Tom Benedetti, Vancouver – The attention that the tsunami brought to the previously overlooked conflict in the Indonesian province of Aceh is contributing to an end to three decades of insecurity and terror there.

But while Aceh may be moving toward peace, West Papua, at the other end of the Indonesian archipelago, has been witnessing the opposite trend – a sudden escalation of military activity by the same force that occupied Aceh, and East Timor before that.

For more than 40 years, the world has looked the other way while West Papua has been ravaged by the Indonesian military in a well-documented program of repression and plunder. In 2004, a Yale University report concluded that there is "a strong indication" of genocide against the Papuans.

Since the tsunami, the number of Indonesian troops in West Papua has grown to an estimated 50,000. The Indonesian military's power is further augmented by police forces and local militias that they fund and protect.

This escalation of military activity is ostensibly to bolster security in the region, even though the vast majority of indigenous Papuans remain true to their ideal of a land of peace. The Free Papua Movement has never been known to attack civilians during 42 years of Indonesian oppression.

Yet Indonesia has labeled the movement a terrorist organization, enabling the Indonesian military to regain military support from the United States, Britain and Australia that had been withheld after the East Timor massacres in 1999.

West Papua's coalition of 250 tribes has repeatedly asked the Indonesian military and its militias to lay down arms and show respect for human rights so that conflicts can be resolved peacefully, through dialogue, to no avail.

If Indonesia was willing to talk peace in Aceh, why not in West Papua? There are three major reasons. First, foreign journalists and most researchers and aid workers are still banned from West Papua. Unlike in Aceh after the tsunami, no one is looking.

Second, peace in West Papua is not what the Indonesian military wants. It earns millions selling security services to resource companies such as the gold-mining company Freeport-McMoRan – as documented by Jane Perlez and Raymond Bonner in the IHT (Dec. 28) and The New York Times – and conflict is good for business.

Third, most of the military's revenue does not come from the government but is generated from all kinds of businesses, legal and illegal. Under the auspices of its own network of foundations, the military generates income from private security contracts, extortion, prostitution, smuggling and illegal logging.

A study released last November by the Dutch government calls Indonesia's annexation of West Papua in 1969 "a sham," and explains why West Papua is so important to the Indonesian military: "There's a lot of money available in the territory and the troops go where the money is,... the military has to find 60 percent of its own budget." Others estimate that the military finances an even higher fraction of its operating budget, and West Papua is the Indonesian military's most lucrative area of operations.

As the number of troops mounts, so does the environmental destruction in West Papua, Asia's largest remaining expanse of untouched tropical rainforest. Since 2002, West Papua has been declared by Conservation International to be the home of Asia's largest illegal logging industry, which threatens to wipe out the bulk of its forests by 2015.

In 2005 Yan Christian Warinussy, West Papua's only indigenous independent human rights lawyer, described human rights abuses "carried out with total impunity by members of Indonesia's armed forces" including "torture, rape, summary executions, arbitrary arrests, disappearances, the killing of indigenous leaders and civilians alike, the displacement of indigenous populations and confiscation of their lands."

In 2005, the US Congress condemned human rights abuses in Papua, and parliamentary committees in Britain, Ireland and New Zealand also expressed concerns about injustice, crimes against humanity and military impunity. We can only hope that mounting international pressure will encourage Indonesian military reform, and lead to fruitful dialogue in West Papua and other outlying regions of Indonesia.

[Tom Benedetti is the moderator of the West Papua Action Network, a group of Papuans and Canadians working for justice and the environment in West Papua.]