Journal of Genocide Research (2008), 10(4),

December, 583– 602

“A thousand miles of cannibal lands”:

imagining away genocide in the
re-colonization of West Papua
TRACEY BANIVANUA-MAR

Following recent calls to monitor intensifications of settler-colonial structures (Journal of

Genocide Research, Vol 9, No 4, 2007, p 403), this article focuses on an as yet poorly
recognized site of settler-colonial violence against indigenous peoples. Rather than
engaging in what the author argues is ultimately a fruitless and potentially diversionary
debate over whether the killings, massacres, disappearances and structural elimination of
West Papuans amount, conceptually, to genocide, this article focuses on the kinds of
discursive and epistemic violence that provide the enabling backbone and camouflage for
genocidal practices. The larger questions with which the paper engages is why it is that we
remain so reluctant to detect the crime of genocide, and what it is that popularly diverts our
attention? In the modern era, when a body of international human rights law maintains
some, if largely ineffectual, global scrutiny, it is not only the acquiescent consent of settlers
on the scene that needs manufacturing for structural genocide and genocidal events to
occur. In the context of globalized markets for, and consumption of, discursive
representations, modern genocides are being sold to, and allowed to happen by, all of us.
With a particular focus on the spectacle of cannibalism, this article explores what the author
argues is a text-book example of the kind of discursive footwork that has historically
accompanied colonialism’s genocidal structures, and has allowed genocide to masquerade
as criminally neutral (unintentional fatal impact or simply progress), or morally compelling
(civilizing missions, assimilation, or development). Finally, in exploring the reflected
presence of claims of cannibalism and savagery in the face-to-face violence of Indonesian
occupation in West Papua, this article also argues for bringing debates about genocide back
from the brink of over-analysis. As has been well advanced to date, dimensions of genocide
studies threaten to tip the balance of debates so that genocide becomes a concept rather than
crime, and a concept that is severed from the blunt physicality of determined and sustained
attempts at mass extermination. An over-determined ‘genocide,’ the paper argues, is a
temporized genocide, and one which therefore opens crucial space in debates for re-
engaging precisely the kinds of colonial discourses that enable, excuse and even naturalize
genocide in the first place.

West Papua has long occupied colonial imaginations as “a few thousand miles of
cannibal land.”1 These words were uttered by John F. Kennedy’s CIA advisor,
Robert Komer, in 1962 as the United States (US) prepared to step in to the struggle
between a newly independent Indonesia and the withdrawing Dutch colonial
rulers over the region then known as West Irian. At the time, the description

ISSN 1462-3528 print; ISSN 1469-9494 online/08/040583-20 # 2008 Research Network in Genocide Studies
DOI: 10.1080/14623520802447743
TRACEY BANIVANUA-MAR

reflected West Papua’s fame as something of a final frontier in the aftermath of

the sensational disappearance of Michael Rockefeller in 1961.2 This fame has
lingered. In a variety of popular media West Papua is often represented as an
Edenic “hotbed of discovery” in evolutionary isolation, and has become home
to commodified dreams of first (and fatal) contact with undiscovered peoples
whose imagined primitiveness is epitomized by their presumed cannibalism.
From discoveries of “tree-dwelling tribe[s] of cannibals,” to advertised cannibal
holidays, and adventure tours to see the world’s “last” cannibals, West Papua has
come to be imagined as a living, breathing natural history display. Since 1963
and the Indonesian invasion that eventuated, however, West Papua has also been
home to the kind of determined policies of transmigration, assimilation, and sus-
tained physical and administrative violence against indigenous Papuans that are
common to settler-colonialism. Many argue that West Papua is a site of unfolding
genocide.3 This sits in stark contrast to the popularly consumed image of a racialized
edenic paradise, but as this article explores, the contrast is not coincidental.
The takeover of West Papua occurred amidst the post-war winds of change,
when the United Nations (UN) led an international commitment to the decoloni-
zation of non-self-governing territories. In the case of West Papua, however,
Komer’s description echoed an international dismissal of Papuan aspirations for
self-rule. In the New York Agreement of 1962, which was brokered by the US
between the Netherlands and Indonesia, possession of West Papua was handed
to post-colonial Indonesia, which in turn promised a future act of self-determi-
nation in which West Papuans would be able to vote for their future. This act,
the Act of Free Choice, occurred in 1969, when 1,000 people representing a popu-
lation of a million voted unanimously and under demonstrable coercion to retain
Indonesian sovereignty. Otherwise known as the Act of No Choice, it is now
increasingly argued that the UN and global community knowingly stood aside
while Suharto’s military engineered the outcome of the ballot.4 In an exemplary
memo sent in 1968 to the US State Department and copied to Canberra, the
Hague and other centres of interested governments, the US ambassador in
Jakarta described the Act of Free Choice as an appropriate “formula” for ensuring
an “affirmation of Indonesian sovereignty.” The world’s governments cited the
primitiveness of Papuans as justification for accepting the vote. As Henry Kis-
singer, then Secretary of State put it, free elections “would be almost meaningless
among the stone-age cultures of New Guinea.”5 In the subsequent vote of the UN
General Assembly, 84 members voted to cement Indonesia’s sovereignty in West
Papua, while 30 members abstained. Those abstaining, mostly from former
African colonies, cited the unacceptability of deeming a people to be too “primi-
tive” to be free.6 Their voices carried little weight against the Cold War interests of
free world governments, however, and the violence that erupted and endured after
1969 has since enjoyed a powerful international sanction.
West Papua, renamed Irian Jaya between 1973 and 2004, is treated within
Indonesian national discourse as a province internal to the post-colonial nation.7
This claim however, is based on West Papua’s former colonial status under
Dutch rule, and Indonesia’s occupation and multi-dimensional marginalization

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of indigenous Papuans lends the region the structural status of a colony of settle-
ment. As is detailed below, West Papuans are close to being outnumbered by
transmigration settlers; they have little administrative or political power; are
subject to pacification and assimilation campaigns; the significant mineral and
timber-based wealth extracted from the region rarely ends up in the hands of indi-
genous land owners, and their land in turn is constitutionally framed as being
owned by no one.8 As is also detailed, expressions of Papuan identity through
dress, language, or music have become resilient and enduring forms of resistance,
and in turn, have been treated as seditious and treasonous, routinely attracting
military campaigns of arbitrary arrest and violence.
While due care must be taken to acknowledge the particularities of Indonesia’s
occupation of West Papua as a defiant act of decolonization, the dispossession and
displacement of indigenous Papuans is nevertheless typically settler-colonial.
Moreover, underpinning the structural similarities between West Papua and the
classic settler-colonies of European empires, and perhaps the ultimate circum-
stance that distinguishes West Papua’s status from simply being militarily occu-
pied, is the international sanction that Indonesian governments have enjoyed.
Like colonialism of old, the occupation of West Papua in the international
realm is legally sanctioned as a civilizing mission, or in twentieth and twenty-
first century terms, as an act of development. It is the discursive context of this
international acquiescence or blindness that this article explores. I argue that the
prevalence of popular images of West Papuans as savages distracts, masks and,
in the end, naturalizes the political state of West Papuans. Moreover the spectre
of cannibalism represents something of a distillation of, and reference to, per-
petuated colonial tropes of the past.
One of the striking benefits of interrogating settler-colonial, and indeed colo-
nial, formations of genocide is that, as Patrick Wolfe put it, settler-colonialism
is an indicator of the kinds of social, political, economic and ideological con-
ditions that enable and perpetuate genocidal processes.9 He is of course not
alone in arguing that colonialism shares an intimate, genealogical, structural,
and social, affinity with genocide, but his analysis of the logic of elimination is
an important reminder that genocide is produced by a far-reaching structural
context.10 It is these contextual mechanisms that this article attempts to unpick.
In 2002, Alexander Hinton argued that the discourses of alterity that accompanied
empire and nation building have historically provided genocidal priming for per-
petrator societies. When these primed conditions were heated and agitated, geno-
cide tended to explode into cases of what we could term hot genocide, such as in
Germany, Cambodia, or Rwanda.11 While I do not disagree with this formula, this
article emphasizes the ways in which, in the case of colonial genocides, we deal
with cold killing—that is, with either a cultivated state blindness towards the mas-
sacres and atrocities of private individuals and corporations, or the structural,
policy-driven, day-by-day genocide of settler-state replacements of indigenous
populations.
In the same collection as Hinton, Nancy Scheper-Hughes argued that in order to
better understand the how of genocide, rather than the whether or what, we must

