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Why West Papua is paying for East Timor

Melbourne Age   17/12/00
http://www.theage.com.au/news/2000/12/17/FFXNCCZKTGC.html
By ROBERT WOLFGRAMM

The Australian stance is hardly surprising, based as it is on the 
convenience of security and on economic priorities. For Australia and 
Indonesia, it is as you were; for the rest of the Pacific, it is as we 
expect.

Foreign policy is rarely based on moral principle and Downer proves 
that, like his predecessors, he is imprisoned by history and necessity. 

What will disappoint the Melanesian Pacific even more is that, in taking 
this line on Jakarta's claims over an alien people, the Australian 
Government seems to have learnt nothing from its 25-year East Timor 
policy debacle.

What right does Indonesia have to West Papua? Is it ethnic or racial? 
Cultural or linguistic? Is it a religious or historical congruence? It 
is none of these. 

The peoples of Indonesia are distinct from the peoples of Papua. They 
have no grounds, no right, to sovereignty over Papua and its resources. 
West Papua is theirs by historic conquest alone a conquest derived from 
the accident of proximity and occasioned by opportunism because of the 
collapse of regional European colonialism. 

On this illegitimate basis, Indonesia's annexation of West Papua is 
being allowed to stand unchallenged by the only power and close neighbor 
in the region that could possibly help right the wrong.

Strategists in Jakarta must be laughing. Having been on the back foot 
for the past 25 years because of global condemnation of their seizure of 
East Timor, they have now successfully gambled away an economic pawn for 
a knight in shining armor. Because that is what the resource-rich West 
Papuan piece is for Indonesia's precarious economic future.

Australian policy makers cannot have been fooled by Indonesian reticence 
and delay in handing East Timor over to its own people. They surely saw 
what was coming. Jakarta's prolonged bluff on East Timor effectively 
masked its intended campaign for the West Papuan prize. 

If Australia was not play-acting with Indonesia in the theatre that was 
East Timor's struggle for liberation, then it has lost an opportunity to 
interpose a moral alternative in dealing with what was, on the face of 
it, a weakened power. In relation to West Papua, some guidelines for 
autonomy and a timetable to independence could have been laid before the 
Indonesians. 

Instead, while we've been basking in the success of our achievements in 
Dili, the Indonesian “tiger” has been waiting for its real victim in 
Jayapura. 

Both Australia and Indonesia have something to gain by their revived 
rapprochement, but they would be mistaken if they thought the indigenous 
Papuan fighting spirit was anything less than that of the Timorese.

West Papua is an orphan child, disinherited by its European parent and 
harnessed into servitude by a regional one. It is banging on the door of 
Australia, pleading for assistance as it heads toward liberation and 
maturation. By complying with Indonesian wishes, Alexander Downer's 
foreign policy is trying to turn them away. 

What a nice Christmas present for those burying the first martyrs of the 
Morning Star. What wishful thinking on the part of Downer.

Dr Robert Wolfgramm lectures at Monash University's school of political 
and social inquiry. 

Email: opinion@theage.fairfax.com.au