Papua

Papua (also known as Dutch New Guinea, West Papua, Irian Jaya, and Irian Barat) is the Indonesian region on the western half of the massive island of New Guinea; the independent nation of Papua New Guinea makes up the eastern half. Papua's flora and fauna are among the most diverse in the world, with interior mountains capped with equatorial glaciers. Containing the world's second largest rainforest (next to the Amazon), Papua's natural resources include the world's largest gold deposit, the second largest copper deposit, and massive amounts of natural gas, along with valuable hardwood forests, all of which are being extracted and harvested for primarily Asian and Western nations.

Papua contains roughly 250 distinct languages and many more cultures. Ethnically, Papuans are Melanesian, marked by what many Papuans self-describe as “black skin and kinky hair.” Papua was colonized in a separate act of Dutch colonization from the Dutch East Indies, after conflict between English and Dutch forces ended with the signing of the Treaty of London (1824), giving the Dutch sovereignty over Papua. Indonesia annexed Papua in 1963 following the so-called Act of Free Choice, a vote that Western and Asian newspapers affirmed immediately was illegitimate, in part because the UN representative responsible for the vote had not arrived until after much of the voting had taken place and the intense pressure that voters received at the hands of members of the Indonesian military to vote for incorporation into Indonesia. Indonesia changed the name from Dutch New Guinea to the province of Irian Jaya (1973) and then again named it Papua (2000).

Following the annexation of Papua by Indonesia, which most Papuans interpret as an act of Asian colonization, Papua has been an arena of ongoing contests between the global forces of religions, multinational extractive industries (e.g., gold, copper, and natural gas), and nation-making strategies that have left Papuans increasingly socially, culturally, and economically marginalized in their own land. The challenge for Indonesia has been to incorporate Papua, whose indigenous people are overwhelming Melanesian and Christian, into the Republic of Indonesia, a Southeast Asian nation with more Muslims than the entire Middle East. World religions have played a critical role in the social and cultural transformations that have unfolded in Papua since the mid-1960s. Western Christian missionaries, from the Dutch period onward, have tried to encourage the conversion of Papuans from their traditional religions to Christianity. Likewise, Muslim missionaries from other Indonesian islands and the Middle East have sought to convert Papuans to Islam. A vigorous government-sponsored transmigration program, seen by many as a malevolent experiment in social engineering, has moved high numbers of Muslims [Page 979]from overcrowded Indonesian islands (e.g., Java) to Papua, radically changing the Papuan social, cultural, and religious landscape to one dominated by Asian Muslims, to the extent that Papuans currently make up a minority in their own land, with Papuans being roughly 48% and non-Papuans 51% of the overall population.

What is striking in Papua is the rise in the numbers of global religionists, due mostly to the transmigration of Muslim communities to the island, yet the globalization of religious pluralism is conspicuously absent. That is to say, although there has been a massive burgeoning of the presence of global religions since the 1960s, with the escalation of religionists, including Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, and an increase in the globalization of those religions, whereby each religious group increasingly builds support and financial networks expanding from Papua to distant countries such as the United States and Saudi Arabia, such changes have failed to translate into a full globalization of religious pluralism, where religionists from various faith traditions coexist in civic harmony and peace. Papuans have sought a Pan-Papuan identity that transcends disparate tribal identifications, and Christianity has been a robust ally in formulating and articulating a Papuan identity rooted in and continuous with the Old Testament biblical narrative, where Papuans declare that they worship the “God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the Papuans.” Islam has advanced through da'wah (Arabic “mission”) activities even into highland Papuan villages, where Papuan Christian conversion to Islam is encouraged by the social prestige and national identification such religious change engenders.

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