In the reporting on the Israeli genocide in Gaza, global Western mainstream coverage showed its limitations. My forthcoming paper, “Post-2023 Gaza: How Independent Media Complicate the Narrative,” argues that the biased coverage of the genocide is patterned rather than accidental. Legacy routines, what I call official indexing, episodic timelines, and a persistent “view from nowhere”, continue to shape what audiences see and what remains invisible. These routines privilege what is easiest to access and verify, such as government briefings or wire copy, while the voices under blockade or occupation are often left out.
Against that backdrop, a constellation of independent digital- native outlets, including +972 Magazine, Democracy Now!, De Correspondent, Forensic Architecture, and Orient XXI, demonstrates how journalism can make transparancy and positionality the new foundations of trust.
Each does this differently: +972 Magazine investigates the policies and command decisions that shape violence; Democracy Now! maintains long-term continuity beyond news cycles; De Correspondent centers listening and transparency through its member-funded model; Forensic Architecture turns verification into a public method; and Orient XXI builds regional capacity through multilingual collaboration.
When viewed through decolonial and change-centric lenses, these outlets show that accountability is not advocacy but just good journalism.
Credibility is earned when journalism states who we are, where we stand, and how we know what we know.
The paper translates these insights into a practical “practice protocol” for newsroom leaders. It includes operational steps like adding a positionality line in stories, disclosing methods and uncertainties, budgeting for co-authorship with local journalists, maintaining language glossaries to remove euphemisms, and creating community listening infrastructure. The goal is to make fairness auditable through verifiable processes and shared accountability.
Founders and editors set the conditions for slower, more transparent reporting to thrive. Palestinian journalists who are working under extreme constraint are the model of this integrity daily; their methods, not just their testimonies, deserve to guide global journalism.
The paper has been presented at the “International Media and the War on Gaza: Modalities of Discourse and the Clash of Narratives” Conference, Doha, 29–30 November 2025.
News reports from India in English will often have the speaker quoted talking in English, even though the language they spoke in was different. There are 22 languages in India listed in the constitution, with many hundreds of unlisted dialects, some of which don’t have scripts. It is likely that a bomb blast survivor in Delhi will speak Hindi, and a road accident survivor in Andhra Pradesh will speak Telugu.
Publications now try and quote the person in the original language in a line or two, to establish what language the person spoke and also because some phrases or concepts are best described in the words of the land.
India has of course accepted (some may say embraced) English as its own, and few publications hold on to British English. Indianisms like ‘take a bath’, ‘give an exam’, or ‘in winters’ are the norm, as more speakers whose language at home may be Bengali, Tamil, or any of the others, come into the workforce.
Reporters, especially those working out of smaller cities and towns, usually think in their mother tongue or the local language they grew up with. When they write, they’re translating in their heads. An oft-made mistake is to say someone sat ‘on the table’ rather than ‘at the table’. So in an Indian newsroom, ‘the desk’ is important.
There are certain concepts in India like caste, which require special treatment. For instance, many publications write Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi (people traditionally considered untouchables, those discriminated against, tribal) in the same way the Associated Press style guide treats Black, with a capital at the beginning.
As right-wing forces surge, there is a tendency for publications to prefix a Hindu god’s name with Lord, which wasn’t the case a generation ago. Similarly, humans venerated to god-like levels also get special treatment. Like the king Shivaji, who lived in the 17th century and is now reclaimed as a Hindu warrior. He is no longer just Shivaji, but Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj (chhatrapati translates to lord of the umbrella or sovereign protector; maharaj is king). His followers insist he be referred to this way, and media houses acquiesce , so they are not ‘outraged’ if he’s just called Shivaji.
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.
Book review: The Myth of the Lazy Native by Syed Hussein Alatas
By Priya Kulasagaran
What does it actually mean to be lazy, and who decides what ambitions are worth pursuing? In The Myth of the Lazy Native, sociologist and academic Syed Hussein Alatas argues that in the eyes of the colonizer, laziness simply meant rejecting exploitation.
Dissecting colonial writings by administrators, scholars, and travelers, Alatas shows how colonial capitalism moralized labor along racial lines across colonies in Southeast Asia. From this perspective, the values of entire communities were measured solely by their usefulness to the empire.
For instance, in colonial Malaysia, Malay rice farmers, fishermen, and smallholders were dismissed as “indolent” for working on their own terms, supposedly unambitious due to their disinterest in colonial enterprises.
However, what counted as diligence was still deeply steeped in contempt. Here is one colonial observer’s “praise” for Chinese laborers, who were often debt-bonded and endured cruel conditions within colonial plantations and mines:
He is the mule among nations—capable of the hardest task under the most trying conditions; tolerant of every kind of weather and ill usage; eating little and drinking less; stubborn and callous; unlovable and useful in the highest degree.
Lazy or not, all were deemed subhuman by colonial masters who avoided manual labor themselves.
What feels most urgent to me as a Malaysian is the book’s exploration of how these myths were internalized by the colonized and adopted by the local elite to shape political and policy narratives. I still see Alatas’ critique reflected in how Malaysians perceive one another, with the same tired stereotypes coloring inter-ethnic assumptions of laziness and entitlement. The same pattern also shapes who we label as “expatriate” versus “migrant worker”. Perceptions of race still play a role in determining whose labor is valued, tolerated, or rendered disposable.
CRACKS 