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look to the invisible, and quiet genocides, or the genocidal continuums of the
present.12 In an extension of this call, I explore the silencing processes by
which the violence endured by indigenous peoples is so often hyphenated, suffixed
or prefixed. A focus on the spectacle of cannibalism observes the discursive foot-
work that has historically ushered genocide into the realm of the criminally neutral
(unintentional fatal impact or simply progress), or morally compelling (civilizing
missions, assimilation, or development). In observing the reflected presence in
West Papua of claims of cannibalism in the face-to-face violence of occupation,
the larger question with which the paper engages is why we, who observe or
ignore what happens to indigenous peoples, remain so reluctant to detect colonial
genocide? What is it that diverts our attention? In the nominally postcolonial era,
when a body of international law and rhetoric of human rights maintains some, if
largely ineffectual, global scrutiny, it is not only the consent of settlers on the
scene that needs manufacturing for genocide to occur. The globalized consump-
tion of the spectacles and discourses of savagery which accompany colonialism’s
racial violence means that modern genocides are sold to, and allowed to happen
by, all of us.
This article does not centre on the potentially diversionary debate over whether
the killings, massacres, disappearances and structural marginalization of West
Papuans amounts to genocide in the legal sense. My reluctance to engage in defi-
nitional debate stems directly from a central point explored in this article. That is,
and this has been well advanced to date, that as definitions of genocide multiply,
genocide also increasingly resembles an amorphous and malleable concept,
occasionally removed from the blunt physicality of attempts to eliminate the phys-
ical, political or cultural existence of a group. Recent exchanges over Christian
Gerlach’s “extremely violent societies” thesis pointed out and exemplified the
way in which debates that are excessively focussed on limiting and expanding
our conceptual definitions of genocide and its hyphenated typologies are
risky.13 They run the risk of setting up taxonomies of genocide, or opening
crucial space in debates for re-engaging precisely the kinds of discourses that
enable and naturalize it in the first place. This argument is certainly not new,
but it is directed at the nagging absence in debates over definition of the violence,
terror, silence, and trauma that brings genocide into the homes of those peoples
who are still defined in order to be destroyed. While studies of genocide must
adopt a little cold abstraction for the sake of analysis, I argue here for the value
of definitions that remain focussed on the experiences of victims, in addition to
those of perpetrators. While this may well lead to politicized discussions fuelled
by victim groups’ desires for survival, acknowledgement or justice, perhaps if pre-
vention is our aim, this is as it should be. In the face of colonialism’s character-
istically dragging and daily genocides against indigenous peoples we must be,
as Ward Churchill put it, “unequivocally political” in our detection of it.14 Geno-
cide, after all, is a crime defined for the purposes of prevention as well as punish-
ment or justice, and when it comes to prevention it is surely preferable to err, if at
all, on the side of over-diagnosis. Moreover, a characteristic of colonialism, and
settler-colonialism in particular, is that genocide is often a means rather than an

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end. As I argue, colonial genocides are frequently passive in their aggression, and
state actions of neglect, omission, silence and inaction accumulate to knowingly
inflict destruction on indigenous peoples. Analyses of genocide that centre on
the impact on victims not only enable the detection of inferred or passive
intent—necessary in a legal context. In addition such a focus may work against
those discursive currents and camouflages explored in this article, which so suc-
cessfully naturalize ongoing acts of colonial violence.

West Papua: scene 1

In 2006, a segment titled “Last cannibals” aired on 60 Minutes on the Australian
commercial television network Nine. The story followed journalist Ben Fordham
and Paul Raffaele, a writer for Smithsonian magazine, as they searched the jungles
of West Papua for “primitive warriors who have never seen a white man . . . and
still eat human flesh.” Stumbling through jungle and waterways, they survived an
altercation with locals, which Raffaele later described in an online chat hosted by
60 Minutes, as a confrontation with “frenzied naked cannibals” asking for money.
As they journeyed further into this “living, breathing time capsule” they met
people who, Raffaele reported, eat everything on a (presumably human) body
but the teeth. On reaching their heart of darkness, Fordham and Raffaele visited
one of the famed Korowai tree-houses to meet people they promised had never
before seen white people. With shining eyes, and declaring himself a “sook,”
Raffaele reported achieving his life-long dream of making “first contact” with
stone-age cannibals, and Fordham’s narration judged “from these astonished
faces [that] it’s clear they’ve never seen anything like us.” Scenes of Raffaele
dropping his trousers and lifting his shirt to wave his belly and wiggle his
naked rear end in the faces of the gathered group makes that easy to believe.15
“Last cannibals” could readily be dismissed as tabloid entertainment of no great
significance, but to do so might miss the point that cannibalism has deep purchase
in colonial worlds, a purchase reflected in the ease with which the report was able
to brand the Korowai as cannibals. No evidence of cannibalism was offered, no
history of Korowai, nor introduction to any West Papuans with more than a first
name, and no “experts” were consulted. This in itself is not noteworthy. As
William Arens controversially claimed nearly 40 years ago, cannibalism has
deep roots in colonial imaginations and has accompanied the discovery of
“natives” since Columbus. Indeed the quest for savagery and conquest, of
which cannibalism is so symbolic, is an industry as central to colonization as vio-
lence and economic exploitation.16 Etymologically derived from Columbus’ dis-
coveries via hearsay of the Carib man-eaters, and conceptually drawing on a
European archive of monsters on the borders and peripheries of the unknown, can-
nibalism has been and may always be the epitome of savagery, primitiveness,
alterity and spectacle.17 Wherever cannibals have been discovered, Arens
argued, they existed prior to and independent of any evidence. Such was the
case in “Last Cannibals.” Filled with images of semi-clothed black Papuans climb-
ing trees and eating in jungle settings of seething rivers and dimmed lighting, the

