Mike Carlton – Some background for you on the story of those 42 refugees from Papua who were given asylum in Australia last month, provoking that torrent of protest from Indonesia.
In 1969 I was the ABC's Jakarta bureau chief and one of a handful of foreign journalists permitted to visit West Irian, as it was then called, before the much ballyhooed United Nations Act of Free Choice which cemented Indonesian rule there.
A suave Bolivian diplomat, Fernando Ortiz-Sanz, had been dispatched by the UN to run the show. Ostensibly, there was to be a plebiscite in which the Papuan people could vote either for independence or for integration with Indonesia. What ensued was a diplomatic swindle of shameful hypocrisy. The TNI, the army of Indonesia's Soeharto regime, already ruled Irian with an iron fist.
The Netherlands, the former colonial power, had washed its hands of any responsibility. The other foreign governments involved – the Nixon gang in Washington and the John Gorton coalition in Canberra – were mesmerised by the Vietnam War and, with cynical realpolitik, were disposed to let the anti-communist Soeharto do whatever he liked as long as he did it quietly.
A cable from the US embassy in Jakarta to the State Department in May 1969 put the thing in stark perspective: "The Act of Free Choice (AFC) in West Irian is unfolding like a Greek tragedy, the conclusion pre-ordained," it read.
"The main protagonist, the GOI [Government of Indonesia] cannot and will not permit any resolution other than the continued inclusion of West Irian in Indonesia. Dissident activity is likely to increase, but the Indonesian armed forces will be able to contain and, if necessary, suppress it."
Indeed. This was more than good enough for the secretary of state of the day, that champion of democracy, Henry Kissinger. And, as obedient as ever, Canberra shuffled into line.
With the hapless Ortiz-Sanz looking on, the Indonesians rounded up a bunch of Irianese "community leaders", exactly 1022 people from a population of about 1 million who, not surprisingly, voted unanimously to join Jakarta.
The UN rubber-stamped this travesty and the world went away – save for the American Freeport mining company, whose predators set up a vast copper and gold mine which wrought, and continues to wreak, environmental and cultural havoc in Papua. After a decent interval, Freeport quietly hired the odious thug Kissinger as a consultant. Deal done.
The small island of Biak squats off the northern coast of Papua. Its airport was once a staging post on the old KLM Dutch airlines route north from Australia.
There, in 1969, I stepped down from a Garuda airlines DC3 with a squad of TNI minders. A coal black Melanesian airport worker ran towards me across the tarmac, hands outstretched in welcome, grinning broadly and shouting "Oom, oom", the Dutch word for uncle but also a term politely used to address the former colonial masters.
"Orang gila, a madman," one of the minders assured me as some Javanese soldiers frog-marched him away to God knows where and what fate.
Later, in my hotel, a waiter whispered in my ear that he was OPM, a member of Organisasi Papua Merdeka, the Papuan Freedom Organisation. Around midnight, he came to my room and spirited me out a back door, then down a tangle of alleys to a grubby shack where, by the light of a kerosene lamp, I found a small circle of OPM activists, grave and passionate young men who, in Indonesian, Dutch, and broken English, told of arrests and beatings and killings.
Bitterly frustrating for a reporter, I was asked to swear, literally on a Dutch Bible, that I would not reveal that I had met them. If word got out, they would be hunted, tortured and shot, they said. Instead, they gave me letters – a tragic, desperate cry for freedom – and begged me to carry them to the Australian and Netherlands embassies in Jakarta. Which, two weeks later, I did.
I assume those letters disappeared forever into a diplomatic black hole. Carelessly, unforgivably, I have lost the copies I made.
Biak, and Papua, would never be free. Thirty years later, in 1999, the Herald correspondent Lindsay Murdoch filed a story which began thus: "An independent investigation has confirmed a Herald report that Indonesian soldiers massacred Irian Jaya demonstrators and dumped others at sea on the island of Biak last year. The investigation team found at least eight people were shot and 37 others hurt when troops opened fire on unarmed people after they had raised the West Papua independence flag, and that 32 bodies recovered at sea were also victims of military atrocities."
Last Thursday, John Howard lowered his own flag. "I would say to people in West Papua and I would say to any people in Australia who may be encouraging them to come to Australia that that is not something that the Australian Government or, I believe, the majority of the Australian public wants," he told ABC radio.
What an infinite bloody tragedy.