Martin Lundqvist, Hong Kong, China – "Witch hunting" has historically been, and still is, a common phenomenon in Papua among the indigenous people. Although different local communities have different interpretations of the practice, the basic tenets are the same: people are blamed for the things that go wrong in life.

It is a cosmology that refuses to accept the haphazardness of death, disease and misfortune. When someone dies at an early age, for example, this is perceived as the work of a witch for which punishment is soon to be meted out.

Information recently received from a local NGO tells of the threatened position of nine women in a village on Bird's Head Peninsula in West Papua. Local religious leaders and the local community believed these women to be witches responsible for disease, death and general misfortune in the local community. For this, the women have been punished.

The nine women were declared "sinful" and "devils" by the religious leaders and were then segregated from their husbands and children and forcibly moved to isolated areas in the jungle surrounding the village. These areas are not fit for living, and the women who were deported there are in pressing need of the most basic necessities, such as food and healthcare. They are naturally also shocked, and possibly traumatized, from the degrading and violent treatment to which they have been subjected by the local religious leaders.

Papua is a region which is normally considered underdeveloped. Many Papuans live in remote locations where they are deprived of access to the services of the Indonesian state, including education, healthcare and a "modern" justice system." The police rarely visit the remote villages; if they do it is normally to arrest, torture or threaten someone allegedly belonging to the independence movement OPM, which is also known as the Free Papua Movement.

On July 19, for example, six Papuans were brutally arrested and charged with the crime of subversion for conducting a peaceful pro-independence demonstration, hoisting the symbolically charged Morning Star flag. This incident is not an isolated occurrence but rather forms part of a pattern of political subjugation of the Papuan indigenous population by the Indonesian military, the police and the military police.

When it comes to healthcare, the remoteness of the Papuan villages is sometimes used to justify inaction by the government. In a recent cholera outbreak in Dogyai District of Papua, Indonesian authorities blamed the outbreak on "the long distance between local medical units, or puskesmas, and the village, where local people usually take a four-hour walk to reach the puskemas." Statements like this make it seem the government is not responsible for the health of these people, that the remoteness of their villages somehow justifies their neglect.

The Indonesian government has a duty to recognize the right of everyone to enjoy the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, according to domestic law No. 11/2005. This law seems to have been bypassed in Papua, where about half the population lives below the poverty line, compared to Jakarta, where approximately 3.4 percent of the population is poor.

At the same time, the government of Indonesia is directing much attention to Papua through the many "development" projects it has initiated there since the mid-1960s. Normally, development would entail an improved standard of living for the people of the region; but in Papua, development has come to have another meaning. Here the government-sanctioned "development" schemes have brought with them large-scale forced evictions, arrests, assaults and killings of indigenous people, as well as environmental disaster, in order to "make room for" transnational mining companies, among which US-based Freeport is the largest.

The Indonesian government has granted these companies access to lands which have traditionally been owned by the indigenous people of the region, who have been forcibly removed from the so-called sacrifice zones – as the Freeport vernacular labels them – and who benefit nothing from the operation of these companies.

The Indonesian government owns 10 percent of Freeport, and Freeport is Indonesia's largest corporate taxpayer. Needless to say, the stakes are high, and such petty matters as the basic human rights of the indigenous people and the destruction of the environment cannot stand in the way of this Indonesian "model of development."

Development is often said to have two faces: one of exploitation and one of economic progress. It is also frequently said that these two sides are interdependent. The significance of this connection becomes abundantly clear in Papua, where the indigenous people suffer in order for the large mining corporations to make profits.

Given the present and historical circumstances of the indigenous people of Papua, it is not without hesitation that one calls for the Indonesian government to intervene in cases of "witch hunting." On one hand, there is a very real problem with development in these areas: people are actually dying from the lack of it. On the other hand, seeing how "development" projects initiated by the government in the region historically have hit, and keep hitting, the indigenous people, asking for "more development" seems instinctively wrong.

Papuans have no need for, as a colleague put it, "the government to march in there to open up a bunch of McDonald's." There is, however, an urgent need for the Indonesian government to redefine its conception of development in Papua in a manner that benefits all citizens, including the so-called tribal people of Papua.

[Martin Lundqvist is currently serving as an intern at the Asian Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong, where he is primarily assisting in the group's work for human rights in Indonesia. He has a bachelor's degree in peace and conflict studies from Malmoe University in Sweden.]