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reliance of “Last cannibals” on revived colonial tropes and imagery was not
subtle. But as dated as the story might seem to postcolonial sensibilities, it
continues to resonate in a perpetuated colonial industry of spectacle.
In the nineteenth century, as Europe found ways to exploit the islands of the
Pacific by representing them, British, French, German, Dutch and American
accounts peopled the black islands of the western Pacific from Fiji to West
Papua (branded “Melanesia” in the 1860s) with ferocious cannibals. Throughout
colonial discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cannibalism was a
synecdoche that stood for a wider colonial experience of discovery or conquest.
In Melanesia, known as the Cannibal Isles, the region remained popular with gen-
erations of armchair ethnologists, cultural tourists, and P&O cruisers whose
demands for cannibalism were met by hundreds of studio photos, travel tales
and seafaring yarns, artefact collections, and travelling human exhibits such as
the Fiji Cannibal Exhibition of 1873.18 The supply and demand for the spectacle
of cannibalism continued seamlessly into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
and from Fiji to Papua New Guinea (PNG) re-creations of cannibalism with
replica cannibal pots and cannibal forks continue to offer tourists an authentic
experience. Such tourism gained some infamy in 1987 with the launch of
Dennis O’Rourke’s documentary Cannibal Tours which unflatteringly turned
the lens back on rich western tourists journeying up the Sepik river into the interior
of PNG.19 From the Italian experts on “vegetating” natives, to the German tourist
in a safari suit, or the New Yorker in search of primitive art and those that had
eaten Michael Rockefeller, the documentary effectively testified to the trans-
national and enduring appeal of cannibal tourism.
More recently, the location of the enduring hope that cannibals might still be
accessed has moved west across the 141st meridian that divides West Papua
from Papua New Guinea and produced best-selling books like Sabine Keugler’s
Jungle Child (2005), about a child of civilization brought up amidst West
Papuan cannibals; the 1994 documentary Lords of the Garden featuring dramatic
first-contact moments with Korowai cannibals; and Discovery Channel sagas of
white men Going Tribal amongst the Kombai cannibals. Finally, while an emer-
ging tourist industry makes cultural adventures available to those who can afford
it, others may be lucky enough to win such competitions as that hosted by the UK
men’s magazine Zoo in 2004 which offered “cannibal sex holidays” in West Papua
as its prize.20
Rather than travelling as journalists, Raffaele and Fordham travelled as tourists
to film “Last cannibals” within a lucrative industry in which connoisseurs can pur-
chase dreams of discovery for a few thousand dollars. Catering to the demand, one
company offers tours to see the Kombai or Asmat people, and conducts regular
“First Contact” expeditions to “discover” Korowai. They promise to consumers
“truly ‘stone age’ tribes” and the experiences of coming “face to face with
humans of a ‘completely’ different nature and time” (their emphases). On its
website the company offers a tantalizing account of an expedition where an
ambush similar to that described by Raffaele and Fordham provided a rite of
passage into the unknown.21 A similar ambush confronted writer Michael Behar

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in 2005, who paid AUD$10,000 to the same company for the journey that he sus-
pected was not wholly authentic. Another company, Hidden Cultures Adventures,
journeys to the stone age, as they put it, where customers can observe the daily life
of a people “who have never been exposed to westerners.” Customers are
reminded that they are “observers” and must not influence the “natural balance”
by teaching “our language, games, songs etc.” Dissuaded from giving gifts tourists
are encouraged to “leave no trace of our presence” and to leave behind only
“smiles on the faces of our hosts.”22
However well intended the cultural advice of Hidden Cultures Adventures may
be, it is hard not to compare it to requests to leave only footprints and not feed the
animals in wilderness reserves and zoos where people are not part of the featured
fragile fauna. This is a fantasy central to this brand of tourism. Underpinning the
superficial element of titillation is the sense that tourists are engaging in the kind
of “salvage” ethnography of a dying peoples that characterized the methods of
such late nineteenth century anthropologists as Margaret Mead and Alfred Kroe-
bler.23 Indeed a looming extinction in the face of modernity is the unsubtle subtext
of the world’s “last” cannibals. The closing scenes of “Last cannibals,” for
example, focused on a six-year-old boy, Wawa, who was condemned to death
by his community as a suspected cannibal witch or xaxua. A few months after
it aired, Nine network’s Australian rival, Seven, sent the host of their daily
current affairs entertainment programme to West Papua on a failed mission to
save Wawa. This resulted in a distasteful network brawl that drummed up a
media frenzy illustrated with a predictable iconography of cannibal pots, grass-
skirted cannibals, and headlines referencing tribalism, spears, and Conrad’s
heart of darkness.24 Apart from the sensational child-saving, however, Wawa rep-
resented a more universal question. If civilization intruded in time to save Wawa,
would it “destroy these last survivors of the Stone Age” in the process? Raffaele
authoritatively concluded: “let them be as they are because, within 20 or 30 years,
it’ll all be over anyway.”25 We were not told why, but the inference is clearly that
it is, mysteriously, inevitable—“discovery” is a fatal impact.
This scene of West Papua as a haven of undiscovered cannibal savages and a
remote and isolated Eden of untouched stone-age wilderness is a deeply racialized
construction that places West Papuans outside time. Conceptually, cannibalism
functions to designate an exotic, inferior and colonizable status to those so
defined. In addition, it functions as a destination, and situates designated cannibals
directly and fatally in the path of the future. In the past, the idea of cannibalism and
the violence from which it distracted attention, were also mutually productive. Not
only did the promise of its existence compel explorers, travellers and missionaries
ever onwards and inwards beyond the frontiers of conquered and civilized terri-
tory. In addition, the cry of cannibalism also provided the moral authority for
this expansion and whatever violence accompanied it. During the nineteenth
century, the violence of punitive raids from Queensland to the islands of the
Torres Strait and Papuan coast; the atrocities of some of Queensland’s most
violent labour raids into the islands of the western Pacific; and the suppression
of uprisings such as those in the interior of Fiji and New Caledonia in the

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1870s, were carried out with a ferocity matched only by the excessive levels of
ritualistic depravity to which the targets of violence were rumoured to sink. Wher-
ever claims of native cannibalism, depravity, savagery or primitiveness intensi-
fied, in other words, the commission of land grabs, labour raids and atrocities in
the name of colonial civilization could be found.26 Claims of cannibalism there-
fore functioned throughout Melanesia like halls of mirrors, matching the accusa-
tion of being less than human with the reality of dehumanizing treatment. As in the
past, cannibalism in West Papua continues to operate in these ways. It powerfully
consolidates colonial narratives of savagery, inferiority and primitiveness, in the
shadow of which colonial violence diminishes as it is naturalized. In this
context, genocide readily becomes a passive and mysterious extinction, edited
of the conditions producing it.

West Papua: scene 2

Through the looking glass of the scene above is a parallel image. Four months
before “Last cannibals” went on air in Australia, 43 West Papuan refugees
made it to the Australian mainland, where all but one were granted refugee
status by an Australian government notorious for its hostility towards asylum
seekers. In receiving asylum, these refugees joined tens of thousands of West
Papuans who have fled since 1969. In fleeing, they have invisibly traversed the
playgrounds of cannibalism’s tour industry, crossing the Arafura Sea where
Michael Rockefeller disappeared, or the Sepik River of Cannibal Tours which
criss-crosses the border with PNG. They all carry similar but individual tales of
experiencing or fearing displacement, disappearance, torture, murder and indefi-
nite imprisonment for their own, their relatives, or their associates’ links to
such seditious activities as contact with the Free Papua Movement, the Organisasi
Papua Merdeka (OPM); attending powerfully symbolic ceremonies for raising the
West Papuan independence symbol, the Morning Star flag;27 or wearing tra-
ditional clothing, fighting for land, undertaking banned cultural practices, or
being in the way of transmigration settlements. The banner flown by these 43 refu-
gees as they landed incited those who saw them to save the souls of West Papuan
people from genocide.28
Cycles of defiance and suppression, fear and terror, pepper the reports that have
seeped from West Papua since the invasion of 1963. Amidst varied politics of resi-
dence where landowners refuse to clear land, to well attended flag-raising cer-
emonies, retaliatory kidnapping of foreigners by the OPM, or the sabotage of
international industries, the conviction amongst West Papuan nationalists that
they are autonomous and should not be a part of Indonesia has proven impossible
to suppress. In the 1970s, the open defiance of Papuans against the Indonesian
takeover peaked in the face of the most intense period of militarization.29
But as large-scale troop deployments were replaced in the mid-1970s with cam-
paigns dominated by secrecy and intelligence, small-scale massacres, intimi-
dation, torture and disappearances, West Papuan resistance has become ever
more dynamic.30 As Chris Ballard reports, the varied protests and campaigns of

