Ed Aspinall (Aceh) and Iain Wilson (Irian Jaya)

The page includes some basic material in English about the history, culture, and environment of Aceh, as well as information for tourists and cultural do’s and don’ts while visiting Aceh.

The main advantage of the site is its extensive archive of articles, mostly collated since the beginning of reformasi, about human rights violations after special military operations began in 1989, as well as statements from the Free Aceh Movement, information about the referendum campaign, and similar topics. Click on the links ‘tragedy’ and ‘violent’. Most are from Indonesian language newspapers. In the English version of the page, a more limited range of English articles come especially from wire agencies.

It is possible to subscribe to the Acehnet mailing list (open to Acehnese and their sympathisers) from this site, as well as to a number of other mailing lists and discussion groups.

The page has over 80 links to other Aceh-related sites: universities, political parties, religious bodies, human rights groups and NGOs, travel agencies, student groups, and many personal home pages. None of these have the same breadth of coverage.

The two daily newspapers with the best coverage are the Medan-based Waspada (www.waspada.com), and the Banda Aceh-based Serambi Indonesia (www.indomedia.com/serambi/). The latter is not always updated daily. In the much less restrictive press climate after May 1998, both have developed an energetic style, and are extremely useful. Web sites for the Aceh-based weekly tabloids with a human rights focus, Asasi and Kontras, are under construction.

Irian Jaya

On-line information on Irian Jaya has become much more profuse and sophisticated in recent years. Unfortunately quantity does not always denote quality. Probably the best general on-line source would be the site operated by Irja.org Inc (pardon the writer’s bias!) found at www.irja.org. It contains historical, political, scientific and cultural resources. Irja.org also operates Kabar Irian, an email listserve, which publishes news items, book reviews, human interest stories and the occasional editorial or opinion piece. There is also a digest version of Kabar Irian.

Another excellent site is net.cs.utexas.edu/users/boyer/fp/irian-jaya.html, operated by Professor Bob Boyer of the University of Texas. It has many links to other sites on Irian and contains useful summary information.

The Australian West Papua Association has quite an informative site: www.cs.utexas.edu/users/cline/papua/. More controversial than most, it delves into the politics of Irian Jaya and paints a pretty dim picture of Indonesian governance in that province.

The Free Papua Movement OPM has a site at www.converge.org.nz/wpapua/. It has not been updated in quite some time.

An Indonesian individual by the name of Liono has an introductory site at www.emp.pdx.edu/htliono/irja.html, but it is not for the serious investigator. Many other personal web sites are too shallow or too personal to be of wide interest. Others are excellent but written in Irianese-Indonesian slang and thus not accessible for most.

Human rights organisations with information on Irian include Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org), and Amnesty International (www.amnesty.org), each with good internal search engines, and Robert F Kennedy Memorial (www.rfkmemorial.org, go to Center for Human Rights, then publications). Project Underground (www.moles.org) includes info on Freeport - use the search engine.

There is a plethora of tourist web sites. Among them www.baliem.com, www.wamena.com, www.ilaga.com, and www.irianjaya.de. A surf on the major search engines will turn up more.

Of several listserves in existence, only three are to be recommended. The first is reg.westpapua, operated by Charles Scheiner (cscheiner@igc.apc.org), to whom ‘subscribe’ requests should be sent. A low volume list. Another called irianjaya is operated by Rex Madepa. Send a request to him at irianjaya@egroups.com. Lastly there is Kabar Irian as described above. This is a higher volume, more comprehensive list. Subscribe by going to www.irja.org/conf.htm.

Ed Aspinall (E.Aspinall@unsw.edu.au) teaches at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Iain Wilson (iain@irja.org) was born and raised in Irian Jaya and is part of the team that operates Irja.org. He lives in Canada.