Around 1978/79 I used to catch the 343 bus to work in the southern suburbs of Sydney. At that time I was working for a company that had the double distinction of (then) being both the world’s 9th biggest multinational corporation and the world’s 1st biggest industrial environmental vandal. On this particular day I was sitting on the bus thoughtfully reading a book by Australian journalist Jill Jolliff on Timor-Leste called East Timor: nationalism and colonialism. In the course of the bus journey I became aware of an Asian (Chinese-looking) guy next to me trying his hardest to read, over my shoulder as it were, the book I was engrossed in.

Suddenly, uninvited, he said to me, “why are you reading a book on East Timor mate?” Having invited himself into my personal space, he went on to voice his (popularly held view) that East Timor didn’t matter, it was too small, unimportant, no one cared about it. I asked him if he was Indonesian, to which he, shaking his head, quickly demurred. “No one cares”, he repeated and looked away.

At that period it did look to all the world that the cause of Timor-Leste was a lost one. Realpolitik prevailed. Australia (at government level at least) had happily washed its hands of this troublesome issue, with Whitlam giving Suharto the green light for a takeover in their hushed up Yogyakarta meeting in 1974, and his successor Fraser, rubber-stamping it with his Government’s formal recognition in 1976 of Jakarta’s Act of Incorporation of East Timor.

No one, or so it seemed, cared about the micro “half-island”. The neighbours in the region, the great nations of the world, all denied the Timorese the right to self-determination. In circa 1980 the chances of Timor-Leste ever gaining independence appeared to be zero! And yet that is exactly what was achieved by the Timorese in 2002 when East Timor attained nationhood whilst still sharing an island border with Indonesian Timor-Barat (West Timor).

As amazing, even miraculous, as this transformation was, advocates of a similar sovereignty for West Papua, a territory with much more economic viability and substance than Timor-Leste could ever have, cannot be as sanguine about its chances of achieving sovereignty and separation from the Republic of Indonesia.

When the Dutch former colonial masters of West New Guinea tried to counter Indonesia’s takeover of West Irian in 1962, President Kennedy, in seeking to curry favour with the Indonesians as part of the US’s anti-communist Cold War strategy, notoriously dismissed the Papuans’ right to self-determination with the words, (they are) “living, as it were, in the Stone Age” … a self-damning perspective of the indigenous Irianese as being too ‘primitive’ to matter to anyone [D Rutherford in M Slama & J Munro (Eds), From ‘Stone Age’ to ‘Real Time’, (2015)]

Even Jose Ramos Horta, East Timor’s former president and the man who led the decades-long diplomatic fight to turn international opinion in favour of an independent Timor-Leste, has not given his support to the notion of independence for West Papua [‘East Timor’s former president Jose Ramos Horta says West Papua “Part of Indonesia” ‘, (23-07-15), www.mobile.abc.net.au].

Morning Star

The justness of the West Papua’s case for self-determination, a genuine self-determination, not the travesty of one that took place in 1969 (the so-called “Act of Free Will”), has never seemed to grab people, especially in Australia the third party with the greatest self-interest in the large island immediately to its north, in the same way as East Timor did. Its lack of ‘sexiness’ has seen the issue limp along under the radar, never really exciting the passion of progressive elements in Australia, New Zealand, or elsewhere in the West. Of course the media has played a key part in this, not getting the message out of Papua, in large part not being allowed to get the message out – such has been the persistently tight control of Indonesia over press freedoms in the province [‘Press Freedom in Papua?’ (R Tapsell), New Mandala, 11-05-15, www.asiapacific.anu.edu.au].

Notwithstanding the overwhelmingly slim prospects of a sovereign West Papua happening in the foreseeable future, and the sense of fatalism this engenders, it would be instructive to look in some detail at how developments during the period of Indonesian rule over the province reached such a grim outcome.