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Amungme landowners against the operation of Freeport’s Grasburg mine on their

land, has involved a range of legal and political campaigns, guerrilla style oper-
ations, and careful management of the international media through the taking of
hostages.31 But as his article also details, Amungme resistance has also necessi-
tated the careful management of military retaliation and attacks which since the
late 1970s have increasingly relied on the production of terror.
The response of the Indonesian military, police and paramilitary to support for
independence or defiant expressions of West Papuan identity since 1969 has been
notoriously swift and bloody. This has been documented by various historians,
journalists, and Indonesian and international non-government organizations. For
example, the military operation of 1977, codenamed Operasi Tumpas (Operation
Annihilation) mobilized against continued Amungme resistance to Freeport mine
with full military paraphernalia. Strafing raids against numerous villages, such as
the bombing of the village of Ilaga and the region of Akimuga with “Daisy
Cluster” bombs dropped from OV-10 Broncos, followed by slash-and-burn
raids on the gardens of surviving villagers, were openly aimed at clearing the
mountains of resistant habitation.32 The OPM later reported that soldiers burned
the houses and churches and shot the livestock in all villages they passed, as
well as frequently shooting men, women and children. At a later human rights tri-
bunal hearing, Eliezer Bonay, a former governor of West Papua, estimated a death
toll of 3000, while the Jakarta daily, Kompas reported that local rivers were so full
of corpses the fish could not be eaten.33 Throughout this and many other cam-
paigns such as that on the island of Biak in 1970, reports detailed the kind of
killing that accompanied these deaths. Reports abounded of disembowellings
where the abdominal cavities of bodies were left on display filled with sticks, cab-
bages and leaves; extreme sexual violence and mutilations of women, particularly
pregnant women and their foetuses; and industrialized mass killings and mass
graves.34 This kind of violence is of course dense with symbolism. When a
soldier killed Nalogolan Kibak, a leader of Kampong Dila, his body was strung
up and his blood drained into a bucket from which tribal leaders, teachers and
pastors of the area were forced at gunpoint to drink.35 While contributing to a
mimetic culture of terror in this land of cannibals, such violence targeting
women, unborn babies, community leaders and the physical means of survival
is all too familiar in the annals of genocide.
While a “culture of terror” haunts the frontiers and remote border areas where
Jakarta’s control over special forces and militia is seen to be limited, this violence
is backed by, and backs, a centralized campaign of resettlement, relocation, and
deculturation.36 For example, following another military campaign codenamed
Operasi Sapu Bersih (Operation Clean Sweep) in 1981, during which numerous
massacres were reported in the Jayapura district and villages in the Paniai Basin
of the central highlands were attacked with napalm and chemical weapons, the
cleared land was later converted to transmigration land.37 Since the mid-1980s,
West Papua has been targeted by Indonesia’s transmigration programmes,
which resettle the dispossessed and alienated poor, primarily from Java and
Bali, on government sponsored land. John Otto Ondawame has noted that the

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numbers of transmigration settlers within West Papua are 88.4% higher than any
other province in Indonesia.38 Those on whose land new settlers are placed, are
themselves rendered “translocals” and resettled amongst transmigrant commu-
nities at specified ratios of one Papuan family to every nine Javanese families.39
Changing regimes, a new status of Special Autonomy since 2002, and the
gradual build-up of anti-Papuan militia since 2000 have all ensured a more
dynamic occupation of West Papua than can be properly represented here. The
key point, however, is that the colonial imagery that compelled and shaped
Dutch, British, German and Australian colonialism on the island of New Guinea,
has been successfully grafted onto this occupation. Reports of the violence of mili-
tary operations have been replete with references to Papuans as pigs, dogs and
monkeys; early programmes like Suharto’s Operasia Bursana (Operation Wear
Clothes) and his donation of 80,000 items of clothing played enduringly on the
language of civilizing Papuan inferiority; and Indonesia’s programmes of civiliz-
ing and Indonesianization have been famously defended by various ministers of
particularly the Suharto regime, as getting Papuans “down from the trees” to
abolish their traditions.40 The campaign to pacify West Papuan resistance to
Indonesianization, in other words, is clearly permeated by discourses of Papuan
backwardness and primitiveness, and has consistently been framed as a civilizing
mission.
The reports emerging from West Papua and Indonesia via a variety of human
rights watch bodies, survivors and refugee testimonies name as genocide the
litany of physical and sexual abuse, extrajudicial killing, and the concerted
efforts to deprive Papuans of a means of survival.41 Rather than mincing defi-
nitions of genocide, many of these claims limit themselves to the 1948 Conven-
tion. Amongst the most recent, for example, is a research report conducted by
the Lowenstein Human Rights Clinic at Yale University’s Law School, which
found that, simply put, the collective acts and omissions of the Indonesian state,
for which reliable evidence is available, amounts to genocide in accordance
with current understandings of the convention and international jurisprudence.42
Not surprisingly, the accusations of genocide are rejected by the Indonesian gov-
ernment and military who continue to maintain that their operations are in defence
of Indonesia’s national integrity. This is a powerful argument for it inherently
draws on the rights of sovereignty confirmed by the UN acceptance of the 1969
act of self-determination. As internal national affairs, military operations with
such names as Clean Sweep and Annihilation are framed as the self-defensive sup-
pression of political insurgency, and as political rather than race-based cleansing.
While it does not take much to argue the case that in the settler-colonial context,
and amidst the entwinement of deculturation programmes with the suppression of
West Papuan aspirations for national independence, the political is racial, perhaps
a more pertinent question emerges from this observation.43 How is it, and under
what circumstances can the resistance of handfuls of indigenous peoples armed
with the symbols of a bow and arrow and the Morning Star flag, be framed as
being so threatening they warrant defensive action involving machine guns,
napalm, cluster bombs, elite Kopasus soldiers and helicopters? Under what

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conditions in other words does genocide disappear? The answer, I believe, lies in
the entanglement of the two contrasting and mutually productive scenes we have
encountered and, I suggest, it reveals a key feature of colonial genocides.

Colonial genocide and the silencing chatter of cannibals

The two scenes of West Papua presented above are mirrored contrasts. The land of
an undiscovered Eden is home to thousands of reports of people who have disap-
peared and communities who have fled military harassment to hidden camps in the
Papuan jungle. West Papua’s pristine wilderness is actually an aggressively
exploited source of rare timber and valuable minerals in ways that are epitomized
by Freeport’s military-protected Grasburg mine—the biggest in the world. It is
estimated that by the time this transnational mine completes its operations, it
will have generated more than twice as much waste as the earth excavated from
the Panama canal. Most of it will be drained into waterways which Freeport’s
own studies have found are consequently too toxic for aquatic life.44 The contrasts
do not stop there. The place of “cannibal sex holidays” is ravaged by HIV/AIDS
whose spread is being facilitated by a two-tiered prostitution industry that expli-
citly offers less protection to Papuan women.45 The “truly stone-age” Asmat
people have for years been working under varied conditions of coerced and free
labour in a thriving and ruthless logging industry, while the undiscovered
Korowai are well accustomed to extrajudicial punishment and torture at the
hands of police following any claims of cannibalism or witchcraft.46 Tales of
West Papuan savagery that are sold to interested audiences, in other words, are
not just empirically impossible in their imagined pristineness. In addition, the
depth of savagery represented in circulating discourses of the ultimate savagery
of cannibalism is reflected in the violence of military crackdowns. Claims by
tourist-journalists Fordham and Raffaelle that West Papuans are cannibals who
eat everything but teeth are reflected in reports of Indonesian military-led mutila-
tions of women; and testimonies of prisoners being made to lick blood from the
floor of gaol cells, or to cut and eat their own hair during recent crackdowns on
flag-raising ceremonies.47 Likewise, the stock images of West Papuans in “Last
cannibals,” or which adorn the websites of tour companies are reflected in the
graphic images illustrating recent reports on genocide showing mutilated
corpses, and smiling soldiers displaying like a hunting trophy the body of Yustinus
Murib, an independence leader who was killed after speaking to an Australian film
crew in 2003.48
Two taboos of human crimes—genocide and cannibalism—circle each other in
the information that comes out of West Papua in a silencing tangle where a con-
stant chatter about ritual violence, lost tribes, lost worlds, and lost people over-
writes the actual disappearances and violence that make such an imagined
world available for a small fee. So too, we see this in the mimetic exchanges of
terror and counter-terror taking place on the frontiers of Indonesian settlement
where the sheer brutality of pacifying violence inscribes discursive patterns
onto the very bodies of West Papuans.49 The co-existence of these two scenes

