News of the massacre has emerged largely because of the presence in Biak of two Australian aid workers, Rebecca Casey and Paul Meixner. In the second part of an interview with Casey and Meixner, the World Socialist Web Site asked them to describe the social, economic and political situation in Biak and West Papua as a whole. Conditions are pretty bad, and a lot worse than many Javanese towns and villages that I have seen. You expect to see poor quality houses, and they are there. But it's things like health that show the real situation.
People can catch a cold and die, or a mild case of malaria and die.
Four people that we knew died while we were there. That was just in two months. While we there, when the economic crisis started, there were no medicines anywhere in Indonesia. One of the big problems was that the hospitals and pharmacies ran out of medicine. No-one could get anything.