Editorial
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday, July 14, 1969

Under the patronage of the United Nations, approved by the United States to the extent of a coincidental Presidential visit, warmly endorsed by the Australian Minister for External Affairs, acquiesced in without a murmur of protest by the Communist and Afro-Asian champions of colonial emancipation, the last stage in the betrayal of the people of West New Guinea is scheduled to begin today. There should be no regrettable hitches; everything has been well planned. The Indonesian Government has assembled its thousand stooges whose farcical "consultations" will decide the political future of the 800,000 disenfranchised countrymen; they have been told that only one decision -- union with Indonesia -- will be tolerated and that any other will be regarded as treason; active dissidents are being harried by troops and planes, imprisoned (a former Dutch barracks has been equipped as a concentration camp) or driven into exile.

No amount of word-twisting, of solemn Australian Ministerial explanations that the 1962 Agreement doesn't really mean what it says, of inane Australian Ministerial eulogies of "musjawarah" can change the ugly fact that an unsophisticated island people is being quite deliberately and openly cheated of its right, guaranteed by an international agreement reached under the aegis of the United Nations, to decide its own political future. Amidst a deafening silence from the outside world the black tribesmen of West New Guinea are being condemned to be ruled in perpetuity by an alien brown people who like on them as an inferior race and whose standards of brutality and administrative incompetence have already been thoroughly demonstrated.

In all this, the Australian Government, mutely dangling its bonnet and plume like the poor craven bridegroom in "Lochinvar," cuts the sorriest figure. First, because its position in eastern New Guinea gives it a particular concern and responsibility for the future of the whole island; secondly, because it has allowed its attitude to be dictated solely by what it conceives to be expediency; thirdly, because it has totally failed to grasp the realities of the situation and what its acquiescence is letting it in for.

It is a remarkably and silly and superficial argument, put forward by some apologists for Canberra, that the Australian attitude is right because it is realistic. The "reality," as thus conceived, is that Australia dare not criticize because to do so would impair our relationship with Djakarta and that, in any event, there is no point in criticism because there is no alternative to Indonesian rule.

The true face of reality is rather different. In realistic terms, the basis of our relationship with Djakarta has been far more seriously and permanently distorted by our uncritical acceptance of Indonesia's own melodramatic assessment of the importance to it of West Irian and by the humiliating demonstration that we will do or say nothing to upset the rules of Indonesia. In realistic terms, the alternative to an Indonesian colony is an independent West New Guinea, aided by the U. N., by the Netherlands, and by Australia and looking forward ultimately to political association with an independent eastern New Guinea. In realistic terms, by ignoring the fact that New Guinea is ethnically and geographically an entity that all the "musjawarah" in the world cannot turn Melanesian Papuans into Indonesians, we are helping to prepare the ground for a Papuan irredentist movement and laying up grave trouble in store for New Guinea and consequently for ourselves. Where else in today's world would the dictum be accepted that a people was too primitive ever to be free?