Unreported World - West Papua: Rainforest Warriors

This edition of Unreported World focuses on West Papua, located to the north of Australia and currently a province of Indonesia. West Papua is home to the world’s biggest copper and gold mine at Freeport.

Reporter Evan Williams and director Siobhan Sinnerton spent three weeks undercover in West Papua - undercover because journalists are forbidden to work in West Papua and are usually arrested by the Indonesian military on arrival. Hence the bloody conflict between government forces and locals is rarely glimpsed by the outside world.

Getting into West Papua is extremely difficult. Obtaining official journalist accreditation is virtually impossible so the team have to film clandestinely.

They begin their journey in Wamena in the remote western highlands. Waiting inside a safe house, hiding from the Indonesian authorities, they meet a group of tribal warriors who have travelled for days to be there. They tell Unreported World that at least 12 of their friends have been killed by the security forces, and claim that thousands more have been killed in a campaign which could wipe out their ethnic group.

West Papua’s tribes lived in stone-age isolation until they were discovered by Europeans in the 1930s. Indonesia annexed the area in 1969, after a group of selected West Papuans voted for annexation under duress (the so-called "Act of Free Choice"), but the rest of the population were not allowed a chance to vote. Since then hundreds of thousands of Indonesians have been subsidised to settle in West Papua, and they now control most of the commerce – leading to seething resentment and conflict between the two groups.