Benny Wenda, Wellington, 10 May 2017. Photo: RNZI / Koroi Hawkins
West Papua is the western half of New Guinea, which was incorporated into Indonesia in 1969 and has been tightly restricted since.
The international spokesman for the United Liberation Movement for West Papua is Benny Wenda.
Last week, he was in New Zealand lobbying members of parliament to support international calls to put West Papua back on the agenda of the UN Decolonisation Committee.
Eleven MPs from four political parties signed his declaration, which calls for an internationally supervised self-determination vote in West Papua.
Wenda's own story captures something of the tragedy of his homeland.
As a child, he says he watched helplessly as the Indonesian military raped his two teenage aunts and beat his mother who tried to protect the girls.
"I don't know what to do – cry for my mum or cry for my aunties. I didn't know what was happening. As a young boy, I couldn't do anything."
Wenda says he is the first West Papuan leader to escape Indonesia alive – he fled in 2003 and now lives in exile in the UK.
While the current Indonesian government claims to be open to more autonomy for West Papuans, the situation for people there is worsening, Wenda says.
"Foreign media is totally banned, Amnesty is banned, rescues are banned, all the international aid agencies are banned. So that's why Indonesia gets away with impunity. Indonesia doesn't want the international community to know what's going on.
"The killings continue. Imprisonment, rape, torture, discrimination, it continues until today. And every West Papuan can tell their own story, every clan, every tribe.
"I don't want to see another generation facing this situation, I want to end it."
The West Papua region is wealthy in gold, oil, gas and copper, and Indonesia is reliant on the income from these natural resources, he says.
"They don't really care about my people, they don't really care about our forests, our mountains, our environment – they care about how they can get our resources out of the country, out of West Papua."
