Skip to main content

Who invited the ship Rainbow Warrior to West Papua?

GREENPEACE has told the Indonesian government its Rainbow Warrior vessel has been invited to visit a natural disaster area in politically sensitive West Papua.

The ship remained anchored outside Indonesian territorial waters yesterday as officials and MPs wrangled over the government's refusal to allow it to port in Jakarta on Wednesday.

West Papua was not listed on Rainbow Warrior's Indonesian itinerary, with Greenpeace International executive director Kumi Naidoo telling The Weekend Australian that an invitation from the provincial governor came after the visit application was lodged.

Mr Naidoo said Rainbow Warrior had been asked to visit Wasior, where flooding and landslides killed 145 people 12 days ago, by governor Abraham Octavianos Atururi, but would go only with proper authorisation.

During a visit on Thursday, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono denied the Wasior disaster had been caused by deforestation, as claimed by Greenpeace and local NGOs.

The Foreign Ministry cited discrepancies between the three-month permit Greenpeace sought for Rainbow Warrior and the one-week schedule of visits it supplied as its reason for withholding permission to enter.

The ministry, however, insisted the ship was not banned and the proposed visit was still under review. Greenpeace called the incident a misunderstanding.

While House of Representatives deputy speaker Pramono Anung said blocking Rainbow Warrior's entry damaged Indonesia's reputation abroad, other MPs have accused Greenpeace of running a "black agenda" to damage the country's palm oil and pulp logging industries.

A senior member of the parliamentary legal, security and human rights commission, Azis Syamsuddin, said visiting West Papua was "not possible in the current situation and conditions".

Deforestation is the focus of Greenpeace's Indonesian activities, while Jakarta is sensitive to the risks of foreign activism stirring separatist currents in the Papua provinces.

Greenpeace is locked in battle with PT Sinar Mas, accusing the Indonesian forestry giant's palm oil and logging activities of destroying native forests while the environmentalists are accused of fraudulent evidence.

Greenpeace was involved in a July protest against a coal-fired power plant and mine in Cirebon, West Java, which was broken up by police, with 12 foreign activists arrested and deported.

Mr Naidoo said Greenpeace wanted to work with Jakarta, particularly in implementing Dr Yudhoyono's proposed two-year moratorium on forest clearing and exploiting peatlands. But, he said, Indonesia with its vast forests and natural resources was on the front line of the struggle to save the planet and Greenpeace did not resile from disagreements with governments.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens

Billionaires Among Thousands of Indonesians Found in Secret Offshore Documents  By Nicky Hager April 9, 2013, 8:15 pm Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens, holding ownership of more than 190 offshore trusts and companies, secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists show. The nine families, worth an estimated $36 billion among them, are at the top of a wealthy class that dominates Indonesia’s politics and economy. Six were closely tied to the late dictator Suharto, who helped a special circle of Indonesians grow rich during his 31-year rule by granting economic fiefdoms to family and friends. The billionaires are among nearly 2,500 Indonesians found in the files of Singapore-headquart ered offshore services provider Portcullis TrustNet, which ICIJ has been analyzing and began reporting on last week. Although there is no evidence in the files of illegality by any of the ni...
Post a Comment
Read more

Debate Islam in Indonesia

http://www.thejakar taglobe.com/ opinion/interloc utors-of- indonesian- islam/560447 Interlocutors of Indonesian Islam Ahmad Najib Burhani | December 08, 2012 A few months ago, the Japanese anthropologist Mitsuo Nakamura told me that studying Nahdlatul Ulama as an organization was beyond the imagination of any American scholar from the 1950s to the ’70s. But he is not the only academic to have noticed this. George McT. Kahin of Cornell University stated the same thing. Even NU-expert Martin van Bruinessen was not expecting to study NU as his primary focus when he came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s.   During the early decades of Indonesian independence, NU was relatively unorganized and its management was largely based on the authority of religious teachers ( kyai ). Of course there were a number of scholars who studied NU-affiliated religious schools ( pesantren ) and its kyai, but not NU as an organization.   Even though NU was one of the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

is that true in Indonesia there freedom of religion?

The problems began shortly after Tajul Muluk, a Shiite cleric, opened a boarding school in 2004. The school, in a predominantly Sunni Muslim part of East Java, raised local tensions, and in 2006 it was attacked by thousands of villagers. When a mob set fire to the school and several homes last December, many Shiites saw it as just the latest episode in a simmering sectarian conflict — one that they say has been ignored by the police and exploited by Islamists purporting to preserve the purity of the Muslim faith.   Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has long been considered a place where different religious and ethnic groups can live in harmony and where Islam can work with democracy.   But that perception has been repeatedly brought into question lately. In East Java, Sunni leaders are pushing the provincial government to adopt a regulation limiting the spread of Shiite Islam. It would prevent the country’s two major Shiite organizations from ...
Post a Comment
Read more