Very little information about the case of Tepenat Wenda is publicly available. According to the monthly West Papua report published by the East Timor Action Network (ETAN), Mr Wenda was arrested by police, along with Dipenus Wenda, Wetius Wenda and Marius Kogoya, while giving out leaflets campaigning for a boycott of the 5 April 2004 elections. They were arrested in the Bokondini district of Papua’s Central Highlands. While this article does not give a date for their arrest, a later email circulated by Koteka Prisoner Support, published on a Yahoo group, states that the four men were arrested on 29 March 2004.
Marius Kogoya was shot dead while in police custody. The police’s version of events, as reported in local and national newspapers the Cenderawasih Pos and the Jakarta Post, was that Mr Kogoya had fought back while under interrogation. The report published by ETAN states that police claimed that Mr Kogoya was trying to escape arrest at the time he was shot. The police also claimed that the four men arrested had admitted to being members of the OPM.
The email from Koteka Prisoner Support relates that in early May the three survivors were being held under arrest in Wamena hospital, but doesn’t give details of injuries or illnesses.
The Office for Justice and Peace (Sekratariat untuk Keadilan dan Perdamaian, SKP), in their chronology of events connected to human rights in Papua, reported from the sixth session of the three men’s court case on 23 November 2004, however there is no report of the verdict or sentence.
While one of the prisoners arrested in this case, Dipenus Wenda, was reported as still being imprisoned by the Alliance of Democracy for Papua (Aliansi Demokrasi untuk Papua, ALDP) in 2011, this has not yet been confirmed. The fates of Tepenat Wenda and Wetius Wenda remain unclear.
Sources
ETAN / Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center, “Papua Report April 2004”, April 2004, http://etan.org/issues/wpapua/rfk/04aprilwpap.htm
Koteka Prisoner Support, “West Papua Prisoner Support Week”, 6 May 2004, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tribal-melanesia/message/1784
Cenderawasih Pos, “Keterangan Kapolsek Memberatkan Terdakwa”, 9 November 2004, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Komunitas_Papua/message/2538
Jakarta Post, “Police Shoot Dead Separatist Ahead of Voting Day”, 5 April 2004, http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2004/04/05/police-shoot-dead-separatist-papua-ahead-voting-day.html
Sekretariat Keadilan dan Perdamaian Keuskupan Jayapura, “Catatan Sosio-Politik No 10”, February 2005, http://www.hampapua.org/skp/skp02/ssp-10i.pdf
Aliansi Demokrasi untuk Papua, (ALDP changed its website during 2012, and its archive is currently unavailable online)
