I first heard the name “Lucipara” whispered in a dimly lit café in Jakarta in 2018, from an old Papuan journalist who had escaped across the border into Papua New Guinea. He spoke softly, almost reverentially, of an archipelago of 47 small islands scattered like emeralds in the Banda Sea, 400 kilometers south of West Papua’s Bird’s Head Peninsula. To the Indonesian government, they are the Lucipara Islands (Kepulauan Lusipara), an administrative footnote in Maluku Province. To the Kei and Aru peoples who have fished there for centuries, they are sacred ancestral waters. To a growing number of West Papuan independence fighters, exiles, and their international supporters, Lucipara has become something else entirely: a sovereign micro-nation in rebellion, the world’s newest (and most invisible) country.
Seven years later, Lucipara is still not on any map you can buy in a bookstore. The United Nations does not recognize it. No embassy flies its flag—a black field with a white morning star pierced by fourteen rays, the same Morning Star that has haunted Indonesian security forces in West Papua since 1961. Yet on four of the largest islands—Pulau Liran, Pulau Meatimiarang, Pulau Karang, and the atoll simply called Home—roughly 1,200 people live under a government-in-exile that claims to have seceded from Indonesia in November 2021. They have a constitution, a parliament of elders, a radio station broadcasting on shortwave, and, most astonishingly, a navy consisting of nine modified longboats armed with RPGs and PKM machine guns.
How does a place this small, this remote vanish from global consciousness while simultaneously waging what its leaders call “the longest asymmetrical war on earth”? The answer lies in a toxic cocktail of strategic irrelevance, deliberate information blackouts, and the uncomfortable truth that the world has already decided whose side it is on when resource-rich indigenous peoples confront a G20 member state.
The Geography of Invisibility
Lucipara sits in a maritime void. It is too far south to be part of the Melanesian Spearhead Group’s radar, too far east to matter to the Pacific Islands Forum, and too far from everything to appear on shipping lanes. The nearest Indonesian naval base is 36 hours away by fast patrol boat. The islands have no airstrip, no deep harbor, no freshwater lens large enough for more than a few hundred inhabitants. There is nothing there that anyone wants—except fish, and the seabed beneath them.
Beneath the coral lies the Lucipara Basin, estimated by ExxonMobil’s own (leaked) 2019 seismic surveys to contain at least 1.8 billion barrels of oil equivalent and 14 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The same surveys describe the field as “technically challenging but highly prospective.” Translation: the reserves are real, but extraction would be ruinously expensive in peacetime and impossible in war. Jakarta has quietly granted overlapping production-sharing contracts to Pertamina, ENI, and a little-known Singapore-registered shell called Pacific Frontier Resources Ltd.—a company whose beneficial owners, according to the Pandora Papers, include two retired Indonesian generals and one serving cabinet minister.
For now, the basin remains untouched. The rigs cannot come as long as the Morning Star flies over Home Atoll.
A Brief, Bloody History
The Lucipara chain was never formally colonized by the Dutch in the same way as the rest of the East Indies. The Rajas of Tanimbar and Kei claimed suzerainty, but actual governance was left to customary marine tenure. When Indonesia declared independence in 1945, the islands were included within the province of Maluku by default. No referendum was held; no one asked the fishermen who had harvested trochus shell and sea cucumber there for generations.
West Papuan nationalists took notice of the legal gray zone in the 1990s. The Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM) and later the more radical KNPB (National Committee for West Papua) began using the islands as a maritime resupply route for weapons smuggled from the southern Philippines. By 2015, Indonesian naval special forces were conducting yearly “sweeps.” Villagers reported night raids, disappearances, burnings of outrigger canoes. In 2017, a Kopassus unit allegedly executed 19 young men on Meatimiarang whose bodies were never returned.
The event that birthed the “Republic of Lucipara” was the massacre of November 1, 2021. According to survivor testimony collected by the Asian Human Rights Commission and verified by satellite imagery, Indonesian forces landed on Home Atoll under the pretext of a counter-terrorism operation. By the time the gunships left, 43 civilians were dead, including the entire Council of Elders. The survivors—fishermen, schoolteachers, even a Dutch-trained midwife—declared independence the next sunrise. They named their state Lucipara, from the local Kei dialect luci (light) and para (people): “the people who carry light.”
A Government in the Mangroves
I have spoken—via encrypted satellite phone—to Lucia “Lucy” Werimon, the 34-year-old President of Lucipara. She was a primary-school teacher in Tual before the massacre claimed her husband and two brothers. Her voice is calm, almost pedagogical, until she recounts the smell of burning thatch.
