Few have heard of the Indonesian controlled state of West Papua. Even fewer that one of its independence leaders, Benny Wenda, lives in exile in Oxford. Sitting in Wenda’s semi-detached in Marston the divided island of New Guinea seemed incredibly remote; not helped by the snoring toddler on the other sofa. Immediately, however, Benny’s charm and passion for his country’s cause was enough to dismiss any lasting apprehension that I had arrived at the wrong address.

To understand why West Papua has sought independence from Indonesia for decades it is necessary to start from Dutch decolonisation. Indonesia claimed West Papua because “Indonesia looked at West Papua and claimed that as both were former [neighbouring] colonies West Papua was automatically Indonesia’s” – not least, Benny asserts, because of West Papua’s vast natural resources. The Dutch contested this, West Papuans are ethnically Pacific Melanesians rather than Indonesian, and maintained control over West Papua until the early 1960s, when Indonesia played “a very clever game by forcing the West to give West Papua to them, or [they] would join Russia and be Communists in the Cold War. So America pushed the Dutch to give West Papua to the Indonesians, with no West Papuan participation.” Wenda’s sense of betrayal by the West is most apparent when discussing the subsequent independence referendum in 1969. By 1969 Indonesia had already been allowed to take over and suppress West Papua for more than five years. So, with only 16 UN observers in the country, Indonesia intimidated and hand-picked one in twenty of the 700,000 West Papuan electorate to vote. It gave Indonesia the mandate it needed to secure control by deploying the military into every district.

It is against this backdrop that Benny’s direct contact with the Indonesians began. Aged two, the military bombed Benny’s remote highland region, killing much of his family, and forcing his community to flee into the jungle for five years, only returning when conditions became unbearable. It was then, Wenda explains, that he saw for himself “that we were treated a different way: internal discrimination, racism, and lack of freedom of movement with military everywhere… which continues today. With the military raping villagers anytime, all the girls covered their faces in mud to disguise themselves” At school he experienced discrimination first-hand, recounting how on his first day he entered a class with only five West Papuans, “and tried to sit next to an Indonesian girl, smiled at her, and she spat in my face. My reaction was that I was stinky, as a black man and had not washed enough because the Indonesians looked at you that way, as sub-human. Then next morning, I bought a soap and washed three times to make sure I was clean enough so she will be happy … I was really confident and went into the class, but before I put my books down I smiled and she stood up and spat again. The whole class was laughing, I was really upset and declared ‘I am like you, I cannot change my body, this is me’.” Benny attributes this experience to his desire to go to university and ensure the same did not happen to future generations.

On his return from university, he was chosen as Secretary-General of the Koteka Tribal Assembly and represented over 250 tribes. In 2002, however, he was arrested on false charges that he had led an attack on a police station. Defended by Australian and British human rights lawyers he was never found guilty of any crime, but still sentenced to 25 years imprisonment. He escaped after three assassination attempts, and fled to Britain via the border with Papua New Guinea, even though Indonesia deployed hundreds of extra security personnel to recapture him. Benny’s escape and flight into exile provides, surprisingly, one of the few light moments in his tale. After breaking damaged ventilation in the prison toilets, a two week walk across the border and a flight out of Papua New Guinea, he arrived at Heathrow speaking no English only to be almost deported immediately. Placed in a small holding room, fortunately he overheard “an Africa guy, who immigration questioned, say ‘asylum’ and immediately take serious notice of him… and so thirty minutes later I just said it, not properly, but “Salum”, or something, and they began laughing and saying, “Why didn’t you tell us?” It was not the end of Benny’s problems. On passing security, he failed to recognise a man holding a sign for ‘Benny Wenda’. “I thought this was Indonesia waiting, and I ran back inside but heard ‘Hey Benny it’s me’ and I turned around and jumped over the barrier and cried, and everyone thought I was a crazy man for running from this friend waiting for me.” Reunited with his family, after they too had to be hidden and smuggled out of West Papua, they have restarted their activism from Oxford.

Benny’s ‘Free West Papua Campaign’ seeks to raise awareness of the human rights situation in West Papua. Particularly concerning is the fact that West Papuans are now a “minority in their own land.” He controversially attributes this demographic change not just too Indonesian migration and settlement but also what he describes as “a slow genocide [as] Indonesians are using many methods to kill West Papuans.” Beginning with the imprisonment and deaths of many Papuans in their flight into the jungle it has now, Wenda claims, developed into deliberately spreading HIV/AIDS. Infected Indonesian prostitutes are, allegedly, placed in villages and logging and military camps so that they can be hired by unknowing West Papuans in return for valuable natural resources. With charities and monitoring groups banned from West Papua there is no independent corroboration, but a recent report showed that the HIV infection rate has, shockingly, increased by 30% in just four months. Wenda also wants to curb Indonesian persecution of West Papuan culture. He portrays a nation under attack, but not defending it “would see the death of the culture and languages. The struggle is about cultural identity and environment… as the forest is like our supermarket but they have been polluted by multi-nationals working with the Indonesians.” Western multi-nationals are extremely active in the resource rich region, with the mining conglomerate Rio Tinto and British Petroleum singled out. According to Wenda, Rio Tinto argue they are “just investing, but own a 45% share in West Papuan mining, in the middle of a genocide, and are funding directly or indirectly the Indonesian military…who use [the revenue] to abuse the West Papuans.” Wenda wants “multi-nationals like Rio Tinto and BP to admit what is happening. [They] cannot just ignore human rights abuses, especially guarded by Indonesian military.” Damningly WikiLeaks recently published a US embassy cable from Jakarta, showing that the USA has serious concerns about rampant corruption and human rights abuses in the region.

