokwari Express newsroom.
Then there are the informers: real journalists who freelance as informers, and are compensated with money or favors, creating a pervasive culture of surveillance and self-censorship. This dynamic often falls along racial lines, between what Papuans call “wartawan rambut lurus” (straight-haired journalists) and “wartawan rambut keriting” (curly-haired journalists).
“They’re missing the facts on the ground in their narratives,” Harsono said of the complicit media.
Andreas Harsono visited the Abepura Correctional Facility in 2014. (Photo credit: Andreas Harsono)
The Language of Liberation and Control
In this contested space, even terminology is a battlefield. Harsono navigates it with deliberate precision. He prefers “Indonesian Papua” in English to clarify the region’s current political status, while acknowledging that many Papuans reject the term. He insists on “orang asli Papua” (indigenous Papuan) to distinguish from non-native settlers who call themselves “orang Papua.”
He is particularly critical of the official label “Kelompok Kriminal Bersenjata” (KKB) or “Armed Criminal Groups” for Papuan militants. “I usually use the term ‘West Papuan militants,’” he said, noting they call themselves the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB). He contextualized their struggle: “They are mostly village guardians who just want to be independent from Indonesia. All of them are upset with the destruction of their forest, their rivers, their waters.”
He clarified that the enmity is not towards all Indonesians, but primarily towards the security forces and those they referred to as “suanggi” – a Biaknese term for a traitor or sorcerer, now used to describe Javanese or Papuan informants and infiltrators.
Andreas Harsono interviewed a number of local women selling produce and herbs in Wamena in November 2014. These West Papuan women said they had no access to bank loans. Permanent kiosks are now owned by non-West Papuan people. (Photo credit: Andreas Harsono)
A Vision of Solidarity, Not Solutions
When asked to envision a decolonized future for West Papua, Harsono became cautious. “I do not oppose the rights to self-determination. I respect Papuans who air their political aspiration to be independent,” he said. “But I also do not support them. Because I know it is a very sensitive issue in Indonesia.”
His position is not one of political advocacy for independence, but of human rights advocacy and profound personal solidarity. He believes the core issue Indonesians must confront is their own deep-seated racism. “Indonesians, sadly to say, are racist towards dark-skinned and curly-haired people. They often look down on them, saying they are stupid and smelly. They call West Papuans ‘monyet’ (monkeys).”
This is why Filep Karma’s book title, *As If We Were Animals*, resonates so deeply. It names the dehumanization at the heart of the conflict. For Harsono, solidarity in storytelling means approaching West Papua with an open mind, setting aside the biases of his Javanese, Muslim-majority upbringing to truly listen.
His connection to the land is also cultural and aesthetic. He spoke with passion of Papuan reggae music, the powerful compilation album of Arnold Ap, the classic folk song “Hai Tanahku Papua,” [‘Oh My Land Papua], and the breathtaking woodcraft of the ethnic Asmat people.
For three decades, Andreas Harsono has worked not as a revolutionary, but as a reporter and a witness, meticulously documenting the cracks in Indonesia’s official narrative, one report, one journey, one friendship at a time. His work encouraged us to think that before any problem can be solved, it must first be seen and named for what it truly is.
This interview was published in Cracks issue #1
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