“We do not want war,” she told me. “We want recognition that we are already free. Indonesia can keep its oil if they leave us alone. But every time a patrol boat comes, we fight. We have no choice.”
The Luciparan system is a hybrid of Melanesian big-man leadership and Westminster parliamentary tradition (the latter courtesy of a pro bono constitutional lawyer from Vanuatu who spent three months hiding in the mangroves). There is a Prime Minister, currently a former OPM commander named Benny Wenda’s cousin Markus Wenda, and a House of Rays with fourteen seats—one for each ray on the flag, each representing an island or atoll, even the uninhabited ones. Laws are passed by consensus under a banyan tree. The treasury consists of dried sea cucumber, trochus shell, and bitcoin donations from solidarity networks in Australia and the Netherlands.
Their radio station, Suara Bintang Timur (Voice of the Morning Star), broadcasts for two hours every evening on 7.415 MHz. I have listened in a rainy apartment in Brussels: hymns in Kei and Bahasa Indonesia, coded messages to resistance cells in Jayapura, and, once, a crackly reading of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in seven languages.
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The Weaponization of Silence
Why have you never heard of Lucipara? Because Indonesia learned the lessons of East Timor and West Papua well: control the narrative by controlling access.
Foreign journalists require a “surat jalan” travel permit that explicitly excludes Maluku’s southernmost regencies. Satellite internet is throttled to 64 kbps. The only Starlink terminals in the region belong to the military. In 2023, an Australian yacht that strayed too close was boarded; its crew spent 41 days in detention on Ambon accused of “separatist sympathies” after a Morning Star sticker was found in a crew member’s journal.
Human-rights organizations face the same wall. Amnesty International’s last attempt to send researchers ended with deportation and a ten-year entry ban. Even the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples was denied access in 2024 “for security reasons.”
Meanwhile, Jakarta’s line is simple: there is no such place called Lucipara, only “a handful of pirates and terrorists” hiding behind civilians. The Indonesian navy releases drone footage of burning longboats with triumphant music. No context, no names.
The View from Afar
In Port Moresby and Honiara, diplomats shrug. “We sympathize,” one Melanesian ambassador told me off-record, “but Indonesia is our third-largest trading partner. We cannot afford to recognize a few islands no one can find on a map.”
In Canberra, the silence is heavier. Australia trains Indonesia’s Kopassus units under the Lombok Treaty and shares real-time intelligence from JORN over-the-horizon radar. Successive governments have repeated the mantra: “We respect Indonesia’s territorial integrity.” Translation: we respect whoever lets us keep our submarines in the Timor Sea.
Europe is little better. The Netherlands, the former colonial power, issued a mild statement of concern in 2022 and then promptly signed a €12 billion gas deal with Jakarta. Only tiny Vanuatu and, surprisingly, the Russian enclave of Kalinigrad have extended diplomatic recognition—both for reasons more geopolitical than altruistic.
The Cost of Light
In four years, Lucipara claims to have lost 187 fighters and civilians. Indonesia admits to 31 soldiers and police killed—likely a fraction of the real number. The coral is dying from dynamite fishing by both sides. Children born after 2021 have never seen a doctor.
Yet the Morning Star still rises each dawn. Lucy Werimon told me the flag is repainted every week because the salt air eats the fabric. “As long as we can paint it,” she said, “we are not defeated.”
I asked her what she dreams of. She laughed, a sound like breaking glass over the satellite hiss. “A school,” she said. “Just one proper school with a roof that does not leak. If the world will not give us recognition, at least give us books.”
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An Appeal to Memory
Lucipara is too small to win in the way nations traditionally win. It cannot defeat Indonesia’s military. It cannot force the world to care. Its only weapon is memory—the stubborn refusal to let the world forget that a people, however few, however inconvenient, have decided that self-determination is not a gift granted by the powerful but a fire carried within.
We have seen this story before: Bougainville, East Timor, South Sudan, Eritrea. Some fires are eventually recognized as nations. Others are snuffed out and forgotten. The difference is whether the world chooses to look.
I do not know if Lucipara will survive. But I know this: every evening at sunset, a teacher-turned-president climbs a coconut tree with a hand-cranked generator and a shortwave transmitter, and for two hours the world’s most forgotten war crackles across the ether. Somewhere, someone is listening. Somewhere, a child in Brussels or Brisbane or Jayapura hears a song in a language he does not understand and feels, without knowing why, that the fight for West Papua did not end in 1969, that the struggle for Melanesian freedom has simply moved offshore, island by island, atoll by atoll, coral head by coral head.
The light has not gone out yet.
If you are reading this, the light reached you.
Now what will you do with it?
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