Let's not celebrate the 40 years since Indonesia took over West Papua

May 1 2003 marks the 40th anniversary of the 1963 Indonesian take over of West Papua, the western half of the island of New Guinea. Whatever Jakarta may claim about its right to this vast Melanesian territory, it is very doubtful that there will be much cause for celebration among the West Papuan people to mark their four decades of occupation.

First under Sukarno, then General Suharto, Indonesia has tortured and killed countless thousands of West Papuan people while systematically robbing them of their land and rich natural resources. At the same time a deliberate policy of transmigration has sought to make the indigenous people a minority in their own land by bringing in hundreds of thousands of settlers from other parts of the Republic.

For a brief period following Suharto's downfall in 1998 there seemed to be the possibility that a new era of openness might emerge throughout Indonesia. For the West Papuans this meant that for the first time since 1963 they were at last able to begin expressing their true hopes and aspirations.

The culmination of this in June of 2000 was the Papuan Peoples' Congress, a peaceful gathering of thousands of West Papuans from across the country. They ended their historic session with a resolution that rejected Indonesian sovereignty and called for an act of Papuan self-determination to take place under the auspices of the United Nations. Importantly this took place less than a year after the UN-organised referendum in East Timor.

Since then, particularly under current Indonesian President Megawati, Jakarta has returned to its familiar tactic of repression and violence in its continuing efforts to stamp out West Papuan nationalism.

In November 2001 Papuan Congress leader Theys Eluay was murdered by Indonesian Special Forces (Kopassus) troops. An advocate of non-violent Papuan nationalism, his killers were sentenced last month to a derisory three to three and a half years in prison.

In response, the engagingly candid Indonesian Army Chief of Staff General Ryamizard Ryacudu commented: "I don't know, people say they did wrong, they broke the law. What law? Okay, we are a state based on the rule of law, so they have been punished. But for me, they are heroes because the person they killed was a rebel leader."

These "heroic" elite troops that the general is so proud of beat, tortured and finally garrotted an unarmed middle-aged man in poor health.

Meanwhile it's business as usual in West Papua. Last week Elsham, the Papuan human rights group reported that ten villages around Wamena in the highlands had been destroyed by the Indonesian army, apparently in retaliation for a fatal attack on a military compound in which some weapons were stolen. The attackers have not yet been officially identified, but nine suspects subsequently arrested by the police were in fact Indonesian soldiers.

So how was this allowed to happen? Why did the western half of New Guinea end up effectively as a colony of Indonesia instead of an independent state like so many other former European possessions the world over? The answer is one that the United Nations and many of its key members including the US and Australia would like to forget.

When the Netherlands pulled out of Indonesia in 1949 they remained in West Papua on the grounds that the Melanesian Papuans had little in common with the Asian Indonesians. Instead, the Dutch slowly began to prepare the country for independence, initially in conjunction with Australia which controlled the eastern half of the island. But while Australian New Guinea became the independent state of Papua New Guinea in 1975, the West Papuans were to endure a very different fate.

Outraged at the idea of an independent West Papua, Indonesian President Sukarno turned to the Soviets for arms and threatened to invade the Dutch colony. In 1962, under pressure from the US, who wished to appease Sukarno and keep him away from Moscow, the Dutch gave in. They agreed to sign a treaty with Jakarta handing West Papua over to a temporary UN administration - but only on condition that self-determination would take place, "in accordance with international practice", within six years.

In the event, the UN pulled out seven months later without any consultation with the Papuans and handed them over to Indonesia. As one senior UN official commented at the time: "That there will ultimately be quite serious resistance to the Indonesians is, I think certain, therefore from the point of view of expediency it behoves the UN to depart as soon as the Indonesians are in fact thick enough on the ground."

When a small UN team returned in 1968 to help Indonesia prepare for the promised act of self-determination, the Papuans had already experienced five years of Jakarta's rule. As one visiting American diplomat noted, the Indonesians had "tried everything from bombing to shelling and mortaring, but a continuous state of semi-rebellion persists."

Aware of its deep unpopularity, Jakarta declared in January 1969 that a referendum was impractical because the people were too "primitive". Instead, they selected 1,026 Papuans to act as representatives for the whole population. Rather than protest, the UN chose to collaborate. As a consequence, in July and August 1969, the hand-picked Papuans were paraded in front of a selection of international diplomats, UN officials and journalists who looked on while these "representatives" unanimously declared their love and loyalty for Indonesia.

Despite the fact that the whole process bore no relation whatsoever to an act of self-determination, there was little international interest. Writing in 1968, one British official commented: "I cannot imagine the US, Japanese, Dutch, or Australian governments putting at risk their economic and political relations with Indonesia on a matter of principle involving a relatively small number of very primitive peoples."

Another British diplomat in New York reported: "the great majority of United Nations members want to see this question cleared out of the way with the minimum of fuss as soon as possible ... the [UN] Secretariat, whose influence could be important, appear only too anxious to get shot of the problem as quickly and smoothly as possible."

US diplomats in Jakarta echoed this, commenting in October 1968: "It would be inconceivable from the point of view of the interests of the UN as well as [Indonesia] that a result other than the continuance of West [Papua] within Indonesian sovereignty should emerge."

In London, a 1969 Foreign Office briefing paper noted: "Privately, however, we recognize that the people of West [Papua] have no desire to be ruled by the Indonesians who are of an alien (Javanese) race, and that the process of consultation did not allow a genuinely free choice to be made."

Meanwhile, according to their British colleagues in the mid-1960s, the attitude of Jakarta-based Australian diplomats towards West Papua had been "one of extreme caution verging on embarrassment. Their main concern is 'not to get involved' since this is the one issue that could seriously jeopardize Indonesia/Australian relations."

Despite this, Canberra showed in 1969 that it would get involved - as long as Jakarta was doing the asking. De-classified documents reveal that when Australian officials detained two prominent West Papuans shortly before the "Act of Free Choice", they did so almost certainly in response to a request from Indonesian Foreign Minister Malik.

It seems that the two Papuans had been on their way to New York to present a petition to the UN from their people calling for independence. Malik feared that this could "stimulate defiance and seriously upset the management of conduct of the Act of Free Choice." Thanks to Canberra they never completed their journey.

In the end, despite protests from some African states led by Ghana, the UN General Assembly simply voted in November 1969 to "take note" of the Papuan "vote" and with that the UN washed its hands of the whole business. Significantly perhaps, at the time no Pacific island states yet had the opportunity to vote at the UN.

As this 40th anniversary comes and goes it can only be hoped that the UN, and those states with a particular responsibility, will turn their attention at last to finding a genuine and just solution to the tragedy and betrayal of the West Papuan people.