MERDEKA!: Self-Determination Movements in West Papua and South Maluku

Translation Policy 

As a Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) scholar, I follow the critical scholarship of Noenoe Silva on translating Indigenous words and phrases into the English language. In her groundbreaking work, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism, Silva decides not to italicize words in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language) to “resist making the native tongue appear foreign in writing produced in and about a native land and people.” For this reason, I choose not to italicize words from the many Indigenous languages of Papuans and Alifuru. 

Introduction 

In October 2017, Benny Wenda—spokesperson of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP)—submitted the West Papuan People’s Petition to the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization. The petition, signed by over 1.8 million Papuans, called for a plebiscite on self-determination in West Papua, a demand that has echoed since Indonesia’s invasion of the island in 1961. Wenda, in a speech delivered at the UN in New York, mobilized the language of historic injustice, mass violence, and grievance inflicted on Indigenous West Papuans to justify the petition and its demands for Papuan self-determination: 

“Today, we hand over the bones of the people of West Papua to the United Nations and the world. After decades of suffering, decades of genocide, decades of occupation, today we open up the voice of the West Papuan people which lives inside this petition.” 

Seven years prior, Alexander Manuputty—then-executive chairman of the in-exile Republik Maluku Selatan (RMS)—submitted a petition to the UN Commission on Human Rights, demanding a plebiscite for the South Malukan people. Declaring that Indonesia was actively “annihilating the Moluccan people,” the petition situated Malukan calls for independence within a broader history of human rights violations perpetrated by the Indonesian government in the islands. In addition to their calls for a plebiscite, Manuputty requested that South Maluku be placed under UN trusteeship and that a UN-sponsored investigation of Indonesian repression in South Maluku be initiated. 

While neither Wenda nor Manuputty’s petitions would gain traction on the international stage, contemporary calls for West Papuan and Malukan independence extend a longer history of self-determination movements in the occupied territories of Indonesia. Since Indonesian independence, self-determination movements in both West Papua and the Maluku Islands have appealed to identity as a mobilizing factor in their demands. West Papuan self-determination activists, however, have been more successful in mobilizing international support for their calls, through inclusion in a variety of international political forums and statements of solidarity issued by seven UN member states. By contrast, the Malukan independence cause has gone largely unrecognized in international forums, with the exception of some organizations advocating for Indigenous Alifuru rights at the UN. Despite a shared history and political present of colonization by the Indonesian state, this divergence in the outcome of West Papuan and Malukan independence calls raises several questions about mobilization tactics for self-determination: What strategies for collective action accounted for the differences in outcome between West Papuan and Malukan calls for self-determination? How did deployments of identity in these independence movements shape their ability to mobilize support both within and beyond their borders? How did these framing strategies impact the forms of repression exacted by the Indonesian state? 

In this paper, I argue that independence movements in West Papua and South Maluku primarily diverge through their framings of identity. My findings suggest that West Papuan ascriptions to Melanesian and global Black identities enable a more defined claim to participation in international institutions and recognition by decolonizing states across the Third World, whereas South Malukan ascriptions to a Malukan Christian identity could not engage with such claims. I contend that the Indonesian state contests these divergent framings of identity through discourses of sovereignty and multiculturalism, a repression strategy that sought to characterize Papuan and Malukan claims as conflicts internal to Indonesia. 

To situate this comparative analysis of independence movements in the occupied territories of Indonesia, this paper begins with an overview of the literature on ethnic conflict and self-determination. I then provide an overview of both cases, focusing on the post-World War II history of self-determination movements in West Papua and the Maluku Islands. By engaging with the digital archives of West Papuan and South Malukan independence organizations, United Nations documents, and semi-structured interviews with Alifuru community members from the Maluku Islands, I compare discourses of identity in both self-determination cases and their ability to mobilize external support in the international community. With these divergent and overlapping identity framings as a backdrop, I engage the Melanesian Culture and Arts Festival (MACFEST) as a limited site of Indonesian repression through the language and aesthetics of multicultural inclusion. At its core, this essay contributes to a growing literature that seriously considers the impact of identity politics on self-determination movements in securing internal and external support for, while generating state repression against, Indigenous claims to land and governance. 

Drivers of Self-Determination 

Scholars of ethnic conflict have long debated which factors most reliably produce demands for self-determination. Economic explanations have emphasized regional wealth disparities, state administrative capacity, and the exploitability of natural resources as primary drivers of secessionism. Sambanis and Milanovic, for instance, find that higher regional per capita income is associated with greater observed sovereignty in decentralized states, reasoning that richer regions face fewer trade-offs in pursuing greater autonomy. These economic accounts, however, rest on an underlying political assumption—that policy independence is inherently desirable—without fully accounting for the drivers of group mobilization. As Monica Toft argues, proponents of purely economic frameworks “fail to explain why some groups are willing to risk death, internment, or mass deportation for seemingly worthless territory.” Economic conditions may reduce the opportunity cost of secession, but they do not generate the grievance required to sustain a movement. From this framing, economic factors function as enablers of self-determination, rather than its root cause. 

