The island of New Guinea is one of the most biodiverse places on earth. It hosts roughly 7% of all global species, with 60% of them being endemic. Peopled by Melanesians, it's one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth, with over 1000 languages.

The east of the island became independent (from Australia) in 1975 and is now Papua New Guinea. Meanwhile, the western half was handed over to Indonesian control following the end of Dutch rule, a status formalized through the controversial, UN-backed 1969 "Act of Free Choice" in which a tiny, handpicked group of local leaders voted under military duress to integrate with Indonesia.

Indonesia has been conducting a decades-long genocide of the people of West Papua. It gets little press because it's an ethnic cleansing slow-burn. Slaughter the Papuan people, replace them with Javanese, then bulldoze their forests to grow palm oil.

For more, read the abstract (or the entire paper) here: https://researchers.westernsydney.edu.au/en/publications/for...

There's a timeline of the history of the "conflict" here: https://www.papuapartners.org/west-papua

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-01/west-papuan-separatis...