Hamish McDonald – With the near Pacific going pear-shaped on just about every front for Canberra, let us take a look at the crisis that kicked off the year, the Indonesian province of Papua.
It is undoubtedly the most intractable and immediately dangerous of the Melanesian trouble spots, with the risk of drawing us into tension, and even conflict, with our biggest neighbour, Indonesia.
Two new publications on Papua, each by alumni of Australian intelligence outfits, have just arrived, approaching it from very different standpoints. Rodd McGibbon is a former analyst at the Office of National Assessments who spent six years in Jakarta with aid agencies. Now at the Australian National University, he has published a paper called "Pitfalls of Papua" for the Lowy Institute.
Clinton Fernandes is a former Australian Army intelligence officer, now lecturing at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. His Reluctant Indonesians has been published by Scribe Short Books.
McGibbon puts Papua in the context of an overriding strategic importance for Australia to maintain friendly ties with Indonesia. As Papua is part of the founding Indonesian dream, and immensely resource rich as well, any Australian move against Jakarta's sovereignty there would bring dire consequences, of which we got a taste when Indonesia recalled its ambassador after Australia gave political asylum to 42 Papuans.
Pursuing what he sees as the "unrealistic" and "utopian" notion of Papuan independence would put Canberra out on the political limb, where we were before 1962, when Robert Menzies supported the Dutch efforts to keep Papua out of Indonesia.
Fernandes sees Papua as one who has studied Indonesia, but saw its worst side in the militia atrocities run by the Indonesian army, the TNI, to try to stop East Timor's independence. He sees some of the worst TNI characters reappearing on the Papuan scene.
He also worries about getting stuck on a political limb. This is the limb that Canberra found itself on for 24 years, supporting Jakarta's claims to East Timor and trying to play down the endless stream of atrocities going on there.
McGibbon is dubious about the validity of Papuan nationalism, based on a perceived ethnic difference to other Indonesians. "It is unlikely that Papuan sentiment would have developed in these directions if it were not for the effects of Dutch colonial policy," he says.
But he admits it has deepened and spread far beyond the small elite raised by the Dutch, as a result of army brutality, lopsided development, rape of resources, and the influx of vast numbers of settlers from Java and Sulawesi.
Efforts by the post-Soeharto civilian presidents B.J. Habibie and Abdurrahman Wahid to give the Papuans a special autonomy package, including a Papuan assembly, were undercut before delivery by the next president, Megawati Soekarnoputri.
The current president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, has tried to restore the Wahid reforms, but Papua remains split into two provinces under Megawati's treacherous divide-and-rule scheme, with more violence this year.
McGibbon's book has inspired some conservative comment here that Australians should stop raising more false hopes among the Papuans. He thinks Australia's leaders should try harder to get us to appreciate Indonesia more, understand Papua's place in that country, and thereby "neutralise" this explosive issue in relations.
Yet he also admits Indonesia's policies will be the key factor in whether the Papuans are reconciled. From all he and Fernandes describe, Papuan nationalism has a dynamic largely independent of the ragged support given from here. Barring a bolt from the blue like Habibie's sudden decision amid economic collapse to give East Timor a plebiscite, or the tsunami that led to Aceh peace, the Papuan situation is probably beyond any quick solution.
The Papuans are unhappy, yet their neighbours like Papua New Guinea and the Solomons are hardly an advertisement for independence. Even Fernandes, whom McGibbon lists among the utopian independence crowd, leans to the halfway house. He ponders the much used Malay word "merdeka" – usually translated as political "independence" and drawing a heavy response from the TNI when Papuans use it.
Some anthropologists think "merdeka" is more complex for Papuans, and includes emancipation from oppression and harmony between the past and the present. Fernandes thinks this points towards "new systems of governance based on indigenous modes of authority that ought to be achievable without separating from Indonesia". It's a train of thought worth pursuing in a world where sovereignty and separatism so often clash with bloody results.