On 16 October the Associated Press reported that a ‘clash’ between the Indonesian military (TNI) and the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) had left fourteen people dead. According to the AP, the TNI said they faced ‘military-grade weapons’ during a six-and-a-half hour battle in Soanggama, a village in Intan Jaya Regency. The details of the weapons seized from the TPNPB paint a different picture: a home-made rifle, binoculars, four air rifles and some rounds of ammunition.
As the TPNPB told the AP, only three of the dead were connected to the armed struggle. The report omitted a fifteenth victim, a 75-year-old woman who fell into a river and drowned while being chased by soldiers. Another victim, Agus Kogoya, was executed after producing his identity card: he shared a surname with a TPNPB fighter.
Indonesia has occupied West Papua since 1963. A media blackout, enforced for decades, means the scant press coverage is often drawn largely from TNI press releases. What happened in Soanggama seems to have been less a ‘clash’ than a massacre. The three confirmed TPNPB members were captured and tortured before being killed.
In the days that followed, the Indonesian airforce bombarded Kiwirok in the Star Mountains, near the border with Papua New Guinea. Aerial attacks have increased in frequency throughout 2025, reflecting both the sophistication of Indonesia’s arsenal and its reluctance to be drawn into close-range combat with the TPNPB.
The conflict in West Papua may be the world’s most unequal war: raids on military bases have improved the TPNPB’s fighting capacity, but they still often face Indonesian jets and missiles armed only with bows and arrows. The activist Tom Beanal, who died in 2023, once asked if West Papua was colonised by Indonesia or by the entire world. Munitions recovered by Lamek Taplo, the TPNPB commander in Kiwirok, include Serbian mortars, Chinese drones and bombs manufactured by the French arms company Thales. Taplo was killed by one such bomb on 19 October, shortly after recording video testimony of the attack that he hoped would force the UN to intervene. Standing in the fallout zone of an Indonesian missile, Taplo offered his beleaguered troops a final prayer: ‘God please raise up our nature and our ancestors; the ones eaten by Indonesia in Kiwirok.’
To say, as Indonesia does, that increased guerrilla attacks are behind the current escalation in West Papua, is begging the question. Control of West Papua’s resources has long been the principal strategic goal of Indonesia’s occupation, informing how and where it deploys its soldiers and its settlers. Much of Intan Jaya lies within the concession zone of the vast Wabu Block gold mine, including the Hitadipa and Sugapa districts, where in May five Papuans were executed and seven others disappeared. Begun in 2020, Wabu Block’s development has seen soldiers pour into Intan Jaya, spawning new TNI checkpoints – 31 in the last three months – and consequent restrictions on everyday life. In this highly militarised atmosphere, markers of Papuan identity such as dreadlocks become symbols of TPNPB membership, inviting beatings or arbitrary arrests.
At the same time, punitive bombing raids have destroyed villages across Intan Jaya, forcing thousands into makeshift camps. Just over 80,000 West Papuans were internally displaced at the beginning of the year; that figure has now increased to more than 100,000. Perhaps one in ten West Papuans has been a refugee in the last five years. By clearing Indigenous people from their land, the TNI both eases the extraction process and seeds future conflict: displacement allows extraction which leads to further displacement.
The cycle is compounded by the TNI’s financial interests in the mines and plantations that they work to protect. A 2021 report identified a number of military figures – active-duty personnel along with retired generals – as investors in the companies behind Wabu Block. The highest profile shareholder is Luhut Pandjaitan, a four-star general and former investment minister, who brought a defamation case against two Indonesian solidarity activists who accused him of profiting from the mine. They were acquitted in January 2024.
Pandjaitan’s involvement in Wabu Block is a measure of the TNI’s relative independence from Jakarta, which endured in West Papua past the fall of Suharto’s New Order. President Prabowo Subianto, a former general accused of atrocities in East Timor, inherited a number of ambitious industrial ventures in West Papua from his predecessor, Joko Widodo, including the largest deforestation project in human history and the 4000km Trans-Papua Highway, intended both to increase production on existing agribusiness initiatives and to encourage new ones.
Seen at first as a reformer, Widodo won Papuan votes on a promise to loosen media access and address atrocities such as the 2014 Bloody Paniai massacre, in which five children were killed and seventeen wounded. At the end of his first term, however, Widodo appointed his one-time electoral rival Prabowo as defence minister. (On assuming the presidency in 2024, Prabowo selected Widodo’s eldest son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, as vice president.)
Rather than rein in the TNI, Widodo confirmed their status as an autonomous power in West Papua. A law passed in 2021 increased the number of provinces there from two to five, ensuring an expanded checkpoint and surveillance regime and giving the military an increased role in administration. Only one soldier involved in Bloody Paniai was put on trial and he was acquitted of all charges in 2022. The combination of a hands-off approach to military command and a terra nullius view of economic development produced the bloodiest phase of the occupation for two decades.
Where Widodo accommodated the TNI, Prabowo is leading it, synthesising the political and military dimensions of Indonesian rule. He has abandoned the euphemistic language of ‘development’, declared Suharto a national hero and instructed Papua’s regional governors to dress in military fatigues during their inauguration.
In another linguistic shift, the TNI have announced that they will stop referring to the TPNPB as KKB (Armed Criminal Group), instead reverting to the traditional designation OPM (Free Papua Movement). In West Papua, OPM doesn’t refer to a particular armed group but to the more general spirit of liberation and resistance to which the vast majority of West Papuans adhere. As one Papuan refugee described it, ‘OPM is not an organisation, it is just a feeling that everyone has for their own fate.’ From this revolutionary perspective, every West Papuan is OPM. But as Soanggama showed, a version of this idea is also held by the Indonesian military: they’re all OPM when they’re dead.
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Douglas Gerrard is a writer and researcher based in London.
