Indonesia and West Papua

Contemporary Review, Feb, 2003 by Charles Foster

THE struggle of West Papuans for independence from Indonesia is shamefully under-discussed. It has claimed the lives of at least 100,000 native West Papuans. Everything Indonesia did in East Timor it is doing in West Papua. Australia and the US State Department periodically mutter unconvincingly that they are watching with concern the situation there. If it can be said with a straight face that the rest of the world has a policy towards West Papua, it is a policy of Nelsonian blindness. West Papua or, as the Indonesians would prefer, Irian Jaya, is a long way from everywhere, and most people are happy to keep it that way. The term Irian Jaya is used throughout this article merely for the sake of convenience. The term 'West Papuan' is used to designate the indigenous people.

West Papua is the easternmost province of the vast Indonesian archipelago. Its native people are dark-skinned, curly haired Melanesians. They are overwhelmingly Christian. They are ruled from Jakarta, five hours flight away, by lighter-skinned, straight-haired Muslims, and they do not like it. They look different, they feel themselves to be different, and they think that they have been cheated into being nominally Indonesian. Historically they have good reasons to think this.

Like the rest of the archipelago, Irian Jaya was originally part of the Dutch East Indies. After the Second World War the rest of Indonesia struggled quite quickly free from the Dutch, but the Dutch hung onto Irian Jaya for twelve years after the independence of the other provinces. Those twelve years were years of bitter and bloody struggle, seen by the watching peoples of Indonesia as the final birth pangs of their state. Because it was the last province to be incorporated into Indonesia, and because of the great cost of its incorporation, Irian Jaya has great symbolic significance for Indonesians. The founding President of Indonesia, Soekarno, felt that Indonesia was incomplete without Irian Jaya. His daughter, the present President Megawati Soekarnoputri, shares her father's mystical feelings about Irian Jaya.

Indonesia's attachment to Irian Jaya is not just mystical, sentimental nationalism. Indonesia would be quite hard-headed enough to forget its war heroes and abandon Irian Jaya if it were not, literally, a goldmine. The province's Freeport mine has the largest gold reserves in the world, as well as vast amounts of copper and silver: it currently generates more than one million US$ profit per day and pays an average of US$ 180 million per year in taxes and royalties. Other big projects are being developed. British Petroleum expects to start production in 2006 at its Tangguh gas plant at Bintuni Bay. It is expected to supply China with up to 3 million tonnes of gas per year.

The world is full of discontented provinces: why should the claims of West Papua be viewed as more than the inevitable petulance of a people who do not tessellate happily with the ruling majority? The first answer is that it never wanted to be part of Indonesia. Its incorporation is a result of the ironically named 'Act of Free Choice' of 1969. This is one of the great scandals of international law.

The conflict between Indonesia and the Dutch was formally concluded with the New York Agreement of 1962, negotiated under the auspices of the United Nations. The Dutch had been resolute in these negotiations, insisting that whatever else happened in the rest of the archipelago there must be self-determination for Papuans. The New York Agreement embodied a provision that, although Irian Jaya would be administered in the interim by Indonesia, within six years of the Agreement, Indonesia would determine and act on the will of Papuans. If they wanted independence they would have it.

When 1969 came, the Indonesians decided that a referendum was impracticable. So they selected 'representatives' of the Papuan communities, bussed them over to Jakarta, and, hey presto, the representatives unanimously declared that Papuans wanted to be grafted into and ruled by Indonesia. This laughable outcome has been mocked and lamented by all objective commentators, but it was endorsed by the United Nations in Resolution 2504. The United Nations is not good at acknowledging it has made mistakes, and its continued refusal to repudiate this Resolution remains a significant obstacle to a just solution in Irian Jaya.

The other reason to take the Papuan claim to independence seriously is that the experiment in integrating the province into Indonesia has demonstrably failed. Only the force of Indonesian arms keeps it attached.

Native West Papuans are almost unanimous in their opposition to continued Indonesian rule. They differ about the means of shaking the Indonesians off, but shaken off they agree they must be. The brutality of Indonesian rule is itself an eloquent indicator of the injustice of Indonesian occupation: welcome rulers, secure in their knowledge of their people's support, do not need to bum villages, assassinate independence leaders, beat demonstrators to death or manipulate the outcome of court hearings in which the conduct of state officials is questioned.