Benny Wenda

Benny Wenda is a West Papuan tribal leader and an international lobbyist for the independence of West Papua from Indonesia. He lives in exile in the United Kingdom.

Benny Wenda in 2008

Quotes

• We’re sick and tired of these stories. The reason they keep using the word ‘cannibal’ about us is because they think we’re savages. It’s like calling Germans today Nazis because of their past, or Britain a land where witches are burned at the stake, of child slavery and public executions. It’s just lazy, racist journalism.
  • Survival and tribal people denounce ‘ludicrous’ cannibal claims

• If you fell the trees then you destroy human culture as well as the birds of paradise. People depend on the forest and the forest has always depended on us. We are as one.
  • As forests are cleared and species vanish, there's one other loss: a world of languages