[The protests followed the death of at least 17 people in interclan political fighting in the region’s remote central highlands over the weekend, as well as a predawn raid on Monday in which unidentified assailants blocked traffic outside the Papua provincial capital, Jayapura, shooting and stabbing four people, including one soldier, to death.]
By Aubrey Belford
 |
A man, with arrows stuck in his body, lies dead as a house
belonging to a candidate
burns after supporters of two rival groups clashed at
Ilaga in Puncak,
West Papua, on July 31. An AP image
|
Several thousand people, many in traditional tribal dress, marched amid heavily armed police officers and soldiers in cities and towns in the provinces of Papua and West Papua, the police and witnesses said.
Protesters demanded a referendum on independence for the region and the repudiation of a 1969 United Nations-backed vote that formalized Indonesian control over the former Dutch colony.
“For 40 years, the Indonesian government has never fairly applied the law or upheld human rights,” Viktor Kogoya, chairman of the self-styled Jakarta consulate of the West Papua National Committee, which organized the protests, said in Jakarta. “The Papuan people have never had justice.”
The protests were largely peaceful, although activists and church workers accused the authorities of fomenting a climate of fear to deter demonstrations. Anonymous text messages had circulated for days warning of a looming “massacre.” And witnesses in several towns said groups of unidentified men in civilian clothes could be seen lingering in the streets from early in the day. Witnesses suspected that the men were part of the security forces.
The protests followed the death of at least 17 people in interclan political fighting in the region’s remote central highlands over the weekend, as well as a predawn raid on Monday in which unidentified assailants blocked traffic outside the Papua provincial capital, Jayapura, shooting and stabbing four people, including one soldier, to death.
The West Papua National Committee has accused elements of the security forces of provoking or staging the violence in order to foil the protests. The rebel Free Papua Movement has denied involvement in the Jayapura attack, according to news reports.
A spokesman for the Papua police, Col. Wachyono, also stopped short of blaming the rebels for the Jayapura attack, despite the discovery of a separatist flag at the scene. “We can’t conclude yet if it’s any organization,” he said. “After we do our investigation, we’ll report who it is. If it’s been staged or if it’s purely criminal, we’ll uncover it.”
Tuesday’s protests were scheduled to coincide with a conference in Britain advocating Papuan independence through legal challenges to Indonesian rule. Many Papuans, who are ethnically distinct from most other Indonesians, chafe at what they see as heavy-handed and exploitative rule from Jakarta.
Measures intended to promote greater autonomy, including a major injection of government funds into the resource-rich region, have failed to end calls for independence or a sporadic, poorly armed insurgency.
Related link: Deadly Political Violence in Indonesian Province
Related link: Deadly Political Violence in Indonesian Province
[A few minutes after the vote, President Obama excoriated his Republican opposition for what he called a manufactured crisis that could have been avoided. “Voters may have chosen divided government,” he said, “but they sure didn’t vote for dysfunctional government.”]
By Jennifer Steinhauer And Carl Hulse
WASHINGTON — The Senate voted Tuesday to raise the government’s debt ceiling and cut trillions of dollars from its spending, finally ending a fractious partisan battle just hours before the government’s borrowing authority was set to run out.
The bill, which passed 74 to 26 after a short debate devoid of the oratorical passion that had echoed through both chambers of Congress for weeks, was signed by President Obama later on Tuesday.
A few minutes after the vote, President Obama excoriated his Republican opposition for what he called a manufactured crisis that could have been avoided. “Voters may have chosen divided government,” he said, “but they sure didn’t vote for dysfunctional government.”
The compromise, which the House passed on Monday, has been decried by Democrats as being tilted too heavily toward the priorities of Republicans, mainly because it does not raise any new taxes as it reduces budget deficits by at least $2.1 trillion in the next 10 years. But it attracted many of their votes, if only because the many months of standoff had brought the country perilously close to default. And rather than soothing already nervous markets, the final passage sent stocks lower.
The wrangling also laid bare divisions within both parties, in the House where scores of the most conservative Republicans and most liberal Democrats refused to vote for the bill, and again in the Senate where senators such as Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Mike Lee of Utah, both Republican freshmen blessed by the Tea Party, also voted against it. The last to vote was Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, who conferred for several minutes with Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, her face twisted in a grimace, then voted yes, as he had done. Ms. Snowe, a moderate Republican who faces re-election next year, is already a target of Tea Party activists in her state.
In a chamber where a Democratic majority was essentially bending to the will of a Republican minority, and where 60 votes were needed under the rules, 28 Republicans voted against the bill but only 6 Democrats voted against it. (One independent went each way.) In contrast, in the House, mostly the Republicans voted yes and about half the Democrats voted no.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, who played a central role in the ultimate compromise, said his party’s goal was “to get as much spending cuts as we could from a government we didn’t control.”
“It may have been messy,” he said. “It may have appeared to some that their government wasn’t working, but in fact the opposite was true.” Legislating, he added, “was never meant to be pretty.”
He and Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, had a gentle toe-to-toe as the debate ended, praising each other’s performance while denouncing each other on the substance.
“It’s never, ever personal,” Mr. McConnell said.
Mr. Reid presaged the next battle, when an appointed Congressional committee is to seek new ways to cut the deficit, by rejecting the assertions of his Republican colleagues that the next phase would again exclude revenue increases, which the Democrats failed to include in the first round. “That’s not going to happen,” Mr. Reid said.
Mr. Obama, too, called for the ultimate solution to include new revenues, including raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans and closing corporate loopholes, saying that he would fight for that approach as the Congressional commission considers what to recommend to Congress for an up-or-down vote before the end of the year, as the new law requires.
Enactment of the legislation signals a pronounced shift in fiscal policy, from the heavy spending on economic stimulus and warfare of the past few years to a regime of steep spending cuts aimed at reducing the deficits — so far, without new revenues sought by the White House.
“Make no mistake, this is a change in behavior from spend, spend, spend to cut, cut, cut,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, as the debate began on the Senate floor.
But the fight, which is only half over until a second round of deficit reduction is completed over the next five or six months, also exposed deep ideological schisms between and within the political parties, and tarnished the images of Congress and the president alike.
And the fight left many lawmakers on both sides deeply uneasy — including Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the assistant majority leader, who said he had consulted with the Senate chaplain over his vote, because “from where I stand it is not the clearest moral choice.” Liberal critics say the plan will hurt an already limping economy.
Despite the tension and uncertainty that has surrounded efforts to raise the debt ceiling, the House vote of 269 to 161 was relatively strong in support of the plan. Scores of Democrats initially held back from voting, to force Republicans to register their positions first. Then, as the time for voting wound down, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, returned to the floor for the first time since being shot in January and voted for the bill to jubilant applause and embraces from her colleagues. It provided an unexpected, unifying ending to a fierce standoff in the House.
Although the actual spending cuts in the next year or two would be relatively modest in the context of a $3.7 trillion federal budget, they would represent the beginning of a new era of restraint at a time when unemployment remains above 9 percent, growth is slowing and there are few good policy options for giving the economy a stimulative kick.
Republicans and Democrats alike made clear they were not happy with the agreement, which was struck late Sunday between the leadership of Congress and Mr. Obama.
Despite such misgivings, members of both parties welcomed the end of the debt-limit clash after months of intrigue, partisan rancor and stop-and-go negotiations that ultimately left Congress voting just hours before a deadline to avoid default.
“On to the next fight,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.