Political factors, and particularly a group’s relationship to state power, more reliably account for the onset of self-determination movements. Cederman, Wimmer, and Min find that rebellions mounted in the name of excluded groups are significantly more likely than conflicts among included groups As excluded groups move from powerless to discriminated to separatist, the association with violent conflict deepens. Threats to territory amplify these dynamics: control over land is tied to physical security and the capacity for self-governance free from state-sanctioned violence. In this context, ethnic identity makes political demands more legible and gives movements a collective basis for mobilization when prompted by state discrimination or exclusion. Successful mobilization, as Cederman, Wimmer, and Min contend, requires both motivation and organizational capacity—rooted in grievance and shaped by framing strategies around identity. This paper engages with both dimensions, examining how identity is strategically deployed to sustain and expand self-determination movements beyond their immediate constituencies. 

The salience of ethnic or Indigenous identity in self-determination movements is actively produced by conditions of political exclusion. Kanchan Chandra argues that ethnic identity, grounded in descent-based attributes that resist fluidity and carry high visibility, becomes more politically salient under conditions of state discrimination. Mashail Malik further finds that when states target specific ethnic groups through structural violence—whether through police mistreatment, bureaucratic exclusion, or deliberate denial of political representation—individuals within those groups develop a defiant pride in their collective identity. This dynamic is particularly pronounced among working-class or economically marginalized communities, whose disadvantages are compounded by political exclusion, intensifying allegiance to co-ethnic communities as hubs of collective resistance. Ethnic identity, then, provides a coherent framework for grievance, enables coalition-building within communities, and, crucially, offers a language through which demands can be articulated on the international stage. 

State responses to identity-based movements further shape their trajectory. Harris Mylonas argues that the interaction between host states and external powers determines the nation-building policies a state pursues toward non-core groups, yielding strategies of assimilation, accommodation, or exclusion depending on the type of third-party support a movement receives. Katharine Adeney’s discussion of Indian multiculturalism as a state strategy illustrates how the recognition of identity in the public sphere—through polyethnic and self-governing rights—can dampen secessionist demands, while segregationist or exclusionary policies, as in the Pakistani case, can intensify them. These findings situate state responses to self-determination movements as deeply intertwined with the identity frameworks movements themselves adopt: the way a group frames its collective identity shapes both the international recognition it can access and the repressive or accommodating strategies the state deploys in return. 

This paper builds on these insights to examine how divergent framings of identity in West Papua and the Maluku Islands produced asymmetric outcomes in international support and in the forms of repression exerted by the Indonesian state. In both cases, discourses of identity formed crucial components of West Papuan and Malukan claims to self-determination, cleaving along ethnic and ethno-religious lines. These identity formations—Melanesian and Black identities in West Papua, and Malukan Christian and Alifuru identities in Maluku—were mediated by each group’s relationship to Dutch and Indonesian state power, particularly as colonial encroachment threatened their social and political standing. While motivating a defiant pride in the collective identities of West Papuans and Malukans, Indigenous and race-based identities proved more salient in mobilizing external support for self-determination claims than ethno-religious affiliation. To contend with these divergent outcomes, the following section briefly traces the rise of self-determination movements in West Papua and South Maluku, beginning with Indonesian independence in 1945. 

West Papua and South Maluku, 1945-present 

West Papua 

West Papua’s modern political struggle began with the collapse of Dutch colonial rule after World War II. While Indonesia declared independence in 1945, the Dutch retained control over West Papua by emphasizing the region’s cultural and geographic distinctiveness from Indonesia. Under Dutch administration, Papuans began building a distinct national identity through pan-Melanesian solidarity networks and international appeals. In 1961, an elected Papuan National Committee declared independence from the Dutch. The burgeoning independence movement, however, was swiftly undermined by Indonesia’s invasion of West Papua, launched as Operation Trikora under President Sukarno. American intervention in the ‘West Irian issue’ on the side of Sukarno intensified Indonesian claims to the Papuan homeland, precipitating the proposal and signing of the 1962 New York Agreement. This agreement, signed between the Netherlands and Indonesia, first transferred West Papua to UN trusteeship and then to Indonesian control, with an expressed commitment from the Indonesian government to provide a self-determination plebiscite for West Papuans. In 1969, the Indonesians held the “Act of Free Choice,” in which only 1,026 hand-picked voters, coerced under threat of death, unanimously voted for Indonesian integration.

Since integration, West Papua has experienced systematic dispossession, military violence, and demographic transformation. The Indonesian military killed and imprisoned thousands throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, governed the region as a military operation zone from 1977 to 1988, and assassinated key independence leaders like Theys Eluay. Freeport’s American-owned gold and copper mining operations, conducted without Indigenous consultation, displaced Native communities and caused severe environmental destruction. Suharto’s transmigration policy reshaped the region’s demographics so thoroughly that Indigenous Papuans became a minority in their own homeland. Despite periodic waves of protest—including the massive 2019 uprising across dozens of cities—Indonesia has continued to suppress self-determination claims.

