By Phelim Kine
Despite Widodo’s promise of an “opening,” journalists are still being kept out of Papua.
There are new hazards for foreign journalists attempting to report from Indonesia’s restive easternmost provinces of Papua and West Papua (generally referred to as “Papua”): visa denial and blacklisting. Just ask Bangkok-based France 24 TV correspondent Cyril Payen.
On January 8, the Indonesian Embassy in Bangkok informed Payen that it had denied his application for a journalist’s visa for a reporting trip to Indonesia’s Papua province. The denial was not wholly unexpected. On November 8, Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials notified the French Embassy in Jakarta that they considered Payen’s previous reporting, which focused on pro-independence sentiment in the region, “biased and unbalanced.” Rather than engaging with Payen and France 24 to publicly challenge the report’s alleged inaccuracies, the Indonesian government took the punitive and disproportionate step of a threatened visa ban for an unspecified period of time for any France 24 journalists seeking to report from the country.
Payen’s predicament highlights the glaring gap between the rhetoric of Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s announced “opening” of Papua and West Papua (commonly referred to as “Papua”) to foreign media and the far grimmer reality for journalists still blocked from reporting there.
Official reprisals for reporting on Papua that displeases the government are a threat to journalists and their sources alike.
Read the full story at The Diplomat