On a recent post, one commenter asked why I bothered writing about the “piffling matter” of the Quran-hating Pastor Terry Jones being banned from coming into the UK. Shouldn’t I be drawing attention to what’s been happening in Belarus, instead?
Well, I will leave that to those better qualified. What I would like to do is raise the situation in Papua, where three Indonesian soldiers have recently received sentences of between eight and ten months in jail for their involvement in a horrendous case of torture that included holding a burning stick to a man’s genitals. The verdict has perhaps understandably been overlooked in the UK, given the news from Tunisia and Egypt and the Palestine-related WikiLeaks. So let me repeat it.
They were convicted on charges of “disobeying orders”, not torture, and none has been discharged from the army. It’s been reported on in America and Australia, but seems to have escaped the notice of plenty of papers here.
But then Papua and the state with which it shares an island, Papua New Guinea, barely register on the European consciousness anyway – even though Papua was a Dutch and Papua New Guinea a British colony.
This history is just one reason why we ought to be a little more aware of Papua’s misfortunes – not least because the Netherlands’ control of the western half of the island was the justification for its eventual inclusion in Indonesia in the first place. Had the Dutch not been such brutal imperial masters in that part of the world, and had they not been so savage in their attempts to reclaim the East Indies after the Second World War, they perhaps might have been in a stronger position to argue that greater attention should be paid to the wishes of Papua’s inhabitants.
Instead, when the Dutch finally left, the territory formally became part of Indonesia after the laughably named Act of Free Choice (or “Act Free of Choice”, as the Australian academic Ron May put it recently) supposedly confirmed that union was what the Papuans wanted.
Many have referred to what happened since as “slow-motion genocide“: transmigration of large numbers of Javanese whose presence has then created “facts” on the ground; at least 100,000 Papuans dead as a result of the military occupation – about one-sixth of the population; and widespread torture and summary execution. Very little of which, unlike the killings in East Timor, appears to merit more than the odd inch in British newspapers. (For an honourable exception, see this report by George Monbiot in 2005.)
That Papua today is part of Indonesia, a situation that any genuine act of self-determination would have rejected, is a result of European colonisation, as is the border with Papua New Guinea – a division still not recognised by the indigenous people who live there.
This might suggest that we have some historic responsibility to the region and its travails over the last few decades. Or is the reason for our lack of interest – in, for instance, the recent lenient sentences for the Indonesian soldiers – that we view it in the same way as did John F Kennedy’s adviser Robert Komer? Is it for us, too, just “a few thousand miles of cannibal land”?
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