South Maluku 

Contrary to the continued Dutch administration of West Papua, the Maluku Islands fell under the State of East Indonesia (NIT) after World War II. Following the Dutch-Indonesian Round Table Conference of 1949, pro-Indonesian nationalist groups demanded the reintegration of NIT into a unitary Indonesian nation-state, which some non-Muslim groups—constituting over 38% of Maluku’s population currently—opposed. The threat of integration pushed Malukan elites to proclaim the independent Republik Selatan Maluku (RMS) in April 1950, a formation driven by the economic instability inherited from Dutch and Japanese rule and fears of Javanese Muslim political dominance over the islands’ Alifuru, or Indigenous Malukan, and Christian populations. On July 13, 1950, the Indonesian government invaded the South Malukan island of Buru, beginning a sustained state campaign against the RMS. The abolition of Indonesia’s federal structure in August 1950 criminalized the RMS movement, with thousands of Malukan soldiers who refused to integrate into the Indonesian army forcibly removed to the Netherlands. Back in the islands, any public expression of RMS identity—flag-raising, symbolic speech, or cultural memory—was prosecuted as treason under the Suharto Regime.

The most violent chapter came in 1999–2004, when ethno-religious conflict between Javanese Muslim and Malukan Christian communities erupted into mass violence that killed over 6,000 people and displaced upwards of 70,000. While state military and police forces were largely inactive, military soldiers tended to side with Javanese Muslims, and the local police sometimes allied with Malukan Christians. Despite its framing as a religious war, Indonesian senior officials and reporters contend that the violence “was provoked as part of a nationwide strategy of rogue military officers linked to the [Suharto] family to disrupt the forthcoming parliamentary elections in June and create the conditions for a return to military rule.” The arrival of paramilitary Islamist forces deepened the carnage. Though the 2002 Malino II Accord ended large-scale fighting, no truth-and-reconciliation process followed, and perpetrators faced no accountability. During this time, new organizations calling for self-determination—including the Front Kedaulatan Maluku (FKM)—were founded by Malukan nationalists to shed light on the human rights violations perpetrated by the Indonesian government during the conflict, which they framed as a genocide. Despite these attempts to hold the nation-state to account, Indonesia continues to politically pacify the region, primarily through infrastructure development and economic integration, while exiled Malukan nationalists in the Netherlands keep the self-determination movement alive. Nonviolent, symbolic support for Malukan independence, however, remains a criminal offense in Indonesia. 

Comparing Discourses of Identity 

Across both self-determination movements, identity cleavages formed a foundational mobilization factor for pro-independence supporters in West Papua and South Maluku. In the Papuan case, the emergence of an Indigenous and race-based national identity distinguished Melanesian Papuans from the Indonesian polity. For South Maluku, the persistence of a Malukan Christian identity in the islands drove calls for independence from a nation-state increasingly dominated by Javanese Muslims. This section discusses the differences in these identity-based cleavages—Indigeneity and ethno-religious affiliation—and the ways they shaped the mobilization strategies deployed by pro-independence activists. My findings suggest that identity-based mobilization was relatively successful internally in both cases, but Papuan framings of self-determination through the language of Indigeneity and race were able to curry greater favor on the international stage than those of South Malukans. 

From the Black Pacific to the Third World 

European explorers and anthropologists arriving in West Papua in the nineteenth century brought discourses of race and power to the islands. Distinguishing Papuans from lighter-skinned Malays of the Malay Archipelago, Papuans were often described as “savages,” “pigmy,” and “Oceanic Negro” to encapsulate European conceptions of Papuan moral and intellectual capacities. In mapping anti-Indigenous and anti-Black discourses onto the Papuan people, Europeans arriving on the island linked West Papua to a broader race-making project in the Pacific. Kanaka ʻŌiwi scholar Maile Arvin argues that Westerners divided Oceania into three distinct, racialized regions—Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia—which constitute colonial projects rather than stable places. West Papua was folded into the Melanesian project, demarcated by Black populations that anthropologists reasoned would make the region unsuitable for white settlement (melas means “black” in Greek). This racial logic underwrote Dutch colonial governance in West Papua, which positioned Papuans at the lowest rung of colonial society. 

At the end of World War II, Papuan intellectuals and activists began reclaiming Melanesian identity while under continued Dutch administration, primarily through international forums. In 1947, six Western powers—the U.S., U.K., France, the Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealand—established the South Pacific Commission, framing it as a body for coordinating development among Indigenous Pacific populations, while carefully excluding political matters that might threaten those states’ ongoing occupation of the region. West Papua was included in this forum by Dutch officials; the Papuans used the forum as a medium to culturally link themselves to other nations and peoples across Melanesia. In addition to building solidarity networks across the Pacific, West Papua’s post-war organizing around Melanesian identity also functioned to sharpen “the racial differences between Papuans and Indonesians, or Melanesians and Malays.” Pan-Melanesian identity, while initially mobilized by Dutch colonizers to mark Papuan inferiority to Malays, became a rhetorical tool that West Papuans mobilized to advance their claims to self-determination. 

