Angela Gregory – Pacific countries are ignoring the brutality of Indonesian armed forces towards West Papuans, a regional peace and security conference has been told.

The problems facing Indonesian-controlled West Papua were put before the weekend conference in Christchurch, which examined security issues in the Pacific.

A West Papuan speaker, human rights educator John Rumbiak, said he wanted the right of self-determination returned to West Papua, deprived after the United States and United Nations paved the way for Indonesia to take control in 1969.

"West Papua was sacrificed to save Pacific security after the fall of Vietnam and fear that Indonesia was heading towards communism."

Mr Rumbiak said that since then the militarist policy of the Indonesian Government had systematically brutalised the West Papuan people. About 100,000 people had been killed in the region, including political assassinations, he said. "They are subject to constant killings and torture ... even as this conference meets."

Mr Rumbiak told the Herald he was in self-imposed exile from West Papua where he does not feel safe. "I left because of the high death rates. It was not safe to go back."

He said Indonesian military presence had grown from 3000 resident troops to about 30,000 in the last four years as independence cries grew. Mr Rumbiak said the British Government had described West Papua as a timebomb that could explode at any time.

The Indonesian Government was also failing to protect West Papua's environment, which was being devastated, and the health of the indigenous people.

Mr Rumbiak said HIV infections were highest among West Papuans, even though they accounted for just 1 per cent of the Indonesian population, and the infant mortality rate was the highest in the world. West Papua had the richest mineral resources but it was the second-poorest Indonesian province.

Mr Rumbiak wanted the New Zealand Government to act, as it had in the Bougainville and Solomon Islands crises. He also wanted New Zealand to raise West Papua's problems at the Pacific Islands Forum and United Nations.