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From: Face
Up (Irish magazine for young people)
January 2002
By:
Clare O’Grady Walshe
Starting
to Remember that West Papua Exists
There
is no doubt that West Papua, which has lost over 100,000 or 10% of
its people to the Indonesian military, is not a priority of either
the Irish government or the international community.
Not yet anyway!
The
question of West Papua has been buried so deep it takes a while to
realize “Irian Jaya, Indonesia” is the same place on the map
as “West Papua”, that West Papua shares the island of New
Guinea with Papua New Guinea, and that both are directly north of
Australia.
Together
with the Amazon, New Guinea has one of the largest surviving
tracts of virgin rainforest in world.
Often described as the lungs of the world, these forests
are being cut down at an alarming rate.
West
Papua was dropped off the United Nations agenda on one of the
darkest days in that international body’s history.
The Netherlands, which controlled West Papua, signed an
agreement with Indonesia at UN headquarters in 1962, giving
de-facto control of West Papua to Indonesia:
the West Papuans weren’t consulted.
The agreement said there would be an “act of
self-determination in accordance with international practice” by
1969.
In
1969, after having killed an estimated 30,000 people, the
Indonesian military regime rounded up 1,025 elders and intimidated
them into voting, in public, to integrate with Indonesia.
The ballot wasn’t secret; less than 1% voted (800,000
Papuans lived there then); the vote was unanimous.
The
UN representative in West Papua at the time, Fernando Ortiz-Sanz,
presented a report of the take-over, which contained at least one
lie, and which did not clearly say that the vote was NOT “in
accordance with international practice”; the countries of the
world took “note” of this report on 19 November 1969, and the
question of West Papua dropped into darkness.
Apart
from two international journalists who were witnesses to the
farce, there has been a deafening silence in political and UN
circles about the betrayal of the Papuans.
Until
today, that is. In a
stunning breakthrough, a former top UN official who was involved
in the take-over, has gone on the record:
“It
was just a whitewash. The mood at the United Nations was to get rid of this problem
as quickly as possible,” said Chakravarthy Narasimhan, a retired
U.N. undersecretary general who handled the takeover.
"Nobody
gave a thought to the fact that there were a million people there
who had their fundamental human rights trampled,” he said in a
telephone interview from his home in Madras, India.
“Suharto
was a terrible dictator,” Narasimhan said.
“How could anyone have seriously believed that all voters
unanimously decided to join his regime?
Unanimity like that is unknown in democracies.”
Former
Irish minister for foreign affairs, David Andrews, followed this
by saying that the international community and the UN should
revisit the “sham” of the “Act of ‘Free’ Choice” (as
the so-called vote was called).
Another
former foreign minister, Dick Spring, added:
“This admission by the former UN official lends
irrefutable credibility to the West Papuan people’s long
struggle for a proper act of self-determination and casts a dark
shadow on the UN itself, which cannot be left stand.”
Irish
solidarity organization West Papua Action is running a campaign to
have the UN re-open the question.
Now
that the door to freedom for West Papua has been unlocked, every
single person’s actions will help to open it wide.
For
more information,
contact
West Papua Action,
c/o
Afri,
134
Phibsborough Road
Dublin
7
Tel.
01 8827563 / 8827581
Mobile.
*353 87 2969742
Email.
wpaction@iol.ie
http://westpapuaaction.buz.org
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