Following West Papua’s declaration of independence from Indonesia, Papuan leaders began mobilizing articulations of Blackness associated with Melanesian identity in support of their claims to self-governance. While Papuans bifurcated Indonesia and Melanesia, the idea of Melanesia was insufficient to curry international support for their cause, leading Papuan nationalists to expand their “nationalist mental map” to Africa. In 1962, the Papuan National Committee—the governing body of the West Papuan independence movement—published a series of booklets, reports, and articles to appeal to African nations for support in its claims to self-determination. One of those booklets, Voice of the Negroids in the Pacific to the Negroids throughout the World, argued that “New Guinea was not a borderland of Indonesia, but of Oceania,” with Papuans ethnically originating from “the Negro Race.” These ascriptions to a global Black identity functioned to not only articulate a shared experience of racism, colonialism, and imperialism with Africans and African-Americans, but also to dissuade African nations from siding with Indonesian claims to the region. In the booklet, the PNC included letters to the elected leaders of Ethiopia, Liberia, Nigeria, Ghana, the Congo, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, asking them to stand against Indonesian propaganda that sloganized freedom and human rights in the name of imperialism. Ascriptions to a global Black identity proved successful for Papuan claims to independence at the UN in the late-60s, with 14 countries, primarily African nations, and the NAACP vocalizing support for West Papuan self-determination. 

In addition to the rhetorical calls for Black solidarity mobilized by the Papuan National Committee, Voice of the Negroids in the Pacific to the Negroids throughout the World effectively leveraged visual elements to generate support for self-determination. Figure 1 shows a map of Indonesia, New Guinea, and Australia as provided by the pamphlet’s authors. In this mapping of the region, Indonesia was grouped with the Asian continent, while West Papua was visually incorporated into both New Guinea and Australia. This intentional division of West Papua from Indonesia is further captured by the map’s layout—the region is bisected across two pages, creating a visual split that emphasizes West Papua’s proximity to Oceania and Indonesia’s proximity to Asia. Interestingly, the map excludes several occupied regions of Indonesia—including the Maluku Islands and Timor-Leste—from the Asian grouping, likely reflecting Papuan solidarity with other Indigenous groups calling for self-determination. Through its visual iconography, the PNC’s pamphlet framed Papuan Blackness in geographic terms, a choice that underscored the colonial undercurrents of Indonesian claims to the region. 

Figure 1. Map of Indonesia, New Guinea, and Australia in Voice of the Negroids in the Pacific to the Negroids Throughout the World, 1962. 

Contemporarily, these identifications with a global Black identity remain salient, evidenced by the formation of the #PapuanLivesMatter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Papuan activists have consciously adopted the aesthetics of global Black movements, repurposing them for their specific anti-colonial struggle under Indonesian occupation. The #PapuanLivesMatter hashtag directly mirrors the structure and iconography of #BlackLivesMatter, circulating through digital platforms to connect Papuan grievances to a globally legible framework of anti-Black racism. Papuan youth organized protests in which they described themselves as “Indonesia’s George Floyd,” drawing an explicit parallel between American police violence and Indonesian state violence. For Papuans, this aesthetic borrowing is a form of “scale-making”—framing local conditions of occupation and racism within a globally recognizable language of Black suffering and resistance. In drawing on the aesthetics of American movements, Papuan discourses reached audiences, including Indonesians, who had previously remained indifferent to West Papuan claims.

West Papuan amplifications of a global Black identity have emerged in tandem with the continued mobilization of Melanesian identity on the global stage. In 1986, decolonizing Melanesian states in the South Pacific Commission formed the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), comprising Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and the Kanak of French-occupied New Caledonia. In 2015, the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), a coalition of West Papuan independence organizations, petitioned the MSG for full membership, on the basis that membership was offered to other Indigenous Pacific groups under occupation. While Indonesia, an associate member of the MSG, swiftly moved to block West Papua’s ability to become an official member, the MSG granted West Papua observer status. ULMWP’s bid was supported by a petition of over 150,000 signatures, urging the government of Vanuatu to support the coalition’s membership. Although observer status does not grant the ULMWP engagement capabilities akin to full members, West Papuan independence leaders frame observer status as a recognition of the organization as “the representative body of the people of West Papua,” while countering “Indonesia’s argument that the West Papuan independence groups are divided and undemocratic.” The relegation of the ULMWP to observer status, however, demonstrates the tension between Indonesian assertions of their international legal right to non-interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state and West Papuan rights to self-determination in regional forums. 

Despite the salience of Indonesian political blockades against West Papuan recognition, the ULMWP’s regional networks have secured several allies for West Papua within the United Nations. In 2016, Nauru, the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Palau called on the UN to intervene in Indonesian human rights abuses in West Papua. These calls were reaffirmed in 2025, when the Pacific Islands Forum issued a communique calling on the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit West Papua, in consultation with the MSG. Benny Wenda, president of the ULMWP, framed the communique as a moment in which “the Pacific stood up with one voice and demanded that Indonesia [open] West Papua – the ‘festering human rights sore’ of our region – to the eyes of the world.” Through the language of regional unity, the ULWMP effectively leveraged its affiliation with Melanesian nations to advance both self-determination and claims of human rights abuses on the international stage. Ascriptions to pan-Melanesian and Black identities made these claims legible to a global audience, situating the West Papuan cause within anti-colonial and anti-racist frameworks that propelled independence movements across the Third World. 

