Papuan Faultlines- Part I a Lost World Twice Colonized

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Papuan Fault Lines- Part I: The Lost World Twice Colonized

By John Gorrindo

Indonesian Correspondent, The Seoul Times

Correspondent, themoderntokyotimes.com

The long list of names Papua has been given over the past one hundred years is testament to the interminable struggle and territorial chaos that has plagued the easternmost part of Indonesia. Under Dutch colonial rule, the territory was called Dutch New Guinea or West New Guinea. Once wrested from the Dutch by the emerging republic of Indonesia some sixteen years after World War II, Indonesia’s founding father and first president Sukarno renamed it Irian Barat (West Irian). After deposing Sukarno in 1965, Indonesia’s second president, Suharto, found Irian Jaya (Victorious Irian) a more glorious name lending itself to a greater sense of Indonesian territorial integrity. With the fall of Suharto’s thirty-two year New Order regime- and with some deference to the Papuan people in mind- a successor to Suharto, Indonesian President Wahid, recast the name to simply Papua. And finally, subsequent to Special Autonomy being granted the region by Jakarta in 2002, some members of the homegrown Papuan nationalist movement finally took matters into their own hands, and in an act of defiance, claimed a name of its own- West Papua.

Though the historically convoluted turmoil in West Papua is well understood and amply documented in international bodies such as the United Nations, academic circles around the world, and inside the state departments of the world’s leading capitals, the island’s agonized peoples have received scant attention or support from the international community. Realpolitik determines the world’s crisis agenda, and since World War II, Papua’s struggle to simply avoid annihilation let alone achieve a small measure of autonomy has yet to be put on anybody’s overburdened triage list.

In part this is a measure of how conflicted the world truly is as full-blown...