Konservasi
WEST PAPUA SYNOPSIS
By WPNews Europe
Sep 8, 2005, 06:55

In geological and ecological terms the Australian land mass consists of Tasmania, the Australian mainland, and the Island of Papua which some eople also know as the island of New Guinea.

It is estimated the three sections were separated just several thousand years ago, long after it had been settled by various indigenous Australian Pacific peoples. Unlike the vast arid mainland, the tropical island of Papua is rich in fresh water with around six meters of rain annually, although species of wallabies, tree kangaroos, and echidna are still endemic to Papua.

As a result, the indigenous people of Papua have for tens of thousands of years been farmers, long ago having developed farming techniques and crops which could coexist with their rain-forests. Some Melanesian trade goods were sold across the world.

To the west of Papua pass the Mollucas islands, are the Celebes and other islands of Asia; and it was to these islands that Europeans first came in search of the farms that produced the nutmeg and other spices. The people of the Celebes having been middlemen in the sale of these spices had strong fiscal reasons for telling the Europeans that Papua and the Mollucas were populated cannibals and headhunters, of dark skin and fuzzy hair who were fierce warriors and too primitive to trade.

Today 500 years later, these myths are still being told by the mining companies and others who have a fiscal interest to belittle the Melanesian peoples.

Although the Dutch did claim the Western half of Papua for itself in Europe, theirs was a benign presence and had its greatest impact by the Dutch Missionary schools. By the 1930s graduates from a teachers college began talking of West Papua's need to form a unified identity and government which

could protect their vast cultural interests of around eight hundred cultures speaking three hundred languages.

Then in 1936 a Jean Jacques Dozy working for NNGPM (Nederlandsche Nieuw Guinea Petroleum Maatschappij) came to explore West Papua for mineral resources; unknown to the Papuan people and unknown to the colonial government, NNGPM was in fact 60% controlled by Standard Oil and the reports would be sent to the US and kept secret from Dutch authorities. Tragically Dozy discovered the world's richest gold &copper deposits were together in West Papua, only the local population and the Dutch administration stood between the Rockefeller's Standard Oil and this potential gold mine.

From 1945 the Rockefeller family had donated funds to the United Nations, and the UN soon began a campaign to create a new nation called Indonesia. The Javanese people had for decades been concerned that without due care and protections, such a nation could quickly fall into the hands of another warlord class. Against Dutch objections in December 1949 a Javanese militant.

radical named Sukarno and his militia were included in the sixteen independent states of the Indonesian federation called the 'United States of Indonesia'. Within a month it became clear to the others that Sukarno intended to absorb their States into his Republic, an act of aggression which he completed by July 1950 while the UN remain silent.


When Japan in 1945 had appointed Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta to lead their Indonesian independence committee, the committee had quickly decide that
they should lay claim to all of the lands which had ever been under Dutch
administration, including not only Dayak peoples Borneo and the Celebes, but the Melanesian islands of the Mollucas and Western Papua.

Having taken possession of the sixteen States including the Mollucas islands, Sukarno again pressed for West Papua to become a Indonesian possession. Being unaware of the mineral wealth of West Papua, the Dutch business sector wishing to protect their investments from being nationalised by Sukarno, also applied pressure for the Hague to surrender the people of West Papua and their lands to Indonesia.

Then in March 1959 the New York Times published an article revealing the Dutch government was now searching for the source of the alluvial gold which had been flowing into the Arafura Sea, that source was the gold and copper deposit which Dozy had discovered in 1936. By 1st February 1960 a Standard Oil subsidiary called Freeport Sulphur signed a contract with the East Borneo Company for the mining of the copper in Dutch controlled West Papua.

In the same year, local elections had been held across West Papua, and in early 1961 a national parliament had been elected and installed, charged with the design and implementation of full independence of West Papua within ten years. Shortly after the aeroplane death of UN Sec. Gen. Dag Hammarskjold in September 1961, the United States with a coalition of Islamic States petitioned for the administration of West Papua to be transferred to Indonesia. On the 1st December all Dutch posts rose a new West Papuan flag, the Morning Star flag, next to the Dutch and played the new national anthem of West Papua. Seventeen days later Indonesia attempted their first military

invasion, a paratroop invasion which failed when the villagers arrested and dis-armed the paratroopers before calling for Papuan police or troops to take the Indonesians away. By the 2nd February 1962 the New York Times was reporting how the West Papuan people had request UN assistance in repatriating another 52 Indonesian sailors from a torpedo boat to Indonesia.

Even though Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States of America, had in 1918 stated, "No right anywhere exist to hand people about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property in a game”- in 1962 President John F Kennedy did precisely this when he traded the people of West Papua to Indonesia to buy the good will of Indonesia (see U.S. Dept. of State, Foreign Relations, 1961-63, Vol XXIII, Southeast Asia http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/frus/summaries/950306_FRUS_XXIII_1961-63.html).

Worse was that this trading of a people and their ancestral homelands was done in secret and without the knowledge or permission of any Papuan council (see ftp://ftp.halcyon.com/pub/FWDP/Oceania/jfkpapua.txt ).

Since the United Nations escorted the Indonesian military into their occupation of West Papua, the Indonesian military has harvested the rain forests for their milling plants, sold mine licenses to Freeport and other companies; and used US military aid and training to conduct aerial bombings and attempted programs of genocide and ethnic cleansing as have been documented by the Yale Law School (see http://www.law.yale.edu/outside/html/Public_Affairs/426/westpapuahrights.pdf ), and the Robert F Kennedy Center for Human Rights ( see http://www.rfkmemorial.org/CENTER/vaw_report.htm ) on a scale which exceeds that inflicted by the Indonesian military upon the people of East Timor.


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