Religion, Violence, and the Making of an Alifuru Nation 

Prior to the arrival of the Dutch, the Maluku Islands were primarily inhabited by the Alifuru—the Indigenous Melanesian peoples of Maluku —who operated a decentralized, egalitarian form of governance. Alifuru situate their existence in adat, embedding people in relation to the land and the cosmos, a worldview that characterizes a custodial obligation to saka lede, the earth. This ethic of responsibility shaped the structure of Alifuru governance, which intentionally dispersed power across various federations through the Siwa-Lima dual alliance system. Muslim and Dutch incursions into the islands, however, unsettled this egalitarian order. From the late fifteenth century, the Sultanates of Ternate and Tidore imposed taxes, forced labor, and slave raiding on Alifuru communities, while the Dutch established a clove monopoly in the islands in the mid-nineteenth century. Dutch traders and missionaries, in particular, characterized Alifuru as “undisciplined, wild and barbaric people” ripe for conversion to Christianity. Despite the salience of Indigenous identity and cosmologies in structuring politics in the Maluku Islands, external impositions both destabilized these practices and led to the formation of new ethno-religious identities, which underlie contemporary calls for South Malukan independence. 

Figure 2. Map of the Maluku Islands. 

While West Papuan self-determination movements grounded their claims in Melanesian identity and pan-African solidarity, South Malukan independence claims emerged from a Malukan Christian identity forged through Dutch missionary activity. During the Dutch colonial administration of the Maluku Islands, the KNIL (Royal Netherlands Indies Army) recruited heavily from the Alifuru population in Ambon, an island in South Maluku. This process generated a distinct Malukan Christian identity through tangsi, the barracks subculture. While serving in the KNIL, Malukan recruits were subjected to a Protestant missionary education and instilled with loyalties to the Dutch crown, producing a conception of identity which “saw themselves as superior to the rest of Ambonese society.” Indeed, the authority of raja, traditional village leaders, progressively eroded as colonial administrative changes stripped them of labor obligations and harvest revenues. Dutch influence in the formation of a Malukan Christian identity extended beyond the colonial military, with the Dutch channeling educational and economic opportunities specifically toward Christian groups in Ambon. This history of preferential inclusion produced structural advantages for Malukan Christians at the expense of Malukan Muslims and, later, Javanese settlers, situating the identity as a marker of social position within the colonial hierarchy rather than spiritual affiliation. 

Indonesian independence threatened to unsettle the colonial hierarchies that privileged Malukan Christians, driving émigré Christian politicians to create the RMS and to declare South Malukan independence. An elite, educated, and urbanized class of Malukan Christians—including politicians, a stratum of raja, and over 2,000 KNIL veterans—formed the foundation of RMS membership, rooted in fears of the material losses that would emanate from absorption into a polity dominated by Javanese Muslims. Indeed, the formation of the unitary Indonesian nation-state resulted in sweeping reforms that enabled Malukan Muslims, constituting about half of the islands’ population at the time, to access educational institutions and government positions previously dominated by Christians. President Suharto’s transmigration policies intensified this dynamic, bringing predominantly Javanese Muslim and Butonese settlers into the Maluku Islands, which shifted economic power toward settler communities. For Malukan Christian elites, unification was registered as a threat to their community’s standing and survival. That grievance was channeled into the symbolic language of kinship, homeland, and ancestral belonging, fundamentally framing the Indonesian state as an occupying entity. 

Within the Maluku Islands, ethno-religious identity proved to be a powerful but limited mobilizing force. Networks of village churches and educational institutions built by Protestant missionaries provided ready-made organizational channels for communal solidarity and resource mobilization. Indeed, even in the most violent phase of the 1999-2004 conflict, some Christian church leaders were able to organize effective peacebuilding initiatives through the institutional infrastructure the churches provided. Importantly, many Indigenous traditions—like pela gandong, a historic intervillage alliance system—continued despite the accumulation of grievances between Christian and Muslim communities at the elite level, emphasizing Indigenous identity as the connective tissue that extended beyond religion. Many of these local structures of governance, however, were drastically changed under the New Order regime, with President Suharto suppressing local political figures and maintaining interreligious conflict to preserve the Indonesian state’s power. While Christian identity served as a mobilizing factor for some Alifuru in their demands for independence, these claims were most salient among elites disgruntled by the dissolution of colonial society. Evident in the continuation of pela gandong, however, Alifuru identity transcended the sectarian divides that ethno-religious conflict brought for most of the Indigenous population. 