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of West Papua, however, are more than mutually productive. We might also view
them as opposing poles marking the contours of a more universal enabling
process. Cannibal tourism signals the kind of cognitive universe where taxo-
nomies of violence impose differing modes of perception and render sustained
and structural violence, or genocide, invisible, inevitable and natural. Cannibal
tourism and discourses therefore matter not simply because of the racism they per-
petuate. More than this, that perpetuated racism—that system of knowledge—
drives the staggeringly bold indifference of the international community that
does not just ignore what is happening in West Papua, but profits from it.
Tom Beneal, the Chairman of the Papuan Customary Council, argued in 2005
that “we cannot just blame the Indonesians for colonizing us. The British and
Americans are colonizing us too.”50 Indeed, given the historical abandonment
of West Papua in 1969, and the Australian, British, American, and other inter-
national commercial interests that have since profited, West Papua is a transna-
tional colony. As we have seen, in the 1960s West Papuans were considered
insignificant primitives on the one hand, and crucial to global Cold War affairs
on the other. In 1969, the US embassy in Jakarta reported to the US State Depart-
ment and Canberra that “there is little question that a great majority of the non-
Stone Age Irianese,” or “possibly 85– 90 percent” of West Papuans wanted inde-
pendence. Despite this acknowledgement of diversity, at no point in the nego-
tiations between the US, Indonesia, the UK, Australia, the Netherlands and the
UN over West Papua’s future were Papuans consulted. Instead, John F. Kennedy
characterized West Papuan independence as an outcome that was to the detriment
of “the entire free world position in Asia,” benefiting “only the communists.”
British intelligence therefore appears to have been correct when it advised its
Foreign Office in the lead up to the Act of Free Choice, that “US, Japanese,
Dutch, or Australian governments would not “risk their economic and political
relations with Indonesia [over] a relatively small number of very primitive people.”51
While global economics and politics mitigated against international support for
the West Papuans’ quest for independence, the rhetoric of civilizing these thou-
sand miles of cannibal land also operated as a powerful distraction. Today,
although only the most crass journalism and overtly commercialized ethnography
is as explicit, it is arguably the case that widespread acquiescence in West Papua’s
colonization is underpinned by a similar reluctance to risk national interests for the
sake of “a small number of very primitive people.” Transnational companies
extract West Papua’s considerable wealth with ambiguous levels of protection
from the Indonesian military. In addition, the physical acts of displacement of
West Papuan landowners continue to receive support and encouragement from
the World Bank, particularly enthusiastic about Indonesian transmigration pol-
icies; while the tacit approval via military training and foreign aid for the Indone-
sian military offered by Australia, Britain and South Africa over time has offered
practical assistance and explicit approval for military campaigns.52
The levels of international support for Indonesia’s position in West Papua point
to the inadequacy of mystifying genocide as solely the actions of rogue states or
individuals. But they also bring us to the enduring feature of colonial genocides

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(settler or otherwise): the invisibility and banality of all but the most sensational
violence against indigenous peoples. This is the insidiousness of settler-colonial
and colonial genocides. The mesmerizing discourses that define the inadequacies
and failures of colonized peoples and compel colonization for their physical and
cultural correction have an enduring ability to mask violence as an inevitable if
unpalatable Fatal Impact. This is intensified in the case of cannibal discourses,
for cannibals are unnaturally savage, and unbearably so, in ways that naturalize
extinction and fatal impacts. This has a long genealogy of entwinement with colo-
nial activity and the legal doctrines that have enabled it. Indeed, since the earliest
debates of the sixteenth century over Amerindian rights, the laws of Nature, and
natural justice, cannibalism was positioned as the ultimate unnatural act. In the
sixteenth century, it condemned entire social systems to a morally defensible,
or providentially inevitable extinction, and while the brashness of such reasoning
is a product of its time, I would argue that, although slightly more sophisticated in
the present, such logic has not been extinguished.53
Within the confines of colonial logic, genocidal activities, policies and relations
are masterfully reframed as reasonable responses to a racial or historical provi-
dence. In other words, a key and defining feature of colonial genocides is the for-
mative role of neglect, inaction, passivity, and inability in the carefully framed
face of civilization’s inevitable future. In West Papua’s neighbouring regions of
Australia and the western Pacific during the nineteenth century, for example,
the rural and remote frontiers were home to semi-legal or illegal settlers, rifle
corps, vigilante groups and mutual protection societies which rapidly spearheaded
colonial invasions. But their spectacular violence, and their talked about but
secreted massacres were frequently and carefully represented as being spatially
and circumstantially beyond the sobering, civilizing and regulating reach of colo-
nial law. This in essence was the point of Kurtz figures “going native.”54 The clear
impact of this has been the essential legitimization of colonial violence in the con-
demnation and punishment of illegitimate violence. Outlawing the frontiers, in
other words, made colonial invasion both legal in international (read European)
law, and morally imperative—if only to limit Wolfe’s “frontier rabble.”55
That colonial forces—particularly in settler-colonies—failed repeatedly to
prevent frontier atrocities, or to hold back the tide of history, has always been
central to the legitimization of ever more invasive penetrations into indigenous
societies. So it was that throughout the nineteenth century the alarming decline
of indigenous populations by upwards of 90% in parts of Australia and the
Pacific was repeatedly framed and acted upon by colonial governments as the
inevitably fatal impact of modernity about which they could do little or nothing
beyond smoothing the dying pillow.56 This was despite inquiries and campaigns
throughout the centuries by indigenous peoples, missionaries and others demon-
strating that population collapses were due to historical actions rather than
racial providence. As would be infamously the case in Australia, state policies
that had the effect of removing Aboriginal landowners, and critically endangering
entire nations and language groups throughout the country were formulated within
a rhetoric of “protection” that actively ignored the destructive impact of Protection

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legislation. This has all been well canvassed in recent years, but repeating it under-
lines a defining feature of colonial genocides.57 That is, colonialism’s genocides
are frequently framed and defended as happenings rather than actions, and
states need only do nothing, or be thoroughly, repeatedly and consciously inept
for nature to take its course, or for the tide of history to wash away colonized
peoples. The result of course is that colonial genocide may still be framed as
the product of misguided benevolence in a language of denial that itself is
central to the deeper genocidal structure of settler-states.58
Unlike the spectacularly intense blood-lettings of Germany, Armenia, or
Rwanda, colonial genocides rarely speak their name. Time and again, colonial-
ism’s violence has been legal and conducted within the parameters of normative
political, economic and moral structures. This is the critical point. In the context of
colonialism, genocide is more likely to be normative than aberrant, and dominant
ways of knowing indigenous peoples as natives are the generating force for this
normalization. It is only in such a context that policy actions aimed at doing
nothing about the engineered dying out of a people, or designed to enforce their
merging, absorption, or assimilation, can possibly be framed as being in the
best interest of those peoples. I have argued that in West Papua a wider assumption
that West Papuans, as cannibal natives, must be developed and civilized masks the
inherent reality that this must necessarily “destructure” their society.59 From
beneath the blanketing overlay of the matrixes of colonialism’s enabling knowl-
edge therefore, genocide disappears.
The presence of horrendous violence conducted by a rogue military or a rogue
nation fits readily with popular perceptions of genocide for many reasons, not least
of which is the ease with which genocide can be imagined as neatly contained in
time and space. Harder to conceive of, and perhaps to prevent, is the kind of sys-
temic and epistemic forces of genocide that structure the very way we think.
Indeed, our attempts to define the extremity of, or to hyphenate genocide
against indigenous peoples might therefore be read as symptomatic of colonial-
ism’s definitive brand of normalized genocide. This brings me, finally, to the
necessity of not dismissing as political self-interest, or ethnically charged, the defi-
nitions of genocide put forward by indigenous peoples, victims and survivors such
as those put forward by West Papuans. As the example of West Papua indicates,
dominant ways of talking about indigenous peoples tend to render them native
savages. If left uninterrogated, conversations about the particular status of the
“metaphoric” violence endured by indigenous peoples is likely to be inflected
with the same taxonomies that compelled the violence in the first place.60 Ulti-
mately, there is a crude simplicity to genocide that is encapsulated by the
brevity of its legal definition. When Indigenous peoples can demonstrate that
they have repeatedly experienced the impact of these definitions—such as the
death of members of the group; serious bodily or mental injury as a group; the pre-
vention of births or removal of children of the group; or the infliction of measures
designed to destroy the group, because of their group status—this should be our
starting point for understanding the myriad and all too common occurrences of
genocide. From that point, in the interest of prevention and restitution rather

