Tuesday, 1st February 2000. Grosvenor House Hotel, London.
Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid arrived in the UK today along with
10 ministers and 100 Indonesian corporate directors for a business seminar
with 400 invited delegates from British industry. They were in the UK as
part of a tour of Europe and Asia designed to drum up business and rescue
the Indonesian economy from the doldrums. It was a carefully
crafted PR exercise aiming to spread the illusion that Indonesia is no
longer run by a despotic regime that murders people and plunders the land to
maintain the wealth of its ruling elite.
The Indonesian delegation flew in from Davos in Switzerland only this
morning where they had been attending the World Economic Forum which had
been besieged by more than 500 rioting demonstrators disguised with
ski-masks. Escaping this, they arrived at the Grosvenor House Hotel in
London's Park Lane where they were met by 25 demonstrators hastily assembled
at only two days notice. The demonstrators, disguised with masks of a West
Papuan tribesman, blockaded the entrance preventing the delegation entering
the hotel and sprayed fake blood across the hotel steps. The delegates were
harangued through a megaphone and greeted with: 'Good morning suits! You are
not anonymous, you are not invisible--if you invest in genocide we will
target you! Your offices will be occupied, your homes will be visited.
Welcome to the world of resistance!' Custard pies were flung at the alarmed Indonesian delegates, while demonstrators chanted 'Papua Merdeka'! ('Free Papua!').
The demonstrators blockaded both the front and the back of the hotel to
prevent delegates arriving unnoticed and were joined by an East Timorese
exile who proceeded to attack the Indonesians in their own language.
A number of protesters, dressed in suits, one of whom managed to grab a
press pass from a conference inside a neighbouring hotel, infiltrated the
meeting and managed to sneak out the information about the delegates
attending the business seminar and the itinerary of the Indonesians'
European and Asian trade mission that will be available on the web in a few
hours at: http://www.eco-action.org/opm/mission/index.html Names, position, company address phone etc, details of business interests for all the delegates.
Photos of about 75% of them. Dates and venues, along with which delegates
will be at which meeting.
After about an hour, when delegates had ceased arriving and the number of
police outnumbered protestors by about 2 to 1, the protestors decided to
leave. A successful, if small, action that hopefully scared off British
companies from dealing with the murderous Indonesian regime and investing in
'developing' West Papua.