Successive iterations of Malukan self-determination organizations would, in turn, demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the RMS’s claims to independence based on ethno-religious identity. During the 1999-2004 period of mass violence, several pro-independence Alifuru leaders formed the Front Kedaulatan Maluku (FKM), rooted in demands for sovereignty on the basis of an “Alifuru nation,” an invocation of Indigenous ancestry. This rhetorical shift, offered by FKM spokesperson Agnus Wattimena, deliberately shifted Malukan claims away from religious affiliation toward Indigenous self-determination, partly inspired by a peace process negotiated in the neighboring Kai Islands. This shift represented the limitation of the RMS’s attachments to Malukan Christian identity, while doubling as a framing response to the Indonesian state’s characterization of the violence as a religious civil war. Indeed, when the Indonesian government held Alex Manuputty—the FKM’s leader—on trial in Jakarta, prominent news sources characterized him as a “Christian separatist leader,” rather than an Indigenous organizer seeking self-determination for his people. Similarly, in Ambon, Muslim leaders blamed the RMS for inflaming the period of mass violence, while some Christian leaders disavowed the independence movement. While Manuputty and other FKM leaders may have been more closely aligned with Alifuru views in South Maluku, the RMS’s longstanding attachments to class-based incentives and ethno-religious identity limited the FKM’s ability to adopt the aesthetics of an anti-colonial movement and to detach from its predecessor’s legacy. 

Despite these limitations, the FKM and other Alifuru-led groups continued to advance South Malukan independence claims in international forums on the basis of Indigeneity. On April 22, 2004, the FKM released a letter to the international community calling for UN intervention to quell the mass violence, characterizing it as a genocide perpetrated by the Indonesian state against the Alifuru people. Highlighting state-sponsored attacks on churches and villages across Ambon, along with the tens of thousands of Alifuru displaced as a result, the letter’s authors contended that mass violence perpetrated by Laskar Jihad, an Islamic fundamentalist militia, and the Indonesian military were mutually reinforcing. Other Malukuan independence organizations, like the Bangsa Adat Alifuru, similarly advanced claims of Indonesian genocide against Alifuru at the UN, using that framing to call for the withdrawal of Indonesian military forces and the launch of a UN fact-finding mission on the violence. Through participating in sessions of the UN’s Human Rights Council and the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, Bangsa Adat Alifuru has worked to advance a framework of Alifuru self-determination to argue for Malukan independence, breaking from initial characterizations of ethno-religious persecution. While attaching to certain critiques of the religious undercurrents of Indonesian colonialism, Alifuru independence leaders gradually shifted focus away from ethno-religious identity as a core driver of self-determination. 

Today, Alifuru activists have shifted previous calls for external self-determination toward an internal self-determination model. On the international stage, the Saniri Alifuru, a council of traditional leaders and chiefs of the Maluku Islands, has emerged as the principal voice advocating for Alifuru rights within the Indonesian state, while framing itself as a pre-colonial governing institution. In May 2017, the Saniri Alifuru submitted a Universal Periodic Review on the Republic of Indonesia to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), declaring that the Indonesian state was actively suppressing Alifuru culture, exploiting their lands and resources, and subjecting Indigenous youth to an education system that encourages social conformity and discourages Alifuru practices. Using the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as its basis, the council recommended that the Indonesian state support Alifuru initiatives toward internal self-governance and end the political perseuction of the RMS and other pro-independence activists. 

Despite these rhetorical shifts toward an Indigenous and human rights framework, no UN member state has formally expressed support for Alifuru self-determination and South Malukan independence. 

Inclusion as Repression: The Melanesian Arts and Culture Festival 

As West Papuan and South Malukan claims to independence were quelled by explicit forms of violence, contemporary repression efforts have shifted toward the deployment of multiculturalism as a strategy to quell identity-based separatism. Following Indonesian independence in 1945, the emerging government engaged in a nation-building project that attempted to bridge the nation’s multiple 

identity cleavages through a unifying national language—Bahasa Indonesia—and an ideology of multicultural inclusion—Pancasila. With hundreds of ethnic groups, religious groups, and a diversity of sects within the nation’s Muslim majority, the construction of a unifying Indonesian identity sought to “reduce the salience of subnational identity […] and to subsume them within a broader national identity.” However, scholars have argued that Indonesian nation-building through multicultural inclusion has worked to simultaneously appropriate the identity of the nation’s subgroups—particularly Melanesians—while suppressing the political demands emanating from them. Despite the sociopolitical salience of inclusion as a nation-building tactic, in the Indonesian case, the strategy works to deny the political undercurrents of marginalized groups. 

For the Indigenous peoples of West Papua and the Maluku Islands, these forms of repression are most visible through Indonesia’s participation in the Melanesian Arts and Culture Festival (MACFEST). Originating from the MSG in 1995, MACFESTs were conceived as a platform to celebrate traditional and contemporary arts from nations across Melanesia. In October 2015, the Indonesian state hosted MACFEST for the first time, holding the celebration in Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara Barat. For Kacung Marjian, Indonesia’s Director General of Culture at the Ministry of Education and Culture, the rationale for Indonesia’s hosting arose from the “fact that majority of Melanesian population, about 80 percent, live in Indonesia.” At the 2015 MACFEST, representatives from predominantly-Melanesian regions of Indonesia—including East Musa Tenggara, Maluku, North Maluku, Papua, and West Papua—were invited to attend the festival, alongside delegations from Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia. The Indonesian state framed the festival as an alliance-building mechanism with other Melanesian states, particularly in economic cooperation. For populations internal to the Indonesian state, Anies Baswedan, Indonesian Education and Culture Minister, contended that “diversity must not hinder unity,” and that the festival offers an opportunity to “achieve a common dream of a peaceful, just, and prosperous world.” From these framings, Indonesia’s participation in and hosting of MACFEST functioned as a nation-building strategy through celebrating ethnic identities subordinate to the prevailing identity and incentives of the Indonesian state. 