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than simply definition, we might more effectively work backwards to a deeper and
more practical understanding of how genocide happens. The gap in perception
alone, as is epitomized by the contrasting scenes of West Papua, should alert
us to the atmospheric presence, the “conceptual blockages” of an enduringly
dominant colonial logic that plays such a functional role in the commission of
genocide.61

Conclusion
It is not difficult to chart the patterns of genocidal relations and the overarching
and transnational setter-colonial logic that positions West Papuans as standing
still in the way of only one possible future. Their land is coveted, taboos of phys-
ical and sexual violence have long been breached so that extreme human rights
abuses are a matter of course in their “pacification,” and the province is crawling
with militia and military engaging in violence that manifests what Stasch has
called a “density of memetic gestures.”62 While much is being written about
this by NGOs and human rights watch groups, mainstream media outlets remain
distracted by the spectre of cannibalism. As a discourse of savagery par excellence
claims of cannibalism reduce West Papuans to caricatures and their sustained and
sophisticated struggle to an inherent cultural belligerence. Cannibalism is not only
mesmerizing, it is also a key indicator of the kind of ideological matrix that has
long been a silencing tool for colonial regimes. As we have seen, this silencing
is nothing as simple as the hiding of underground killings, although this
happens. Rather I refer to the disappearance of genocide into a range of explana-
tory frameworks of thinking and knowledge that continue to neutralize and nor-
malize all but the most bloody violence that is committed daily against many
indigenous and post-colonized peoples. It is for this reason that the contrasting
images of West Papua as both an eden and an invaded territory should be
viewed as mutually referential, where the savagery of state-sanctioned violence
can be seen in parallel existence with the desire for cannibals.
In West Papua, we can see through cannibalism the way in which discourses of
savagery and of race are definitive in the processes that render the lives of indigen-
ous peoples less meaningful. In addition, however, colonalism’s frontier conflict,
with its spectacular shows of violence, serves well to highlight the reciprocal role
that violence itself plays in the process of minimizing the perceived right of a
people to exist. Genocide is a profoundly corporeal crime, focused on bodies,
blood and blood quota, and the symbolically loaded violence committed against
the living and deceased bodies of victims does not only serve to generate cultures
of terror on the ground. This violence also serves to dehumanize and desensitize,
and to prepare ordinary sensibilities (perpetrator, bystander, and victim alike) for
the dull methodical everyday genocides of colonial displacements of indigenous
peoples perpetually elsewhere. In this sense, the notion that genocide is aberrant
and historically atypical, or even unique, is its most effective survival mechanism.
We should acknowledge that genocide occupies a normative space in colonial
worlds alongside and in tandem with that occupied by race. So, too, should we

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acknowledge that colonial epistemologies still occupy a normative position in

what Vinay Lal and others have argued are the everyday categories of knowledge
guiding the constructed “international community.”63 This adds another way of
thinking through what others have called structures of genocide, genocidal conti-
nuums, or genocidal relations, but to think in terms of normality captures the ease
with which ordinary people are primed to become perpetrators, bystanders, collab-
orators, or even victims. It captures the sense of enduring routine and ordinariness
of colonial genocides and speaks to the processes by which, despite their scale,
they continue to be belittled and explained away.

Notes and References

1 Cited in George Monbiot, “In bed with the killers,” The Guardian, May 2, 2005.
2 West Papua was also of interest at the time due to alluvial gold that had been found flowing into the Arafura
Sea in 1959. In 1960, the Rockefeller interest Freeport Sulphur had signed an agreement with the East Borneo
Company to establish a mine in West Papua. John Otto Ondawame, “West Papua: the discourse of cultural
genocide in conflict resolution,” in: Barry Sautman, ed., Cultural Genocide and Asian State Peripheries
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp 105– 106, 111.
3 Claims of genocide in West Papua are controversial and unsurprisingly denied by the Indonesian government.
Reports of genocide, as opposed to widespread human rights abuses, have intensified in recent years. Of note
are the reports of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic in 2003, the report for the West Papua
Project at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney in 2005, and Rev. Socratez
Sofyan Yoman’s submission to the International Court of Justice Australia in his capacity as President of the
Federation of Baptists Churches. This report not only details the systemic impact of transmigration, but also
lists the individual names and ages of victims of violence clashes with the Indonesian military. Elizabeth
Brundige et al., Indonesian Human Rights Abuses in West Papua: Application of the Law of Genocide to
the History of Indonesian Control (New Haven, CT: Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights
Center, Yale Law School, Yale University, 2004); Ondawame, op cit, p 111; John Wing and Peter King, Gen-
ocide in West Papua? The Role of the Indonesian State Apparatus and a Current Needs Assessment of the
Papuan People (Sydney: Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Sydney and ELSHAM Jaya-
pura, Papua, 2005); Socratez Sofyan Yoman, “Systematic genocide of the indigenous peoples of West
Papua under special autonomy,” submitted to ICJ Australia, 2005.
4 John Saltford, The United Nations and the Indonesian Takeover of West Papua, 1962–1969: The Anatomy of
Betrayal (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). See also John Saltford, “United Nations involvement
with the act of self-determination in West Irian (Indonesian West New Guinea) 1968 to 1969,” Indonesia,
Vol 69, 2000, pp 71– 92.
5 Airgram A-803 from Jakarta to State Department, October 4, 1968; Memorandum for the President from
Henry Kissinger on Suharto Meeting, July 18, 1969. National Security Archive, George Washington Univer-
sity, www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB128/index.htm
6 Speeches by the representatives of Zambia, Togo, Sierra Leone and Ghana were particularly forthright. For
brief excerpts of these speeches, see Robin Osborne, Indonesia’s Secret War: The Guerrilla Struggle in Irian
Jaya (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp 48–49.
7 For an interesting and succinct analysis of eras of nationalism in Indonesia, particularly in relation to the treat-
ment of Acehnese and West Papuans, see Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, “Indonesian nationalism today and in
the future,” Indonesia, 67, 1999, pp 1– 11.
8 Article 33 of the 1945 Indonesian Constitution. Ondawame, op cit, p 117.
9 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol 8,
No 4, 2006, p 403.
10 For a good historiographical essay covering the key contributions and the contours of these debates, as charted
by such scholars such as Tony Barta, Alison Palmer, and Jürgen Zimmerer, see A. Dirk Moses, “Conceptual
blockages and definitional dilemmas in the ‘racial century’: genocides of indigenous peoples and the
Holocaust,” in: A. Dirk Moses and Dane Stone, eds, Colonialism and Genocide (London and New York:
Routledge, 2007), pp 148–180. See also Alison Palmer, Colonial Genocide (London: Duke University
Press, 2003), and the two edited collections: A. Dirk Moses, Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence
and Stolen Aboriginal Children in Australian Society (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003); A. Dirk Moses and
Dan Stone, eds, Colonialism and Genocide (New York: Routledge, 2007).

