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Australian Financial Review  http://www.afr.com.au/<;?xml:namespace prefix = o /><o:p></o:p>

Saturday, October 28, 2000
Asia-Pacific,
By Peter Hartcher

You have heard a great deal more about Israel and Yugoslavia, but if any dispute is going to draw the deployment of Australian troops on the scale of the East Timor operation again it will be neither of these. It will be the one unfolding much closer to home - in the Indonesian province of West Papua, formerly called Irian Jaya.

Like East Timor, it was a dangling relic of European colonialism when the Indonesians decided it should become an embedded artefact of Javanese colonialism instead.

The US endorsed an Indonesian takeover. Washington ordered the Dutch to hand the place over. Why? It was part of a Cold War deal to keep the Indonesians from going communist, and it seemed a small price to pay. John F.Kennedy didn't seem to value the place very
highly: "Those Papuans of yours are 700,000 and living in the Stone Age."

And the Indonesian army has been working to subdue the place ever since - for 37 years.

The Indonesians tried to break the West Papuan will for independence. They tried to ban the local flag. They launched an official campaign to eradicate the chief item of local apparel for
West Papuan men - the penis gourd, or koteka. The effort even had a military codename, Operasi Koteka, as Michael Maher records in his new book, Indonesia: An Eyewitness Account. But Jakarta has failed to impose its will on every point.

West Papua's post-Soeharto drive to break away is just getting started. It has only barely begun to intrude into the periphery of the Australian public consciousness. So far this year Australian newspapers have published 329 stories referring to West Papua. That might sound like a lot, but it compares to some 2,700 pieces on Yugoslavia and 5,200 on Israel.

The events in Yugoslavia and the Middle East are important and gripping but they are, for Australia, what the Japanese would call fires across the water. At such great distances we can sit and watch comfortably. But West Papua, like East Timor, is a neighbourhood issue.

And there is real momentum in West Papua now. Australian policy makers are starting to sweat.

In June the West Papuans convened a national congress to declare that their land had never been a part of Indonesia. In September their case was mentioned in the UN General Assembly for the first time since 1969.

This month marked the beginning of a major new confrontation with the colonial occupier. Jakarta dispatched thousands of extra troops to the province and ordered that the local flag of independence be lowered. Troops and police with guns confronted villagers with bows
and arrows. Indigenous Papuans confronted immigrant Javanese. The outcome: about 40 people were killed and many more wounded.

Elevating the campaign, Nauru and Vanuatu took it up during the week at the South Pacific summit, calling on other countries of the region to recognise the West Papuan right to self-determination.

How does all this involve Australia? The first point is that Australia's main political parties want no part of the conflict. Both Government and Opposition agree that West Papua should remain part of Indonesia. But this political resolve is likely to be tested as the conflict intensifies. Jakarta has taken a harder line against the West Papuans since the nationalist Vice-President, Mrs Megawati Soekarnoputri, chaired a Cabinet meeting on the subject
early this month.

And the West Papuans, who resisted nearly 40 years of Indonesian attempts at repression, are not about to submit now .

If the conflict intensifies, two effects will operate to draw Australia in. One is the so-called CNN effect, named after the US cable TV network that made its name specialising in live coverage of security crises.

The CNN effect is what happens to a country when its citizens are confronted in the comfort of their living rooms with horrifying pictures of inhumanity in a region within reach.

When enough people see enough brutality, an irresistible wave of opinion builds - their government should "do something".

Governments, in crisis after crisis, have been drawn reluctantly to act. East Timor was just such a case.

As a morality play, West Papua already bears some strong similarities to East Timor. Oppressive Indonesian troops from Muslim Java or well-armed militia thugs are the bad guys; brave Christian freedom fighters are the good guys.

The second effect is an indirect one. The West Papuans share a border with their ethnic brethren of Papua New Guinea. The Prime Minister of PNG, Sir Mekere Morauta, does not want to risk a war with Indonesia by supporting the breakaways next door but he explains that he might not have a choice: "My major concern is being reluctantly sucked into it once the conflict takes firm shape."

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