["The United Nations and the Indonesian Takeover of West Papua, 1962-1969: The anatomy of betrayal" by John Saltford. Review by Julian Evans.]

With the spotlight abruptly taken off the United Nations on 17 March, we will never know how its alternative to a US-sponsored invasion of Iraq would have turned out. Belligerence would doubtless have been reached more slowly, and for that reason alone many millions of Arabs and westerners have cause to condemn the sidelining of the UN.

Yet after reading John Saltford's impressive analysis of an earlier UN mediation, we could be forgiven for thinking differently about the organisation we look to as our guarantor of justice. We could be forgiven, for example, for thinking that the UN was only sidelined because this time the foreign policy aims of the United States were too aggressive to be disguised. If President Bush had shown more subtlety, he could have got everything he wanted in Iraq, and the UN to rubber-stamp it.

The background to this book is that of decolonisation and America's postwar campaign for influence in southeast Asia. After the collapse of the Dutch East Indies, Dutch New Guinea (as West Papua was then known) should have been a candidate for self-determination. Its people's Melanesian cultural roots gave them nothing in common with their Indonesian neighbours.

But Achmed Sukarno, as President of the new Indonesian Republic, was determined to hold on to West Papua, and President Eisenhower supported him, up to a point. "A strong Indonesia," Eisenhower declared, "would provide the essential barrier to the spread of communism in the East" – though regional rebellions against Sukarno were also being exploited by Washington, whose objective, as Saltford quotes from A. and G. Kahin's Subversion as Foreign Policy, was to "eliminate the Communist Party, weaken the army's strength in Java, and drastically clip the wings of, if not fully remove, President Sukarno". (Try substituting Ba'ath for Communist, Baghdad for Java, and Saddam for Sukarno – are you getting this?)

The Dutch were unwilling to fight a war they could not win, and Kennedy followed Eisenhower's line. Portents of large mineral and oil deposits fortified Indonesian and US resolve. In 1962 U Thant, UN Secretary-General, was told to appoint a US diplomat, Ellsworth Bunker, to mediate, and in August of that year, under this cloak of UN impartiality, the New York Agreement was wheeled out. This provided for a temporary UN administration of West Papua, with interim control passing to Indonesia on 1 May 1963; a clause of astonishing offhandedness that did not include the words "plebiscite" or "referendum' stated that the Papuan people were to be consulted about their future no later than 1969.

West Papua is the first instance we have of the UN administering a territory, and it provides comparisons with later UN administrations in, for example, Kosovo. One obvious parallel is the extent of pressure that can be brought to bear by the United States for the UN to come up with the desired US solution.

From Saltford's evidence, however, the UN's own attitude was suspect: it was necessary to give the appearance of seeking Papuan self-determination, but from UN headquarters it was impatiently viewed as impractical.

Thus in April 1968, when the Bolivian diplomat Fernando Ortiz Sanz was appointed UN representative in West Papua, he was given only 16 staff to help oversee the West Papuans' "Act of Free Choice", for a territory the size of Spain (compare this to the 1000 UN staff sent to East Timor to oversee its referendum).

Ortiz Sanz comes in for plenty of justified criticism here. As UN representative he effectively sleepwalked West Papua into annexation by Indonesia. From a population of nearly a million Papuans the final vote in August 1969 was carried out among only 1026 "representatives" of regional councils, who under well-documented intimidation by the Indonesian military voted unanimously for integration.

At one regional vote a journalist told Ortiz Sanz that young Papuans protesting outside a voting hall were being thrown into trucks and driven away by Indonesian soldiers. Ortiz Sanz replied: "Our job is to see what happens inside." The most disgraceful aspect of this is that his attitude was corporate policy. Narasimhan, for example – U Thant's deputy – knew the vote was a sham, and is on record as saying that he didn't care.

Saltford's book, which ought to be required reading for UN officials and international law students, is based on declassified US, Dutch, British and Australian papers, plus UN archives declassified at his request. Within the constraints of his analysis he rightly implies that the need for remedy is urgent – if only because for more than three decades these matters were not raised because the UN General Assembly legalised Indonesia's occupation.

A year ago international efforts were begun to urge Kofi Annan to review the UN's role. He has not done so yet. What about the Papuans? Nearly 40 years of violent repression by their Indonesian masters, including bombing and strafing of villages, have resulted in at least 100,000 Papuan deaths.

The Papuans have been prevented in every way from determining their future. They haven't benefited anything like appropriately from the natural riches of their territory.

One of the most interesting pieces of evidence Saltford unearths is the testimony of one Ian Morgan, Third Secretary at the British Embassy in Jakarta in 1968, who after a visit to West Papua reported that of the 100 Papuans he had spoken to, exactly 100 "made it clear they all wanted freedom".

His report also stated that an American company, Freeport Sulphur, had recently "struck it rich" in the Papuan highlands and was busy concealing the extent of its find in order to keep share prices low while it organised large-scale insider dealing. 35 years on, the Freeport mine sits on the largest gold reserves on Earth – and has recently [NB March 13] been obliged to admit to US authorities that it has been paying $4-$6 million a year to the Indonesian Army for protection (payments first revealed by this writer 3 years ago).

Which gives an idea of what is truly at stake here – not for the Papuans, for whom the question is their land and human rights, but for the Indonesians, Americans and other 'investors' in their territory. Money, since the Dutch monopolized the clove trade in the 17th century, has flowed out of these colonies like a current in the Arafura Sea. In that respect, brown on black colonialism is indistinguishable from its predecessor.