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11 Alexander Laban Hinton, “The dark side of modernity: toward an anthropologoy of genocide,” in: Alexander
Laban Hinton, ed., Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2002), p 29.
12 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Coming to our senses: anthropology and genocide,” in: Hinton, Annihilating Differ-
ence, pp 369–373.
12 Christian Gerlach, “Extremely violent societies: an alternative to the concept of genocide,” Journal of
Genocide Research, Vol 8, No 4, 2006, pp 455 –471.
13 Ibid. For responses to Gerlach that make similar points, see Alex Hinton, Patrick Wolfe and Henry
R. Huttenbach, “Documents and discussion,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol 9, No 1, 2007, pp 11– 23.
14 Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present
(San Francisco: City Light Books, 1997), pp 11– 12. As he puts it, in the context of the denial surrounding
colonial genocides, such a political stance goes towards “not just opposing genocide but . . . ending it.” On
this point, see also on this Moses, “Conceptual block,” p 151.
15 “Last cannibals,” Reporter: Ben Fordham, Producer: Stephen Rice. Broadcast on 60 Minutes, National Nine
Network, May 21, 2006. Transcripts at sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/sixtyminutes/stories/2006_05_21/
story_1653.asp; and the online chat of May 21, 2006: sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/sixtyminutes/stories/
2006_05_21/story_1655.asp. See also Paul Raffaele, “Sleeping with cannibals,” Smithsonian: The Magazine,
Vol 37, No 6, 2006, pp 48– 57.
16 William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1979). See also his re-stated position in William Arens, “Rethinking anthropophagy,” in: Francis
Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen, eds, Cannibalism and the Colonial World (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1998), pp 39–62; William Arens and Gananath Obeyesekere, “Cannibalism recon-
sidered: responses to Marshall Sahlins,” Anthropology Today, Vol 19, No 5, 2003, pp 18–19.
17 Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986),
pp 15–16.
18 “The Fiji Cannibal Exhibition” of the US featured “[t]wo celebrated Fijian Chiefs . . . Regular Man Eaters . . .
also the hand of the Late Lovoni Rebel King.” Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material
Culture, and Colonisation in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p 166. For more on
cannibal claims in the Pacific see the collection of essays in Gananath Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk: The
Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
I have also developed this further in relation to Fiji in Tracey Banivanua-Mar, “Cannibalism in Fiji: a
study in colonialism’s discursive atavism,” in: P. Grimshaw and R. McGregor, eds, Collisions of Cultures
and Identities: Settlers and Indigenous Peoples (Melbourne: RMIT Publishing, 2006), pp 155– 175.
19 For in interesting discussion of O’Rourke’s film and the wider industry of developing world tourism see
Edward Bruner, “Of cannibals, tourists, and ethnographers,” Cultural Anthropology, Vol 4, No 4, 1989,
pp 438–445.
20 On Lords of the Garden, see Rosalind Morris, “Anthropology in the body shop: lords of the garden, canni-
balism and the consuming desires of televisual anthropology,” American Anthropologist, Vol 98, No 1,
1996, pp 137–146. “Living with cannibals” is the third of Bruce Parry’s series Going Tribal, co-produced
by BBC Wales and the Discovery Channel; on Zoo’s cannibal sex holiday see the excellent article by Paul
Kingsnorth in which he discusses the obfuscating effect of cannibal tourism: Paul Kingsnorth, “Spot the
real savage,” New Statesman, Vol 15, March 2004, p 13.
21 These are offered by Papua Adventures. See www.papua-adventures.com/first-contact.html. See also
Michael Behar, “Rumbled in the jungle,” The Age, August 2, 2005.
22 Journeys to the Stone Age are offered by Hidden Cultures Adventures. See www.hiddencultures.com/trips/
korowai.html and www.hiddencultures.com/what_to_expect.html
23 Scheper-Hughes, op cit, p 353.
24 See The Age, The Herald Sun, The Australian, and The Weekend Australian, September 15– 17, 2006. See also
cartoons for this period such as Nicholson’s “Naomi Robson eaten by cannibals” which ran in The Weekend
Australian, September 16–17, 2006. This can be viewed at http://www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au/cartoon_
5025.html
25 “Last cannibals.”
26 I explore this at much greater length in Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The
Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), pp 20–42,
121–149. There is an extensive literature on cannibalism, colonialism, and power. See for recent overview
of the literature Obeyesekere, op cit, pp 1–23; Richard King, “The (mis)uses of cannibalism in contemporary
cultural critique,” Diacritics, Vol 30, No 1. 2000, pp 106–123.
27 The raising of the Morning Star flag is a symbolic display of independence, and ceremonies are usually
conducted on the anniversaries of West Papua’s independence from the Netherlands (October 1, 1962)

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when the territory was placed under the administration of the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority
before being handed to Indonesia.
28 The banner they carried read: “Save West Papua People Soul From Genocide . . . From Military Government
Of Indonesia [We] Need Freedom Peace Love And Justice In Our Home Land.” Image held by the Australian
West Papua Association (http://www.zulunet.com/AWPA/). On the past status of refugees, particularly
along the PNG border, see Carmel Budiardjo and Liem Soei Liong, West Papua: The Obliteration of a
People, 3rd edn (Surrey: TAPOL Indonesia Human Rights Campaign, 1988; reprint, 1988), pp 93– 112;
Klaus Neumann, Refuge Australia: Australia’s Humanitarian Record (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2004),
pp 65–91. On the 2006 responses see David Palmer, “Between a rock and a hard place: the case of
Papuan asylum-seekers,” Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol 52, No 4, 2006, pp 576–603.
29 The troop build-up since 2000 now rivals the period of the early 1970s. Ondawame notes that there are 50,000
troops in West Papua, including the elite Kopasus and Kostrad troops. These have been re-deployed from East
Timor and Aceh, and join an intensifying presence of militia such as Laskar Jihad. See Ondawame, op cit,
p 111; John Wing and Peter King, Genocide in West Papua? The Role of the Indonesian State Apparatus
and a Current Needs Assessment of the Papuan People (Sydney: Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies,
University of Sydney and ELSHAM Jayapura, Papua, 2005), pp 7 –8, 38–39.
30 On changing patterns of resistance in West Papua, particularly post-Suharto, see Peter King, West Papua and
Indonesia since Suharto: Independence, Autonomy or Chaos? (Sydney: University of New South Wales
Press, 2004), pp 27– 51; Eleri Harris, “Kidnapping, West Papuan resistance and the Australian media,”
BA(hons) thesis, Department of History, University of Melbourne, 2005.
31 Chris Ballard, “The signature of terror: violence, memory, and landscape at Freeport,” in: Meredith Wilson
and Bruno David, eds, Inscribed Landscapes: Marking and Making Places (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i
Press, 2002), pp 13– 26. Freeport is estimated to have displaced as many as 40,000 people, including
Amungme. Ondawame, op cit, p 116.
32 Budiardjo and Liong, op cit, pp 35–37. See also Elizabeth Brundige et al., op cit, p 23.
33 Gathered from various field reports of the OPM and refugee testimony cited in Osborne, op cit, pp 71–72.
Kompas, November 28, 1977 cited in Budiardjo and Liong, op cit, p 68.
34 The disembowelling incident referred to occurred in the village of Kuyuwagi in front of a number of wit-
nesses, and was reported along with a number of other atrocities by OPM Captain Rudy based at Sorong.
Osborne, op cit, p 71. The massacres on Biak were reported in the Dutch press based on survivors’ accounts.
Cited in Budiardjo and Liong, op cit, pp 79– 80.
35 This was reported in the OPM’s “Full report on the Irian Jaya situation” detailing survivor and witness tes-
timonies. Cited in Osborne, op cit, p 71. An anonymous reviewer of this article queried whether or not we can
take these claims at face value. Many are based on reports and testimonies gathered by Church and OPM offi-
cials; NGO representatives based in Jakarta, Jayapura and visiting refugee camps in PNG; and a range of UN
reporting bodies (see note 41). Although these bodies along with scholars based at Sydney and Yale Univer-
sities have done the cross-checking and careful sifting of information that I would suggest makes these claims
reliable, I would also note that, like Chris Ballard, I am also speaking here of a frontier situation where tales,
rumours, eyewitness accounts, memories and experiences of this violence circulate and interact to create a
culture of terror.
36 Michael Taussig, “Culture of terror—space of death: Roger Casement’s Putumayo report and the explanation
of torture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol 26, 1984, pp 467– 497.
37 Budiardjo and Liong, op cit, pp 80–82; Osborne, op cit, pp 86–88.
38 Ondawame, op cit, pp 116– 117.
39 Budiardjo and Liong, op cit, p 53; Osborne, op cit, pp 128 –133.
40 Citing Foreign Minister Subandrio and education minister Daoed Yusuf in Osborne, op cit, pp 136–137;
King, West Papua and Indonesia, p 33; Ballard, op cit, p 16.
41 The key reporting agencies in West Papua are extensive and decentralized. They include the National Human
Rights Commission of Indonesia; the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights (which reports
annually); the West Papuan Catholic Church and a number of Catholic organizations both within and beyond
West Papua; Amnesty International; the International Court of Justice; Human Rights Watch; and the United
Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. The West Papua Information Kit (at http://
wpik.org) is a good starting point for accessing these agencies and their reports.
42 For a good discussion of the importance of jurisprudence, in this case in relation to definitions of “groups” in
hearings of the Rwandan genocide, see Paul J. Magnarella, “Recent developments in the international law on
genocide: an anthropological perspective on the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda,” in: Hinton,
Annihilating Difference, pp 310–322.
43 For an account of the very political context of the dropping of “political” groups from the Convention see
Hinton, op cit, p 3.

