Off the northern coast of West Papua, just south of the equator, lies Biak — a small tropical island whose waters contain some of the richest coral reefs in the world. For fifteen generations, its indigenous clans have farmed its rainforest, fished its seas, and maintained a relationship with the land that is as much spiritual as it is practical. Now the Indonesian government wants to build a spaceport there. The indigenous people of Biak have not been consulted. Their position, in the words of Apolos Sroyer, chief of the Biak Customary Council, is unambiguous: “We reject the plan. We don’t eat satellites. We eat taro, and fish from the sea. That is our way of life for generations.”
The project has been in development in various forms since 2006, when Indonesia and Russia began formal discussions about building an equatorial launch site at Biak through their respective space agencies, LAPAN and the Russian Federal Space Agency. A framework agreement between the two countries had been signed in 2003. In April 2025, a further dimension to Russia’s interest in Biak emerged when it was reported that Moscow is seeking permission to station long-range military aircraft at the island’s Manuhua Air Force Base — a development that alarmed Australia, which hosts a rotational force of US Marines just 1,300 kilometres away in Darwin.
Biak, it turns out, is not only of interest to space agencies. It sits 2,000 kilometres from the US territory of Guam and close to Papua New Guinea, a country that Australia, China and the United States all regard as strategically significant. The island’s geography, which makes it ideal for launching rockets, also makes it valuable to anyone with an interest in the Pacific. The indigenous people of Biak did not choose to live at the centre of a geopolitical contest. They simply live there.
The Abrauw clan, one of 360 clans on the island, have lived for fifteen generations on the land now targeted for the spaceport site. Government maps show that almost all of their ancestral lands — including homes — fall within the proposed buffer zone. The Indonesian space agency claims to have purchased 250 acres of their land in 1980. The clan disputes this. Community members recall that during the 1980 negotiations, military personnel threatened residents who rejected the project, accusing them of being members of the Free Papua Movement. It was only in 2002 that the community discovered land release certificates had been issued — apparently using signatures taken from attendance lists without consent. Marthen Abrauw, the clan chief, put it simply: “For Papuans, land is identity.”
That identity is not a metaphor. In Biak culture, clans share ancestry with specific plants, animals and places in the landscape. The crocodile is a sacred totem — the power of the sea made flesh. A flowering heliotrope tree on the island’s northeastern shore marks the origin of the Abrauw clan. Clan members visit it to pray, to make offerings, to camp for days in the presence of their ancestors. If the spaceport is built, the tree will be off limits. So will the beach where the Abrauw fish, and the forest where they farm. What is being proposed is not merely the acquisition of land. It is the erasure of a living civilisation — its stories, its belief systems, its way of knowing the world. These are not things that can be relocated or compensated for. They exist in relationship with specific places, and those places cannot be moved.
What makes the situation more alarming is the military dimension — and on Biak, it has accelerated sharply. Between November and December 2025, between 1,200 and 1,750 Indonesian military personnel were deployed to Biak and the surrounding Supiori Regency, occupying schools and public facilities. Three Territorial Development Battalion units are now based there, officially framed as supporting food security and infrastructure development. Civil society organisations have been clear about what they believe the battalions are actually there to secure: the spaceport project and other National Strategic Projects in the region. The large-scale military presence has, according to human rights monitors, revived collective trauma linked to the Military Operations Zone period — a dark chapter in Biak’s history that the island’s communities have never been allowed to fully process or grieve.
Apolos Sroyer, the same Biak Customary Council chief who publicly rejected the spaceport, was subjected to a sustained campaign of intimidation between November and December 2025, allegedly linked to his leadership of indigenous opposition to the planned military headquarters. Unidentified officials visited his home without warning. Drone surveillance was conducted over his property for several hours. Intelligence vehicles followed him in Jayapura. TNI members reportedly attempted to create divisions between clans and coerce communities into accepting the military project. Human rights monitors have documented a further disturbing pattern: state institutions facilitating the formation of counterfeit customary bodies to create a veneer of indigenous consent for land transfers that have no legitimate consent behind them at all.
On 5 December 2025, a customary meeting attended by the Biak Customary Council and representatives of thirteen clans formally declared their rejection of the military headquarters — reaffirming that the project violated the principle of free, prior and informed consent, and endangered the survival of the Biak indigenous people. The Indonesian government has not responded to their declaration.
The broader picture across West Papua is one of militarisation on a scale not seen in recent years. As of January 2026, more than 105,000 civilians across multiple regencies have been internally displaced due to military operations. Human rights monitors documented 141 armed clashes in 2025 — the highest on record. Tactics have included drone strikes and victim-activated explosive devices used in or near civilian areas. A Papuan senator publicly called on the government to build schools instead of military bases. There is little indication the plea was heard.
The Biak Massacre of July 1998 casts a long shadow over all of this. On the morning of 6 July, Indonesian military and police forces attacked a peaceful gathering of West Papuans at a water tower in Biak town, where demonstrators had been camping for days, singing and praying, with the Morning Star flag raised above them. Troops opened fire from four sides. Survivors described the dead, dying and wounded being loaded onto trucks, driven to the naval base, tortured, and in some cases dumped at sea from naval vessels. Women were raped.
The 2013 Citizens Tribunal at the University of Sydney which heard first-hand survivor testimony concluded that scores of men, women and children were killed, tortured and mutilated. No charges have ever been laid. The massacre is not officially recognised by the Indonesian government. For many Biak residents, the trauma of 1998 remains unhealed and unacknowledged. The spaceport project risks burying that history further, replacing it with a narrative of progress and technological ambition that has nothing to do with the people whose land it is built on, and everything to do with the interests of those who have never had to live there.
Indonesia frames the spaceport as a gift to the future. The indigenous people of Biak are being asked to sacrifice their past, their present and their identity for a future that was designed without them. The stars, as Biak’s elders might point out, have always been part of their world. They simply did not need a rocket to reach them.
Dancing Turtle has been documenting the situation in West Papua for many years, through our undercover documentary Forgotten Bird of Paradise and the feature-length film The Road to Home about exiled independence leader Benny Wenda. Biak is the latest chapter in a story that has never really paused. Both films are available via the Dancing Turtle shop.
