Viva West Papua?

In the film ‘V for Vendetta’, the freedom fighter V urges his fellow countrymen to rise up against tyranny and oppression in a futuristic totalitarian Britain. V also reminds one of the lead characters in the film that, “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”

In the case of the 43 Papuans who fled their province for Australia in January, “the people” certainly were afraid of their government. However, I have also been somewhat nonchalent over the recent granting of temporary protection visas (TPV) to the 42 Papuan refugees (decision is still pending for the 43rd member), who incidently arrived in Melbourne today – nearly a month and a half after they were intercepted off Cape York Peninsula in far northern Queensland on 18 January after journeying across the Torres Strait in a traditional outrigger canoe. (Read the article in 'The Age' today)

Australia, being a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, is obligated under international law to provide asylum to refugees who have been found to have met the requirements of Article 1 of the Convention, which defines a refugee as “someone who has fled and is outside his country of nationality and cannot return home due to a well-founded fear of persecution arising from reasons of political opinon, race, religion, nationality or membership of a particular social group.”

I am nonchalent partly because I am caught in a bind myself. On the one hand, here we have individuals whose claims for refugee status have been found to be bona fide (even if they are only on TPVs) but on the other hand, I am still undecided as to the issue of West Papua and its independence movement.

Formerly called Irian Jaya up until 2002, Indonesia divided and renamed the province into West Irian Jaya, a smaller province consisting of the Bird's Head Peninsula and the surrounding islands in the far western part of the original Irian Jaya province and the remaining province bordering PNG as Papua in 2003. This split was largely opposed in Papuan as it was seen as an attempt to quell the separatist movement. The term ‘West Papua’ however, is generally preferred among Papuan nationalists who hope to cede from Indonesia and become an independent country.

Indonesia’s stability as whole certainly would be at stake here if it allowed a further breakup of its vast nation, especially only after East Timor’s successful secession in recent years. Faced with the Aceh separatist movement on the western flank of its archipelago and the Free West Papua movement on the east, Indonesia also has to keep a lid on its already existing precarious internal socio-economic, political and ethnic conflicts in its various provinces.

Australia’s Foreign Affairs White Paper also clearly stipulates that it is in Australia’s own fundamental national interest that Indonesia remains stable. The Australian Government, through Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, has also repeatedly reaffirmed its support of Indonesia’s current territorial integrity recently. That certainly puts the Australian Government in an awkard position in light of recent developments.

For now, the Australian Government will try and walk the middle ground, arguing that DIMA’s granting of refugee status to these 42 Papuans will not undermine Australia’s commitment to also preserving Indonesian territorial integrity, that they are two unrelated issues that can be handled separately. I am somehow not fully convinced.

After all, one of its own departments has granted refugee status to these Indonesian citizens, which sends a strong message of legitimacy to their claims of persecution to the rest of the West Papuan nationalists in Papua province, which in turn can only serve to bolster - not diminish - the legitimacy and struggle for West Papuan independence in the eyes of the world. It also remains to be seen whether DIMA's decision to grant TPVs to this first group of West Papuans will spur other West Papuan nationalists to attempt to also seek protection in Australia - not exactly a situation the Howard Government would want to encourage.

Although I feel that Irian Jaya or Papua (or Dutch New Guinea) should never have been annexed and ceded to Indonesia in the first place more than 40 years ago, what has happened has happened and the present reality is that the international community by and large does recognise Papua to be a integral sovereign part of Indonesia.

Australia certainly cannot afford another new state to emerge within its neighbourhood – well, maybe it can, but it is certainly not desirable, economically speaking in terms of the eventual assistance and financial aid it will have to provide – as it does now with East Timor and several of its other Pacific island neighbours including PNG and the Solomon Islands. Neither is it desirable for its own national security reasons and for the stability and security of the South East Asian region as a whole either. Australia simply cannot afford to allow Indonesia to fragment further.

And so where does this leave me? Do I support the freedom of a people group whose aspirations and hopes for their own nation have been allegedly squashed, suppressed and persecuted by the Indonesian government or do I support the status quo of preserving a broader stability in regional terms, which has a flow-on economic, financial and security impact on millions of people in this part of the world?

Will the independence push by West Papuans only lead to more bloodshed and destruction? It is one thing to watch people fight for freedom in movies, it is quite another in real life. Is the so-called ‘freedom’ and the freedom to govern oneself really that worth it? Could a compromise not be found between the Indonesian government and the Papuans – just as the Indonesian government appears to have begun doing in recent years – by moving towards granting greater autonomy and self-rule in Papua province?

And so, even though I am sympathetic to the West Papuans’ cause and concerned about the alleged brutality of the Indonesian military on political dissidents, I am undecided on the independence movement. For now, I am not convinced a sovereign West Papuan state of its own is necessarily the panacea. And Australia will have to tread carefully to ensure that whatever actions it takes now and in the near future in regards to Papua won’t come back to bite itself one day or it may find itself in an even more difficult situation than the one it found itself in over East Timor several years ago.