Papua: Challenges for Indonesia’s National Integrity

Currently, a conflict over independence is smouldering away in Indonesia’s most easterly region, partly as a hangover from Dutch colonial times as partly because of the Cold War. In the past, the Indonesian government was able to treat the unrest in the region as a domestic matter, but recently it has started to attract more and more international criticism. Although it is now ten years since the introduction of the Special Autonomy Law relating to Papua, 2011 was still a year of rising tension in the region.