With its primary focus on Melanesian arts and culture, MACFESTs have become sites of repression for political mobilizations of Melanesian identity, particularly for the occupied territories of Indonesia. At the 2018 MACFEST in the Solomon Islands, police and state officials prohibited the raising of the West Papuan flag. The rule precipitated a confrontation between an Indonesian official and Ben Didiomea, a Solomon Islander wearing a Free West Papua shirt and carrying the West Papua flag. As Didiomea attempted to unfurl the West Papua flag outside the Indonesian tent, the official attempted to confiscate it—a move swiftly blocked by onlookers who intervened in Didiomea’s defense. The incident prompted one anonymous Indonesian citizen to submit a comment to the Free West Papua Campaign, arguing, “Could the actions of this Indonesian abroad be the way my country shows its iron grip in Melanesia, without actually valuing Melanesian culture?” This seeming contradiction in Indonesian attendance, as pointed out by the concerned citizen, speaks to the broader repressive strategy deployed by the Indonesian nation-state through MACFEST—the depoliticization of Melanesian regions demanding independence from Indonesia through uplifting their culture. 

Figure 3. West Papua and Republik Maluku Selatan flags at the opening parade of the 7th Melanesian Arts and Culture Festival, July 19, 2023. 

Despite Indonesian attempts to frame Melanesian identity as a culture internal to the nation-state, other Melanesian nations denied Indonesian narratives of inclusion. At the 2023 MACFEST, the government of Vanuatu invited ULMWP to formally participate as a special guest, a development that coincided with West Papua’s bid for full membership to the MSG. The flags of West Papua and the RMS were waved by the ULMWP delegation at the festival’s opening parade, displayed in Figure 2. The inclusion of RMS flags demonstrates the solidarity between the self-determination movements in West Papua and South Maluku, bound by a shared identity and experience shaped by Indonesian occupation. For Anna Naupa, the presence of flags from the occupied regions of Indonesia, alongside other states from across the Pacific, rendered the cultural dimension of the festival through a political lens—as she contends, “culture is not a politically neutral category.” Despite attempts by the Indonesian state to channel Papuan and Malukan claims to self-determination through multiculturalism, MACFEST enabled a multiplicity of Melanesian political expressions to emerge, unbounded by the statist politics that precede and follow the festival. 

With contemporary West Papuan and South Malukan claims to self-determination rooted in Melanesian identity, the Indonesian government attempted to frame Indigeneity as a cultural sub-group subordinate to the nation-state through MACFEST. These framings of Indigeneity mirror the legal arguments advanced by Indonesia on the international stage, which stake Papuan and Malukan self-determination claims as conflicts internal to the state. The construction of these claims as internal insulates the Indonesian state from external intervention under the international system, since state sovereignty is maintained through the principle of non-intervention. Indigenous scholars have argued that policies and institutions advancing multiculturalism function as new forms of colonialism in the age of neoliberalism. In the Indonesian context, multiculturalism functioned as a core component of nation-building and anti-secessionist repression, containing Indigenous claims to the boundaries of the nation-state. Like Pancasila, MACFESTs operated as the vehicle through which the Indonesian state attempted to strip the political dimensions of Papuan and Malukan identity, an attempt that had limited success in regional spaces dominated by their Melanesian allies. 

Discussion and Conclusion 

Across the self-determination movements in West Papua and South Maluku, identity functioned as the core mobilizing factor and framing strategy deployed to stake claims to independence from the Indonesian state. While both contemporary formulations of the movements—ULMWP and the Saniri Alifuru—root their claims to self-determination in Indigenous identity, West Papuan nationalists initially reclaimed both pan-Melanesian and global Black identities to distinguish from Indonesians, while South Malukan groups emerged from an ethno-religious identity forged within colonial society. These differences in identity formation resulted in divergent outcomes in international support, with Indigenous-based claims finding greater success in alliance-building. West Papuan ascriptions to Indigenous, Melanesian, and Black identities enabled access to international forums and statements of support from UN member states with overlapping identity attachments. Initial claims from the RMS, however, were disregarded as sectarian politics internal to the Indonesian nation-state. Building on the extant literature on ethnicity and self-determination movements, in the cases discussed, Indigenous identity provided both a framework for co-ethnics to channel grievance and a more perceptually legitimate basis for self-governance and land reclamation claims globally. 

