Octo Mote is a West Papuan journalist and academic currently living in exile in the United States. He is a former bureau chief of Kompas magazine (Jayapura).

In 1999 Mr Mote acted as mediator in a dialogue between the Indonesian government and the “Group of 100” West Papuans tasked with discussing the province’s future. As a result of his involvement, Mr Mote was threatened by the Indonesian military. He fled West Papua in fear of his life and arrived in the US in 1999.

Since then Mr Mote has been involved in a major campaign lobbying policymakers in the US Congress and US State Department, raising issues of West Papuan self-determination and human rights.

Mr Mote served as Visiting Fellow at Cornell University (1999-2002) and Visiting Fellow at the Genocide Program, Yale University (2000-2006), where he compiled a Genocide Data Base on West Papua.

Mr Mote is one of the founders and is on the Board of Directors of the Indonesian Human Rights Network, based in Washington DC, Co-founder and on the Board of Directors of the Papua Resources Centre, the RFK Memorial Human Rights Centre (Indonesia Support Group) and the American West Papuan Action Network. He also works with religious based organization such the Catholic Peace and Justice office, Mennonite Church and US Council of Churches.

Mr Mote has also been involved in facilitating the Papuan leaders reconciliation meetings, in Singapore (2000) and in the Netherlands (2003).