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44 Grasburg mines gold and nickel. See Jane Perlez and Raymond Bonner, “Below a mountain of wealth, a river
of waste,” New York TImes, December 27, 2005. For more on Freeport see Ballard, “The signature of terror,”
pp 13–26; Denise Leith, “Freeport and the Suharto Regime, 1965– 1998,” The Contemporary Pacific, Vol 14,
No 1, 2002, pp 69–100; Ondawame, op cit, pp 104– 111.
45 Leslie Butt, “Kb kills: political violence, birth control, and the Baliem Valley Dani,” Asia Pacific Journal of
Anthropology, Vol 2, No 1, 2001, pp 63– 86. See also Brundige et al., op cit, pp 34–36; Wing and King, op cit,
pp 8– 10, 45.
46 Budiardjo and Liong, op cit, pp 38– 40. On the Korowai, see Rupert Stasch, “Giving up homocide: Korowai
experience of witches and police (West Papua)’,” Oceania, Vol 72, 2004, pp 33–52.
47 Brundige et al., op cit, pp 44– 46, citing the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women reporting on the
military campaign on Biak on July 16, 1998 and reports by Human Rights Watch on the military response to
the Wamena flag-raising ceremony on October 6, 2000. Two months after the initial crackdown, students
from the Ninmin Dormitory in Abepura, and residents from neighbourhoods settled by Wamena residents,
were arrested, beaten and tortured; prisoners also reported being made to lick blood from the floor and cut
and eat their hair.
48 Ibid; Wing and King, op cit, pp 20–34; Ballard, op cit, pp 13–26.
49 See Taussig, op cit, pp 467– 497; Michael Taussig, Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia
(New York and London: The New Press, 2003); Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the
Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), pp 46– 84.
On West Papuan narratives of terror Ballard, op cit, pp13– 26; Stuart Kirsch, “Rumour and other narratives
of political violence in West Papua,” Critique of Anthropology, Vol 22, No 1, 2002, pp 53–79; Stasch, op cit,
pp 33–52.
50 Tom Beneal in Wing and King, op cit, pp 46– 48.
51 In order of citation: Airgram A-278 from Jakarta to State Department, July 9, 1969. National Security
Archive, George Washington University, www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB128/index.htm;
John F. Kennedy to Dr J.E. de Quay, April 12, 1962 cited in Monbiot, op cit; I.J.M. Sutherland to
D. Murray, Foreign Office Southeast Asian Department, April 30, 1968 cited in Saltford, “United Nations
involvement” p 75.
52 Osborne, op cit, pp 146– 147.
53 L.C. Green and Olive P. Dickason, The Law of Nations and the New World (Edmonton, Alberta: University of
Alberta Press, 1989), pp 176– 214; Phillip P. Boucher, Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs:
1492– 1763 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992).
54 I explore this in greater detail in Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, pp 20–42, 139–149.
55 This is well elaborated in Wolfe, op cit, p 392. These themes are also developed in Jordanna Bailkin, “The
boot and the spleen: when was murder possible in British India?,” Comparative Studies in Society and
History, Vol 48, No 2, 2006, pp 462– 293 and by myself in Tracey Banivanua-Mar, “Consolidating violence
and colonial rule: discipline and protection in colonial Queensland,” Postcolonial Studies, Vol 8, No 3, 2005,
pp 303–320.
56 On population declines, see David Maybury-Lewis, “Genocide against indigenous peoples,” in: Hinton, Anni-
hilating Difference, pp 43– 53. This is also a theme developed by Tony Barta in his “Mr Darwin’s shooters: on
natural selection and the naturalizing of genocide,” Patterns of Prejudice, Vol 39, No 2, 2005, pp 116– 137.
57 An extensive historiography regarding Australia’s assimilation and protection regimes has emerged since
1998. For an exception see Tony Barta, “Relations of genocide: land and lives in the colonization of Austra-
lia,” in: I. Wallimann and M.N. Dobkowski, eds, Genocide and the Mordern Age (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1987). For a good overview see Neil Levi, “‘No sensible comparison’? The place of the Holocaust
in Australia’s history wars,” History and Memory, Vol 19, No 1, 2007, pp 124–156; and for one of the
better discussions see Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (New York: Verso, 2003).
58 Tony Birch, “‘History is never bloodless’: getting it wrong after one hundred years of federation,” Australian
Historical Studies, Vol 118, 2002, pp 42–53; Churchill, op cit, pp 19–80.
59 This from the Fanon-esque argument that all colonialism is settler-colonialism in Jean-Paul Sartre, “Geno-
cide,” New Left Review, 48, 1968, p 16.
60 Barry Sautman, “Cultural genocide in international context,” in: Barry Sautman, ed., Cultural Genocide and
Asian State Peripheries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp 1, 20.
61 Moses, “Conceptual blockages,” pp 148–180.
62 Stasch, op cit, p 49.
63 Vinay Lal, “Genocide, barbaric others, and the violence of categories: a response to Omer Bartov,”
The American Historical Review, Vol 103, No 4, 1998, pp 1187– 1190; Vinay Lal, “The concentration
camp and development: the pasts and future of genocide,” in: Moses and Stone, Colonialism and Genocide,
pp 124–147.

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TRACEY BANIVANUA-MAR

Notes on Contributor
Tracey Banivanua-Mar teaches colonial and postcolonial history at La Trobe
University in the School of Historical and European Studies. She is the author
of a number of refereed articles, a monograph titled Violence and Colonial Dia-
logue: The Australian-Pacific Labor Trade (University of Hawai’i Press, 2007),
and the co-editor with Julie Evans of Writing Colonial Histories: Comparative
Perspectives (RMIT Publishing, 2000).

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