The international legibility of Indigeneity emerges from a distinct legal and political tradition that undergirds the source of state sovereignty in the West. Enlightenment thinkers, like Thomas Hobbes, and the Treaties of Westphalia constructed a conception of sovereignty rooted in a state’s “unfettered control over persons and objects within their respective territories.” This centralization of authority in the state structures the modern international system, with states emerging as the “basic units” of global politics, and guided by principles of formal equality, exclusive territorial jurisdiction, non-intervention, and the supremacy of state consent. While non-state actors—like Indigenous groups internal to the borders of a nation-state—are relegated to unequal political bodies that lack recognition and decision-making authority, Indigeneity provides the basis for a variety of state-like rights on the international stage. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), for example, declares that Indigenous peoples have the right to “self-determination, have the right to autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs, as well as ways and means for financing their autonomous functions.” Importantly, UNDRIP articulates a right to land reclamation, a provision that has complicated state support for the resolution, but closely mirrors Westphalian conceptions of territorial sovereignty. 

In both West Papua and South Maluku, UNDRIP and other international Indigenous rights frameworks form the basis for their claims to independence from Indonesia. Despite the state voting in favor of UNDRIP in 2007, Indonesia does not fully accept the concept of Indigenous peoples in national law. Indonesian officials argue that almost all Indonesians are Indigenous, and thus deserve equal rights—an extension of Pancasila and the creation of a superordinate national identity. This strategic universalization of Indigeneity coincides with the state’s amplification of ethnic and religious diversity, which frames Indigenous groups, such as Papuans and Alifuru, as Indonesian nationals with distinct, subordinate cultural backgrounds. The Indonesian state’s flattening of Indigeneity mirrors the rhetorical strategies it deployed to frame mass violence in the Maluku Islands as a purely sectarian conflict, an articulation that allowed it to stave off external intervention into its borders. Despite the salience of Indigeneity as a basis for self-determination claims among actors on the global stage, including Indonesia itself, the state has effectively mobilized its sovereign authority to foreclose self-determined futures for Indigenous peoples vying for independence. The continued occupation of West Papua and South Maluku, as such, demonstrates the limits of international bodies as a mechanism for advancing self-determination claims. 

These limitations of state sovereignty have led Indigenous scholars and activists across Oceania to advance visions of an otherwise beyond Westphalia. Kanaka ʻŌiwi scholar Jamaica Osorio, rooted in a genealogy of Indigenous scholars critiquing state sovereignty, argues that Native peoples should abandon colonial political structures in favor of liberatory styles of governance that predated, and continue to live alongside, the Western world. Examples of these styles of governance permeate the cases at-hand—from the diffusion of centralized authority under Maluku’s Siwa-Lima system to the coalition-based organizing of the ULMWP. Despite the state-centric objectives and divergent identity mobilizations of the West Papuan and South Malukan self-determination movements, the community-based structures that sustain their calls for independence should be given equal scholarly attention. As Papuans and Alifuru confront genocides against their communities perpetrated by the Indonesian nation-state, the framing tactics deployed by these Indigenous peoples should not be understood solely as a political mobilization strategy, but an affirmation of place and identity in the face of elimination. 

In these continued calls for independence, the ongoing conditions of Indonesian occupation have fostered solidarity among West Papuan and South Malukan nationalists. On Feburary 3, 2026, activists from West Papua, Maluku, and Aceh gathered at the Indonesian Embassy in The Hague, Netherlands, to protest Indonesian colonialism. Importantly, Indonesian ambassador Sidharto Reza Suyodipuro was elected president of the UN Human Rights Council by member states for that year, a development that activists contended would provide ample grounds to demand self-determination. Benny Wenda, speaking on a megaphone, chanted “once proclaimed, remains proclaimed,” a refrain underscoring the ongoing and unceded rights to self-determination that Papuans and Malukans hold. Across divergent framings of identity, self-determination movement leaders from West Papua and South Maluku find unity in the shared project of liberation, articulating a form of collective identity quite different from those constructed by the Indonesian state. In a Facebook post highlighting the rally, Wenda grounds this unity in a shared commitment to hope: 

“Free West Papua. Free Aceh. Free Maluku. We stand united in one spirit, with one voice, and one shared determination to liberate our lands from Indonesian colonial rule. Across our islands and mountains, from forest to coast, our peoples continue to resist injustice, defend our ancestral lands, and uphold our right to self-determination, dignity, and freedom. Our struggle is not divided by geography. It is connected by history, by suffering, by hope. In unity, we remain strong. In solidarity, we continue the path toward freedom.” 

Through imagining an otherwise beyond the conditions of occupation, shared history, suffering, and hope have emerged as the underlying ties that bind the occupied regions of Indonesia together. Across the variety of identity formations that generated internal grievances and external support, the self-determination movements of West Papua and South Maluku persist, both in their homelands and in exile. The persistence of those movements speak to the depth of Indigenous demands for self-determination, and the frailty of colonial political regimes that arbitrarily divide and unify. In an essay re-published by the Moluccan International Campaign for Human Rights, George Aditijondro contends that Indonesian independence did not sanction unfettered expansionism, but affirmed that the colonial borders established by the Dutch “can continuously be re-negotiated and determined in accordance with the wishes of the people who live within those borders.” In an unyielding demand for merdeka, freedom, West Papuan and South Malukan re-negotiations of the borders, sovereignties, and violences that confine them open generative futures for liberation. 

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Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Free West Papua, Photo by Matt Brown | Image sourced from Flickr | CC License, no changes made

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