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| A security forces surveillance camera "eyes" on Papuans outside a Malang police station in East Java. Image: ULMWP |
By David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report
ASIA PACIFIC REPORT, the Auckland-based independent news and analysis website, has been increasingly targeted by Indonesian trolls over the past three months, involving a spate of “letters to the editor” and social media attacks.
One of the most frequent letter writers, an “Abel Lekahena”, who claims to be a “student” or “writing on behalf of the people of Papua”, has accused APR of “only taking the separatists’ narrative as they played the victim”.
Sometimes he is purportedly a student living in “Yogyakarta”, West Java; at other times he is a migrant from East Nusa Tenggara “currently living in Manokwari, West Papua”. He has written to Asia Pacific Report 10 times in the past eight weeks – twice in one day on December 29, 2020.
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“Lekahena”, if that is even his real name, claims in his latest “template” letter on Monday that since January, “the armed separatists prowled in Intan Jaya” and burned a missionary plane on January 6 and he has cited several clashes between pro-independence militants seeking independence for West Papua and the colonial Indonesian security forces.
