Why Papua's Rebels Keep Attacking the Catholic Church

For weeks, foreign coverage of Papua fixed on one killing: on July 2, fighters from the West Papua Liberation Army, the armed wing of the separatist movement, shot down a small plane and killed the American pilot Nicholas Goselin. A new analysis in the Lowy Institute's The Interpreter asks a harder question: why the rebels keep going after the Catholic Church in particular.

The plane belonged to PT AMA, a Church-run air service that flies food, medicine, and supplies into remote highland villages the government struggles to reach. The rebels said it carried military cargo; the Church denied that. This was not a one-off. In March 2025, rebels attacked Catholic schools in Yahukimo and killed a teacher, Rosalina Rerek Sogen. Through services like these, the Church delivers the schools and clinics the state has failed to provide.

That, the author argues, is exactly why it is a target. The rebels draw support from the state's failure to help ordinary Papuans, so any group that succeeds where the state fails becomes a rival. The Church's growing reach threatens rebel recruitment rather than helping it. The picture is tangled: some young Catholics protested in April 2026 after bishops backed government plantation projects that clear forests and push people off their land, and the Church is seen as friendlier to the military than Protestant groups are.

Why it matters

This helps explain why violence in Papua is unlikely to ease soon: as long as the state cannot deliver basic services, whoever fills that gap gets pulled into the fight. For Papuans, it means the flights, schools, and clinics they depend on are now targets themselves. For everyone else, it is a warning that Jakarta's development push in Papua may deepen the conflict it hopes to calm.