en bit om Indonesia og Vest Papua (vestlige del av New Guinea) fra The
Guardian i dag:
http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/Print/0,3858,3900017,00.html
Knut Rognes
***********************************
Indonesia's island hit list is lengthy
West Papua has been raped and pillaged, just like East Timor
George Monbiot
Thursday September 9, 1999
The Guardian
The west's concern for human rights, the Indonesian government has been
promised, stops in East Timor. If the army stops massacring the East
Timorese, suggests Don McKinnon, the New Zealand foreign minister hosting
the inter-governmental conference, the global powers will turn their backs
on butchery elsewhere. "We do not consider," he told the BBC yesterday,
"any other parts of Indonesia in any way as being the same as East Timor."
The west is still playing geopolitics with Indonesia's people.
There is another occupied territory, whose existence lies beneath the scope
of Mr McKinnon's elevated worldview, but whose story is almost identical to
East Timor's. West Papua, or Irian Jaya as the Indonesian government calls
it, is the western half of the vast island of New Guinea. Holland held on
to it when the rest of the Dutch East Indies became the Republic of
Indonesia, for it lies on a different continent, two and half thousand
miles from Jakarta, and is peopled by a different race.
New Guinea, its Melanesian inhabitants had long demanded, should be allowed
to form a single, independent state. At length, the Dutch and Australians
agreed. But in 1963, after this plan was disputed by the Indonesian
government, the Dutch handed West Papua to the United Nations. In violation
of every principle the UN was established to defend, the US insisted that
it be given to Indonesia. When President Kennedy was asked how the handover
could be justified, he replied: "Those Papuans of yours are some seven
hundred thousand and living in the Stone Age."
I n truth, there were more than 1m West Papuans who, having failed to
master the art of time travel, were living in the 20th century like
everyone else. But Kennedy's racist realpolitik gave the Indonesian
government the green light to pursue its own.
The Indonesian army wasted no time in demonstrating the benefits of
integration. The Papuans trained for political life were rounded up and
kicked to death. Tribal villages were strafed and napalmed from the air,
then machine-gunned from the ground. Detainees were electrocuted and had
nails hammered through their feet. As Papuan men took to the forests armed
only with spears and poisoned arrows, the Indonesian army, equipped by
Britain, France and the US, began a full scale pacification programme.
Girls were raped then killed with a bayonet in the vagina or a stick up the
rectum. Tribal leaders were taken up in helicopters and dropped, alive,
into their villages. The slightest spark of resistance would trigger off
punishment bombings. As vast mineral and timber concessions were handed to
British and American companies, the global superpowers raised not a squeak
of protest.
The United Nations had insisted that Indonesian rule in West Papua could be
ratified only when a full and free referendum had taken place. The
Indonesian government argued that this would be too complicated. Instead,
it insisted, representatives should be chosen to vote on their communities'
behalf. President Suharto announced that anyone who voted against
integration would be guilty of treason. In 1969, 1,025 men selected by the
army were lined up at gunpoint, and the population was recorded as having
unanimously chosen Indonesian rule. The UN left the Papuans to the mercies
of one of the most violent governments on earth.
By the mid-80s, Indonesia had started to apply its final solution to West
Papua. Hundreds of thousands of Javanese people were shipped to the
territory, in order, the governor explained, to give "birth to a new
generation of people without curly hair, sowing the seeds for greater
beauty". The programme was assisted by the World Bank and implemented by
British and Canadian development consultants.
In 1987, working with the photographer Adrian Arbib, I spent six months in
West Papua, traversing the island on foot, documenting Indonesia's
atrocities for our book Poisoned Arrows. We found that the Papuans were
being herded into model villages, while the migrants sent to displace them
from their lands were scarcely better off, dumped far from home without
food, schools or hospitals, and forbidden to return. We saw British
armoured personnel carriers, recently re-equipped for counter- insurgency
by a British company, being sent to quell dissent. We spoke to thousands of
Papuan people, and, apart from a couple of junior officials, failed to find
one who did not want independence.
Since then, hundreds of thousands of acres of forest have been
clear-felled, and many of the most fertile lands have been expropriated for
massive agro-industrial projects. The massacres and torture continue
unabated. Yet, as the calculating Mr McKinnon indicated yesterday, the
Papuans can be sacrificed to help the west save face. Human rights will be
defended only as convenience dictates.
© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 1999
********************************************************