With the eternally optimistic Wenda, it seemed only right to conclude by asking him what he thought the future held for the troubled region. Unsurprisingly, he was hopeful. His lobbying is gaining international political support whilst in West Papua mass protests have recently broken out. In Benny’s words, “West Papua is beginning to wake up… a lot of people are getting confident after what has happened in the Middle East. Indonesia has kept my people as prisoners for a long time, and they are deciding to free themselves.” There is no doubt that if an independent West Papua does emerge, Benny Wenda will be at its heart.

The response to Ed Miliband’s call for the dismissal of the justice secretary, Ken Clarke, has been almost unanimous. On this week’s Question Time the biggest round of applause came when a member of the audience attacked Miliband for making the issue personal. This suggests that the general public is still highly unsympathetic towards cheap political point-scoring, and that it sees Miliband’s statement as a typical example of this.

Ken Clarke’s comments about rape last week were, of course, serious and needed to be corrected quickly. But essentially they were misconstrued and largely exaggerated by the national media. Sadly, the Labour party leadership jumped all too willingly on the bandwagon. Harriet Harman’s letter to Clarke, published in the Guardian on Monday, was lightweight at best and proved that she did not truly believe there to be an enormous ideological chasm between herself and her addressee.

“You should support, not undermine,” she professed, “the extraordinary and dedicated work of bringing rapists to justice.” I find it difficult to believe that Ken Clarke would have disagreed.

Ed Miliband’s declaration in the House of Commons last week when Clarke’s comments were broadcast on BBC Radio 5 Live that “the justice secretary should not be in his post at the end of today” was rash and intended merely to get one over on the coalition government.

It was exactly the kind of stunt that Miliband promised he would stand above when he became leader of the Labour party. And the simple fact remains, the opposition leader really doesn’t need to get involved in this style of politics. He should, at this point in time, be looking rather to how he can make a strong challenge to David Cameron.

With new figures out this month demonstrating that Britain’s economy has not grown at the rate the coalition were hoping, this would be the perfect time for Miliband to speak up and undermine the economic policies of Cameron and George Osborne. But where is he?

In April, Johann Hari wrote an article in The Independent which highlighted the areas where Ed Miliband needed to improve in order to catch the attention of the British public. Referring to the members of his own family, Hari claimed that Miliband “hasn’t said or done anything that has jutted into their stressed and busy lives”.

And this is the problem. Whether we like it or not, politics is now more than ever a case of getting your voice heard in soundbites, catchy one-liners and emotional appeals. We only need to look as far as the various titles given to the bulk of the British population over the last year to see that attitude in action – “Alarm-clock Britain” and “The Squeezed Middle” are just a couple of the best.

Ed Miliband is doing well in the polls, but he still needs to get himself ‘out there’. He also needs to start talking about his policies. In an article he wrote for the Guardian last week, he began by saying, “I said when I became leader of the Labour party that the first stage of my task was to go out and listen”. I think he has been listening long enough now; it is about time we heard something from him for a change.

Ask the average individual what he thinks about animal testing and you’d probably expect a fairly standardized response: Something along the lines of, “it may not be ideal, but it is necessary”. Many people see such testing as a necessary evil, justified by the advances made in modern healthcare. Perhaps.

The question that is all too often missing when we consider such “necessary evils” concerns where we draw the line, and how that line is policed. With regards to the former, animal rights groups have regularly concentrated on the controversial practice (common to Oxford University laboratories) of vivisection. It doesn’t take much research to understand why.

Vivisection, for those unlearned in the field of animal testing, is “the action or practice of performing dissection, or other painful experiment, upon living animals as a method of physiological or pathological study”.

Its brutality is perhaps better expressed in the sobering accounts of animal rights groups such as Animal Aid, who recollect primates having metal coils inserted into their skulls, cats having their eyelids sewn together, and dogs having ribs removed and blood vessels closed up during heart experiments.

The cruelty implied by such experiments suggests the need for clear and police-able limits to animal testing, and in particular, research vivisection.

Whether the limits that currently exist are satisfactory is, at best, questionable. Certainly the quantity of such experiments seems excessively large, with animal rights group SPEAK estimating that the opening of Oxford University’s new vivisection laboratory 3 years ago will mean that 150,000 animals will be experimented on annually.

