In September 2024, Susi Air pilot Philip Mehrtens was released after nineteen months in captivity by the West Papuan liberation army and returned to his native New Zealand. Mehrtens’s kidnapping was a personal trauma — and an ordeal for his friends and family. Locally, the central highlands region is notorious for its vast human rights violations, its refugee crisis, and blatant colonial warfare. For the liberation movement, Mehrtens’s presence was an opportunity.

One source attached to a local refugee-aid program in Nduga Regency tells me that “when Mehrtens was still in the highlands, there was attention on the conflict.” She adds that “a white man walked among the Papuans, in captivity, sure, but he walked on the same soil and along the same paths as the refugees, the suffering people, and the liberation movement.” Surely, “people feel sorry for him, and rightly so; he couldn’t return to his loved ones. But in the same vein, Mehrtens’s case forced many to think about us who live here, who also wish to go somewhere — to freedom, to independence, to have our lives back.”

As Mehrtens left West Papua via a press frenzy in Jakarta, so did Western media. Their focus turned elsewhere. This is, after all, also a time of daily human rights atrocities in out-starved and aid-blockaded Gaza, the besieged and US-raided Yemen, and in Ukraine.