fPcN interCultural:

friends of Peoples close to Nature

‘Mambesak Dance Troop’ plus ‘The Lani Singers’ are opening the Tadpole stage in the Greenfield in Glastonbury, at 3pm on Friday 25 june 2004. Interviews & West Papuan music can be heard on Radio Avalon through out the festival.....If your going, please pop in say hi and show your support. FREE West Papua T-shirts, West Papuan Music CD's and much more will be available. Join them around the camp fire....

“The Mambesak are from West Papua, the western half of the Island of Papua New Guinea. It’s a land of paradise beaches, coral reefs, steaming rainforest ...some of itstill remains un-chartered.

But it’s also got the largest copper/gold mine in the world from which the local population derive no revenue, only a destroyed environment. Instead the profits go straight out to the Western companies that mine it and to the Indonesians who have brutally occupied the region since the Cold war times – from 1960’s to the present date.

The band Mambesak Dance Troop was put together by Arnold Ap in 1975 as a way of galvanising West Papuan nationalism in response to the many atrocities that were being committed by the Indonesian authorities on the Papuan population. The band was subsequently declared illegal by the Indonesian authorities.....but Mambesak played on and the same authorities murdered Arnold Ap in 1984. The band then fled and settled in the Netherlands. All the dancers are refugees.
In their own words:

“It is our duty to promote our beautiful culture.
We are proud to be West Papuan and we dance proudly for our people.”

The Lani Singers, excepted as refugees in the UK are now beginning to get their voices and songs, about their desperate struggle for survival, out to a wider and wider audience. They hope, that through their music and stories, they can invoke, in the international community into action and compel the UN to re-visit the fatally flawed ‘Act of FREE choice’

See a slide show

Please Join us around the camp fire....

Wa Wa & Papua Merdeka