If these figures are even close to accurate, they surely beg the question of whether the animal welfare costs of such experiments are being appropriately internalized.

Evidence in this field does not make for pleasant reading. A 2003 study by Dr William F. Crowley Jr. of the Harvard Medical School found that, in a total of 25,000 articles surveyed featuring animal testing, only about 2% contained some claim to future applicability.

Too frequently, the relevance of scientists’ findings does not justify the cruelty that is implied by their methods. This is not lost on critics of animal testing, who cite case studies of Parkinson’s disease being tested on primates upon whom the disease has a significantly different effect as to that evidenced in humans.

Writing from a non-medical perspective, the chances of any important learning occurring through such research appear overly-optimistic given the suffering such experiments inflict.

The failures in the existing use of animal testing in scientific research suggest, at the very least, the need for greater accountability in the application of vivisection techniques.

The extensive animal welfare costs of such analyses imply that we should not permit gross failures, of the like that characterize some experiments. Particularly striking in this respect is the study in which 30% of the tested animals died during the vivisection process, only for the scientists responsible to conclude that their small sample size obscured any conclusive findings.

Accountability is fully consistent with animal testing, provided that the results from such tests can be shown to have social relevance. Thus even for those who advocate animal testing as a “necessary evil”, the quest for greater accountability is something that should be strived for, insofar as it prevents animal suffering where its contribution to overall scientific understanding is negligible.

The vast amounts of evidence collected by animal-rights groups of seemingly pointless brutality makes calls for greater accountability – and the increased restraint that such accountability would imply – a necessity.    

Vivisection is a complex issue, one that is difficult to examine free from emotional impulses.  Crucially however, it is an activity that saves human lives – a goal surely the majority would be in support of? Not only that, it prevents the loss of life – both in literal terms and by alleviating the symptoms of debilitating, painful and chronic illnesses.

 Vivisection has assisted in the prevention and treatment of tuberculosis, diabetes, polio, Parkinson’s, disease, muscular dystrophy and high blood pressure.

One in ten children in the UK currently receive treatment for asthma; inhalers – both ‘reliever’ and ‘preventer’ – were developed after work on guinea pigs and frogs.  

Leukemia treatments, including chemotherapy, have advanced massively through animal experimentation: today eight out of ten children diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia survive for at least five years whereas twenty five years ago, seven out of ten children with the disease died within five years.  

The anti-viral rejection medication used in heart and kidney transplants was also developed using animals. The involvement of animals in biomedical research is absolutely essential. However, this use is not undertaken lightly.

Few would advocate the suffering of animals for little actual gain.

Since 1960 the government has pursued a programme of replacement, reduction and refinement – to find humane alternatives wherever possible, to reduce the numbers of animals used and to minimize any pain and distress the animals may experience.  

There have been some notable successes in replacing safety tests.  However, progress is limited and difficult.  This is partly due to regulatory authorities’ cautious approach to safely testing new medicines and other products.  

There seems to be a certain hypocrisy – an unwillingness to allow potentially unsafe products onto the market coupled with a misplaced moralism over animal research.

Approximately three million animals are used each year in animal testing. While this may seem excessive, it is estimated that UK meat and fish eaters consume 2.5 billion animals annually, nearly seven hundred times the number used in research.  Misunderstandings and misconceptions abound the vivisection debate.  

Primates constitute but 0.12% of the animal species used in laboratories and the use of chimpanzees, orang-utans and gorillas is banned in the UK.

Non-medical safety testing makes up only 2% of total procedures and the testing of costmetic and toiletries has been banned since 1998 with an EU-wide ban that came into effect in 2010.

An argument frequently cited to attack vivisection is that the research produces little actual result, as animals and humans are so genetically and biologically different and that diseases humans suffer, are not recreated in other species.  

In acctuality, many veterinary medicines are the same as those used for human patients – antibiotics, pain killers and tranquilisers.  Any differences between the way a disease effects animals may add to our understanding.  If we knew why the mouse with muscular dystrophy suffers less muscle wasting than human patients, we may discover a treatment for this debilitating and fatal disorder.

Emotionally manipulative images of animals in intense pain simply do not reflect reality.  The 1986 Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act safeguards laboratory animal welfare while allowing important medical research to continue.  

These controls are widely regarded as the strictest in the world. Living arrangements must be adequate and species-appropriate.  Anaesthetics are used for all surgery.  Painkillers are given as necessary.  If animals have a painful or fatal disease, scientists are legally obliged to slaughter them humanely before they show severe symptoms.

Few of the immense advances made in the realm of medicine would have been possibly without this necessary pursuit.  

There is a fundamental moral disconnect here, whether you consider human life of greater essence than the lives of animals.  And yet those who deny animal testing as an ethically viable means of research would, I suppose, be unlikely to refuse life-saving medication produced through these very means.