Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

One of the very scarce reports on what is going on in prisons in Papua came earlier from Oswald Iten, a journalist with the Swiss quality paper Neue Zuercher Zeitung, who was imprisoned in Jayapura for twelve days in December 2000. He had allegedly violated the conditions related to his tourist visa (he had been making photographs and since he was a journalist that counted as working without a work permit). I can’t recall that that report got much attention in this country...

"What amazed me most during the UNTEA period was that the Indonesians, after a dozen years of listening to Sukarno's rhetoric about the burning Indonesian desire to liberate their Papuan brothers from their largely imaginary colonial yoke, seemed on nothing so intent as to subject these brothers to a real one. Instead of treating the people with tolerance and understanding, declarations of loyalty (through manifestoes, processions and flag raisings) were forced out of them through intimidation that was from time tot time reinforced by violence - or, in the case of some key figures, by blandishments such as the red carpet treatment in a free trip to Jakarta." Arie Brand

"Dr Abdoh, the Administrator of Papua during the UNTEA administration, was, as we saw, very concerned about anything that might possibly be construed as insulting to Indonesians. He showed considerably less concern about the rights of Papuans, rights the UNTEA administration was supposedly there to protect." Arie Brand

"Early in 1963 Harold Luckham, former British colonial civil servant in Malaya, and then Divisional Commissioner for UNTEA in Fak fak, Papua, got word that his services were no longer appreciated and that he should arrange for his departure. Why was this? The UNTEA administration was, after all, supposed to finish on the first of May that year. Harold Luckham was suspected of the ultimate offence in the UNTEA period: being 'anti-Indonesian'. That is he had reacted as a reasonable human being to unreasonable provocations." Arie Brand

"Those first Indonesian military failures were however neither a reliable indicator for Indonesia's ultimate military plans nor for its capacity to execute these. Soviet and American supplies of new weaponry and the training of Indonesian military personnel in the use of these seemed to turn the military balance in Indonesia's favour." Arie Brand

"The image of the Papuans as a bunch of savage, stone age and illiterate tribes persisted in American ambassadorial reporting from Indonesia right up to the so-called 'act of free choice' in 1969 and helped to gloss over the fact that this so-called plebiscite was an obvious fraud." Arie Brand

"Though the idea of self-determination had been an important factor in keeping Papua, at any case for the time being, out of what was then still the United States of Indonesia, the Dutch were in the first half of the fifties far too optimistic about the time they would have to prepare the Papuans for this. They were thinking in terms of gradual evolution that would require a few generations. In 1954 the New Guinea Government opened a School for Civil Administration in what was then Hollandia (now Jayapura)." Arie Brand

"Was it Sukarno who maintained the conflict or the conflict that maintained Sukarno? Some observers, varying from the one-time American Ambassador to Indonesia, Howard Palfrey Jones, to ex-Dutch Prime Minister and High Commissioner in Indonesia, Louis Beel, have maintained the latter. The Papua issue, they say, was giving Sukarno his oxygen, kept him in the saddle and gave him wellnigh dictatorial powers. However this may be, conflict there was." Arie Brand

"The negotiations that year that the RTC-agreements called for remained utterly futile. The proposal of Indonesia was that sovereignty would be immediately transferred to that country with a vague promise of some kind of autonomous status for Papua in the future. The counter proposal of the Dutch was to transfer sovereignty to the then still existing Union between Indonesia and the Netherlands, leaving the de facto administration in Dutch hands, and to continue negotiations under the aegis of, for example, the United Nations." Arie Brand

"It was now certain that the transfer of sovereignty would in Dutch parliament not get the two third majority required if Papua was not, somehow, excepted from this transfer. The question Papua was therefore put last on the agenda for final negotiations with Indonesia and it almost wrecked the outcome of this so-called Round Table Conference. Both parties decided finally that the status of this region would be decided within a year in further negotiations. For the time being it remained under Dutch sovereignty. The Dutch had however not been able to obtain self-determination for some other regions." Arie Brand

"The fact that Sukarno and Hatta had, in Saigon, a meeting with the Japanese commander in chief, Marshall Terauchi, a few weeks before the declaration of independence of the 17th August 1945, seemed suspicious. This could suggest that the creation of the 'Republic' was in fact a political manoeuvre, a last hurrah, of the Japanese. It is of course true that the 'Commission for the Preparation of the Independence of Indonesia' was formed under Japanese auspices." Arie Brand

"The federalist idea came naturally to the Dutch because their own state had had from the beginning a more or less federalist organisation through the so-called ‘Unie van Utrecht’. Dutch political history of the nineteenth century revolves partly around the attempt to regain this ‘federalist’ set up after the centralising policies of King William I. If a ‘federalism’ of sorts seemed a natural set up for such a tiny country as the Netherlands, this should hold a fortiori for an independent vast archipelago state as Indonesia." Arie brand

"Though about two thirds of the pre-Second World European population of Indonesia was of mixed ancestry, only a minority of those were regarded as true Indo-Europeans. These were in the first place people of whom one of the parents (generally the mother) was fully Indonesian. They were, if they had been officially recognised by their European parent, classified as Europeans. This was not in all respects an advantage. For one thing, they were not allowed to own land, a right that colonial legislation had reserved for truly indigenous Indonesians (land exploiting companies got around this through long term leases)." Arie Brand

"It is well known that presently the region with its rich mineral resources is one of the most important income spinners for the Indonesian government (and the Indonesian army). That was entirely different in Dutch times. The scanty knowledge about mineral resources then encouraged virtually no one to invest in a region the future of which was so uncertain." Arie Brand